Madam Zilda and the airplane: Rethinking about rural-urban migrations in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (1943-1963)

Abstract

Part of the analytic bibliography about internal migrations explains this phenomenon relating it mainly to macroeconomic processes. Without denying this approach, but instead problematizing it, this paper discusses individual trajectories of migrants that came from rural areas of Rio Grande do Sul and settled in Porto Alegre, the state capital, and its adjacencies between 1943 and 1963. This paper observes carefully an example that is particularly revealing about this subject. The analysis is based on recent interviews, supported by oral history and collated with newspapers stories from the same historic period (Correio do Povo and Diário de Notícias). This approach intends to establish an interlocution between the retrospective and internal view of the utterances and the coeval and distant view of the press. Therefore, we intend to bring features that escape from the simplified interpretation based on the idea of need (“escape from the rural area”) that would invariably result in unfavorable conditions for later development. There is evidence of multiple conditions, stimuli and aspirations related to migration, and we think that these observations are essential to understand the social processes. Therefore, this paper analyzes in a complex way the view that minimizes the peculiarities of individual trajectories in favor of macroeconomic explanations by giving real attention to the capacity of the social subjects themselves, verifying the possibilities of social ascension of migrants.

Keywords: internal migrations, trajectories, social subjects.