Refletindo sobre exclusão: turismo e cidade a partir das falas de uma comunidade periférica de Caxias do Sul/RS (Brasil)

Abstract

A city, the locus of coexistence and human sociability, constitutes a logic of inclusion-exclusion in its territory. Tourism, an essentially urban activity, has consolidated itself as an exclusive social practice, which benefits the economic, social and cultural elites, although their speeches present it as an inclusion practice. Therefore, this dissertation aims to discuss the possibility or impossibility of forwarding travel and tourism as an exercise to overcome economic exclusion and as a practice of social inclusion. The theoretical constructs that support the approach refer to <city> and <tourism>, in both cases emphasizing the processes that imply economic, social, cultural and tourist exclusion, which started with the exclusion of population groups that live in the periphery's urban areas. The methodological option was Participant Research and Data Triangulation Analysis as a strategy for data analysis. The spatial approach prioritizes the Marianinha de Queiroz Housing Cooperative, a community located in the municipality of Caxias do Sul, in the south of Brazil. According to the data collected in the research, the peripheral condition of the community under study is reiterated, not only in territorial terms, but also in economic and cultural terms, and that tourism is not a priority among the expenditures of the residents of the community. The data indicate that the community reproduces the theoretical discourse on city, periphery and tourism. It is indicated that economic and territorial exclusion leads to cultural and tourist exclusion, in a cycle that, by feeding itself back, deepens the processes. It is also inferred that overcoming economic exclusion, by itself, does not enable the full exercise of citizenship in the city, in addition to not enabling the exercise of travel and tourism as a practice of social inclusion [resumo fornecido pelo autor].