Entre o rio e o mar, Rocas: de bairro sinônimo de inferno a bairro da tradição e da cultura popular (1900-1950)

Abstract

This thesis proposes a general analysis of the process of urban development in the city of Natal, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, during the first half of the 20th century, focusing on a significant part of this urban complex, the Rocas neighborhood, in order to highlight the fractures and imbalances present in this process. From reading and critiquing the sources (newspapers, government reports, laws, decrees, photographs, literature, memorial accounts) as well as the historiographical production on the subject of Natal's urban history, it was noted how, during the period in which modernizing proposals and projects were thought up and implemented for the city, certain places - Ribeira, Cidade Alta and Cidade Nova - were favoured, while others, located in the peripheral zone, such as the Rocas neighbourhood, were treated secondarily in terms of the distribution of resources and material interventions. The urban planning projects, as well as the legislation regulating the spaces, had a segregating and excluding character, as they were related to the wishes of the ruling classes to ensure the shaping and modernization of the city, or rather parts of it, those parts that served as their spaces of interaction and valued sociability, which were located in the central zone. Rocas was not, at least until the mid-1920s, part of the (political and economic) interests of the dominant groups. On the contrary, Rocas was a place of poverty, misery, disease and danger; it was a place where the city's poor and working class lived, a place for fishermen, port and railway workers, small traders, socially excluded groups, or rather, those perversely included in society, until it was associated, around the 1940s, with tradition and popular culture. In view of this, the thesis defended in this work is that the way in which the ruling groups treated the Rocas neighbourhood during the city's modernization process, whether from an administrative or discursive point of view, contributed to the production and reproduction of a dynamic that resulted in processes of socio-spatial segregation, that is, making this place, physically located on the banks of the river and the sea, also appear on the margins of modernizing projects and, in a certain sense, also on the margins of history.