“Menores viram cidade do avesso”: infância pobre nas páginas de um jornal semanal (Criciúma, SC, década de 1970)

The purpose of the article is to analyze the discourse present in the Tribuna Criciumense, from the city of Criciúma (Brazil), about poor childhood in the 1970s, when the so-called marginalization cycle of the “minor”, enunciated by the authorities of the National Foundation for Child Welfare (FUNABEM), entered the pages of the Brazilian press. Children, adolescents and poor young people were reported in the newspaper Tribuna Criciumense under three main legal approaches: abandoned children, juvenile delinquents and minors. In the newspaper the journalistic discourse went to denounce the problem of the minor associating it to the cycle of marginalization, as well as of ways to point to a solution to the problem. For ten years the possible changes in this journalistic discourse were not significant