Os humildes peregrinos da civilização cristã: grupos letrados da cidade de Vigia de Nazareth – Grão Pará (1866-1883)

Abstract

In the small town of Vigia de Nazareth in the Province of Grão-Pará in the final decades of the 19th century, a literate group of simple people who we call "humble pilgrims" aimed to accomplish a sociopolitical project, which was based on the development of education as a strategy to fight for rights. Led by the teachers Araújo Nunes, Vilhena Alves and Bertoldo Nunes, they created schools, literary, beneficent and theatrical entities and wrote periodicals, cultural practices that mediated the dreamed Christian civilization, molded from popular Catholicism and the appropriation and resignification of ideas of the civilizing movement in Brazil. The initiative of a new sociopolitical project clashed with the objectives of the other literate groups led by the economic elites in the cultural field of the city, in a social context of misery, illiteracy, and slavery that the group found ways to combat, seeking the formation of an educated individual, politically active and with a social conscience.