A community in the Maranguapinho river ecosystem in Fortaleza – CE: everyday elements and vulnerabilities

Abstract

By unveiling the socio-environmental fabric of the carnaubais ecosystem in the Maranguapinho River basin, in Fortaleza, we rescue the history of the São Francisco community in this peripheral region. We bring together various elements of everyday and environmental life in order to generate complexity to understand how specific socio-environmental conditions became markers of vulnerabilities during the Covid-19 crisis. Our qualitative effort, without seeking structural determinants, but only sequential contingencies that become casually appropriate and only has heuristic value in the fusion of actants and socio-environmental frameworks, recomposes, through bibliographical review and reports from former residents, the history of the region and the current status of this ecosystem. We then used ethnography as a method to collect elements that we interpret as essential for the socio-environmental framework of daily life in this territory. Above all, the dimensions of vegetation and the stream, non-human animals, climate, houses, walls and courtyards, dirt streets and accumulated trash, occupations and work, transportation and food, in addition to the synchronic relationships between these descriptive elements. In this way, the article aims to contribute not only to updating the mapping of the socio-environmental history of this endangered ecosystem, but also to the suggestion that these particularities be taken into account in future contexts of epidemics and pandemics.