Empreendedorismo étnico na nova diáspora negra em São Paulo: uma análise pragmatista à luz da Sociologia dos problemas públicos

Abstract

This paper analyzes how migrants representing the new Black diaspora, even having arrived in SP in adverse conditions, emerge as entrepreneurs and understand how this entrepreneurship contributes to position racial and migratory problems - involving this ethnic community as a public problem in the public and political arenas in which this phenomenon is included. In it I adopted a theoretical-epistemological posture anchored in French pragmatist sociology, especially in its unfolding in terms of a Sociology of Public Problems. About the methodological approach, I combine the use of life narratives, comprehensive interviews, direct and participant observation and document analysis. Consistent with the pragmatist posture, ethnography allowed me to conduct the investigation from the perspective of the actors before their experiences and realities. However, due to the worldwide pandemic context, I made an adaptation of the ethnographic method, using netnography. The results of the research show that the subjects who compose this new Black diaspora in SP emerge as entrepreneurs from a complex network of connections with human and non-human actors. Four main findings emerged in the netnographic field work as being strongly related to the beginning and continuity of their enterprises: the types of networks, agencies and connections that these subjects have and which ones they can achieve; the reason they chose to leave their home country and the context in which they are inserted in Brazil; the path taken for ethnic entrepreneurship and; the intersection between race and migrant identity with other social markers of difference. The way their businesses relate to controversies and conflicts that favor or block the emergence of racial and migratory issues related to this new Black diaspora in SP in the public and political arenas depends on the entrepreneurial profile of migrants. This investigation identified three categories, two analytical and one empirical, on these profiles: fragile or vulnerable entrepreneur, entrepreneur by necessity and entrepreneur by engagement. This research brings two relevant contributions. The new theoretical and analytical reading that establishes relationships between ethnic entrepreneurship and the new Black diaspora in SP allows advancing the theory about this phenomenon, until then anchored, above all, in a structuralist perspective, far from the actors' ability to action. In addition, the analyses presented could broaden discussions aimed at promoting new policy formulations concerned with mitigating negative effects and encouraging beneficial consequences for entrepreneurship and ethnic entrepreneur. These migrants are not only passive in this process, the object of these policies. Above all, they are active in building the public problem, capable of influencing the public policies that affect them. They are therefore part of public action