Entre leitores, bibliotecas, campos e jardins: Gabriela Mistral e Cecília Meireles em projetos de educação popular México (1920) e Brasil (1930)

Abstract

In this thesis I discuss reader formation projects wherewith Gabriela Mistral and Cecilia Meireles have engaged during the educational reforms in Mexico in 1922 and Brazil in 1931, respectively. I liken the multifaceted trajectories of both intellectuals in the historical time of modernity educational by analyzing the actions that supported the implementation of libraries, especially those intended for children’s public reading. I temporally organize the events from the experiences lived by two intellectuals through the educational chronicles that have circulated in journalistic spaces and letters that they have exchanged among themselves and with other intellectuals. When comparing the trajectories of Gabriela Mistral and Cecilia Meireles, seeking to clarify meanings from the new in historical time, I identify possibilities and limitations from that they have forged in the educational field, analyzing how popular education projects have conceived school, child and reader formation. The highlighted problems refer to aspects that have hindered the maintenance of libraries that were designed inside to these reforms, with political, administrative, economic and geographical natures. Problems that eventually, in the case of Brazil, have led to the extinction of some of the libraries and, in the case of Mexico, to the impoverishment of investments in the maintenance and expansion of collections. Notwithstanding the differences in the education expansion process, the fact is that these initiatives have represented a moment of educational modernity which can be evidenced in this thesis by analyzing the design of idealization and organization of children's libraries by Gabriela Mistral, Mexico, and Cecilia Meireles, Brazil. These two women have conceived such libraries as a means to strengthen the values, emotions and cultural references. The concerns of both with child´s formation were central in their different occupations in the public sphere, representing the new that was placed in that time which was necessary to invest in public reading. They have understood the importance of acting in the direction of formulating a conception of children's literature in which childhood´s purity and imagination of childhood have been allied, defending the idea that writing for children demanded detailed studies about literary taste and sensibility. In the same vein, actions were thought aimed at expanding books access, as well as the development of reading practices in children's libraries understanding this set of actions as a possible realization of what they believed was necessary to such training. The historical time interpretation allows us to understand what happened in Mexico and Brazil educational reforms from the intervention of these two intellectuals, leaving the later generation the possibility of continuing to which they have proposed that time: to form the reading child.