If you visited Brazil in the last few years, you will have seen it: “the other red hat.” Now a trendy accessory on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the decidedly anti-MAGA baseball cap represents not the hard right but the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST).

At nearly two million members strong, the MST is now likely the world’s largest social movement, battle-hardened now after four decades, demanding agrarian reform. Even more impressively, the MST has thrived under adverse conditions, namely the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro. The MST’s goal is to make good on the unfulfilled promises of Brazil’s democratic transition and to break up colonial relations that still reign in the countryside.

The last decade, though, saw that historical mission gain new momentum. The growing visibility of the MST was, in fact, part of a canny “rebrand” — retreating to a defensive posture as the Bolsonaro government declared open war on the movement’s land occupations. In response, the movement made overtures to the progressive urban middle class.

Flying the unlikely banner of organic food, the MST successfully repackaged agrarian reform — and its contentious land seizures — as a mission to deliver nutritious, sustainably sourced, and affordable produce to the Brazilian masses. In doing so, public opinion began to see the movement less as a “mere” peasant movement and more like a project of national transformation. Though allied to the left-leaning government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the movement maintains a complicated relationship with the Brazilian state.

For Jacobin, Nicolas Allen spoke to MST national leader João Paulo Rodrigues about the MST’s strategic vision for the future and how the movement plans to fight to put working-class politics on the national agenda.