Eu saí da rua, mas a rua não saiu de mim: narrativas de pessoas em situação de rua em ações coletivas de luta e resistência.

Abstract

The study aimed to understand the meanings of the involvement and experience of homeless people in the Brazilian National Movement of the Homeless (“Movimento Nacional da População de Rua - MNPR”). In relation to specific objectives, the purpose of the study was to: (1) identify mobilizing elements of the engagement of homeless people to the “MNPR”, with emphasis to aspects related to their life stories and experiences in social policies; (2) understand transformations and homelessness, before and after involvement in collective actions; (3) identify how individuals narratively perform their identities and become militants; and (4) analyze experiences of homelessness and involvement in the movement, based on networks of solidarity, conflicts and resistance strategies adopted by the militants. We have taken as relevant theoretical frameworks the studies on race relations and subjectivation processes, decoloniality and the Theory of New Social Movements. A qualitative study with a biographical approach, including ten participants who presented narratives on their homelessness experiences and on how they became involved in the collective actions. In-depth interviews were conducted as a data production technique. Data analysis was based on Catherine Riessman’s narrative analysis. It was observed that for the interviewees, the street is an ambiguous space where situations of abandonment, violence and negligence are experienced, but also where they build emotional ties and solidarity networks, turning them into militants in the measure in which they reframe their biographical trajectories. From their increased involvement in the social activities, militants begin to take their place as active subjects, facing adversities and reaching important achievements in their lives and in that of their peers, changing the concept that they had about their own self. Despite overcoming the situation of homelessness, through their involvement in the social struggle, militants usually maintain a deep attachment with their street kinsmen. Through their own personal narratives that they tell themselves and to others, they reconstruct their identities, established in the relationships with other more experienced people who are part of the group of reference, where they acquire the necessary rules towards a narrative formula. These personal narratives take on the role of transforming the lives of those who survive the necropolitical regime of extermination and obliteration of black existences, to enable these trajectories, reconstructed through stories of resilience, generating the existence of activists, lives that acquire meaning through their engagement in collective actions. Becoming a militant means having a voice and being heard in spaces where militance is being exercised. Accordingly, having a voice is only possible over time and in the measure in which militant identities acquire form, forged from accumulated experiences of violence, abuse, negligence and abandonment and through protesting behaviors, demanding dignity and the right to exist, without being relegated at all times to the other side of abyssal lines.