BETWEEN “SPARPS AND CONFETTI”: DISPUTES BETWEEN DIPLOMATS FROM SAMBA AND POOR PEOPLE FROM CAIAIRI, IN THE 1970s TO 1990s, PORTO VELHO/RO.
Carnival; Porto Velho; Amazon; Popular culture; Dispute.
The city of Porto Velho has already hosted the best Carnival in the northern region, with large parades of Samba Schools, in the 1970s to 1990s. Two of them, A Pobres do Caiari and Diplomatas do Samba, enchanted Carnivals for many years, through of a carnival dispute that went far beyond the Avenida, it was along the lines of a social, economic and even political dispute, within the working class itself, divided between the residents of the first planned neighborhood in Brazil, the Caiari neighborhood and the residents of neighborhoods originating from another formation process, without higher education and without high-ranking public service positions, belonging to Porto Velho, which remained outside the dividing line. This research has a qualitative approach (GASKELL, 2002), with semi-structured interviews (MANZINI, 2004) as a procedure for data collection, as well as the focus group, with real characters who lived and experienced this dispute between the two biggest carnival groups that the municipality had in the last decades of the 20th century. The research also includes several newspaper clippings from the period, which portrayed carnival disputes in Porto Velho, available at the Documentation Center of the State of Rondônia. For data analysis and formulation, we used Oral History (ALBERTI, 2005; SOUZA, 2005) and Discourse Analysis techniques (PIOVEZANI AND SARGENTINI, 2011), to construct data, based on the speeches of our interviewees. Discussing the concept of Popular Culture (BAKHTIN, 1987) and Carnival (SEBE, 1986) in the Amazon (BRAGA, 2009).