Entre cangalhas e motocicletas: as transformações ocorridas na paisagem da Feira Livre da cidade de Viçosa - Alagoas

Abstract

In the northeast of Brazil, street markets act as an important instrument in socioeconomic functions, as it is one of the indispensable ways of commercializing agricultural production. Every Friday, in the municipality of Viçosa, part of Avenida Firmino Maia is isolated for the organization of the fair, which begins at dawn on Saturday. Traders go to the place to set up the work environments, so that the next morning they can wait for customers who will come to buy: livestock and farm goods, handicrafts, vegetables, fruits, fish, grains, artisan sweets, among others. Feira de Viçosa unites knowledge, forms of expression and connections between the inhabitants of the city. Knowing the high relevance of the fair for the city and that there are recurrent changes in the physical space, as well as transformations in the ways of executing the event, this work is carried out with the objective of directing studies on the historical evolution of the fair and its relation with the city landscape, acting as a memory record about these uses. In order to identify these modifications in the landscape of the fair, there were two types of investigations: Changes in the organization of the space, that is, how it was organized and sectored over the years, and if there are constants; and changes in trade practices. In this case, due to the precise similarity of the description of the Feira Livre de Viçosa in the 1970s by the writer Sidney Wanderley with the song “feira de mango” composed by Sivuca and Glorinha Gadêlha in the same decade, where they report experiences lived in free fairs in the interior of the Northeast, the comparative method of ethnolinguistics of music with the landscape of the Viçosa fair was chosen, to recognize permanent, substituted and forgotten traces.