A valorização dos desvalorizados: (des)encontros entre luta pela terra e cultura caipira no nordeste paulista

Abstract

This essay seeks to analyse the meanings of appreciation of the caipira culture, present at five editions of the National Meeting of Guitarists - conceived and organized by the Rural Landless Workers Movement [MST-SP], between the years 2003 and 2009 -, and its implications for the organizational process of the settlers of the Northeast of the State of São Paulo. Our main hypothesis points out that the appreciation of the caipira culture was configured as an organizational strategy of MST, directly related with the rooting of its settlers in a period in which the Movement sought to establish itself in the region of Ribeirão Preto a town that boasts the title of the national capital of agribusiness. This process occurred in reaction to the social derogatory imagery about the caipira, hegemonic during the last century, and that under the dual thinking, started to be considered the typical representative of the Brazilian archaic rural past , this is, the antithesis of the modernization process of the country. The theoretical framework of this research is critical to this school of thought - held by the Paulista Sociological School - which was responsible for interpreting the caipira and its culture from the historical-dialectical movement manifested, specifically, in the type of capitalist development adopted in Brazil. By observing the recent movements of appreciation of caipira culture, one of which we consider to be the empirical field of this work, we reaffirm the relevance of this debate. The method of observation and data collection is based on two sources: a documental one, which refers to the interviews carried on the Meetings of Guitarists aiming to build part of the event memory; and another one, result of our fieldwork done in a settlement of the region in which we conducted semi-structured interviews with settlers who actively participated in the design and construction of the National Meeting of Guitarists. We believe that this research brought important elements to think critically about the caipira culture not only as the survival of a past to be appreciated, but as part of a concrete historical process which, in the present, acts in a contradictory reality of agrarian reform settlements.