(Des)compassos entre cirandas e mares de concreto

Abstract

Although the phenomenon of homeless populations is not recent in Brazil, research and studies cannot keep up with its progressive growth or contemplate other situations that make up the daily lives of these populations. The lack of up-to-date data at municipal, state and federal levels makes it difficult to understand who these people are, their relationship with the street and the scope of equipment and services aimed at serving them. The capital of Rio Grande do Sul, like other urban centers, is historically constituted by the phenomenon of homeless populations, the result of growing inequality that increases, as an expression of the social issue, whose manifestations also include resistance. The strangeness caused by their presence in public spaces causes other expressions of stigma and discrimination to be directed at them, which is intensified in times of exacerbated individualism, blaming others for their own ills, among other factors that reiterate structural violence and conform neoliberal rationality. In the same direction, the demand for referrals of these populations to some of the services and equipment available in the service network, which are generally insufficient, grows. On the other hand, the demand for “cleaning the cities”, demanded by those who understand that public spaces should be restricted to a privileged few or even by government officials who intend to make invisible the ills of inequality that make up the city’s scenarios, means that actions, such as the removal of these populations from public places. This is aggravated by the fact that the State agents who perform them are not part of the service network, they operate within a logic contrary to the work carried out by the Specialized Service in Social Approach teams, whose centrality is anchored in intersectoriality. The present dissertation tried to unravel these contradictions by resorting to the symbolism of cirandas to understand the relationship of these actions with neoliberal rationality and to identify how actions of this nature hinder the construction of intersectoral strategies to work with these populations in a perspective of guaranteeing rights. It is a documentary and bibliographic study of a qualitative type, based on dialectical and historical materialism.