Lembranças de Cavalhadas: memórias e estratégias de sobrevivência de uma tradição do Brasil Central (19732024)

Abstract

Brought by the lusitanians after the pachakuti in the beginning of the colonial enterprise, the Cavalhadas are a set of dramatical celebrations/horse games idealized to teach the colonized people about their place under the christian yoke, with the colonial violence represented through this catechetical and pedagogical mechanism. However one can’t simply consider that, by doing this movement, the tradition not only kept the same just like the ones across the Atlantic, but didn’t change in the many Brazils, at the centuries that apart the first Cavalhadas from the current ones. Using the Cavalhadas of Pirenópolis (GO) as an example, this dissertation aims to comprehend the transformations of the tradition towards its specification and the continued drift from the iberian model, in a process of reinvention of the Cavalhadas, in a movement of decolonization of the tradition. Through a decolonial approach (Mignolo, 2007), this investigation seeks to highlight this process of differentiation of said tradition in the last fifty years, decades that witnessed deep changes and challenges not only to the celebration, which is part of the Holy Spirit Festival since 1826, but to the community itself. Using the Oral History Methodology, online and in-person interviews were conducted, looking after members of the community that weren’t directly connected to the tradition (i.e. Knights and the Priest), although somewhat linked to it. Questions like the way the celebration is cherished by the community and how the forgetting or the hiatus caused by the SARS-CoV-2 affected directly their memories of the celebration arose, but not only. Insofar it was only sighted an outlook of the experience of a set of individuals with their community, their agency (analogous to the subalterns of the colonial hierarchy still alive in the Modernity/Coloniality) in the appreciation of the tradition runs along other agencies, whose almost demiurgical power seems to upset the community (namely, the State of Goiás and tourism and outsider-centered elites) when it goes against the “will of the people”. As conclusions, it stood out that the grey frontier between individual identity and collective experience its behind the way the community lives the Cavalhadas as something “that’s in the[ir] blood”, and that this is the reason behind the transformations and the possibilities of disappearance are perceived almost as individual, existential threats, hence the impossibility to imagine such tanathopical reality (Pirenópolis without their Cavalhadas or, above all, their Holy Spirit Festival) and the very mourning derived from the only moment where this was a tangible reality: the cancelment of the celebration in the 2020-2021 biennium.