From the “Populaça Desenfreada” to Catimbolândia: controls on white fear in Recife (1855-1937)

Abstract

The work revisits the control and repression of the white fear in Recife between the 19th and 20th centuries, from the construction of the Casa de Detenção, in 1855, until the period of action of physicians-psychiatrists from the Hospital de Alienados da Tamarineira on Afro-religious people in the city, between 1932 and 1937, followed by the advent of the Estado Novo in Brazil and the intensification of police repression against the xangôs in Pernambuco. Therefore, the transfer of a panoptic control over enslaved, free and freed people in the central districts of Recife, and, thus, in the so-called “Populaça Desenfreada” (area of ​​mocambos of São José), to a medical-psychiatric control in the territory of “Catimbolândia”, already in the republican context and within the scope of the displacement of terreiros from the urban center to the northern outskirts of Recife, during the modernization and expansion of the city at the beginning of the 20th century. Contrary to these controls, a mesh of resistance tactics of Afro-religious people is recalled, conceived as territorialities contrary to the oppressions of the slave system and the scientific procedures of modernity.