Memórias, imagens e experiências o município de Uberlândia a partir de seus distritos, MG (1980 2012 )

Abstract

In the municipality of Uberlândia, state of Minas Gerais, there is a latent memory which tends to identify and associate its counties with the past and presenting them as bucolic and idyllic places. This study troubles the way people live in there by taking into account its inhabitants experiences. Researching the living in this municipality required to consider the ways of life and work of people who really live in the counties. The starting point is the assumption that relationships experienced by them are contradictory, tense and conflicting; instead of being given in advance by abstract definitions of what are the countryside and the city, the rural and the urban. This study aimed at reflecting how they dispute improvements in their life and fight for their sense of belonging; as well putting into question certain constructed images that permeate those memories since they stand out in the local society. Research sources included historical studies and other type of studies who deal with the counties as subject matter, books of memories, City Hall website s articles, newspapers stories, TV programs episodes, legislation, demographic statistic data, oral accounts and notes of non-recorded conversations. The thesis was build upon a wider historical process of transformations and changes which has been affecting the municipality of Uberlândia over the last thirty years; a process in which life in the counties is marked by tensions and conflicts that static concepts can t embrace properly. They re a space of social, political, economic and cultural disputes regarding a society that doesn t live in past, which means it faces contemporary problems like its embracing by the marketplace economy and the consumption circuit. That said, in these counties its inhabitants establish relationships whose scope goes far beyond that idealization of a population rooted to the past and of a place of idyllic and bucolic features.