A necropolítica no município do Crato: o Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto e o Campo de Concentração do Buriti na década de 1930

Abstract

The subject of this research is the formation of two spaces that, with different initiatives in their organization and objectives, had in common the grouping of people who migrated from their homelands and hinterlands, descendants of indigenous peoples and africans, to the municipality of Crato, in the interior of the State of Ceará. We are talking about the community of Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto, founded in 1926 and destroyed by the state in 1938, and the Concentration Camp of Buriti, founded during the drought of 1932 and closed in 1933. The aim of this study was to analyze the relations of exclusion, control over bodies and permission to die of these people who migrated to the Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto and the Buriti Concentration Camp in the 1930s. Thus, the guiding questions are: What led the state to confine people who migrated from the countryside to the city in a closed space and to create disciplinary rules of control? What led the state to destroy a collective and autonomous community in the interior of the State of Ceará? Why were such territories created in the municipality of Crato? What caused so many families to migrate to this city? How did information about Caldeirão and Campo do Buriti reach people in rural areas? How were these spaces symbolized by state agents, the press, the population in general, and the migrants themselves? To study these two areas is to study the history of the sertanejos and sertanejas who migrated, either to a rural area where they could have other forms of existence where the workers enjoyed their own work, which didn't happen on the estates where the peasants maintained a relationship of land ownership oriented to the market and the commodity; or by migrating to the city, also to seek a new way of life different from what these workers were used to in the countryside. In this way, we tried to analyze different sources that would allow a broad debate on the spaces I am studying. Among the sources analyzed are: a) the productions of the memorialists; b) the newspapers of the time, such as Diário de Pernambuco and O Povo; c) the official discourse of Getúlio Vargas, found in official reports or reproduced in other media, such as newspapers, magazines and books; d) interviews with survivors and others who know the history of these two areas, some of which I conducted myself, while others were found in academic works and even documentaries; e) the Eugenics Bulletin produced between 1929 and 1933; f) Caldeirão's diligence report. In order to analyze these sources and provide us with an understandable perspective, we have taken into account concepts such as racism, necropolitics, biopower and the state of exception. In this way, a theoretical discussion based on authors such as Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben is not isolated in a separate chapter, but is present throughout the text, contributing to the analysis of the sources and leading us to a perspective of understanding these events.