Etnografia das relações sociais de meninos e meninas de rua na feira do Ver-o-Peso

Abstract

At the Ver-O-Peso fair, on the shores of the Guajará bay, exactly the place where our city began, lives a group of street boys and girls, besides other "street old men". This ethnography aims to give visibility to the social relations carried out by the various actors that live and work at the fair, in order to describe the dynamics of survival of the street group that lives at Ver-O-Peso. Our hypothesis is that the established relationships serve to give the street people the conditions to continue living on the streets through practices such as: donation of clothes and food, and the purchase of stolen objects by the market vendors. Through an ethnographic description (GEERTZ, 1989) we saw that these actors assume a complicity with their group and that they take refuge in places with little light, there, far from "normal" human beings, they reveal to their equals the inadequacies that constitute their stigma (GOFFMAN, 1980): survival of theft and begging, drug addiction, "street smell", prostitution. We noticed that in their relationships, street people tend to avoid embarrassment towards the "normal" ones, being happy and grateful towards those who help them and obedient and submissive towards those who treat them with violence. We also noticed that the Ver-O-Peso fair, due to the new urbanization, became illuminated "like a day", and that as a consequence the street group started to circulate and sleep in other less illuminated squares, close to the old place where they used to live, since it is still from the fair that the group derives its subsistence.