“A gift from God”

the correlation between memory and identity in the legislative process of the Statute of the Gypsy

Abstract

This work is a description and analysis of the role played by the Associação Nacional das Etnias Ciganas (Anec) in the political articulation of the Senate Bill No. 248, of 2015, which proposes the institution of the Statute of the Gypsy. Through field work, which involves incursions into the daily life of the Nova Canaã camp, document analysis, semi-structured interviews and open dialogues, as well as the existential narratives and life stories of the two social actors who built Anec, we compile and interpret the ethnographic data, along with light two studies involving processes of identity and memory. The objective was to understand how the subjects involved in this plot attribute meaning to the creation of this law and to the political struggle for the affirmation of two blind rights. It is noted that the political action of this association is not restricted to the claim of a regulatory framework with the provision of public policies. It also involves an effort to intertwine the trajectory of the group with the history of the recognition of the gypsies rights at the Federal Legislative Power, a that occurs through a dichotomous impetus in which socials subjects experiences its process of subjectivity and dispute politically the narrative regarding the proposition of the Statute of the Gypsy in Brazil.