Nem tão doce infância: educação escolar para crianças na Usina de Açúcar Bom Jesus (Cabo de Santo Agostinho/PE - 1990)

Abstract

Located in the Brazilian Northeast, State of Pernambuco, the city of Cabo de Santo Agostinho has its history marked by the sugar cane plantation. A relationship started with the installation of the first mills in the region, remaining until the arrival of the first sugar mills, marking the process of industrialization of sugar production in Pernambuco in the 19th century. The Usina de Açúcar Bom Jesus is inserted in this context. In its surroundings, a village of workers was established. In it, children were circulating, playing, studying and being exploited in the use of their labor in the cutting of the cane. The objective of this work is to analyze the construction of inequalities within the inequality in the daily school of children who experienced their childhood in that space during the 1990s, separated between “Infances within the School” and “Infances outside the School”. The temporal cut-off is justified by the first decade of the approval of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, last decade of the school under the administration of the Usina, going to the State in 1999, in addition to all the mobilizations of civil society organizations in the fight against the exploitation of the work of children and adolescents in the rural area. We seek to discuss the issues related to schooling and initiation to early work from oral narratives, research related to the exploitation of child labor and Archives of the Jornal do Commercio. The results show us the construction of two strategies in the territory of the Usina Bom Jesus, one would be “Education for Labor” and another “work without Education” for the children and adolescents who lived in the Usina Bom Jesus.