Para além das fronteiras: culturas e experiências de trabalhadores latino-americanos: Uberlândia, 1990/2007

Abstract

This research has as central point of reflection concerning the experiences of Latin American workers (not-Brazilians) in our country, more specifically in the city of Uberlândia-MG. They are workers who had come from Peru, Chile, Argentina, Equator and Uruguay and work mainly producing and/or selling handicrafts. I investigate the social meanings, the tensions gifts in the relations established for them in its trajectories, memories and cultures, the disputes for the spaces of the city, the fight for the right to the work and the respect to its differences. Attempting to understand the social dynamics lived by these citizens, I tried to reflect on the manner such they produce and they transform the spaces of the city by means of their works and constituted relations. Moreover, I analyze the relations that they constitute, since the exit of their countries, as one way to make possible to them to obtain work, housing and to continue their journeys and/or to remain. It is noteworthy that the main concern questions was around themselves growing as human being of these social citizens, therefore the given importance to their ways of living and working, to the way as they conceive their life and the meaning attributed to themselves works. Among a variety of possibilities of analysis that the sources had opened, as well as what I desired to interrogate on research beginning, I point the problematic one of handicrafts production, which stimulates their journeys, besides make possible to them resisting and evading excluding laws that place them as illegal . Among used sources there are oral narratives produced with the workers, the Foreigner s Statute, the Periodical Correio de Uberlândia, photographs published in this newspaper and others produced by me, became possible to reflect on what means the presence of these citizens in the city of Uberlândia, how they ve seen by public power and the society in general, how these workers present themselves, which is the meaning of their itinerant way of life and which are the limits and possibilities of this life.