Compleição do migrante em Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você, de Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

The present work analyzes the novel Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você, by Luiz Ruffato, in order to understand the development of the migrant’s complexion. Starting from a close reading, we analytically decompose the elements that proved to be most fruitful for the understanding of the many meanings that the novel evokes. In addition to being a reference in the field of Literary Studies, we maintained an interdisciplinary dialogue with three concepts by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “habitus”, “field” and “capital”. The study process led us to detect three central symbolic topoi in the work: naivety, magical thinking and an antagonistic notion between progress and decay. Once in the receiving country, and then a migrant, the migrant characters, especially the protagonist Serginho, find themselves in new conditions that lead them to develop what we call the migrant complexion. During this period, they have to deal with: precarious material conditions, social networks, perspective of return and provisional and alterity relations with other social actors – nationals and other migrants. Therefore, we assume, as a hypothesis, that the migratory process transforms the individual who migrates, causing him to move not only spatially, but also in terms of his beliefs and actions. They start from a naive condition and, with the passage of time, experience and conditions changing, they reach a new condition different from the initial one: helpless and without prospects. This process of transformation is what we call the migrant complexion. This is revealed both by the content and form elements of the work, as well as by the author's cosmovision, which denounces the terrible conditions of the urban lower middle class in Brazil that dreams of the possibility of ascending socioeconomically through migration.