Do badame aos corres: memória coletiva e práticas juvenis em um Gueto Lixo

Abstract

This ethnography aims to describe and analyze how collective memory surrounding a landfill functions as a political mediator in the construction of territorial identities across different generations in a peripheral neighborhood of the city of Salvador. It starts with the definition of symbolic boundaries around a landfill-neighborhood, where agencies and discourses of the State, the media and the public mobilize in the construction of a segregated space. These images are confronted with the collective memory of the pioneers who shaped the environment under the signs of abjection and death, but also of resilience and political organization. The stigma surrounding the figure of “badameiros” is analyzed through the recovery of an identity recycling process that spans the history of the waste industry in the city, reestablishing hierarchies, economies and precarities. This scenario serves as a backdrop for the practices of local youth in the fields of culture and art, where “corres”, violence and precariousness are identified as markers of black, peripheral, and youthful experience. The fieldwork involved various techniques for gathering information, such as document analysis and artistic production, interviews, photographic work, and the researcher’s participation in the “corres” of waste pickers and young residents. It was possible to identify the use of native concepts of space (such as “chácara” and “selva”) that challenge the symbolic construction of the city surrounding the landfill-neighborhood, while also highlighting reminiscences (“mocorô”), transitoriness (“badame”, “corre”) and identities (“badameiro”, “catador”, “cria”) in the intergenerational intersections that shape the space. These components of collective memory act as inventive arrangements in the artistic and cultural production of young residents, who, in turn, use the notion of “guetto” to evoke Africanness and redefine the struggle for visibility of the neighborhood in which they live.