Popular Health Surveillance in southern Brazil: expressions of a pulsating territory

Abstract

Throughout the country it had been identified diverse initiatives of popular protagonism in the perspective of promotion and protection of life, in search of healthy and sustainable territories. This text aims at describing the experience of a historical, dynamic and permanent process of struggle and social mobilization against the violation of fundamental rights for health and environmental sustainability in the Settlement Santa Rita de Cássia II, in Nova Santa Rita, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. This experience can be considered as an action of strengthening and reinvention of health surveillance by the population, therefore a Popular Health Surveillance, trespassing the fragmenting frontiers of knowledge hegemony, going through paths that prioritize and face the problems of its living territory, a territory that pulsates and struggles since its resumption.