Thread by @DislocatingUS

Now presenting: Laura Belik!

Drought migrants angered the city residents, and the camps were set up to be 'bad' places

How to bring these events to light despite their present physical non-existence

Here I will share some photos that do exist:

Here is the only camp that still has physical presence today:

I want to complicate this through multiple ways these camps are remembered, both good and bad,

Q from the floor:
what was the purpose of the camps?

Laura:
Officially to provide aid: shelter and food. But as I mentioned, the president very oriented toward the modern, wanted the camps to be 'labour' camps as workers for nation building. Elites wanted these people separate, due to xenophobic issues. So many diff. narratives

Q from floor:
In my research I see a similar thing in Spain in the 1930's...

Yes indeed there are many other examples from around the world, in South Africa for example, but none of these cases are quite homogenous

Q from floor:
In other places in Brazil there are less than memories, there is no knowledge, but these things still work as kind of re-constructions

Laura:
I am also from south of Brazil, and this is something I didn't know until I came to work on my PhD. Indeed they are not well know in Brazil generally or even in the local area, only maybe 10% of people know about this...

...so it's not straightforward, we may think of these as maybe 'bad' places but to the migrants at the time these camps may have just been 'another stop on the way'

Lorena:
Also being from Brazil and not knowing this...it is not only about the memories but the material conditions e.g shelter, add a very important aspect to this in terms of creation/erasure of memories

Laura:
Yes that's a very nice comment. In fact my next case studies continues following this and I hope this can begin to address that. For example, workers were mobilised for latex making for the war, and then later may be Brasilia, then even later to São Paolo...

...and what I'm getting at is that these processes seem to be cyclical. For example, the gov in the 40's kind of overemphasised that the was a drought to try to create these movements for development projects

Q from the floor:
besides photographs and oral history, what other sources could you use do “rebuild” this history? is there literature, such as “cordel”, or music?

Laura:
People often ask me: who are the NE people's? Is it a race issue? But its so much more than that. Vargas would say that the refugees were 'perfect' for being working class because they were mixed: former slaves, indigenous and the poor

...in one way we look at the area as this "quintessential" or idyllic Brazilian place, but also somehow modernity hasn't arrived yet, so then there was the drive to colonise it

Claudia:
About the issue of race and radicalisation in connection with a body. For example, 'the poor body will bring disease'. So my question is about intersectionality, is it that one's body can represent more of a threat and that feeds into the processes of modernisation here?

Laura:
So much of the documents I look at are medical research. In the medical reports you find the racial question coming up often, which is very much related to this eugenic race science that was in vogue at the time

Q from the floor:
Have you traced some of the geographic histories/mobility trajectories of the people passing through the camps? So how the space of the camp might be interlinked to the wider geographies of modernisation and migration at the time?

Laura:
I have been doing some work with a geographer and work a lot with historical work, it is really interdisciplinary, but I'm still working through this

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