The process of social integration of Warao indigenous children and adolescents in the public school in Mossoró-RN

Abstract

This article brings together a set of ethnographic notes and anthropological reflections on the current process of social integration of the Warao in the Public School of Mossoró-RN, aiming to organize the effort of critical apprehension that has been built within the scope of the research The Warao in Mossoró: the migratory dynamics and the urban village process in the Covid-19 pandemic scenario. The dynamics underway since the year 2021 of this winding process that involves the small “foreign” indigenous group and the welcoming local Brazilian society, in a broad sense, has advanced significantly in the current year of 2022. However, bureaucratic obstacles persist on the part of the authorities and, above all, equivocations at a symbolic, moral-emotional and political-ideological level on both sides (the Warao and the surrounding Brazilian society) on how (and if) this Warao integration in the Formal Education of Public Schools should continue, in abstract terms. And, at a concrete and situational level, in a local school unit despite all the well-known regrets in the already precarious and overloaded Brazilian Education. This bureaucratically tense, pedagogically challenging and anthropologically rich process of integration of the Warao in the Public School in Mossoró-RN was problematized in three argumentative moments: the arrival of the Warao in urban Mossoro; the legal diplomas that guarantee the School Education to the Indigenous and to the Migrant; the concrete process of social integration of the Warao at the Padre Alfredo State School.