Infância e movimentos sociais: participação política de crianças no Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)

Abstract

After the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of 1989, children's participation takes a central place in the discussion of children's rights and in the field of Social Studies of Children. This concept, based upon the social experiences of children from the countries of the Global North and assumed to be universal, disregards the experiences of child participation in the Global South that existed even before the CDC. In order to give visibility and to better comprehend the experiences of children participation in the Global South, this research has as its main goal the analysis of the political participation of children in Latin American social movements, focusing on the Sem Terrinha – the children of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), in Brazil. The starting point for this research’s theoretical-methodological framework are the discussions of Infancy Social Studies and the Theories of Social Movements and Collective Actions, as well as the instability of the concepts of ‘agency’, ‘social actor’ and ‘participation’ when analyzed from a Latin American perspective. The methodological strategies were conditioned by the researcher's involvement with the reality under investigation, as an educator-researcher, taking into account the demands and dynamics of the social movement. The field research was carried out based on the researcher's participation as an educator in the 1st Sem Terrinha National Meeting; in the Preparatory Workshop for the Minas Gerais Sem Terrinha regional meetings; in the Minas Gerais Sem Terrinha Regional Meeting; and in the Ciranda Infantil from the Marielle Vive camp. In combination with field observations, interviews were conducted with eleven children between the ages of 7 and 12 who attended the Sem Terrinha National Meeting. Alongside with empirical observations, they contributed to understand the instability of the aforementioned concepts and demonstrated the need to describe and analyze the concrete experiences of participation of the Sem Terrinha. The main findings of the research were summarized in seven characteristics of children's political participation in the MST: i) the Latin American context and its material and historical conditions, which presents to the children and their families the daily need to struggle for their rights; ii) the development of a systematic process of construction of spaces and children participation experiences throughout the history of the MST; iii) the collective dimension of child participation in the context of their insertion in a social movement; iv) intergenerational power relations as an conditioning and structuring factor of participation; v) the effectiveness and impact of children's decisions in the restructuring process of the social movement to guarantee their participation; vi) the formative intentionality, which seeks to reconcile a project of social transformation with the necessity to guarantee the continuity of the movement through the training of new militants, in which the political participation of children, even if it is part of a project for the future, takes place in the present; vii) the different forms and languages of children's participation through which traditional models of adult participation are brought into question. These characteristics condition and are conditioned by a childhood that acts politically, that has a political conscience and in which the social struggle crosses all dimensions of the children's lives. Thus, the analysis of their political participation made it possible to question the normative and universalizing interpretations still present in documents from international organizations and in the academic field, contributing to complexify the comprehension of the concepts of the Social Studies of Childhood and to deepen the possibilities of reflection about children's rights in contexts marked by political issues.