ABSTRACT
During our fieldwork twenty years ago in Paulista, a textile company town in the Brazilian North East, Adauto Machado, a worker in the factory, gave us, one year after we had a long interview with him, a remarkable autobiographical text, in the form of a novel.1 It is a written testimony of the experience of survival amidst social change. This document, written by hand in about fifty pages of a large school notebook, with the title The miserable ones’, was in fact one of the few documents written by the workers themselves which we were able to collect.2
