A Festa de Santos Reis como resistência da cultura caipira no bairro rural dos Camargos em Juquitiba-SP

Abstract

With a focus on understanding the resistance of caipira culture, a case study was conducted in the Camargos neighborhood, in the municipality of Juquitiba-SP, registering the population’s way of life and especially the performing in the Three Kings’ Day celebration. The municipality has a socio-spatial formation that is historically connected to the formation of rural neighborhoods with the development of caipira culture in the 19th century. Along with urban expansion, caipira societies have undergone transformations regarding their working, leisure, and inhabiting dynamics. However, some changes have happened in a slow and fragmented way, considering that the municipality is still mostly rural, being requested as a spring protection area with decisive environmental importance. Our goal was thus to identify aspects of change and permanence essentially based on caipira sociability. For that, literature on this study area was used, as well as quantitative population and urban infrastructure data to measure the challenges found in these rural areas. Using a qualitative perspective, we adopted the oral history technique to get to know the reality experienced by the inhabitants of the Camargos neighborhood, grasping their memory and experience. Due to its environmental potential and to being part of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region, it was possible to register a dynamic of growth in the occupation by summer country houses. Within this complexity, the municipality of Juquitiba is also part of the Ribeira Valley and faces the tendency of emigration due to the low offer of infrastructure in the areas of health, housing, education, and quality of life, while the leisure use of these places grows. Contradictorily, this dynamic can offer employment alternatives for the population, ensuring their permanence in rural neighborhoods. The passage from a subsistence economy to the service sector has kept a way of life that is connected to the land, with flexible time and relative autonomy regarding the religious practices of popular Catholicism. The structure found in family and neighborly-based neighborhoods, in its turn, gives rise to a dense network of communitarian relationships, be it at work or in religious manifestations. Just as it was common in previous decades, it is possible to find elements of the caipira culture reframed and adapted to a new context. Due to the time-space fragmentation, different temporalities coexist in the same space, being expressed at work, in habitation, in the way of dealing with the environment and with the social life. Among the materializations of this way of live, we registered the Three Kings’ Day celebration, which, with its symbolism, reinforces neighborly bonds and affirms the territoriality of the neighborhood life, alluding to the church, the family, and the property, seeking the permanence of its celebration goers for the following years. The celebration outlines the desires of the group, which not only wishes to reach grace through the divine, but to reestablish their contact with collectivity and to reproduce the community spaces of peasant life. Devout celebration goers transport the desires of being, standing, and producing a space, seeking permanence and the symbolic appropriation of their territory.