O grito escrito e desenhado: táticas de mobilização do Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas de Rua no Recife (1988-2002)

Abstract

This work aims to build a historical narrative about the participation of children and adolescents in the newspaper O Grito de Meninos e Meninas de Rua, in Recife city, between 1988 and 2002. That periodical, most known as O Grito, was a publication produced by boys, girls and social educators who participated of the National Movement of Boys and Girls of the Street (Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas de Rua – MNMMR) from Recife. Published for the first time in 1988, the newspaper became a space for the boys and girls who were part of the MNMMR to brought news from their communities, reflections, complaints, and register happenings about the events planned by the organization. The entity responsible for its publication, the MNMMR, is an autonomous popular non-governmental organization composed mainly of boys, girls, social educators and volunteers, who seek, through the engagement and participation of children and adolescents themselves, the achievement and defense of their rights. The MNMMR emerged in the 1980s, from the articulation of social educators who worked in the care of children and adolescents in street situation and that they opposed the State's welfare and repressive conception in the treatment of childhood and adolescence which was based on the Minor Welfare National Policy (Política Nacional de Bem-Estar do Menor – PNBEM) that was in force from 1964 to 1990. The information from the newspaper’s reports, investigated as a historical source, was intercrossed with the documentation, the dissemination publications of the MNMMR and the reports of memories of people who participated in the newspaper's construction. The published editions allow, in a historical perspective, an analysis of the afflictions, tensions and hopes of boys and girls who circulated in the streets and sidewalks of the neighborhoods of the capital of Pernambuco and had the opportunity to transform their screams into written records and drawings.