Olhar redentor aos ínvios sertões mineiros: a campanha do saneamento rural (1916 - 1927)

Abstract

Republican Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century still presented itself as a vast nonurbanized territory, made up of rural populations of “half-savage” Brazilians, visibly inhabitants of barbarism and backwardness. The geographic frameworks and the populations of “inside” presented themselves in this way to the elites who, by assuming an urban perspective of the coast, denied the “real” Brazil. Thus, within a context of increased nationalist and racial impetus, the issue of Brazilianness from Brazilian intellectuals begins to gain strength, substantiated by several themes, especially, for the purposes of this research, the theme of health promotion. One of the efforts to rebuild the national identity will start from the movement known as the campaign for rural sanitation from 1916, which sought to mobilize and popularize political-institutional solutions to change the conditions of the populations affected by rural endemics and, consequently, make the State the guardian of the course of the nation, based on republican moral values. We were particularly interested in how sanitary ideas found in Minas Gerais other agents, political, social, sanitary and economic issues, that is, how ideas were contextualized and materialized differently in this state of the federation. On the other hand, the year 1927 was characterized as one of the last years in which the sanitation debate actually took place via official sources of the government of the state of Minas Gerais. In the same year, the Diretoria de Higiene do Estado, the body responsible for rural sanitation, was reformulated and extinguished in its public functions. From the theoretical-methodological foundations of historical geography, in this dissertation, we elaborate a historical-geographical understanding of the discourses mobilized by the rural sanitation campaign in the construction of a territorial project in the state of Minas Gerais, based on the sources of the periodical press d'O Pharol and the Relatórios da Diretoria de Higiene do Estado of the State of Minas Gerais and the Relatórios dos Presidentes do Estado of Minas Gerais. The main question of the research was the following: how the speeches that were mobilized for the rural sanitation campaign, present in press and state government sources, legitimize the constitution of a territorial project for Minas Gerais in the period from 1916 to 1927? The first chapter discusses the geographical ideas present in the hygienist discourse in Brazil between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In the second chapter, we seek to understand the contexts and ideas from the strengthening of public health in the figure of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz and its legacy for the knowledge of the sanitary reality of the brazilian sertões; the imaginary of the sertão constructed as a geographical ideology based on the Neiva-Penna Report, and, finally, we analyze the interlocutions of the sanitary movement in an authoritarian-welfare state context. Chapter three deals with the universe of documentary sources necessary for the historicalgeographical investigation of the phenomenon in question, the Minas Gerais policy in the Primeira República and the structure and sanitary state of Minas Gerais, prior to 1916. Finally, in chapter four, we understand the different phases of the rural sanitation campaign in the state via primary sources. From a first moment with centralizing discourses, and signed agreements, through the division of the state into sanitary districts as a spatial strategy of state hygiene, until the later construction of rural prophylaxis posts, regional hospitals and sanitary works. We analyzed all this material infrastructure created, inseparable from the immaterialities of the campaigner phenomenon, and we understand that the rural sanitation campaign actively participated in the production and territorial reordering of the state in the beginning of the 20th century, by basing its speeches and actions on the maxim “sanitize the soil, to sanitize and educate the people” as an essential condition for the economic, moral and civilizational progress of Minas Gerais. The mixed method enabled the use of qualitative and quantitative techniques in the search, consultation, collection and analysis procedures of the wide document universe referring to the rural sanitation theme.