"A nossa força é a união": do protagonismo da Associação União da Beira Rio à estruturação do bairro São José, João Pessoa-PB (1981-1989)

Abstract

The urban layout of the city of João Pessoa, former city of Parahyba, until the end of the 19th century was practically limited to its colonial and imperial design, a little beyond downtown and surrounding neighborhoods of Tambiá and Jaguaribe. Some rural areas coexisted with small housing nuclei, in Mandacaru, Penha, Tambaú, Gramame, Zumbi and Cruz das Almas, generally connected by very precarious paths and mostly inhabited by hardworking individuals, developing activities such as fishing, pottery, shellfishing, grass planting and others small economy activities linked to the lives of these populations. However, from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, this urban structure began to rapidly expand beyond the central limits, inherited from its first centuries, and new neighborhoods began to define themselves, such as Jaguaribe and Torrelândia. Considering this process in general terms, the self-construction of Beira Rio, the current São José neighborhood, was formed in 1968, linked to the process of expansion of the city towards the East and North, based on the occupation of the Jaguaribe River valley. With the intense movement of occupation in the region, residents decided to found the Beira Rio Union Association (AUBR) in 1980, and in an institutionalized way, they started to demand measures from the public authorities that would allow them to live well and with quality in Beira Rio, like land regularization, an urbanization project to the construction of collective use equipments, such as a school, health care centers, square, etc. The present work aims to analyze the actions of AUBR, between 1981 and 1989, and how they exerted influence in the act of organizing internal forces to claim their rights guarantees, which consequently resulted in the recognition and regulation of the title of neighborhood by the City Hall of the city of João Pessoa. Thus, we carried out a bibliographic survey and an analysis of the documents in our chronological cut, added to the methodology of Oral History, allowing the interviewees to stop being mere informants and become protagonists of History, with their experiences of life through memory accounts. In this sense, it is worth emphasizing the importance of this research in view of its contribution to the production of scientific knowledge in the context of Graduate Studies in History on the subject of local historiography, since there is a scarce collection on the subject, as well as it seeks to deepen research on the history of neighborhoods in the city of João Pessoa, which still lacks more productions in the field of historiography.