Reverenciando a história do centro de SP: conheça 03 territórios negros em São Paulo

Honoring the history of downtown SP: discover 3 black territories in São Paulo

The history of downtown São Paulo is a direct reflection of the city's history and part of Brazil's history. Living downtown means being in contact with this at every corner. It's a street, a square, a little shop that takes us back in time and experiences what our ancestors built and left as a legacy.

What few people know, and what they didn't learn in school, is that greater São Paulo is essentially an indigenous and black territory. Yes, the native peoples lived in this region, and that's why we have places called: Anhangabaú, Ibirapuera and Ipiranga, and so on. And later, with the arrival of enslaved Africans, the city began to have not only black names, but a new design, and an energy and history of resistance.

Historic neighborhoods and buildings that we know, churches like Sé, were built by black and indigenous people, and we find traces of these people in the architecture, design, drawings, and in every brick placed in the buildings. That's why, in today's text, I want to bring you three black places so that you can get to know them, honor their ancestry, and realize that living in and making the city center a residential neighborhood is a matter of history and respect.

History of downtown SP passes through Liberdade

Photo: opsfuiviajar.com.br

Known as the neighborhood of Japanese culture , with banks and signs in Japanese, markets, temples, restaurants that pay homage to Japan and the immigrants who came to Brazil, the true history of Liberdade is dark. It is also a beautiful meeting of the name with the past.

Before becoming a commercial area, the Liberdade neighborhood was part of the Cemitério dos Aflitos, where black people, indigenous people, and hanged people were buried. Before becoming a saint, Chaguinhas was beaten to death and buried in this cemetery. Relatives and people who lived in the area, also black and indigenous, began to light candles at the site, and so the Igreja Santa Cruz das Almas dos Enforcados (Santa Cruz Church of the Souls of the Hanged) was created in 1853. The Capela dos Aflitos was also present, and there people performed so-called “sympathies,” which are actually ancient folk wisdom, in which they would place someone’s name under a piece of wood and knock on it three times.

Today, there is a legal struggle for the construction of the Black Memory Reference Center in São Paulo, trying to prevent commercial construction in the cemetery and chapel area, where nine black bones from the 19th century were found. In addition, collectives and members of the Capela dos Aflitos continue to try to restore the place.

The process of Japanese immigrants coming to São Paulo and the incentive to occupy the Liberdade neighborhood, one of the first suburbs of São Paulo in the central region, had a political background: the State wanted to whiten and erase black culture in the area, thus enhancing the roots of Japanese culture. This, in the end, is also part of a process of resistance, but here we need to recognize the plurality of the Liberdade neighborhood and not allow this erasure.

Therefore, by living in the center and making it a more neighborhood-based place, rather than a commercial one, we are also helping the black people's struggle to bring this historical, cultural and community essence to the country's economic power, which at all times seeks to flatten what really happened in the past, and what is happening today in the present.

When you go to Liberdade, don't forget that before the Japanese lights – which are beautiful, I love them – there was a pillory, a place of public violence against black bodies, a chapel, a cemetery, in short, an entire architecture that was not only about pain and suffering, but also about spirituality and resistance.

The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men

Photo: Wesley Yamaguchi

Leaving the blue line, Liberdade station, and heading to the red line, República, we will review the history of the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men.

This church is located in front of Galeria Olido - a very important cultural hub for hip hop culture – behind Galeria do Rock e do Reggae – where you can get tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks at a reasonable price. It's called Largo Paiçandu. It's a large, yellow building with a monument to Mãe Preta at the entrance and is located in the heart of downtown São Paulo's history.

The church reflects one of the facets of the black struggle for dignity and respect in the city of São Paulo, but also in Brazil. It brings back the stories of the brotherhoods, a union of black Catholic people who worshipped Catholic saints in line with the Bantu tradition – one of the black peoples who came to the Americas as slaves. These cults and rituals united as many hymns as drums, and are present throughout the country.

The church was consecrated in 1903, after Mayor Antônio Prado's urbanization process demolished the first Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men, in the region of Praça Antônio Prado. It was built collaboratively by black people, between 1721 and 1722.

The brotherhoods, in addition to being a form of resistance, were also a black spiritual circuit in São Paulo. The Paiçandu church is dependent on the first church, the Parish Church of Santa Efigênia, created by a Catholic Nubian princess.

The figure of the mother is also important in this story. Historically, black women have been leaders and the foundation of the family in all African culture. They were also wet nurses and among the first teachers of literacy in Brazil. That is why the sculpture of the Black Mother in front of the church Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Pretos has an immeasurable symbolic value. The sculpture was made by Júlio Guerra in 1955, and is entirely sculpted in bronze.

It is worth going to light a candle in the Church and paying homage to those who came before, as well as learning more about the history of the city of São Paulo.

Municipal theater – a story in AmarElo

It's hard to find someone who hasn't watched the film "AmarElo – é tudo pra ontem", a documentary by singer and composer Emicida, in partnership with Netflix, which recounts the artist's career history, linking it with the struggles of black people in downtown São Paulo. This is all because the concert for Emicida's album AmarElo was at the Teatro Municipal, a place that in the social imagination has always been made for the elite, but which was actually built by black hands.

In the documentary, Emicida highlights the importance of being a black man performing on a stage historically reserved for white artists, and that his movement allowed black people to occupy the audience and celebrate themselves in the theater.

The steps of the Municipal Theater are the stage for much struggle by the Unified Black Movement, which resisted the dictatorship, built racial quota policies, began to fight against the genocide of black youth, and shouted to all of Brazil that black people have always organized themselves in favor of freedom.

The theater, designed by Ramos de Azevedo , is part of the history of downtown São Paulo and was inaugurated in 1911. It hosted the Modern Art Week in 1922, a landmark in Brazilian visual art. Modernism revived Brazil's colonial history and, in many ways, made African and indigenous heritage central to our culture.

By the way, have you ever imagined living in a building designed by Ramos de Azevedo? Come take a look at our unit at Palacete Mococa!

Obviously, the construction of the theater was done in light of European architecture and the desires of the elite to listen to opera. So much so that the first performance was an opera of Shakespeare's Hamlet. And so the structural racism of the architecture, culture and city was maintained, meaning that whoever had built this monumental building, so important for the territory, could not enter or perform.

In addition to AmarElo, which occupied the Municipal Theater, we had the opening of Hip Hop Month in 2020, before the pandemic, with a show by black, indigenous, and favela-dwelling figures who are important to black culture and resistance. One of the main shows was by Rincon Sapiência, a rapper from the East Zone! But the one I loved the most was by my friend Gabi Nyarai (listen to her here on Spotify !), creator of Batalha Dominação – I have a text that talks about the battle. Gabi made the entire audience at the Theater – black and peripheral – sing and dance, exalting that black people also belong in an opera house.

Want to know more about the center? Take a look at the other texts on our blog

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