Carvoeiros: trajetória do trabalho e dos trabalhadores da carvoaria em Manaus (1945-1967)

Abstract

The period between the decline of the rubber economy, around 1920, and the establishment of the Manaus Free Trade Zone in 1967 is traditionally seen in local historiography as a time of economic stagnation, crisis, and paralysis in the city. After a new and brief euphoria in the years of the second war with the battle of the rubber, the city continued it’s state of inertia, that would only end with the Free Trade Zone, that would put it again in the course of the progress. This conception, the result of an official historiography, however, ends up hiding various processes and realities of urban space, homogenizing the subjects and relegating the shadows to different experiences, to live and to work, shaped in this context. In this sense, the present dissertation tries to approach one of the many categories of workers, the coal workers, who composed the informal work in the city Manaus in that period. These workers dealt with a product which was fundamental to the economy of the country and very present in the daily life of the city at the time, charcoal, whether in the domestic environment, factories, power plants and other spaces. Therefore, from the oral reports of ancient coal workers, from newspapers, official documents and other sources, we intend to understand these subjects in their multiple dimensions and experiences of living and working, that are often intertwined in their own daily life and exercised simultaneously to other activities.