"A cidade é nossa roça, nossa luta é na carroça”: trabalho e tradição dos carroceiros na região metropolitana de Aracaju

Abstract

This research consists of an empirical-qualitative analysis of the Wagon Workers of the Metropolitan Region of Aracaju (RMA), their labor relations, culture and tradition through various social mechanisms involved in the struggle for the recognition and maintenance of their historical legacy in the state territory of Sergipe. Initially, this work category in Brazil and its genesis as a social group was explored through a socio-historical strategy of research and so its dynamics in previous historical periods, its process of proletarianization in the post-slavery epoch and its racialization marked as black and migrant. In addition, the aim is to understand the consequences of urban development infrastructures in cities and labor systems as an agent of promoting social inequalities in emerging capitalism by using former slaves as marginalized labor force in the infracircuit of the economy. In a second moment, the ideological conflicts regarding the boundaries of human and non-human relations are identified as relevant since this group has developed an ancestral interspecific relationship amongst equines, considering kin members in their families. However, they have struggled in public sphere conflicts between government institutions and civil society to legitimize their multispecies way of life in urban contexts resulting in acts of racist violence aiming to prohibit their status as companion, to repress black workers and their more-than-human families with equines. Thus, it’s concluding the crucial role Wagon Workers’ occupation does into dialectic of urban development since they perform a function of marginalized labor force at peripheral neighborhoods of the region lowering the costs of social reproduction of the urban space, and still, State reinforces its domination over these workers through racial, class and species repression. Furthermore, the State, through various colonial practices of dehumanization, perpetuates the erasure of an endogenous form of interspecific organization in the form of epistemicide of their culture and traditions guided by developmentalist ideology that prevails in the metropolitan region.