Arigós in Porto Velho: the construction of order and social stratification from institucionalized state violence

Abstract

Northeastern migration is a permanent phenomenon in Brazilian history since the second half of the 19th century. The Northeast as a poor and famished region, arises from an imaginary purposefully built throughout the Empire and during the Republic. The drought was considered a true human industry to provide to the producing centers, cheap labor and available to any type of service. In 1940, the Varguista State appropriated this labor, creating the figure of the rubber soldier, a worker with a professional education militarized and promptly subordinated to the authorities that would govern his life in the rubber plantations. Even in the face of this fascist project, the landowners knew how to construct alternatives and became the key element of settlement in the Amazon. They secured with their work and their lives the production of rubber for the efforts of the Second World War. In their displacements they were confined to the points of concentration, disciplinary and authoritarian places, molded from the fascist and hygienist mentality of the time. In Porto Velho, the fallow field was called Arigolândia and gave rise to a peripheral neighborhood, mostly inhabited by Northeasterners. This work intends to inscribe the formation of the neighborhood Arigolândia in the urban and social context of the city of Porto Velho. The research method used was based on bibliographical and documentary revision, as well as on interviews organized from the methods of the Present Time History and Oral History techniques.