THE ROLE OF THE PRESS IN CONSTRUCTING THE CARTOGRAPHY OF POVERTY AND CRIME IN FORTALEZA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

Poverty and criminality have always been fatalistically linked in so-called scientific discourses and through the eyes of the wealthy classes, contributing to the construction of a criminal imaginary. In the early decades of the 20th century, in Fortaleza, an image of a den of crime and vice was projected onto the spaces of poverty, as well as onto the behaviors of the poor, which were seen as harmful and deviant blemishing the image of a modern and polished city that the elites sought to build. Newspapers of the time created narratives to define the dangerous areas of the city and to criminalize certain spaces of sociability seen as places of delinquency, thus constructing a cartography of crime. In this work, we aim to reconstruct that cartography based on the fragments of the past found in police chronicles and other newspaper articles.