Histórias de vida de mulheres romeiras: experiências sociorreligiosas e os processos formativos na terra da Mãe das Dores e do Padre Cícero

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the life stories of religious pilgrim women, known as romeiras, participants of “Meeting at three o’clock”, in the city of Juazeiro do Norte. This meeting has as objective the comprehension, biographically, of how the socioreligious experiences experienced by romeiras women repercuted in the constitution of formative processes of their identities and subjectivities. Our investigative process combined grounds and procedures of ethnography and (auto) biographical research. Our principal point was the “Meeting at three o’clock”, an event organized by the Pastoral of Pilgrimage, that always happens at three o’clock, in the most principal periods of catholic pilgrimage. We use “Meeting at three o’clock” as our research place, and as source: a) biographical narrative produced by catholic religious pilgrim women expressed in spoken interviews, and later transformed into life stories; b) biographical fragments presented in the meeting (life reports, testimonies, prayers popular sacred music, known as “benditos, etc) and integrative activity (autobiographical albums and mandalas); c) ethnographic observations, audiovisual records, focused interviews and roaming journal. The material produced and collected throughout this research was analyzed based in the method of textual discursive analysis. The analysis of life stories has made it possible for us to comprehend that the socioreligious experiences, marked by the condition of being a romeira, devout and engaged, correlated to the circumstances of being, staying and remaining at catholic pilgrimage, known as romaria, generate important changes that lead to a self-awareness awakening and condition of religious pilgrim, which creates existential senses. These theses constitute founders and trainers experiences of their trajectories and create existential senses. The perception of these senses leads us to the transformation of attitudes and behaviors capable of contributing to a personal and collective empowerment. On the whole, the experiential learning and knowledge, learned in this process, contribute to the formation of the identities of romeiras, devoted and engaged, and to the consolidation, continuity and transmission of structural meanings of collective processes of empowerment.