O Ramal do 40: histórias e memórias de comunidades na reserva extrativista Marinha Maracanã, Nordeste do Pará (1960-2020)

Abstract

This study aims to understand, from the point of view of historical experiences, changes and continuities in the ways of life of the residents of an Amazonian fishing community, 40 do Mocooca, from the emergence of new forms of mobility with the construction of a road that provoked the emergence of other contact zones, social practices, cultural exchanges, altering traditions in local daily life. The research was carried out in the 40 do Mocooca region, a village in the municipality of Maracanã, in the Salgado Zone of Pará, between 2018 and 2021, chronologically defined between 1960-2020. Theoretically, it was based on Social History and Cultural Studies and methodologically, it followed guidelines from documental criticism and Oral History to dialogue with collective and individual memories in circuits of oral tradition as a constituent of the ways of being, thinking and acting of the inhabitants of this region. In the work, the thesis is defended that changes perceived in the study of the past compared to the present, on the one hand, alter webs of relationships woven for decades between residents and the environment with the contact of new historical agents, information, cultural products, especially, at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, on the other hand, even in unequal conditions, the social agents of the place re-elaborate the new technological and cultural apparatuses and continue in defense of their living traditions, fighting daily for what they believe to be the path of local development. To explain this thesis, the research is based on analyzes of the experience and experiences of these people, as well as on the study of small and large local events, some individual, others collective, in an attempt to understand the trajectory of this community that presents itself in a network of relationships and decisions of a mobile life between the countryside and the city, between the past and the present, between nature and urbanization, between fishing and a type of tourism, which we call “alternative” and “informal”, which comes forcing the emergence of some globalized practices observed from the arrival of new needs and habits of local consumption, above all, by the younger ones.