This article results from an ethnographic research implemented in Pará, which involved dozens of men who, from 1940 to 1970, systematically extracted the latex known as balata. Their work, established on highly hierarchical relations, in a productive chain which attached them to local employers and foreign traders, was based on delivery system, which characterized large scale extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon. The balatais were these men's workplace and home for about six months a year, until the moment that their trade was no longer of interest to the international market. Then they found themselves devoid of work and, in many cases, of family and patrimony, as they had spent long periods of their lives in the forest. Recording reminiscences of those extractivists, elderly citizens now, and their biographical narratives, aim at reconstructing the contexts, processes, relations and meanings of the work in the balatais in their social experience.
balata; Pará; reminiscences; work