Resumen de Migration and female empowerment in Brazil
This article reports on my activities as a social worker in the favelas (slums) of Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, in Southern Brazil. The close contacts I established with these communities allowed me to observe the empowering process that women experienced after migration. Most of them had migrated from the countryside to the city in search of better living conditions. As part of my activities, I interviewed fifteen female leaders and activists in these communities. To get to know their life stories over time and space, I have chosen to use the biographical method, since it allowed me to listen to the voices of different individuals, groups or segments of society which hardly ever had the opportunity to manifest themselves in official history. Through the analysis of the narrative interviews, I have reconstructed the social-economic and cultural history of these women’s lives. All migrant women selected for my study are descendants of Brazilian indigenous peoples. It is important to mention that miscegenation processes have historically been very intense in Brazil and most mestiços (mixed-bloods) were classified as caboclos (descendants from relations between whites and natives), according to the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro (1995).
