Impressions of São Paulo nordestina: Between territories and identities in the collective imaginary

Abstract

The objective of this analysis is centered on the search for elements of the social imaginary that define the northeastern cultural identities formed and maintained outside the northeast, especially in São Paulo, one of the largest centers of concentration of migrants, in which religiosity, festivity and symbolic images of this imaginary form privileged spaces and stages for symbolic-territorial processes of regionalization based on cultural and devotional practices that traveled through Brazil and moved to the largest city in the country. Thus, the ways of conceiving these places, their definitions, and contours in the (trans) formation of the traits of the Northeastern culture, including accents, colors, flavors, memories, and religiosity in the largest concentrations of Northeasterners outside of their own, were privileged for analysis and interpretation place of production of meaning. From these references and cultural representations, its main relationships and meanings were glimpsed in the construction of the imaginary for society. As a methodology, the analysis of images of places of memory and territories that contemplate migrant experiences and memories was privileged, in addition to a bibliographic review on the production of identities. As a result, reflections on the idea of​maintaining migrant identities in other lands through collective imagery are painstaking.