Garimpeiros da Amazônia (1970-2000)

Abstract

This work problematizes the formation of the prospectors class at the Amazon, besides to understand them as social subjects, capable of defining the direction of their own lives. It analyzes how poor men and women moved, mainly from the state of Maranhão, in search of work. And after different experiences of life and death at the Amazon, they found in the gold mining at the rural prospector village “Pista do Cabeça”, north of the Mato Grosso state, the place to survive and fight. The difficult of the daily work, from the handwork to the dredges use, was lived with the exploration and negotiation to obtain lands, food and equipments for gold panning. But it was in the coping against the gold panning owner that the prospectors have formed themselves as a class to remain on alluvial lands. And, after, they reorganized in opposition to the farmers, encirclers of the lands destined for the panning reserve. In the struggle for land and land reform, prospectors and other workers conquered the land to plant at the “Jacamim” Settlement and in the small properties of the 28 Community. For this historical approach, the studied evidences were recorded interviews at the gold panning, newspaper news, magazine articles, government documents and other records kept by the interviewees. Therefore, the theorical bases and methodology of the analyzes focuses on men's conceptions as social and fight subjects, according to historian Edward Palmer Thompson. And, in the living memory, in dispute and transformation in the time of the oral historian Alessandro Portelli. Thus, this research approaches of the historians of the theme with this grounds. But questions the historiography that does not consider the gold panning workers as builders of history and presents them as adventurers in search of easy wealth.