O “ciclo de greves” dos trabalhadores canavieiros de Pernambuco (1979-1985) e a academia sindical da FETAPE: cultura histórica, consciência histórica e consciência de classe

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Bárbara Maria Costa e
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFPB
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufpb.br/jspui/handle/123456789/27969
• topic: Lutas de classes - Canavieiros; Trabalho canavieiro - Memórias; Trabalho rural; Consciência histórica; Class struggles - Sugarcane workers; Sugarcane work - Memories; Rural work; Historical consciousness; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::HISTORIA

The misery, hunger and violence to which rural workers and their families were subjected fueled the indignation of the growing class mobilizations for rights and citizenship since the 1950s in Northeast Brazil. Such struggles respectively compromised the Rural Worker Statute (ETR), proposed in 1963, after the great strike of 200,000 sugarcane workers in the same year, thus culminating in the negotiation of the Campo Agreement, through which basic, but essential, rights were negotiated for the category in the state of Pernambuco. The open debate around the agrarian reform generated projects from the political and economic sectors, in order to stabilize the social question of the countryside and the fixation of the peasant on the land. Partially blocked by the military coup in 1964, the organized mobilizations of the rural working class in Pernambuco were resumed with force from the year 1979, after the 3rd National Congress of Rural Workers, during the slow opening to democracy in the country. Given this context, based on the perspective of history from below, the objective is to analyze the narrative construction of the Federation of Rural Workers and Workers of Pernambuco - FETAPE about the “cycle of sugarcane strikes”, a term coined by the anthropologist Lygia Sigaud, a scholar of sugarcane workers in the Zona da Mata region of Pernambuco, when dealing with the mobilizations that took place between 1979 and 1985. The approach of this narrative construction by the workers was carried out on materials produced by Academia Sindical FETAPE, created in 2012, a branch of the Federation responsible for organizing the memories of struggles in rural areas since the 20th century, as well as promoting the maintenance of political formations and the circulation of this narrative among the associated sugarcane working class. As we will try to demonstrate, such narratives are related to the construction of a historical culture linked to forms of historical consciousness and class consciousness of these agents, collectively constructed and that seek to articulate visions about past and present experiences of social struggles, relating them directly to horizons of future. For the development of this Thesis, we used materials produced by Academia Sindical in the present time, among newspapers, leaflets, magazines and other publications; the newspaper Diário de Pernambuco, as well as materials produced by other union entities, with news and texts produced in the “heat of the moment”, that is, during the sugarcane “strike cycle”; and reports from Pernambuco sugarcane workers who reached rural union leadership positions during the decade of struggles. Memories about the exploitation of sugarcane labor, persecutions, organizations of strikes and stoppages, conquests and contradictions of the working class in Pernambuco, refer to workers' narratives that result in their own historical culture, committed to class struggle and social transformation. In this sense, the experiences of sugarcane workers and their interpretations of the present and expectations for the future of struggles are in focus in a reflection that sought support from classic and recent bibliographical analysis on related themes. To this end, the English historian E. P. Thompson's concepts of experience and class are central to the development of this brief analysis of the historical culture of sugarcane workers organized around FETAPE and its Academia Sindical.