Pobreza e lugar(es) nas margens urbanas: lutas de classificação em territórios estigmatizados do Grande Bom Jardim

Abstract

This research aims at understanding the meanings entailed by poverty and places on unprivileged urban areas in the city of Fortaleza, state of Ceara in the 2000 years, according to the evaluation of dwellers of stigmatized territories, in this case, the Grande Bom Jardim region. In view of this configuration, a qualitative research was chosen with adoption of participative observation to complement the interviews. It is a social and anthropological study encompassing the Mela Mela and Marrocos communities that are heavily burdened by social and territorial stigmatization and social disavowal commonly associated with residents in a poverty condition. In local classification patterns, stigmatization associated with poverty, “the poor” and their dwelling places is at one time refused/dissimulated and at another time transferred/reproduced by agents who battle in different spaces and levels. This thesis tries to apprehend the daily symbolic struggles within the territory that are weaved by individual and group environments related to dwellers dealing with new linguistic meanings of poverty/“being poor” and the social buildup of place or places considered “the pits” in the region. According to their micro-tactics of social empowerment, the narrators/dwellers engendered new classifications that were transformed into perceptions that they have of an “ideal us” as well as hierarchy-based refusal of the local “poor” demarcating symbolic frontiers between unequal people who are on the other hand geographically close, but who became socially distant. They elaborated their native concept of poverty delineating two main versions: the first, an individual and private configuration that distinguishes “surviving poverty” from “spiritual poverty”; and the other that associates poverty with dwelling place, meaning neglected space plagued by social-economic and civil insecurity. In order to understand the re-significations of urban poverty in the present required from the researcher to delve into the “roots” of places indicated by narrators, being this instance an important parameter seen in relational production and its territorial classifying patterns as well as in stigmatizing classifications that are projected on the region and its residents. The other dimension of those symbolic struggles as evaluated by this thesis refers to the meaning of locus according to two perspectives: the increased value of dwelling territory, caused by an increased social-cultural sense of memory, appreciation and belonging, in spite of a feeling of being abandoned by the city administration; and spreading of fear and insecurity encompassing topophobic practices that inhibit dwelling and sociophobic practices that enhance social avoidance revealing trends of living under siege within those areas of the city. Therefore, this thesis offers a critical evaluation of native concepts of “poverty”/“poor” and the related lociassociated with them in their characterization as dwelling places that engross multivocal and polissemic reflections on living beyond urban limits at the present time.