A trail of memory: land, kinship and crafts in the Belém Family in Acari / RN (18th-21st century)
Memory. Kinship. Crafts.
The objective of this work is to understand the process of erasing the black presence in Seridó from the comparative analysis of historical documents and memories of the "Belém family" composed of domestic groups coming from a farm to create that has in its records the greatest number of Slaves in the mid-eighteenth century. Since enslaved Africans have been present in Seridó since the beginning of the colonization, their descendants have suffered a process of invisibilization and stigmatization beyond the rapt of their lands that were "taken" by the great landowners. The genealogical trajectory of the Belém family, the memories of the descendants of the Moura, Guiné and Belém were crossed with the available historical documents. I will describe how "The Belém family" was built around a voluntary erasure of the stain left by slavery. Thus, through the historical perspective, we seek to question the ethnographic data and from the ethnographic data, fill the gaps left by historical documents (Wachtel, 1990). Among other results, the research reveals a great diversity of by-laws among Afro-descendants throughout the historical process, the existence of daily practices and crafts that refer directly to the colonial past, despite the few records of memory. Cowboys, muleteers, cooks and other characters who have specialized crafts testify to the historical continuity of the African populations enslaved in Seridó and strategies of resistance to domination.