THE “FILHOS DA FOLHA” AT THE TIME OF INDEPENDENCE IN GOIÁS: the forgotten protagonism of poor brazilians

o protagonismo esquecido dos brasileiros pobres

Abstract

This article proposes to address the participation of the poor population of Goiás in the process of Brazil's independence, which were forgotten by official historical narratives. For this, it is intended to discuss the meanings attributed to the word popular, through the analysis of the dictionaries of the time, and to identify, in the official correspondence of the leaders of Goiás, the presence of indigenous, brown and black people who were protagonists in political conflicts, acting in the military troops. It starts from the assumption that the written representations are part of a “cultural circuit” (HALL, 2016), which compose the constructions of the subjects' identities, giving meaning to the roles that each one has in the social world. Within this circuit, produced and reproduced by a white and Europeanized elite, military service beckons to poor Brazilians as a possibility of suppressing the cleavage in relation to racial and class issues, as long as the individual, inserting himself in “service networks” (COSTA, 1992), agreed with the rules of the game of a slave-owning and unequal society.