Processo de institucionalização de crianças nos anos 2000: a Aldeias Infantis SOS Brasil Caicó/RN e a política de constituir famílias sociais

Abstract

The present ethnography has as its theme the process of institutionalization of children in Caicó, in the 2000s, seen through the family's own memory and the experience of having been a “Village” child. I approach the topic thinking about the management methods that led to the integration of Venezuelan refugee families into shelter homes that were the homes of several social families. Such a social family was made up of a social mother, social brothers, social aunts and a social uncle-director. This first contact with the topic took me on a different path, which is, throughout the text, to analyze the process of child settlement in Seridó Potiguar and the establishment of relationships between various actors and agencies of the State and mainland that lost, during seven years, custody of the three children. Photography, which, as an activator of memory, results in the recording of moments, processes and years, as well as the official documents that legitimize the intervention, contributed not to the search for truth, but to the understanding of what is produced with the negotiation of these memories. The ethnography is divided into three chapters. First, I present the admission process. In the second part I highlight the ways of forming social families that to a certain extent replaced families of origin. In the last chapter I portray the process of disconnection and its contradictions.