Corpos pretos ao sol e peles brancas às sombras: trabalhadores no Sertão do São Francisco, entre o inferno e o paraíso

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigated the process of creation and implementation of Chesf and its policy of building plants and dams in the Municipality of Paulo Afonso-Bahia, in the backland region of São Francisco, between 1950 and 1990. The creation of the state-owned company is part of the logic of the Brazilian developmental model and its modernizing action aimed to meet the bases of the emerging industrial capitalism. Chesf disseminated a description based on environment and race, influencing the hierarchy inspired by skin color, educational background and sociocultural origin of the working class. The company attracted a contingent of almost 15 thousand workers to the backlands. The presence of the state-owned company reconfigured sociopolitical, economic and symbolic relations, forging a spatial identity linked to a historical process. Chesf's description produced a specific type of racism and a pathologization of the human that moved through the ambivalence of acceptance, refusal and identity resistance to adapt to the modernizing process implemented by the company. The black and brown worker became invisible in terms of race, but they became a useful object for the discipline and control necessary for the developmental policy, which took advantage of the hydroelectric potential of the São Francisco River. To identify and analyze racist and discriminatory practices found in the territory; We first covered the migratory space of the working class; which enabled us to identify socioculturally, origin, train and enter the world of work. In the world of work, we see the functional occupation, residential segregation, surveillance and discipline imposed by the state on white, black and brown workers. In the space of political citizenship we were able to verify the records of struggles, class conflicts, resistance and silences of the union organization of state-owned workers in the backlands. We establish dialogues with literature from Classical Sociology, History and Sociology of race relations. Black and brown workers were visible in their bodies for work, but invisible in their ancestry as a people, backlands and nation. In the hinterland of São Francisco, Brazilian racism was narrated with northeastern and country singularities, which through the practices of Chesf designated hell and paradise for white, black and brown workers.