Passo Fundo e a construção do imaginário de capital do planalto : comemoração, memória, visualidade e políticas públicas

Abstract

This work aims to study Passo Fundo's centenary celebration and the construction of plateau capital imaginary in 1957. A group of authors such as François Hartog, Joël Candau, Fernando Catroga, Michel de Certeau, Bronislaw Baczko among others, constitute the framework adopted to achieve the proposed goals. When the celebration of the 100th anniversary took place, the people responsible for its organization supported a political and economic project for the city: to claim the city as a regional center of the middle plateau region of Rio Grande do Sul based on agribusiness developmment and urban growth. To achieve this goal those responsible for the celebration used different devices, such as commemorative publications (of history, literature, tourist guides and a special edition of a local newspaper), post cards, celebrations, expositions, parades, urban interventions, among others. Thus it is important to explain who the individuals engaged in the organization of celebrations were and how they were engaged in that context. It were identified groups of local intellectuals (who supported the centenary celebrations through a foundation of a study centre which would become later the Historical Institute of Passo Fundo; many of its members joined also the Letters Association of Passo Fundo) and groups of political and economic leadership (the mayor, who was also envolved in the cultural institutions with the councilors, deputies, traders and industrialists). Therefore, the main goal of this researche is to clarify the relations among the celebrations, the literary and historical productions (that affected the frontiers between history and memory), the formation of urban visuality and the imaginary of Passo Fundo as a plateau capital, which influenced the urban planning of the city and left consequences that are visible in the city in the 21st century.