The paths of São Paulo: migrations and urban work by peasants from Minas Gerais

Abstract

This article analyzes the history of farm workers who migrated annualiy from the Jequitinhonha and Mucuri River Valleys, in the state of Minas Gerais, to the city of São Paulo, during the 1960s and until the late 1970s, after which job openings in the cities eventually dwindled. The article investigates these labour experiences, which were simultaneously rural and urban, and concludes that there were few relationships between them: experience on the farms was not useful in the city, where civil construction adapted its work to the migrants. Likewise, skills learned in the city did not affect the already instalied systems of production. Their political organization, built up in the 1980s and 1990s, is only distantly related to the urban experience. In the narratives, the workers' rural and urban history were virtually foreign to one another, even though they were both mediated by their community of origin, by concern for and by the culture proper to peasant societies.