A arte de fiar memórias e tecer narrativas: o viver urbano do operariado areiense (1940-1980)

Abstract

The consolidation of Areia‟s history and identity as “the Land of Culture” was allegedly elaborated by Horácio de Almeida in his work Brejo de Areia (1958). On bringing up a discourse of past and tradition, the referred author elected the city‟s most important events in the 19th century and “forgot” about the manufacturing experience through which the city goes in the 20th century. Owing to this, we seek to rediscover the city of Areia within this period of time as of the appearance of the city‟s first and only textile factory: “Fiação e Tecelagem Arenópolis”. Therefore, our research is done inside the Social and Cultural History environment, for our main interest turns to the collective memories from a group of former workers so as to understand how these historical subjects portrayed their mid-20th century experiences, labor, and routine. In the development of this study, we used, as a primordial source, oral reports of memories due to the scarcity of written records and aiming at the truthfulness of aspects that other investigation methods would not be able to provide us. However, the oral-story choice was not intended to make the silent ones speak out; rather, it was meant to make them heard by leading people‟s attention into voices that had never been heard before as a way to potentiate it. On threading memories and weaving narratives, we rediscovered a new landscape of Areia, as represented by the factory‟s innovation, by the siren‟s call, by the chimney‟s smoke, by workers who used to occupy the city‟s main street on different day-shifts. Beyond the walls: routines, affective relationships, enjoyment, other appropriations of the urban space: inside them: work, fatigue, accidents, resistance. On weaving these stories, we reported the theoretical analysis of the memories and narrativization of such recollections, as proposed by Maurice Halbwachs (1990) and Paul Ricoeur (1994; 2007), respectively. Thus, through memory oral data along with other documents, we made known some aspects of these Areiense workers‟ urban living in the period between 1940 and 1980, so that the stories told herein should present a mixture of reading and interpretation upon the art of remembering.