"Para os vivos e para os mortos... transformações urbanas e os cemitérios em Uberabinha/Uberlândia 1898-1955"

Abstract

To problematize the history of cemetery construction and manegement in Uberabinha/ Uberlândia in between the years 1898 and 1955 is the aim of this research. The reason for choosing this period is due to the fact that in the given span of time the local leaders started discussing more emphatically the place for the dead in the city. In between 1898 and 1954 the several municipalities of that period came to expand one cemetary in 1923 (Municipal), to build a new necropolis in 1928 (Municipal/São Pedro), to abandon the old cemetary and to tear it down in the year 1953, and to inaugurate another cemeterial space towards the end of 1954 (São Paulo). On the basis of these observations, this study seeks to establish the relation between the building up and tearing down of these spaces and the projects of city proposed by the political and administrative elites of the city throughout those five decades. This research intends to analyze the ways of manifestations and expressions of ideals of progress and urbanismo then in vogue in the configuration of these spaces. Searching through the available resources such as historians’ works, newspapers, City Council, death certificates and other material, this study seeks to understand the social representations at stake for the creation, distribution, expansion, preservation, and tearing down of the spaces for burial in the service of the living and the dead. Given the expansion from one single space in the then called Uberabinha to the creation of two other spaces that served distinct social groups in the city of Uberlândia, this research seeks to trace the urban history of one of the main cities of the Western most region of the Triangulo Mineiro in the XX century.