Scene 1
V - Portão
Gate
Tim - Luiz Ernani - MUMBI - Museu Memória do Bixiga
/ The object I want to present to you is half of a gate at the entrance to the houses, which is still from a time - Bixiga has many of them, the museum is one of them - with low walls and low gates. So it's a gate that alone tells the whole story of the neighborhood. It passes through all the peoples, of course, apart from the original indigenous peoples, who today exist in the neighborhood only in street names. So, Japurá, Avanhandava, Bororós. But the gate is interesting because it's a gate that most likely belonged to a house built by Italians who migrated here at the beginning of the 20th century. But just like, I think, almost all the gates in Bixiga... It's a gate that has a Sankofa in the middle, this adornment that is an adinkra, which is an African symbol that belongs to the community and there are many studies about it, from an architectural and art issue, to a way of communicating from other peoples who were enslaved, to come here and see that there was a black community here too, that it was here 150 years before the Italian migration, which goes back to 1750 to the Quilombo da Saracura, a place where people came to escape, to save themselves, to establish a community or to pass through. It was a place of thick forest, the distances were very long. So it was a place where people came to hide.
So since 1750 you've had this black community, you've had a Sankofa in the middle of that gate. At the beginning of the 20th century, Italians arrived there, since the neighborhood was formed in 1878. And this gate was from a house that belonged to an Italian, most likely, or a Portuguese, it has in its foundation, in the very construction of the gate, these two symbols of something Italian and black together.
In 1950, a northeastern migration to Bixiga began, with a peak in the 1970s, with the military changing the country's structures and so on, so these flows began. And at the same time as the Italians began to undermine the neighborhood, people were leaving, there was something like this, this very house here in the museum is a result of this, of people leaving and abandoning and leaving the house behind. Sometimes the guy didn't go back to Italy, he left here and went to Santo Amaro neighborhood. And he would leave his house behind. And that's when an occupation began, both by the black community, but also by this northeastern community that came.
This gate specifically belongs to Bá, who is a baiana de Acarajé, who came to Bixiga 45 years ago, more or less, arrived here in the late 80s, early 90s... More or less that's how she set up her tray. And then she set up a restaurant in her house, which was here on Luiz Barreto, called Patuá, Patuá da Baiana. Ba's food is very sophisticated Bahian food. Very good, a person very careful with her ancestry and her history. And this gate belonged to her, who is what? A northeasterner living in a house that was built by an Italian, with a black symbol next to it. So it tells the story of a neighborhood, which is an Afro-Italian-Northeastern neighborhood. I say that Bixiga is an Afro-Italian-Northeastern neighborhood because the Northeast is a nation here. Inside Bixiga, the Northeast is a nation, it's Bixiga's workforce.
Most likely, anywhere you go, it's either a northeasterner who owns it or a northeasterner working and serving you. Achiropita, for example, was once considered the biggest Italian party in the world. Not even Italy has a festival that attracts as many people as the Achiropita festival. But when you go and see the volunteers, it's basically northeasterners. When you take the shuttle bus, for example, you see a lot of black people from the northeast, it's completely ingrained in the culture of the neighborhood. So I think this gate is that synthesis. It's a powerful object. Because it's half a gate that tells the story of the entire neighborhood, which is the museum's slogan: a museum that is an entire neighborhood.