Displacements and Frontiers: migration, racism and gender issues

Abstract

In this research project, we intend to carry out comparative studies on the situation of contemporary migrants in global cities, aiming to scale new social tensions, the disrespect for human rights, racism and expanded sexism, based on new population displacements arising from environmental catastrophes and imperialist wars intensified early in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Also, we intend to identify in the cultural practices, in the agreements and disagreements between groups that manage to enter into new territories and countries, and in the social and political processes arising from capital globalization the situation of migrants and their coexistence strategies in foreign lands. With the extension of national frontiers, new problems have emerged and different forms of intolerance appeared on the public stage, challenging everyone to find convivial alternatives and to use the creativity that emerges in cultural meetings, especially in adversity, new modalities of public policies able to challenge the old statist forms, from the circuits of affection and perspectivism, developed respectively by Castro Nurseries and Vladimir Safatle, as a possibility of a good life in contemporary diversity.The research focuses on the city of Sao Paulo, whose growth, in recent decades, has made it to become a megalopolis, according to the UN classification. By becoming a receiving center of people who individually migrate in search of better living conditions, or the dream of modernity, the city has began to revive problems like those that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aggravated by new intolerances. We chose to analyze the cases of Latin Americans, Africans and Haitians. These, migrated to the city in search of its insertion in the labor market, better possibilities for studies and freedoms, and the hard task of rebuilding their dreams and places after the two earthquakes that struck their country, that was taking its first steps towards the freedoms achieved with the victory against the Doc (François and Jean Claude Duvalier, father and son) during the long dictatorship that devastated the country. In the group of Latin Americans, we are interested in the situation of Bolivians, because they are in a more significant number and they represent different displacement processes throughout the 1970s and 2000s: political refugees, individual immigrants with professional experiences and undocumented immigrants, coyotes' hostages, recruiters for forced labor. In concern to Africans, we will emphasize the analysis of migrants from Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP), who migrated at different times and for different reasons.In partnership with organizations such as Cáritas, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and European research centers, we intend to organize an integrated database for comparative studies. We are interested in verifying the following hypothesis: the contemporary immigration, result of new capital flows, produced in European cities new coexistence codes and, in a way, the necessary review of human rights, as a consequence of the need to incorporate people with distinct languages, habits and culture of the national hitherto hegemonic. In contrast, in megalopolis such as Sao Paulo, was not possible to keep immigrants in peripheral places with the high level of preservation, because they were inserted into fragmented productive spaces where they started to live together with workers deprived of the preserved spaces of the city and, being without immigration documents, they became a mass of workers without rights and invisible for the whole city. (AU)