Lázaros reclusos: “lepra”, cotidiano e sociabilidades na Colônia Antônio Diogo (1950-1980)

Abstract

The Antônio Diogo Colony was built in 1928 in the city of Redenção with the aim of controlling the endemic "leprosy" disease in the state of Ceará. Over the years, the institution received men and women afflicted with leprosy who were involuntarily interned and who had to reinvent their lives in the face of physical and institutional limitations, despite the suffering caused by the disease and its treatment. This research analyzes letters produced by the inmates between 1950 and 1980, which were found in an archive previously classified as strictly "administrative." These correspondences reveal a little-explored dimension of the leprosarium experience, offering privileged access to the daily lives of the inmates, their social networks, affective bonds, and the power tensions that permeated the context of compulsory internment. This documentation therefore constitutes the guiding thread of the present research: through the voices of the patients themselves, through their self-writing, I problematize how the isolationist policy reshaped sociabilities, identities, and memories in a space designed for separation, but which ended up generating unique forms of coexistence.