Cultura afro-brasileira e educação: significados de ser criança negra e congadeira em Pedro Leopoldo - Minas Gerais

Abstract

The present study aimed at understanding the meanings of black child and congadeira from following-up of a group of children living at the city of Pedro Leopoldo state of Minas Gerais Brazil, and integrants of two guardas de congado (religious folklore groups based on Afro-Brazilian culture). The meaning attributed to the subjects to their childhood at the Congado, their perception as black and congadeiras children taking into account the specificities of their ethnic-racial and cultural belongings at the local context were guidelines followed at the analysis carried. Besides that, we have sought to apprehend and understand how children learn to be congadeiras at the perspective of exchanges and interactions made possible by different relationships with adult and between themselves. In order to proceed with the analysis we have adopted ethnography as the central methodological axes. The children were followed up at the parties promoted by the guardas de congado and at the visits made by them to other congadeiras communities. There have also been individual conversations, collective meeting and visits to the children and their families. The field work counted also with the following resources: video recording, photography, and entries at the field diary. The research pointed out that the congadeiras children circulate and interact in several spaces. School is one of them. Though this institution has not been the central focus of the investigation, it emerged at the children's discourses and at their memories on the time lived as a meaningful time/space, marked by negative livings in relation to their ethnic-racial belonging, of their family members and colleagues. It is at that complex process that they learn to be black and congadeiras. It is a movement marked by questionings, silencing, fears, negation, affirmation, and reframing. Even though the children did seem to understand the aspects of faith, of devotion, of the symbology and the abstractions integrating congado, we have observed that, inside that cultural practice they construct values, educate themselves, des(educated) themselves, affirm themselves and live the identitary tensions that follow the Afro-Brazilian universe and the racial relationships in Brazil.