Suffering and working in the city in forced march

Abstract

For the history of the city in the 20th century, metallurgic workers and motorcycle couriers (known as “motoboys” in Brazil) are somehow an archetypal voice that portrays the mentality of an entire era. The city viewed in the perspective of these two social-professional groups reveals the brutality of the acceleration process of social time. Thus, in the lines below, the collective memoirs of metallurgic workers of São Paulo’s ABCD industrial belt in the mid-twentieth century and the oral autobiographical reports of “motoboys” in the Metropolitan Region of Campinas, collected in two separate surveys, intertwine in a process of brushing the history of the city’s circulation system against the grain.