Guardiãs da terra e da memória: trabalhadoras rurais e as transformações da mineração no Lago Juruti Velho, Pará (1950-2009)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the socio-environmental transformations experienced by the traditional communities of Lake Juruti Velho, in western Pará, through the memories and experiences of rural women workers. Based on oral history, the research weaves together individual and collective trajectories to understand how these women lived through, confronted, and redefined the changes brought by the arrival of Alcoa’s mining project in the early 2000s. The narrative is built from everyday life, forms of labor, and community relations shaped over time, with particular focus on the period between 1950 and 2009. Within this span, stories of resistance emerge, revealing the strength of women in sustaining life, land, and networks of solidarity. Far from a passive reading of impacts, the dissertation highlights strategies of organization and struggle, especially through women’s participation in local associations and movements for territorial rights. Mining, upon entering these territories, reshapes ways of life, alters social dynamics, and imposes new forms of dependence and exclusion. However, women mobilize memory as a tool for claiming rights and asserting belonging, recovering knowledge, practices, and values that support resistance against the advance of mineral capital. By opposing the narratives of mainstream media and corporations with the voices of the affected women themselves, the research reaffirms the central role of women in constructing a social memory that refuses erasure and demands a future in which land, labor, and memory are recognized as rights, not commodities. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to a social history of mining in the Amazon, centered on the experiences and struggles of the women who have become guardians of their territories and their histories.