“A esperança de uma vida nova em um lugar novo”: história oral em Taquarussu/MS — origens, recomeços e cotidianos

Abstract

The dissertation examines the oral expression memory regarding the settlement of the municipality of Taquarussu, located in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, using the methods of Applied Oral History in the narrative genre of Oral Life History. For the analysis, fourteen people who witnessed the creation and development of the municipality between the 1950s and 1980s were interviewed, within the context of the "March to the West" project implemented by the Vargas Government. The dialogical method was used in the analysis of the sources, combining the interviews with textual and imagistic sources, in order to contrast the different narratives about the founding of Taquarussu (MS), revealing the complexity of memory in its individual, collective, official, and clandestine aspects. The analysis of the interviews highlighted subjective aspects of the networks of collaborators and revealed a trajectory marked by the challenges of domestication of the landscape and urban development, as well as aspects marginalized by official historiography, such as the original presence of the Ofaié indigenous people in the former lands of Taquarussu. The narratives from the studied destination community, composed of migrants from different regions of Brazil in search of fertile lands in the south of the then state of Mato Grosso, allowed us to understand memory as a bridge between the individual and the collective, demonstrating the dynamism of memory in the construction of the social identity of a people and the important role of oral history in historiographical studies.