"Negros em território de brancos" : urbanidade, permanências e apagamentos em torno da Irmandade do Rosário dos Pretos na Cidade da Parahyba - Séc. XVIII-XX

Abstract

This dissertation addresses, from a historical investigation, the rescue of the memory of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Rosary of Black Men in the conformation of urban space and architectural production in the city of Parahyba, today João Pessoa. The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men figured in the primitive urban nucleus of the city, until the second decade of the twentieth century, as one of its main examples of colonial religious architecture. The monument built by the Brotherhood of the same name became a victim of the so-called "progress" that prevailed in the period of the First Republic, characterized by the modernization of brazilian cities, whose landscape aspect of still colonial bias would be supplanted by the demolition of buildings, as well as by new proposals for the appropriation of public spaces. The demolition of the Rosary of Blacks Church and the considerable scarcity of documentary records about its architectural aspect contributed, in a way, to the forgetting of the presence of the Rosary Brotherhood in the city, and the consequent historical erasure of its main material legacy, its immaterial expressions as forms of appropriation of urban space and, therefore, the urban development of the city of Parahyba with emphasis on the black population. The present work seeks, through a historical, documental perspective, to systematize the contributions and effects imprinted on the landscape from the permanence of this group, considering the actions of the Church in relation to the dynamics of land ownership, the problems surrounding the black population in the colonial scenario, as well as the set of relationships developed between specific agents and their implications for the conformation of urban space. It is also intended to reassemble, from data collected from cartographic, iconographic and journalistic collection of the time, as well as from other churches of the Brotherhood of the Rosary, the architectural production developed by the Brotherhood of Blacks in the city of Parahyba.