Memories of captivity and jongo in the Paraíba do Sul river historical valley - São Paulo

Abstract

This work aims to give visibility to Jongo, an expression of black immaterial culture, by means of an ethnographic research carried out in Bananal-SP, a city located in the Paraíba do Sul River Historical Valley,
nowadays comprised of around 11 thousand inhabitants. The synchronic description of the daily life of this small city, built from the ethnographic observation and field notes, enabled the researchers to retrieve memories of captivity and life histories of black families, who still hold important accounts for understanding our colonial past. The synchronicity of the ethnographic account was questioned by the diachronic nature of the historical facts concerning the process of settlement of the region, profoundly changed by the development of coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, in the state of São Paulo, during the early nineteenth century. This work is the result of a doctoral thesis entitled “A Divorce between School and Community? Bananal-SP, an ‘open-air laboratory’ in the Historic Valley of the Paraíba do Sul River”. Beyond the walls of the local school, there were memories, songs and dances that are characteristic of the black populations brought by the African diaspora, such as the chorus in Jongo songs, which reveal their cultural heritage. This thesis arguments that the high rates of black families, historiographically confirmed, enabled the maintenance of the individual and collective memory of Africans and AfroBrazilians in the locality. These subaltern memories unveil a worldview, as well as black cultural manifestations that resisted the passages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up until the beginning of the twenty-first. The cosmogony present to this day in the city gives historical particularity to the identity of the local population, as well as demonstrates the cultural diversity in the State of São Paulo.