The ‘Amazon Chernobyl’: environmental racism and the experience of Quilombola women in environmental resistance in Barcarena, Brazil

This study uses critical thematic analysis of archival documents from 1947 to 2024 to examine historical patterns of environmental injustice and women’s resistance in Quilombola communities. It contributes to environmental sociology through a dialogue among environmental racism scholarship, feminist political ecology and Latin American decolonial feminism. Four themes emerged: collective identity formation, environmental racism manifestations, gendered dimensions of environmental harm and transformation of traditional knowledge into environmental resistance. Findings show that gender in Quilombola communities operated through complementary rather than hierarchical arrangements and that extractivism actively re-organized these relations. Women’s leadership emerges not from caregiving roles but from collective territorial defense. This study demonstrates how race and gender are co-constituted through colonial violence and resistance.