Abandoning the stigma: visions of Mato Grosso on the pages of Série Realidade Brasileira and the Brasil-Oeste magazine

Abstract

This article intends to make a discussion about two press publications, namely Brasil-Oeste magazine and the supplement Série Realidade Brasileira (from the newspaper Folha de São Paulo); the intention is to investigate a sort of representations that historically bothered the Mato Grosso ruling groups and were still present in the mid-twentieth century. Thus, what I want to present is the annoyance that resulted from these representations and some of the proposals made in order to reverse that situation. This means that, using those discourses, which used to stigmatize the Mato Grosso state, the elites reformulated them using its negative elements under a new reading, building other “images” for that local. Throughout the text, there are several examples that are able to illustrate such assertions.