"I'm illiterate, but I'm not quiet"

The aim of this master's research was to understand the strategies constructed by black women (black and brown) who are students in Youth and Adult Education to live with little schooling in a society organized through writing. To this end, five women were selected - aged between 27 and 67 - who were in the process of becoming literate in the EJA. The aim was to retrieve their life and work trajectories and also to survey the literacy events in which these women participate in their daily lives, in order to understand what solutions they find to resolve situations that require reading and writing (in their personal and professional lives and at school). The categories of gender, race, work and generation were articulated and the concepts of social vulnerability, strategy, intersectionality and illiteracy were used. It was possible to observe common trajectories among the interviewees: abandonment, poverty, domestic violence, low salaries and difficulties in coming out as black women. This confirmed the initial hypothesis that issues relating to gender, race and lack of schooling together produce social effects in their lives.