The city as a form of differentiation

Founders and pioneer families in the Amazon

Abstract

This work aims to show how the form and histories of the formation of cities in areas considered as frontiers are signs that reveal values ​​which guide the movement of pioneer families in the South and Southeast of Brazil in search of new lands to open, occupy and civilize in the Amazon. When they arrived in the places where they founded cities, they recreated scenarios of encounters with other peoples, reformulating ways of belonging and differentiating themselves internally and externally to what they conceive as their ethnic group, based on criteria of belonging inherited from ancestors and reproduced for their descendants through the daily construction of memory. The analysis is based on ethnographic work carried out since 2013 in Novo Progresso, a municipality crossed by the BR-163 highway in the Southwest of Pará, as well as on the literature on pioneer settlers and founders of cities. I am especially interested in cases of cities located on highways opened or consolidated by colonization policies in the Legal Amazon: North of Mato Grosso, Southwest of Pará, Rondônia and South of Amazonas.