Produzindo territórios festivos em São Paulo: as fraternidades folclóricas bolivianas como experiência e pertencimento

Abstract

In addition to the sewing workshops and other informal labor, already covered by the literature on the Bolivian presence in São Paulo, this article proposes to observe it through the folkloric “fraternities,” dance groups whose contexts - from large urban festivals to private rituals - reposition them in the urban experience in terms of fraternos. Subsequently, the way they experience the city is also transformed: spaces and temporalities that are only consumed on the occasion of fraternity festivities figure in this new belonging. It is another territoriality marked not by the rigidity of labor in the workshops or by leisure in “ethnic ghettos” such as the Plaza Kantuta, but by the movement in time and space in the urban landscape. Using methods focused on mobilities, I accompanied the fraternities in their festive calendars, observing how they make mobility dynamic in the interstices between productive logics (the fraternos work to dance in the fraternities) and reproductive logics (the leisure spaces are places of festive practices). In this process, they repeat, in the migrant experience, the historical experience of the Bolivian fraternities in Andean Bolivia in the second half of the twentieth century, when they were instruments for claiming new social and political spaces.