Gente intratável ou fiéis vassalos do rei: poder, motins e armas em Pitangui (1715-1760)

Abstract

This work has the objective of analyzing the different performance of the social groups that composed the elite of the Termo de Pitangui between the years 1715 to 1760, paying attention to their different relations with the Crown. This theme involves the question of the conformation and legitimation of the power spaces in the locality and the strategies used by the actors, seeking to reach the highest levels of the social hierarchy. Thus, we sought to understand how the process of conquest and settlement in the region was related to the performance of Paulistas who frequently challenged the rules established by the metropolitan authorities to assert their particular interests. These individuals not only rebelled at times against the designs of the Crown, as they sought to subject and/or co-opt the other social groups that established themselves in the locality, basing themselves on their prerogatives as first conquerors. This position of insubordination explains the image traditionally related to the inhabitants of the Pitangui by the metropolitan authorities, during the first half of the eighteenth century, forged from a context marked by several conflicts and riots that occurred in the first two decades of seven hundred. On the other hand, we sought to confront the image of the rebel with the profile of another group in which its members behaved like faithful vassals, that is, those whose relationship with the Crown and its local authorities was based to a large extent on the provision of services to the monarchy and the consequent retribution of the same by the monarch, which guaranteed to these people a series of benefits and privileges, contributing much so that they occupied prominent places in the social pyramid. From this analysis, we also found trajectories from individuals who did not contest the power of the Crown of the region but who, at least apparently, did not participate in the municipal government, an alternative profile in the constitution of the colonial elite identity in Portuguese America.