Os “Meninos do Recife”: o olhar de Abelardo da Hora sobre o abandono de crianças e adolescentes (1960-1962)

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the setbacks between the legal discourses of the Child Assistance Service (SAM) about abandoned and destitute children and the scenario of social vulnerability and violence experienced by children and adolescents, between 1960 and 1962, in the city from Recife. In a theoretical-methodological way, the work adopts the perspective of children and adolescents as historical. Therefore, in the first chapters, the work started from the historical contextualization of the creation of the Service and identified its internal problems and its goals of discipline and control, based on Foucault's studies. Then, in the third chapter, explained both the violent and repressive way that the SAM applied in Recife, using material from the Diário de Pernambuco, published throughout January 1960, which denounce the hospitalization of a teenager done in such a way. abusive and inappropriate. As well as, in the last chapter, based on the trajectory of Abelardo da Hora as an engaged artist and his artistic production as a social denunciation, he exposed the scenario of vulnerability that children and adolescents suffered from the analysis of engraving 22, from the Meninos do Recife series (1962), by the plastic artist. In this chapter, the theoretical and methodological aspects of the use of art in History, the conceptualization of intellectual being, the role of the artist in society, engaged and militant art, among others, will be deepened. In this way, the work intends to contribute to the historiography of childhoods so that children and adolescents can be considered as autonomous and protagonists of their own history. It also presents itself as relevant and innovative when identifying as setbacks between legislation and as different social realities of Recife from alternative and artistic sources, highlighting the importance of aesthetic-political education (GOMES, 2019) in the construction of historical awareness, leading to not only rationality counts, but also subjectivity, thus building a more humanized and less exclusive historiographical modus operandi.