Cursinhos populares on the move: braiding struggles for education and re-existence/resistance

Maíra Tavares Mendes^[1]

Cibele de Camargo Lima^[2]

Marcela de Andrade Rufato^[3]

The possibility of entering higher education, particularly prestigious universities, is a challenge for the majority of the population. Even in countries that have massive educational systems, students face increasing difficulties, especially due to the high degree of privatization that this level of education has faced, which requires the payment of tuition fees and, often, student debt with banks and credit systems. Another facet of this phenomenon is the historical selectivity of admission exams, especially in free institutions.

Latin America is a cradle of examples for understanding the power of social movements in education, sometimes capable of reshaping higher education. Even though more than a century separates us from the Córdoba University Reform, which took place in Argentina in 1918, there is an up to date dispute over the idea of the university as a public good institution, as well as holding power conflicts. Such struggles may contribute to the solution of national challenges, even though the agents of neoliberalism invest tirelessly against higher education through fiscal adjustments, precariousness and reactionary attacks.

Latin America's strength is partly explained by our history of colonial exploitation. The processes of violence inflicted on our land and our ancestors have made struggle not an option, but a necessity.

In the Brazilian case, from where we speak and where most of the reports presented here come from, the first higher education institutions were only created in 1808, after more than three hundred years of colonial violence in this land. Even so, the first actual universities, as we conceive them today, were created only at the beginning of the 20th century (Fávero, 2006). This represents a historically recent origin when we consider that the first American university was founded in Santo Domingo in 1538. Subsequently, universities were organized in Lima, Mexico City, Bogotá, Cuzco, Santiago, Cambridge-Massachusetts, Connecticut and Philadelphia (Gomes, 2002).

The absence of universities in Brazil, however, did not prevent the elite from accessing this level of education back then. They went to Europe to study. Thus, for more than four centuries, access to university served as a valuable element in differentiating social classes. This is also why it was convenient for the elites to keep access to university education restricted, creating mechanisms to make admission to higher levels of education in Brazilian education more difficult (Saviani, 2011).

Thus, the creation of universities in Brazil is the latest in the Americas, with the first durable institution only appearing in 1920 (Fávero, 2006). For this reason, even today, in the very recent history of higher education in Brazil, there have been educational experiments aiming the democratization of higher education access (Cunha, 1968). Educational collectives that organize prep courses to increase the presence of marginalized groups inside the university are known in Brazil as cursinhos populares (popular courses), cursinhos alternativos (alternative courses) or cursinhos comunitários (community courses).

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (2005[1970]) highlights the existence of limit situations, situations of oppression that prevent the oppressed from being more, to the maximum of their potential as human beings. For Freire (2005[1970], p. 85), “any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence”.

From the moment they realize that this situation exists, the oppressed can direct their action towards overcoming it, towards creating the untested feasibility. Lima (2019) highlights how, in relation to higher education admission, cursinhos populares are untested feasibilities, since they collectively transform the reality in which they are inserted, and also transform universities and society.

These movements are called cursinhos populares to distance themselves from experiences organized in the format of cursinhos pré-vestibulares^[4], which are offered by corporations in the educational market and therefore have a commercial character. Commercial cursinhos are products of an educational market that specializes in selling training packages for higher education admission exams, often mobilized as shadow education, a recurring strategy among the middle and upper classes to increase the chances of passing these selection exams (Gouveia & Neto-Mendes, 2014).

Cursinhos populares have a popular pedagogy that focuses less on specific training for selection exams and does not encourage students to see themselves as adversaries in a meritocratic dispute. These educational experiences are concerned with turning preparatory studies into a tool for confronting the barriers that marginalize people from academic environments, from undergraduate to postgraduate studies, including scientific research and funding for higher education (Mendes & Rufato, 2015; Lima, 2019; Lima & Rufato, 2018; Castro, 2019; Vasconcelos, Mendes & Mussi, 2023).

Although they are experiences with at least six decades of history, preparatory courses, whether popular or commercial, are not educational spaces formalized in Brazilian legislation. As such, they are ambiguous spaces by nature. Their non-formal feature allows them to be both privileged environments for experimentation, fostering a contestatory ethos, and, on the other hand, opens up scope for market activity that mimics well-established corporations. Since their reason for existence is connected to the demand for admission to higher education, this diversity of political orientations and, consequently, organizational forms, coexists in tension within many of these experiences (Costa & Aragão, 2018; Carvalho, 2013; Verrangia, 2013; Vieira & Caldas, 2017).

Our intention with this dossier is to discuss cursinhos populares that operate from a contestatory perspective, in other words, that identify themselves as popular education social movements. We are grateful for the invitation from fellow members of Rizoma Freireano who immediately showed their interest in the experience developed in this field of Brazilian popular education and its international articulations. In an effort to broaden the scope of our reflections beyond our previous experience in Rede Emancipa - a social movement of popular education^[5], we launched a public call for productions (articles, documents, artistic and audiovisual materials, etc.) on cursinhos populares as a social movement, receiving an unexpected response. We received with surprise and enthusiasm more than 40 proposals for texts from all regions of Brazil, presenting us with a variety of approaches to popular courses: work aimed at the LGBTQIAPN+ population, courses with an emphasis on anti-racist education, research into the role of women in these educational environments, analyses of educational experiences in the country's urban and rural peripheries, etc. For us, such diversity evidentiates the capillarity of these movements throughout Brazil, with all its specificities and adversities.

The representativeness expressed in numbers and in the diversity of experiences reflects the deep interest and enthusiasm for this topic of academic research, but also highlights the remarkable reach of cursinhos populares as a social movement, outlining its scope and influence on higher education students.

Making this selection was no easy task. Throughout the reading of the abstracts, we came across the various collectives that organize themselves in provided spaces (schools, churches, unions, associations), driven by a militant impulse, through voluntary work or with symbolic subsidies, in order to project an educational future designed in community. While the target audience of a cursinho popular is usually portrayed by their shortcomings in the process of university admission, the experiences we have shared here point to the need for the university to recognize the potential of their pedagogy.

What is the relevance of a dossier on cursinhos populares?

The material we present here addresses different cursinhos populares movements in Brazil, as well as articulations with Portuguese-speaking African countries. By sharing traditions from other Latin American social movements, especially those in the field of popular education, they contribute to a political subjectivation characteristic of the pedagogies of the South (Said, 2018). In Brazil, the cursinhos populares movements have also made an important achievement on the political and educational scene. They were part of the coalition behind one of the greatest achievements in the social composition of universities: affirmative action (quotas) for public school students, Black and Indigenous people^[6] (Bacchetto, 2003; José et al., 2012; Mendes, 2016; Mendes & Santos, 2021). Together with Black people’s movements (and often as one of their fronts), cursinhos populares took part in the development, dispute, implementation and even monitoring this important educational policy.

In the daily life of popular courses, it is possible to face an apparent paradox: by questioning the meritocratic mechanisms underlying university admission exams, they sustain a position that could lead to their own extinction. Wouldn't preparation for admission exams (vestibular and Enem) be their very reason for existing?

To this supposed paradox, as we discussed earlier, the real movement among these experiences has shown that their focus is less on the aspect of preparing for an exam, but rather on tensioning the boundary between who is in and who is out of higher education. Therefore, the cursinhos populares movements act to denaturalize the historical selectivity in access to this level of education, even if this means their future dispensability (Mendes, 2012). It stands for prefigurative politics (Boggs, 1977; Wright, 2010), which seeks to imagine what kind of practices could be developed in a context in which all people had access to knowledge, not limited by exams, tuition fees and other restrictions.

This gesture requires a historical understanding of the determinants of educational access, such as the limitation of public vacancies, the elitist nature of access to this level of education, especially in the most prestigious careers, as well as a monocultural dynamic in university institutions, which usually understate knowledge produced by Black, Indigenous and Quilombola people, women and thinkers from the Global South. Many cursinhos’ experiences therefore seek to carry out curricular "subversions" that anticipate university entry by knowledge sharing, while at the same time work to raise awareness of the structural determinations that constrain the range of the right to higher education.

This is a perspective that ends up generating a certain degree of strangeness, since students interested in going to university often have their own future project in mind: individually accessing a right restricted by performance evaluation, not necessarily involving themselves in advocating that all people should have this right guaranteed. In the process of questioning where the conditions for university admission are rooted, there is the hypothesis of public engagement and the proposal to imagine a society in which there is unrestricted access to knowledge, including in specialized careers.

By crossing the line beyond passing the exam, it is possible to develop pedagogical experiences that transcend the aspect of preparing for an exam whose content is barely used after admission, but rather for the critical posture of knowledge production compatible with university education. This leads us to the very dynamics of cursinhos populares as spaces for pedagogical development. In these spaces, there is a coexistence of references from commercial cursinhos, which teachers may have, and exploratory dynamics of both disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical forms: new disciplines, inter, multi or transdisciplinary articulations, co-teaching, learning communities, etc. If there is anxiety about "teaching all the exam content" over the course of a year, it coexists with a transgressive proposal to rethink pedagogical time for more meaningful, contextualized and creative learning (Mendes & Rufato, 2015).

The characteristics listed here - questioning meritocratic mechanisms, organizing around the struggle for democratization of higher education, creativity in political-pedagogical practices, the ability to prefigure counter-hegemonic pedagogical relationships and their potential as a space for teacher education - demand the kind of task we set ourselves with this dossier. As these are movements whose memory is mainly embedded in the subjects and not always recorded, the historiographical effort of analyzing cursinhos populares can make a huge contribution to reflecting on these experiences, as well as enabling extensions to other spaces and times. Telling the story of the cursinhos is a political act of the utmost importance, and it can often be regarded with some degree of suspicion because memory, like everyday politics, is in dispute. Through questioning and sometimes discomfort, we are satisfied with this dossier, which is a political act of memory and cannot be erased by gestures of distrust of the past.

Cursinhos populares and emancipatory pedagogies

The first text in the dossier, "Cursinho popular da Rede Emancipa Malês: parceria Brasil-África em educação popular", presents the innovative initiative Emancipa Malês, an internationalization experience developed by an educator collective that has begun its activities at the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony, UNILAB. This university was created in 2010, during Luís Inácio Lula da Silva's second government term, and is based on two campuses - the Redenção campus, in a city with the same name in the state of Ceará, and the Malês^[7] campus, in the city of São Francisco do Conde, in the state of Bahia.

Organized by Bissau-Guinean and Brazilian teachers, Emancipa Malês aims to have a direct impact on admission to UNILAB. As it is a Lusophone integration university, 30 per cent of its spots are for students from countries in the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) - Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor. In this way, Emancipa Malês draws on the experience of Bissau-Guinean students in Brazil to promote the right to higher education by offering cursinhos focused on admission to UNILAB in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Angola. By narrating the experience of the educators involved in the project, the paper recounts the experiences in which these leaders were involved.

What the paper by Sabrina Balsalobre, Alfa Silom, Cidália Tavares and Nembali Mané presents is a possibility for international cooperation that is different from what is hegemonically practiced in university institutions. The imperative of internationalization often intersects with the axis of the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2005). Experiences that go against this perspective, especially those based on South-South relations, i.e. between countries in the Global South, allow us to reimagine knowledge production from a transformative perspective. In this dossier, the article is an example of what we call internationalist pedagogy.

Next we present a paper by Gabriel Swahili Sales de Almeida and Wesley da Ressurreição Conceição, entitled "Insurgency, Black consciousness and access to higher education: the experience of Educational Quilombos". Based on their experience in the cursinhos populares and in the Black movements, the authors argue that the cursinhos for Black people in Salvador are part of a long tradition of educational quilombos. We recover Abdias do Nascimento's (1980, p. 255) concept of quilombos, which he sees as the result of the vital demand of Africans who had been enslaved to reclaim freedom and dignity, constituting an authentic, extensive and permanent movement. Quilombismo is then described by the author as a myriad of associative forms with an important social function for the Black population, due to their role in sustaining African continuity, genuine centres of physical and cultural resistance: an Afro-Brazilian praxis.

Almeida and Conceição's paper makes an invaluable contribution to the historiography of cursinhos populares, especially by highlighting the influence of Black pedagogies on the constitution of this social movement. Articulating the Black insurgencies present in various expressions of quilombismo - from the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Experimental Black Theatre), to Black protagonism in the student movement and the interethnic pedagogy of the Núcleo Cultural Afro-Brasileiro (Afro-Brazilian Cultural Nucleus) in Salvador - the cursinhos populares organized by the Black movement are re-signified as educational quilombos.This is not a mere semantic change, but a political act that relocates the epicenter of cursinhos populares to Black people in Bahia, starting in 1992, with the founding of the Steve Biko Cooperative in Salvador.

Pioneering is expressed in the paper in multiple senses: reaffirming the fact that the Steve Biko Institute was the first cursinho in Brazil focused on Black people; demonstrating how educational quilombos in Bahia were the first experiences of education (non-formal in this case) for ethnic-racial relations, even before the Brazilian federal laws adopted for this purpose in basic education^[8]; in the process of setting up a movement that pushed for quotas in universities - which came to fruition in 2002 at the State University of Bahia (UNEB), also one of the first in Brazil to do so. There is also an important record of the Forum of Educational Quilombos of Bahia, a movement that certainly deserves more attention from anti-racist researchers and educators. The anti-racist pedagogy reported in this paper turns out to be a quilombist pedagogy and a reference point for the social movement of cursinhos populares.

In “A Formação Política de Pessoas Trans em um Cursinho Pré-Universitário Social”, Ana Cristina Fournier and Flávia Salazar Salgado discuss the potential of a cursinho focused on the trans population in the world's deadliest country for this group^[9]. They make a significant contribution, given the lack of visibility that the problem of trans people's exclusion has in educational environments as a whole, an exclusion that begins at school and takes on staggering proportions at the highest levels of education. Along this path of invisibility, we can also mention the lack of knowledge we have about cursinhos populares that work on gender and sexuality.

The authors analyze interviews with teachers and students at a pre-college cursinho in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro city, discussing political education as a category, which requires listening and denaturalization. In doing so, they are challenging the heteronormativity that is established in educational practices - which permeates not only schools, but also spaces which are often intended to be emancipatory. In the context of the far-right's advance, it is the discourse of abjection of what is different and the moral panic against gender dissent that has prompted, in addition to everyday violence, retrograde policies such as the banning of neutral language, surveillance of bathrooms and even greater control over bodies that do not fit cis-heteronormative norms. By seeking to reaffirm this identity as the only acceptable one, this conservative position contributes to increasing the already alarming school dropout rates of the trans population, as well as hindering their chances of entering the job market and enjoying a dignified and fulfilling life.

Contrary to this limit-situation, the work by Fournier and Salgado presents the processes of raising awareness among the students who attended the cursinho investigated, highlighting the broadening of horizons that the experience provided and their militant engagement. Themes such as autonomy, empowerment, political awareness and participation are recurrent in the words of the research participants. Challenging gender binarism through collective organization is therefore the axis of what the authors call the pedagogy practiced in this cursinho: a pedagogy of differences.

Maria Inês de Oliveira Sousa and Anna Paula Vencato's paper “Educação popular e pedagogia feminista: desafios e possibilidades em um cursinho pré-vestibular popular em Belo Horizonte” is based on research into the Emancipa Floresta cursinho popular in the state capital of Minas Gerais, Brazil. This work is part of a long tradition of Rede Emancipa in the state, which has courses in various cities in Minas Gerais, starting with Cursinho Darcy Ribeiro, in Montes Claros, passing through Emancipa Alfenas, and more recently including Belo Horizonte and Pouso Alegre.

This tradition has produced a number of valuable works, some of which have deeply discussed one of the main elements of Rede Emancipa's cursinhos identity, the Círculos do Emancipa (Emancipa Circles). Rodrigues and Rufato (2021) traced this history analyzing elements appropriated from classic Freirian thought for the context of the cursinhos populares, in which the idea that culture involves broader elements than scientific knowledge is highlighted, and therefore has a political-educational aspect of a different order. The various generations of educators from the Rede Emancipa who have made this re-appropriation of ideas have created a popular education that is contextualized to the purposes of this social movement.

Sousa and Vencato's paper makes a major contribution by pointing out that the feminist pedagogies developed within the cursinho popular analyzed aim to denaturalize the patriarchal context. In a movement that is mostly carried out by women activists, many of them have to face the various forms of oppression (double/triple working hours, harassment of different kinds and even the erasure of their political action) and still develop their own pedagogies that subvert androcentric norms in a creative and challenging way.

Following the perspective of contributing to the record of memory, in this issue we present a copy of the document produced for the Primeiro Encontro de Professores (e Professoras) da Rede Emancipa (First Meeting of Rede Emancipa Teachers), held in May 2011, among the Rede Emancipa cursinhos in the metropolitan region of the city of São Paulo. This is an important record, especially since organizing documents and recording memories is a challenge faced by many social movements. Their collections are often dispersed, scattered in the houses or in emails and virtual folders of different leaders from different moments in their history. This document in particular, although it records the first meeting of educators from Rede Emancipa in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, highlights the fact that moments of meeting and exchange are a fundamental strategy for the movement and for the work carried out weekly in the cursinhos. It was from meetings like the one recorded in the document that many other activities (such as political-pedagogical meetings, a day at USP, student meetings, Emancipa circles, free time, etc.^[10]) were born and gradually built the identity of Rede Emancipa as a popular education social movement.

The choice to share this document is related to its character as a synthesis of the political-pedagogical concept at a relatively early stage of Rede Emancipa (four years after it was founded), expressed not only in an exposition of the contradictions relating to university admission, but also in the elaboration of questions capable of triggering intense debates about the day-to-day reality in the cursinhos. In this way, the political-pedagogical conception elaborated in this document by the then-coordination, formed at the time by a majority of women, puts itself to the test through problematization and through a pedagogy of dialogue.

Since none of these pedagogies can assume their full potential without the artistic dimension, we share two of their forms in this issue. The poem we have here was shared by members of Cursinho Popular Chico Mendes, a pioneering cursinho of Rede Emancipa, located in Itapevi, a city on the far west side of São Paulo's metropolitan region. Based on the initiative of the movement's members, and in response to the lack of cultural facilities in a peripheral region, the organization of Slams^[11], such as the Slam Emancipado, has created spaces for artistic, cultural and political creation and expression.

The poem “Book Ammunition”, by Matriarcak, Belom Dan, Adrielly Teles and Trava da oeste, represents a pedagogy of contestation embodied in street poetry, reading and re-reading violence in peripheral areas. Portraying scenes of execution that have become daily occurrences in a country that murders a young Black person every 23 minutes, without even sparing children of increasingly early ages, the authors invert this meaning to remember the devalued knowledge of their ancestors and the power of sharing knowledge. With this, they update the slogan "Education is Our Weapon" mobilized in recent years by Rede Emancipa to confront the policy of militarization imposed by the recent far-right government and supported by its supporters.

We end this dossier by recommending the web documentary “Amálgamar - cidade, corpo, pandemia e o trabalho da UNEAFRO Brasil”, produced by the União de Núcleos de Educação Popular para Negras/os e Classe Trabalhadora [Union of Popular Education Centers for Blacks and the Working Class] (UNEAFRO) in partnership with the Social Service of Commerce (SESC). UNEAFRO is another important Brazilian social movement whose best-known activity is the organization of cursinhos populares for university admission. Founded in 2009, the movement is central to the anti-racist struggle. In this web documentary, they present some of the social work they have done with the street and LGBTQIAPN+ population in the center of the city of São Paulo, through their Luz and Laura Vermont nucleus, during the quarantine of the Covid 19 pandemic^[12], along with the Pastoral do Povo da Rua and Casa Florescer, which welcomes and assists transvestite and transgender women. This audiovisual production is yet another record of how the work and struggle with popular education transcends the scope of teaching or preparing for higher education entrance exams and often leads to the construction of learning communities based on affection, care and the search for good living. Considering the set of papers in this dossier, this production is a valuable contribution towards a pedagogy of care.

All this work represents a rich braid of emancipatory pedagogies that challenge capitalist and conservative policies, building paths towards a world with more social justice, freedom and equity. There is still much to be done. The defense of the environment, the struggle against environmental racism and the protection of the lives most affected by climate change, for example, are also challenges for popular education movements. We have no doubt that the means of tackling these problems also involve a popular university committed to its social function, as opposed to privatist and neoliberal university projects.

For this reason, we believe that the examples presented in this dossier are also a braiding of pedagogies of hope, in the sense that Freire taught us, as an “existential, concrete imperative” (Freire, 1994[1992], p. 8) that sets us in movement to transform the world. Different pedagogical approaches emerge from each of the works braided here, which intertwine towards a liberating education. The internationalist pedagogy teaches us to cooperate across borders, redesigning the production of knowledge from a decolonial and transformative perspective that values South-South relations. The quilombist pedagogy reminds us of the roots of the black movement in Brazil and how educational quilombos are hotbeds of physical and cultural resistance, constituting authentic, broad and permanent movements. The pedagogy of differences seeks to denaturalize cis-heteronormativity and the educational exclusion experienced by those who challenge it, promoting empowerment through education. The feminist pedagogies prove to be a powerful tool for denaturalizing male protagonism in spaces of power, such as academia, politics and leadership in social movements. The pedagogy of contestation manifests itself in street poetry, creating spaces for artistic, cultural and political expression and valuing ancestral knowledge. The pedagogy of care is essential in a popular education that transcends the limits of teaching, building learning communities based on affection and the search for good living. This braiding takes place through a pedagogy of dialog that articulates previous experiences with those built daily by social movements.

Our journey towards a more just and equal education is multifaceted, but these pedagogies provide us with the tools to walk this path. They inspire us to continue challenging norms, building identities and promoting resistance, knowing that popular education is a fundamental transformative force in our quest for the emancipation of the oppressed.

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1. Assistant Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Co-leader of the Research Group on Higher Education Access, Retention and Dropout. Co-founder of Rede Emancipa - Social Movement for Popular Education, acting as coordinator between 2007 and 2014 and in other roles until 2022.↑

2. Teacher in the municipal education system of the city of São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil), "daughter" of Grajaú, a district on the outskirts of the city, where she was born, lives and works. Graduated in History from the University of São Paulo (USP) and holds a master's degree in History Teaching from the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). Worked at Rede Emancipa between 2008 and 2016 as a teacher, coordinator and trainer, helping to create new courses in São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. ↑

3. Adjunct Professor at the Federal University of Alfenas (Minas Gerais, Brazil). Worked at Rede Emancipa between 2011 and 2017, especially coordinating works in São Paulo and Minas Gerais. ↑

4. The term "cursinho pré-vestibular" refers to the model of preparatory courses for the selection exam practiced in Brazilian universities (called vestibular, and which today coexists with another exam, called the National High School Exam, ENEM). They exist as a niche market, at significant cost, and outside the formal education system. ↑

5. The Rede Emancipa - social movement for popular education - is a network made up of cursinhos and other pedagogical experiences that demand the right to education and are affiliated with the field of popular education. It was founded in 2007 and continues its activities to this day. The three organizers of this dossier met while were engaged in this movement, in which they developed an important part of their teaching, political and pedagogical identities. Although we are currently far apart, we still share many of its political and pedagogical principles with Rede Emancipa, which we helped organize and systematize. An example of this is the document that makes up this dossier. ↑

6. Since the late 1970s, collectives from the Brazilian Black movement have discussed the centrality of education and the labor market as a focus of action. Among the various agendas of this movement, the defense of reparation policies involving access to higher education stands out, particularly the defense of reserved spots (quotas) for the Black population on university admission (Gomes, 2017). Initially achieved in the state universities of Rio de Janeiro and the State University of Bahia in 2002, after intense conflict, Federal Law 12.711, known as the Quotas Law, was signed in 2012, establishing reserved spots in all federal educational institutions. ↑

7. The Malês revolt was an uprising against slavery, organized by enslaved Black men and women of Islamic origin. According to João José Reis (2018), the word Malês comes from imalê, the equivalent of Muslim in the Yoruba language. In Bahia, these people were known as Nagô. The movement took place in the city of Salvador in 1835, during the Imperial period. It is a unique event in the history of the fight against slavery in Brazil, because this group mastered writing, a rare skill even among whites at the time. This was a central tool for the success of the movement, since it was secure, given that many of the intercepted communications were written in Arabic and were incomprehensible even to those literate in Portuguese. The circulation of messages was made possible by the participation in the movement of women "ganhadeiras" and also "escravos de ganho", groups of enslaved people who worked outside private spaces, circulating between locations in the city. The city of Salvador at the time had approximately 65,000 inhabitants, 40% of whom were enslaved. These, together with the free poor (called criollos, pardos, mulattos and other denominations), made up 78% of the population. For this reason, the Malês uprising, although unsuccessful and violently repressed, scared the white elite of European origin, not only in Bahia, but in provinces all over Brazil, including the capital Rio de Janeiro (Reis, 2018). ↑

8. Law 10.639 of 2003 made it compulsory to teach African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture throughout basic education in Brazil. It was later extended by law 11.645 of 2008, which made it compulsory to teach indigenous history and culture as well. ↑

9. According to the Atlas of Violence 2021, Brazil recorded 3,967 cases of violence against the trans and transvestite population, an increase of 5.6% compared to 2018 (IPEA, 2021). The Dossier carried out by the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals of Brazil (ANTRA) shows 131 murders of trans people in 2022 alone (Benevides, 2022). According to Transgender Europe (TGEU, 2021), which tracks surveys carried out by trans and LGBTQIA+ organizations around the world, in 2021 Latin America accounted for 70% of all murders against the trans population, 33% of which were in Brazil alone. ↑

10. We discuss a little more about the conception and implementation of these activities, especially in the context of Rede Emancipa cursinhos in São Paulo, in the following communications: Mendes & Rufato (2015) and Lima & Rufato (2018). ↑

11. Slams, also called spoken word poetry competitions or battles, are part of Hip Hop culture and began in the United States in the 1980s. They are events held in public spaces with free participation, usually in a circle format. At these events, each poet presents their poetry to the public and is judged by a group of judges chosen from the audience. The poems are usually protest poems, dealing with issues such as racism, politics and elements of life in the periphery. In recent years, Brazil has seen the creation of hundreds of Slam collectives, especially among peripheral youth. Currently, there is an annual national championship with champions from the state stages. The national champion takes part in the World Cup of Spoken Poetry. There are also local and student festivals (Paula, 2019; Campos, 2023). ↑

12. For more information on UNEAFRO's work during the pandemic and in other regions of the city of São Paulo, see Raimundo & Moreira Junior (2021). ↑