Abstract:
The study theme of this work is the presence of segregation and stigma in the social space of the Teotônio Vilela neighborhood in Ilhéus/BA. The work seeks to reveal that the people don’t live in the peripheral neighborhoods or occupy territories which should be preserved because of free and spontaneous desire, but because of an existing territorial real estate policy in the urban space of the city. This policy, tied to the crisis stemming from cacao in the decade of 1980 and from a resignification of the economy aimed at tourism and the valorization of the areas in the center of the city, forced many poor people, especially from other neighborhoods of the city, to leave the valued territories, being condemned to live in the sewers, in social spaces both planned by the public power as well as abandoned by it. The research also reveals that the people who reside in the segregated neighborhoods, such as Teotônio Vilela, a neighborhood which projects into a mangrove, are stigmatized, considered the incarnation of evil, and thus, rejected from communal interaction and from the social relations for the simple fact that they are dwellers of a disqualified neighborhood. We defend here that the deconstruction of segregation and of stigma in the Teotônio Vilela neighborhood must happen through the mobilization of Education, of the faith communities and through the Dwellers Associations in the articulation of the struggle for dignity and improvements in the neighborhood.
