O “BAIANO” ENTRE AS MIGRAÇÕES INTERNAS E O NEOESCRAVAGISMO NO RIO GRANDE DO SUL

Abstract

Between 2013 and 2016, I researched the conflicts that took place in Rio Grande, a city in the south of Rio Grande do Sul, during the installation of the Polo Naval, a mega enterprise for the construction of naval platforms. There, the representation of the “Baiano” was coined, a stigma that synthesized the variation of migrants who came from all over Brazil to work at the Polo. In 2023, the “Baianos” sign reappears amid denunciations and scandals of the occurrence of slave labor in the same State. The objective of the article is to establish a record of the findings of slave labor in Rio Grande do Sul, the senses in the atmosphere surrounding slave labor, the agents, places and sectors of its practice; but above all to point out possible lines of historical correlation between the cultural conflicts at the Naval Pole a few years earlier, having in common the effort to construct a stigma of the migrant as “Baiano” with the recently triggered stage of those who also receive such stigma but now subjected to the limit of exploitation and subordination: enslavement, the total alienation of the right over oneself.