NARRATIVES OF NORTHERN SERTÕES URBANIZATION

Abstract

The scant cartographic information on the processes of occupation and transformation of the sertões of the captaincies (royal land grants) of the North presents challenges to the researchers interested in the subject. The challenge increases with the awareness that these areas have been known and occupied since the mid seventeenth century. On the other hand, the abundant documentation written by Royal officers (civil and ecclesiastical) shows the sertão hidden in images, structured by a hierarchical network of settlements formed by towns, villages, parishes, julgados (legal/administrative areas) and filial chapels. That said, this essay intends to represent the sertões outside of the "cartographic scene" created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, showing dynamic territories transformed into landscapes. Political and cultural relations will be treated as foundational to the formation of macro-landscapes shaped in space over the long term. The methodology interweaves text (hermeneutics) and image (representation) to think with the eyes (pensar con los ojos) – according to the poetic meaning of the Argentinian art historian Damián Bayón – the urbanization processes emanated by the Portuguese Crown or those operating in the inhabitants’ daily life. Georeferencing was also used, in order to place the settlements in the territory and interpret the reason for their geographical position in the social-political context in which they were inserted.

Key words: cartography; landscape; representation; sertões of the North; urbanization.