For a socio-cultural history of abandonment and juveniles in Belo Horizonte 1921-1942. / Por uma história sócio-cultural do abandono e da delinqüência de menores em Belo Horizonte 1921-1941.

Wesley Silva

The purpose of this paper is to broach the historical and social production of representations about abandonment and the juvenilesdelinquency in Belo Horizonte between the years of 1921 and 1941. Through the approach of spaces, places and institutions specifically constructed for or appropriated by them, I tried to understand how the notion of delinquency and desertion was circulating in the spaces of the Capital of Minas Gerais in the period in regard. In this way, I broached, in a summarized way, the city of Belo Horizonte as a geographical space that offers multiple places to the appropriation for his inhabitants. There was revealed the prejudiced form with which the urbane space usage was conceived by the poor people and in a sharper way for the juveniles. The school and the primary education, which should privilege the presence of these characters from the modern urbanity characterized in the New Capital, pedagogic city par excellence, did not achieve result in carrying out a project of schooling of masses and although they wished provide it as a usage of the primacy of the obligatoriness. Not even this strategy with all the devices put working was able to bring into effect the enrolment, frequency and school use of good part of the contingent of poor juveniles of the city and of the State of Minas Gerais. The resistance undertaken by this sector of the society had several shades among which the poverty and the necessity of the work on behalf of the support of the family, when that one was existing. There was drawn, so, a scenery in which the school obligatoriness that intended to be wide given place to another with a selective character, so what was claimed efficiently and functionally. In the context where the research was realized, one of the principal elements the contributed for the production of this notion of delinquency was the legal reform started by the dominant sectors in the legislation for juveniles. Therefore, it was necessary to broach the process of production of the laws and projects that has in the Law of Budget 4.242 of 1921 an essential great landmark though the longings of regulations turn back to the initial years of the Republic. In 1921 the consolidation of the JuvenilesCode of 1927 started, passing by the presentation of projects with this objective including the promulgation of Bills of Assistance of national and state extent, in Minas Gerais. The promulgation of the JuvenilesCode in 1927 constitutes a referential landmark in the process of consolidation of the juveniles notion. This code will produce also a term by which abandonned, delinquent, helpless children and teenagers will start to be identified, but also poor workers, boys and girls who live around the streets. It constitutes a process of depersonalization that will send the childhood and the adolescence for a legal identity. Becoming legal the social identity of delinquent, helpless and exposed children and adolescents, between others nominalization, will become a policial case. Among other spheres of the society which the JuvenilesCode influenced, remarkably, the work of juveniles appears. In a context of deep, social and economical transformations, whose the mainly change is the loss of importance of the agrarian sector and the growth of the industry, the utilization of juvenileslabor will demand regulations and other attitudes because it will crash to the produced childs and childhoods representation and because it will constitute an obstacle to the primary schooling claimed for all the children. Considering the process of urbanization and its attractive character for the inland populations, it was necessary to consider that the population displacement constituted as a corollary of urbanization, cooperating to increase the contingent of poor and unemployed families without dwelling, increasing consequently the number of abandoned and delinquent juveniles. The work of the juveniles, observed in the city, was allocating the labor of poor children and adolescents in activities badly remunerated and with hard physical and moral conditions and risks. Among them, it was the sale of objects, services and mostly newspapers. The imminent danger what the presence of these children in the streets was representing to the social defense and to their entirety itself it will demand a capture of position of the organized society which will be found in the JuvenilesCode an signficant instrument of backrest for the creation of institutions of preservation and reform. Among them there were created the JuvenilesShelter and School of Reform. Even it was not predicted in the Code, the Protective Association of NewspapersSellers will represent an outstanding initiative, because it was created as an effort of the political, judicial, educational and religious personalities. The production of these institutions in the context of reforms started in the education field, amongst which appears the process of consolidation of the obligatoriness of the primary teaching, can be understood like a resource adopted to decrease the resistance of poor people to go to school as also a process of differentiation of the school and of the education to be offered to the different subjects of the society. It will be verified, the production of a school for the ruling classes with an encyclopedic aspect and another one with formative function for work, being intended to the poor persons and, especially, to abandoned and delinquent children, clients in the institutions of preservation and reform. The notions of appropriation, representation, strategies and tactics are called to give understanding to the reading of the sources, on behalf of the production of a social e cultural history about the abandonment and the juvenilesdelinquency. The journalistic press and the specialized press, represented by the Revista Forense (Forense Review) and for Revista do Ensino (Teaching Review) were constituted as important fountains to attest the production and circulation of representations about the abandoned e delinquent juveniles in a useful dialog with legislative texts. The historical productions concern the subject drove me to the meaning of several representations about the object, providing an understanding that started in the common sense and reachedthe specific knowledge concern the delinquent and abandoned juveniles in Belo Horizonte.

For a socio-cultural history of abandonment and juveniles in Belo Horizonte 1921-1942. / Por uma história sócio-cultural do abandono e da delinqüência de menores em Belo Horizonte 1921-1941.

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