João de Camargo: um negro na encruzilhada da modernidade

Abstract

This research aims to study the figure of João de Camargo in the city of Sorocaba-SP. He was a black man who lived the condition of a slave, went through abolition and survived from the beginning of the First Republic until the Vargas Era, becoming an important religious leader, especially of the black community. João de Camargo's black body went through violent processes in its existence, as it experienced the whole context of the European modernity project intertwined with the Brazilian development movement. This perception of the world, created since the long process of rationalization of European life and its overseas expansion, consolidated a relationship of alterity, establishing the white man as the “us” in opposition to the other understood as savage and uncivilized. This modernity was consolidated by the European imperialist project that imposed its civilizing process on the world – an extremely violent process that could not have existed without the support of a series of theories that can be summarized in the notion of the “white man's burden” of bringing civilization to other, savage, and inferior peoples. It was in this context that scientific racism developed, linking the backwardness of peoples to the condition of their race. Such theories arrived with great force in Brazil, especially in the historical period in which João de Camargo developed his religiosity in the Sorocaba society. This whole scenario created by modernity did not accept João de Camargo's ancestral knowledge as knowledge, nor as religion. This subjective construction of the subject that he had to survive and reinvent himself, in face of the whitening policy which the Brazilian elites believed to be the solution for the country's development, saw the black as the responsible for social backwardness and their bodies as something unwanted in the public space. It was in this context that João de Camargo created a space of survival and resistance for the black community in Sorocaba, a Capela Nosso Senhor do Bonfim. Throughout his life, João de Camargo earned respect and was known nationally as the Black Pope of Sorocaba. However, the advance of modernity did not stop and with his death, the city suffered with the arrival of progress, avenues, and real estate speculation. Gradually its history and memory became a point of dispute for some sectors of society. In the manifestation of the whitening of his cult, he is regarded as a spiritist medium; for others who regard him as a black leader, he brought the cults of the ancestors of Bantu and Yoruba matrices, who were present in that space materialized in his Chapel. Therefore, among the many threads of this memory about the life and struggle of João de Camargo to inscribe himself in a capitalist society with aspirations to the imported model of modernity, this work signals the restricted possibilities of access to black history in the city, since the subjectivity shaped by modernity crossed all the systematization of this past. Nevertheless, this text aspires to have brought more elements to the difficult understanding of the historical process through the daily life of a common man, a freed black man who reinscribed his destiny.