"Sou fundadeira dessa cidade": identidade, resistências e empoderamento feminino na umbanda goianiense

Abstract

This research is inserted from the perspective of the History of Religions and presents the proposal of the writing of the History of Umbanda in the city of Goiânia. It focuses on the study of Umbanda Centers founded from the 1950s that remain active in today's reality. It demonstrates that there has been resistance from the impoverished to assert elements of their religious culture in the new city, specifically within the umbandista religion, whether they are elements of Catholic traditions or Afro-Brazilian traditions. For this, the organization and religious language of the spirit religion, similarly, were appropriate for providing an appearance of lawful and institutional religion, acceptable in the new social physiognomy that was outlined in that modern city. It is demonstrated in this research that women started or continued the umbandista movement in the state capital of Goiás and that the created religious centers had different characteristics, following the creative orientations of their authors, which they credited such idiosyncrasies to their spiritual entities. Some of the Religious Centers responded to the needs of impoverished migrants from the rural area and other regions of the country in search of better living conditions; others were given to the impoverished in search of health restitution, also trimming them, also with new networks of solidarity established in the new urbanized reality. Such leading women have found meanings for their lives in the umbandista religion and in the development of their mediumship, which empowered them and provided prestige in a society full of social, racial and gender inequality contradictions. The oral history of life and participant observation is used to know the strategies that the population was finding in the umbandista religion to safeguard the values, customs, words and rites of various matrices. It is concluded that Umbanda is an integral part of Goiânia's history, with women being its main protagonists and responsible for cultural maintenance and the creation of new religious behaviors necessary for survival within the universe multifaceted from the Capital of Goiás