Identidade e migração: as experiências dos maranhenses em São Gotardo-MG entre os anos de 1995 a 2016

Abstract

This thesis aimed to reflect on the population dislocation from the State of Maranhão to the city of São Gotardo, in the State of Minas Gerais, both in Brazil. This dislocation is one of the results of the agricultural development of the last 40 years, which have been changing significantly the economic, political and cultural relations within the interior of this community. From the cultural point of view, the settlement of migrants from different regions of Brazil in an country town of Minas Gerais State caused important impacts in the sociability forms and in the identities of these subjects, whether they are the locals or the migrants themselves. The dislocation of people pursuing work, which literature calls labor migration, produces important effects both in the societies that welcome these migrants, and in the places that "export" them. The transformations that occurred in these spaces have been studied with assorted looks for the social sciences, for instance, from the perspective of the economic changes in a macro sense, or from the point of view of the individual motivations in the micro sense, that resort references from the Economic, the Sociological as well as the Demographic studies. The direction of the analysis is built in the sense to comprehend the reconfiguration process of the identity of the people from Maranhão in São Gotardo and the strategies of cultural continuity with their home community, based on the assumption that these migrants establish and reestablish their social manners in a migration environment. The semi-structured interview was the chosen data collection technique for this work, as it has the advantage of allowing greater freedom to the interviewed to talk about their experiences, what would avoid, theoretically, the imposition of the issue by the researcher. The interviews were recorded with a cellphone and afterwards the audio was analyzed and the relevant issues to the proposed goals were embedded in the discussions of the research.