Os quilombolas do Veiga e o São Gonçalo: memória e identidade na festa e devoção a São Gonçalo No sítio Veiga

Abstract

The present work seeks to analyze the role that São Gonçalo dance, in the community quilombola Sítio Veiga, plays in the process of building the ethnic identity of this social group. The Sítio Veiga community is a group recognized as a "remnant community of quilombos", located in Quixadá, central sertão, whose linkage of this group with the territory refers to the descendants of the black populations enslaved in Ceará. Thus, the claim regarding the ownership of the territory involves the assumption of a category normalized by the right, inserted in the constitutional text. The methodology used was the field research, through local memory, triggered in contexts of identity claims, refers to a connection with the past, with the common origin. Therefore, through the ritual, narratives are elaborated on the descent of this collectivity, its origins, its ancestry that refers to the slave period. The focus of the research was to understand the paths that this ritual has taken to build itself into an element of ethnic belonging, a situational diacritical, that will be activated in the process of claiming its territory. In this process of identity affirmation, the external agents (NGOs, public agents and other institutions) contributed in different contexts, but they were also relations marked by conflicts and tensions.