Memória e História da Mui Heroica Villa de São José do Norte: a Festa de Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes.

Abstract

The feast of our Lady of Navigators of São José do Norte, municipality of the peninsula of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, is probably the oldest to be held with that Marian invocation in the country. It is a Portuguese-Brazilian tradition inherited from Azorean families that occupied the territory in the middle of the 18th century. Probably such Portuguese roots contributed to the legacy of the religiosity, mainly expressed in the devotion to Navigators, worshiped in the site through the feast since 1811. The main goal of the thesis is to delimit a historiographical study of the feast of our Lady of Navigators of São José do Norte, by analysing it as a demonstration of the cultural memory (Assmann, 2006), where the meanings, continuities and break-ups come from a communicative or generation memory, and therefore, they have affective, nostalgic, and priority value. Within this framework, we seek to detect the senses of belonging and meanings of the feast, elements that assure its dynamic, its existence, and the unit of the community in its environment. The problem of the research is, therefore, to reconstitute the historicity, by making diachrony of the feast of our Lady of Navigators of São José do Norte, analysing the elements that involve and characterize it as a popular feast, verifying the recurrences and interruptions happening along these years. The main methodologies used were the participant observation, from 2013 to 2017, and the oral history, in open interview and with pre-established itinerary. Also a historic research of the feast of our Lady of the Navigators was carried out based on primary sources such as manuscripts, documents of the Diocesan Bishopric of Rio Grande and Register Books of the São José Parish, newspapers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and old photographs. It may be stated that our Lady of Navigators of São José do Norte, because of its aspects related to a place, such as work techniques linked to primary activities, in this case agriculture and fishing, provide an “intimacy” with the natural elements, and a plea and gratitude feeling for the fertility of the soil and waters, such as in the gift theory (Mauss, 1925).