Ver e ouvir Santê : história e memória mediadas pela diversidade cotidiana de Santa Tereza em Belo Horizonte (MG)

Abstract

Santa Tereza, Belo Horizonte’s neighborhood, is an example of the capacity to mobilize different sectors to preserve houses, landscapes, and everyday practices in counterpoint to the voracious advance of real estate speculation in the capital of Minas Gerais over the last three decades. Along with an identity supported by cultural and bohemian traditions, this space encourages strong bonds of belonging in its defense, having as landmarks the law guaranteeing the Area of Special Guidelines (ADE), from 1996, and the listing as Municipal Heritage, in 2015. The language of heritage and tradition, however, points to continuity from perspectives of isolation and resistance to urban development, little in keeping with the intense exchanges between the neighborhood and the rest of the city throughout the 20th century. In the same sense, the discourse about the present constructs an anachronistic image of a “place frozen in time”, not reflecting the multiplicity of landscapes constituting this space and the very idea of tradition as transmission. Not so intent on diminishing the contributions of heritage policy to its preservation, this thesis is structured, at first, as research into the engendering of this representation of tradition in certain historical processes in the neighborhood, which sometimes come closer to, sometimes move away from, such discourses. On another front, we seek to investigate the dynamics of certain everyday spaces, such as grocery stores. We use the methodology of participant observation and drifts and, at a given moment, the soundscape – the latter opening us to a new panorama of analysis, particularly for the redefined role of the bell and music in the territory. Finally, we analyze defense and activism actions in the neighborhood based on the body's role in the lived process and sustainability networks, highlighting material and theoretical characteristics of borders, disputes and mediation, concepts dear to this work. Assuming the role of the researcher in the present, using photography as a research element in an interdisciplinary approach, a methodology was constructed to capture and unveil the urban through walking, along with the analysis of specific practices and spaces – this perspective highlights a marked place for heterogeneity, diversity, and acceptance of difference. From the role of architecture to grocery stores, from Clube da Esquina to the different public voices and cultural circulation that mobilized its past, we question assumptions based on a practiced culture. In summary, we found some fundamental answers, such as the identification of a process of modernization typical of the neighborhood that cannot be seen as archaic, rural or “out of time”, but with a suitable and desired urbanization in a place with strong circulation of memory. We also understand closely the dynamics of everyday spaces and practices, with the re-updating of traditions. This proposal opens us up to identifying new territories of memory and combating socio-spatial exclusions in the spatialization and cultural cartography of the neighborhood. Above all, it highlights the action of subjects in reinventing space and heritage as a daily experience.