A americanização dos sertões do Seridó: a implantação do Programa "Alimentos para a Paz" e as frentes de trabalho

Abstract

This monograph aims to study the Foods for Peace Program between the second half of the 1960s and the mid-1970s. We looked to perceive, how in this period, programs seen as humanitarian assist carried out in the Northeastern Sertão, due to the drought that ravaged the region, became decisive in the survival to their residents. Also the agglomeration of desperate workers, causing relevant impacts in counties and arounds, causing, thus, a relevant historiographic exercise between history, politics and space, since it resurfaces an abstruse territory, whose panorama materializes in memorialistic collections, like newspapers, reports, forms and books, which, more than the news of progress, calamity and assistance, also refer to the details, which represent the facts formed from momentary insatisfaction. Being these the hunger, illness, insurrection, looting, and death. Understanding the practices not only of the flagellates, but also of the political elite in times of drought, and realizing how palliative measures were seen as primordial activities for the survival of people, whose organizational dynamics provided the basics in exchange for the workforce that would be responsible for the social and political development of marginalized areas. And having this insistence on the new, even if it is in an emergency character, and the dispute of the old methods, is how the Sertão becomes alive and now increasingly present through academic trends.