Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
what was happening, he raised his hand as well. So the soldiers and the marshal
brought some Guarani - those who raised their hands - to São Paulo.
When my grandfather arrived in São Paulo, he felt like a fish out of water: he didn't
know how to speak Portuguese and had no idea of what he would do in such a
huge city. I don't know exactly how, but a German couple ended up adopting him.
This couple gave him all kinds of education, a white man's education, and even
found funny the existence of an Indian who didn't speak his language anymore,
but only Portuguese and German!
When he was about 40 years old, my grandfather married my grandmother, who
was only 12 years old. When my grandfather's adoptive parents died, he received
a small piece of land as an inheritance. Because of lots of land disputes among the
Guarani, because their land was not demarcated, my grandfather decided to move
to the small piece of land that his German parents had given him.
Around 1984 my father decided to move to the city, near my grandfather. He
invaded a neighboring track of private land. That was the beginning of the
struggle for a stretch of demarcated land. My uncle followed my father in the
struggle, and one by one the struggle became stronger and the land claim grew
bigger and bigger. In 1986 the Pico do Jaraguá Indigenous Area was demarcated
and homologated [by the Brazilian federal government].
Today we are more or less 16 families and about 58 people. While we still lived
on Indigenous land, we were not practicing our culture anymore - our religion,
dances, language, art craft, and cooking lore. Since 1996, with the construction
of the
Opy
, our prayer house, we started rebuilding our Guarani culture. First
the religion, and then came the dances, the cooking and afterwards the artistic
creations. And now the most difficult part is to revitalize the Guarani language. I
am part of the third generation and I fight hard so that the future generations keep
alive the Guarani culture.
Poty Poram Turiba Carlos, Guarani Nhandeva teacher at the Jaraguá Indigenous
School, São Paulo City.
The elaboration of
Table 4.1
- Indigenous Peoples of São Paulo State, shown above,
generated multiple exercises involving quantitative and qualitative data, such as the
standardization of all land measurements into hectares (a unit of area equal to 10,000
square meters); the sum of numerical columns; estimates of salaries; and the total
number of individuals living in urban areas, among many others (see
Table 4.1)
.
