Memórias da ponte internacional da amizade: representações de um espaço binacional

Abstract

This research concentrates on the International Friendship Bridge,opened in 1965, the first in the tri-national region over the Paraná River between the cities of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, and Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. The work gives visibility to the different memories around the bridge in insignia or speeches. The main objective is to analyze and understand the International Friendship Bridge from a periscopic view of memories and representations. The specifics objectives are: to discuss the concepts of landscape, border, memory, and modernity; to identify the reasons (political, economic, and social) that led Paraguay and Brazil to make the bridge and the construction impacts; understand the importance of the bridge in the prospect of mobility and occupation in the region; make the history of the International Friendship Bridge from the images, displaying the technical specificities, the political and tourist uses, as well as their representations in the photos and speeches. It is an interdisciplinary approach, using the theoretical and methodological contributions of Cultural History. The method proposed by the historian Carlo Ginzburg is used in the investigation, mainly in the perceptions, when capturing traces, signs, and evidence that could assist in this incursion, in which was need careful reading, focus on details, connections, and constructions. This thesis has three chapters. The first chapter discusses the theoretical-methodological foundations that supported the reflections, analyzes, interpretations, and how to use the selected sources, like interviews, photographs, insignia, official speeches, magazines, newspapers, among others. Chapter two presents the importance and relevance of the construction of the International Friendship Bridge over the Paraná River to Brazil and Paraguay. It shows a panorama of the border, analyzing the hydrographic versus road system, attempting to investigate the causes of that connected frontier. The third chapter contextualizes the construction of the bridge from the images. It concludes that the bridge is much more than an engineering work. This bridge has technical, historical, ethnographic values. The International Friendship Bridge is a depository of an important binational heritage. And, also, that it is an architectural element that fuses the interests of Brazil and Paraguay, representing continental level mobility, transforming the landscape by integrating itself with the scenery of the Paraná River, and building a new dynamic around the border.