Estrada de ferro de Mossoró e vida cotidiana: história e historiografia (1912-1951).

Abstract

The objective of this work is to identify and understand in the historiography and in the memorialists the way in which the representations inscribed in the texts were accepted or imposed regarding the Railroad in Mossoró, since these texts are not exempt or neutral, but are constructed to give meaning and senses to the world. The ideas that led to the construction of the road, by the Swiss João Ulrich Graf, in the 1870s, were the motto for the dominant groups in the Republic, and this “Graphic dream” was claimed in countless “advertisements” throughout Brazil in defense of the railroad The methodology was built from bibliographic research and access to texts, articles (newspapers, documents, memorials, opinions, etc.). Thus, the concepts of representation, by Roger Chartier (1990, 1991, 2002); “political theatricalization”, whose references were Georges Balandier, Marc Bloch, Adam Hochschild and Clifford Geertz. At that historic moment, the elite tried to show “solidarity” with the migrants, appropriating the “drought speech” and the suffering of others through dramatic language to produce images that convinced the Central Government that the cause of the misery and backwardness of Mossoró was the absence of the railroad. There are few works on this topic, but some were fundamental to answer the problems, such as the work of Clementino (1990), Camelo Filho (2000), Melo (2000), Aranha (2001, 2003, 2007), Rocha (2005), Rodrigues (2006), Galvão (2019), among others. Thus, it was observed that built from a different layout than the initial plan, the rails brought economic, social and cultural impacts to the city of Mossoró in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the population increase, public income, the spatial expansion of the city, among others.