O Carnaval de Rio Novo: uma festividade e seus significados plurais (1907- 1979)

Abstract

This thesis is the result of research into the carnival of Rio Novo, a small city in the Zona da Mata of Minas Gerais, between 1907 - when the first “Carnival Club” was founded, to 1979 - which saw the consolidation of a new carnival in the city, one promoted by the new Samba Schools. This research was conducted via means of interviews with witnesses, newspaper articles, statute laws, donation registries and minutes of meetings, amongst other documents. Firstly, the past of the “zé-pereira”, a merriment that announced the beginning of carnival in the city throughout the entire 20th Century, is rescued. The objectives of this initial chapter is to present the township of Rio Novo, the arrival of this manifestation in the city, and the diverse facets that this frolic or merriment took on within the same. Furthermore, the exercise of reinventing this tradition, with focus on rescuing it’s past in the last decades of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century, is debated. The second chapter focuses on the study of the carnival which was promoted by the “Carnival Clubs” of Rio Novo , with their typical social divisions. By means of personal accounts, the profiles of the clubs, the distribution of the revellers in these guilds, their rivalries, behaviour and consequent policing, which usually resulted in conflict, are reconstructed. In the third chapter, the process of the reorganization of the carnival in Rio Novo, with the strengthening of the Samba Schools, is tackled. These guilds, which, at first were marginalized, gradually took on distinctive proportions in the carnival of the 1970s, becoming hegemonic in festivities and giving new facets to the city’s carnival in a period of social transformations in which the ancient racial segregation had began to crumble.