This work argues about relations of public policies in the past, present and future expectations of inhabitants from an amazonian mining. Through an ethnographic study with twenty two subjects, from fifteen families, we sought to analyses the meanings of public local policies; histories, daily life and expectations towards the future of the interviewed persons. The analysis based on cultural-historical psychology revealed that the participants' past experiences are connected by the conditions of poverty, low education and migration in a search for better opportunities. Currently, the mining residents deal with scarcities in public services and labor mining exploitation, reflecting in their expectations to the future, that vary from waiting for the end of their lives to having basic conditions of housing and schooling. Issues that focus on exclusion feelings and desires of recognition, and that points to the necessity of policies to become a breaking point, based on peoples' concrete conditions.
social protection; psychosocial exclusion process; historical-cultural psychology; mining.