Itu, a vila do açúcar: espaço urbano, cultura material e vida cotidiana (1780 a 1830)

Abstract

The dissertation is configured as a case study from the perspective of historical geography, which seeks to understand the social space of the village of Itu, in a time frame that covers the period from 1780 to 1830, where due to a combination of factors internal and also external, the sugarcane monoculture had a considerable increase in its production in the locality, making the village of Itu the largest producing unit in São Paulo at the end of the second half of the 18th century, with production numbers well above the other captaincy villages. Thus, from this point of view, the research aimed to analyze the spatial formation of the city of Itu, eg, how the urban plan of the village had its patterns changed, frightened houses were built, improvements in the public space became visible and new perspectives and realities began to project itself into the lives of its inhabitants, understood as those individuals identified from the existing compulsory population packs, a significant increase in their number and expressed in the countless elements that made up the local material culture. Therefore, the past study of the village of Itu is only possible based on the theoretical methodological framework of historical geography, which, based on its interdisciplinarity, provided the appropriate and necessary tooling in this study where space and time interact. Primary sources such as inventories, bundles of the population of the village, minutes of the chamber, reports from the overseas historical archive, maps, iconography and travelers' reports are used in conjunction with secondary sources, such as Petrone's “sugarcane crop in São Paulo” and are capable of to elucidate considerably this past space, filling gaps and enabling the identification of the most diverse factors that together formed the village of sugar. The data obtained by the research pointed to new cultural elements inserted in the locality, exercising influences and being a determining factor of the most diverse transformations that the city of Itu went through, implying in the relevance for the understanding of the space of the understanding of the social layers that interact and in which , from the central figure of the owners of the mill, it was possible to interpret the social organism and the classes that gravitated around these dominant figures, with whom slaves, aggregates, traders, tropeiros kept a relationship of dependence. As possible conclusions raised, it was observed that the power structures of the ituana society established the hierarchy and delimited patterns and symbols of its members, which identified themselves as a community through the uses, customs, material goods, or even by the clothes, allowing an understanding broader of a society that was formed out of a slave-based agricultural economy, and these configurations found in the past would be reflected up to the present day, whether in social formation or even in the appropriation of city spaces that have significant inheritances from that period.