Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Terra Prometida como “lugar” de catador: trajetórias, conflitos e guetização na periferia urbana de Campos dos Goytacazes, RJ

2022; Volume: 20; Issue: 72 Linguagem: Inglês

10.36398/1980-63102022ano20n72.3

1980-6310

Érica Terezinha Vieira de Almeida,

Urban Development and Societal Issues

This article is the result of university research and extension conducted between 2011 and 2021 with the collectors of recyclables from the dump in Campos dos Goytacazes municipality, Rio de Janeiro State.Located on the outskirts of the city, the Codin dump, as well as the waste pickers who worked there, were subject to urban conflict involving a group of "homeless" and the local government.Removed from their "occupation" and sent to the subdivision Promised Land, the "homeless" rejected the new subdivision because of its proximity to the municipal dump, later occupied by the collectors of recyclables that worked there and/or by the residents of the dump.Based on an extensive literature review of research on the Terra Prometida subdivision, conducted in 1990 and 2000, and of that done with the waste pickers from Codin's dump from 2012, this article proposes to update the issues involved in the occupation of this "place" and its "uses" by the waste pickers and other actors.In the analysis, the processes of precarization, racialization, and ghettoization of what was one of the first subdivisions of the city are emphasized.Twenty years later, the waste pickers from Promised Land and surrounding areas returned to the public scene in another conflict: the closure of the dump in 2012, after more than two decades of existence, in defense of their right to work, drawing attention to the permanence of practices of institutional racism and subalternization in local public policies.