“Cantigas dos Pretos” a presença da voz negra no livro Cantigas das Creanças e do povo e danças populares

Abstract

The writer and educator Alexina de Magalhães Pinto (1869-1921) was born in São João del-Rei, Minas Gerais. She published some works throughout her life. Among them, As nossas histórias (Our Stories – 1907), Os nossos brinquedos – (Our Toys -1909) and Cantigas das creanças e do povo e Danças Populares – (Children's and People's Songs and Popular Dances – 1916). Alexina Pinto dedicated to registering folk culture through her works with the main aim of educating and instructing children at that time, once she was a teacher. In this bias, this research aims to present some reflections about the book Cantigas das Creanças e do Povo e Danças Populares, specifically the part named Cantigas dos Pretos (Africans’ songs), which is composed of 7 songs, entitled Pae Jose, Charuta, Pae Francisco, Sinházinha, Chiquinha, Tumba and Carola. For this purpose, we will seek to answer the following question: To what extent do the songs arranged in the chapter Cantigas dos Pretos represent the life of enslaved people at the time the book was published? The research also aims to achieve the following objectives: to verify whether in the chapter Cantigas dos Pretos any production can be identified as a work song; identify how black people are represented by Alexina Pinto when making comments about the songs; check in the analyzed work whether the author selected other songs that can also be classified as work songs or black songs; and also identify how the culture and history of African peoples are presented in the work. As an initial hypothesis, we considered that the collected songs date back to the time of slavery and what was experienced by the enslaved, consequently, reverberates in folk songs. For this work, we based on the bibliographic method, using the theorists Flávia Guia Carnevali (2009), Rita de Cássia Silva Dionísio Santos (2017), Maria Zilda da Cunha (2017), Arthur Ramos (2007), Luís da Câmara Cascudo (2012), Mário de Andrade (1989), Leonardo Arroyo (2011), among others. Therefore, we intend to reflect on the way in which black culture is represented in Cantigas dos pretos, since the analyzed work, despite having been written in the early twentieth century, appears to be an important document to be discussed thoroughly as a topic in the present century.