Trabalhadores de sonho e de pó: garimpando histórias, extraindo subjetividades e lavrando sensibilidades nas banquetas de caulim em Junco do Seridó-Paraíba.

Abstract

This is a paper about the life, the art of living. It is a sensitive reading elaborated by the senses: in the good and bad smells; at the attentive ears to the barriers’ crack; in the taste, enjoying the talks during the meals; and, at the sighting and in the tact, observing atmosphere’s physical and atmospheric transformations. In this way, the aim of this work is to present a new visibility and “dizibilidade” about the extraction of “caulim” at “banquetas” in Junco do Seridó. Based on the concepts of sensibilities and subjectivities, we search through this text to answer at the following questionings: Who are these people? Which dreams they had or they have when resolved to get in caulim’s mining claim? What motivated them to face a routine and an everyday life as hard as this one? Establishing as object of our study the memories and histories of caulim’s prospectors, we search to produce a historicity of Junco do Seridó, from the decade of 1960 up to 2011, and of the caulim’s extraction in banquetas from 1971 to 2011. At the same time, we intend to filling in some gaps proceeding from the silences of the sources that, anyway, “pointed out as marginal” the “banqueteiro” as a destructor agent of the atmosphere and the mineral as more one product to be commercialized. Linking with the life’s lines of these workers, we also search to make clear the geography of the everyday life of these subjects, that, with their bodies in movement marked and demarcated spaces and routes, and with their emotions they prospected histories, extracted subjectivities and ploughed sensibilities in banquetas de caulim;