Northeast — Dom Fragoso Agricultural Family School - CE (Young people)

For us, peasant young people educated at EFA Dom Fragoso, a just future is an ancestral and sovereign future in which we can understand our identities and, from them, build good living in our communities of plural peoples — original peoples, Afro-Indigenous peoples, and terreiro peoples.

As youth, we think a just future is connecting with our ancestors so that we can leave the alienation imposed on us. It is having our basic rights guaranteed, access to contextualized education, access to agroecology, religious freedom, health, land, water, culture, and harmony among the many aspects of life.

A just future for us is a future with equality, respect, and harmony with one another, without racism, without machismo, without homophobia.

To think a just future we have to think from the beginning of the construction of that future. We want other young people to know the EFAs as well, to become familiar with their ancestors, and to work with empathy for those who have no land to work. That we may be revolutionary young people, that we may help other people, and that we may respect one another, above all with the support of spiritualities.

We join our voices to affirm the dreams that move us and the principles that guide the construction of a just future: we want a future in which youth is happy, can work at what they love, and live with those they love. We want our communities to be recognized, respected, and for everyone to fully enjoy their rights.

A just future is one in which we win our struggles: quality education, health, sanitation, land, water, dignified housing, leisure, transport, and freedom to live each person’s faith and culture.

We want sovereignty over our soil. Our dream is access to land and waters, to produce dignified, quality food. Agroecology is a path of freedom and resistance: planting trees, cultivating life, creating agroforestry systems, and caring for desertification. We want family agriculture that produces for families and communities, not for capitalism. We want an end to burnings, deforestation, large-scale mining, pesticides, and the destruction of fauna and flora. The just future is agroecological, sustainable, in connection with the cycle of life.

A just future means ending every form of inequality, racism, machismo, homophobia, religious prejudice, or discrimination for being, thinking, and acting differently. Our color, our hair, our cultures and spiritualities are symbols of resistance, pride, and struggle.

We recognize ourselves as children of the drought, of the semiarid, of peasant struggles, and of Afro-Indigenous heritage. We want to recover and value our identities, our rural schools (EFAs), our ways of being, acting, and thinking, keeping alive the stories of our ancestors, so that we can leave alienation and live freedom in the many aspects that define our lives.

We want young people to dream and to realize collectively. Revolutionary, empathetic young people who care for the environment, share knowledge, take part in social movements, and inspire children and other young people to fight for their rights.

Above all, what we want to do, besides dreaming a proposal for a new society, is also to denounce. Everything we are saying are things that should constitutionally be guaranteed and are not. So, beyond everything else, today we are denouncing a criminal State that says it guarantees rights and robs us of the most basic things in life.

The just future we want is made of what should already be guaranteed to us — a future of equality, respect, solidarity, agroecology, freedom, ancestral memory, and dignity for all peoples. We dream of a world where no one is left behind and where life flourishes in harmony among human beings, nature, and spiritualities.

Because alone we dream, but together we make it real.