Literacy and identities in the struggle for agrarian reform in southeast of the state of Pará

Abstract

This study analyzes the discursive processes of identity (ies) formation of illiterate rural workers. Our attention turns especially to linguistic-discursive elements that indicate their representations about the school literacy and their practices of reading and writing in non-school situations, trying to understand how to set up as subjects of the participate in the struggle for agrarian reform. Using methods of discourse studies Bakhtin, we analyzed fragments of three interviews that are a corpora existing in the database of the Universidade Federal do Pará, Campus of Marabá. The results show that the illiterate rural workers build negative representations of vernacular literacy and that speakers overestimate the power of the written representation, specially the model of school writing they have constructed.