Subjects of law: mobilization of immigrant women in the city of São Paulo between the 20th and 21st centuries

Abstract

Brazilian society is made up of diverse groups/ethnicities, which have fought and conquered rights (re)organizing issues that were veiled and silenced, such as issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity, among other social markers of difference. In this way, I seek to understand, in this article, the speeches of a group of women who are part of the Front of Immigrant and Refugee Women in the city of São Paulo. I ask, therefore, what tactics are adopted by the subjects of rights in Brazilian society to question and guarantee access to education, health and the culture of immigrants and refugees (men, women, children, LGBTQIA+ population), whose mother tongue is not Portuguese and that mobilize other cultural matrices in Brazilian society. In this sense, the procedures of oral history were used (Holanda; Meihy, 2007; Portelli 2016; Rovai, 2021), which involve participant observation in collectives, conducting interviews. The initial problem to be investigated is how the mobilization of migrant collectives and civil society in Brazil, specifically in the city of São Paulo, allowed the demands of immigrants to be made visible, especially of the immigrant woman, and that intercultural practices were adopted in the mediation relations constituted in the State and civil society institutions to meet these demands.