BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: SOCIAL MEMORY OF QUILOMBO OF ROSA – MACAPÁ, AMAPÁ

Abstract

The Quilombo do Rosa started, as well as many quilombola communities in Amapá, the quilombola recognition process and territorial titling at the beginning of the 21st century. Not being guaranteed immediate access to their constitutional rights, the realization of their citizenship depends on a political mobilization on the part of the community. The purpose of the research is to interpret the meaning of the social memory of the community in its contemporary mobilization by recognition of its citizenship. It seeks to interpret the place of the past in the construction of the future of the community. The methodology adopted was that of ethnography with the community, more precisely the mode of "historical ethnography" (Sahlins, 1993), and under the theoretical framework that explains the relations between memory and space (Halbwachs, 1990). As results, we identify that the past is the source of political strength of the community, not only in the sense that it emanates the legitimation of the right claimed, but also of emanating the motivation, meaning and moral force for the struggle. In the recent past, the murder of Benedito, patriarch of the community, produced the emotional element that is the main source of political strength of the community. This murder is alive in the conscience and affective structure of their children. Faced with the pain and the impact of this injustice, today the sense of defending the territory mixes with the sense of protection of Maria Geralda, the matriarch, widow of Benedito. At the other extreme, the memory of the more distant past, almost exclusively achieved by imagination, its African ancestry, plays a fundamental role in the syntax of the struggle for rights, since it is the source of legitimacy and meaning of the most significant strategy of contemporary territorialization of the community : his self-identification as a quilombola.