Quitandeiras contemporâneas : vivências cotidianas de mulheres comerciantes de comida de rua nos bairros de São José e Santo Antônio em Recife

Abstract

Women, food, work and the city and their interrelations, signalling a female invisibility, are the core of this study that focuses on the daily life experienced by women who produce and sell food today in the public streets of Recife, in Pernambuco, northeastern Brazil. In researching these everyday activities, we sought to observe the strategies developed by these social actresses, as they occupy an urban space and construct meanings by reproducing an ancestral condition of openwork, street and peddling in their contemporary greengrocers in streets of the districts of São José and Santo Antônio. The methodological approach of this research went through a first step in a historical survey of how the activity of the female kitanda in Brazil colony arises and how the occupation of the urban network of the contextualized neighbourhoods delimited in this research was formatted. In the second moment, the selection of the corpus to be investigated and the subsequent encounter between the researcher and the researched were given. The objective of these observations is to present the socio-economic profile, the experiences and work practices, the networks of family relationships, as well as the entrepreneurial perspectives seen by them, and finally to understand how they relate to the subjective structure that permeates the occupation and the use of urban roads in Brazilian cities, their perceptions about urban violence and their unfolding in this studied daily life. The use of semi-structured interviews and participative observation scripts was carried out in the corpus researched, women whose work activity is delimited by being street traders of food and supplies, located in the vicinity of the public market of São José. After collecting and analysing the contents delimited in categories, it is noticed that the historical invisibility of women, initially envisaged, is present in contemporaneity, insofar as the registration data of the secretariats of planning and control of the studied area does not refer to the numbers and so little the female faces that occupy it, ignoring the needs and particularities of territorial uses by these women. The female faces found are poor women, structurally illiterate, but full of knowledge and even aged and exfoliated by the arduous journey, they remain active and sometimes even cheerful in their offices.