Nos confins dos chapadões sertanejos: pensamento geográfico em Mário Palmério

Abstract

This paper proposal is to analyse the reading Mario Palmerio did in his books Vila dos Confins, 1956, and Chapadão do Bugre, 1965, on the national issue based on Triangulo Mineiro's hinterland. On Antonio Carlos Robert Moraes' studies tray, this issue can be outlined as the dilemma of the building of a National State only from its territory, excluding people out of the process. Hinterland constitutes itself as a privileged place to discuss the formation of National State, once it has been always figured as the opposing pole to littoral on the building of a national identity. Many interpretations on wilderness, sometimes as the authentic nationhood cradle, sometimes as element of delay, change according political elite interests. Mario Palmerio books' approximation of an structural world view is based on his biography investigation, related to historical facts that characterized the Vargas' Era and Juscelino Kubitschek's administration towards progress. It is stablished an interconnection between the author's life and achievements with the implantation of capitalism in Brazil, starting from the Proclamation of the Republic Day up until 1964's military coup, under which impact Palmerio wrote Chapadão do Bugre. It is researched in hinterland's readings, featured since Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter until Graciliano Ramos's Vidas Secas and Euclides da Cunha's Sertões, the tradition on which Mario Palmerio's voice fits. The role of intellectuals and writers in the formation of a national mind is questioned, considering many times they are coopted by political leaders only to legitimate their ideological proposal. The analysis of Mario Palmerio's speeches on the Chamber of Deputies contribute to the formation of Brazil's worldview during the process of power transition from municipal spheres to wider spheres, aiming to federate it on a Government encharged of the definition of nation's directions. These analysis altogether form the basis to understanding the author's literary work approach. It is seeked on them the author's attitude facing the enormous contradictions between the speeches of agrarian and urban elite groups in power, anger only to get profit and personal gains, and extreme abandonment of rural population, to whom it was regarded all the blame for the delay and barbarism conditions preventing the full realization of progress. We find, at the end, the author committed to the country's development and his approach that such a development called for investments focused on the effective improvement of the population's quality of life.