Aflitos de São Paulo: a estigmatização perante a morte

Abstract

The objective of this dissertation is to analyze, through funerary expressions, the urban development of the São Paulo city, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period in which sociopolitical and cultural measures were institutionalized to respond to the daily needs of paulistanos. With the increase of the population in the city and its expansion beyond its imagined limits, it became essential to implement public resources that would meet the urban space structuring needs. The spatial and strategic location of the São Paulo city, which allowed its development within a basic mercantile system, also attracted an impoverished population devoid of its origins, adventurers seeking enrichment a horde that was associated with the malt of the land, black linings and escapes that could not be absorbed as wage labor, women of bad life, among other miserable ones. Among the public facilities needed for the urban structuring to attend to the funeral demands of those excluded from the order, the first public cemetery was created, which together with the space of the force, the pillory and Santa Casa de Misericórdia, led to the formation of the scaffold of the death in São Paulo. From this first public necropolis survives, among the skyscrapers, in a dead end, the Chapel of the Afflicted. The small and humble hermitage whose patron saint, Nossa Senhora dos Aflitos, is the consoler of those who wait for nothing, keeps several testimonies, both material and immaterial, that remind us of the process of segregation and social stigmatization resulting from the economic development of the São Paulo city