Abstract
This research note is part of a historical ethnography that I have been developing with the Tupi and Tupi Guarani of villages in several coastal and interior locations within the state of São Paulo. The following is an attempt to reconstitute the process by which homonymous identities were formulated during the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. For this purpose, I have tried to gather the oral memory fragments of the txeramôes and txedjrays, the grandfathers and grandmothers of these Indians, as well as written documents available in the public collections of SPI-FUNAI, the São Paulo State Public Archive (APESP), libraries, and other sources. Preliminary results indicate that during the nineteenth century, intellectuals and politicians considered the end of the Tupi groups a certainty, whether by racial dilution or extermination. They also confirm the contemporary existence of indigenous people describing themselves as the descendants of these Tupi groups (which up to this time had been considered extinct) and of Guarani groups which settled in these areas during the final displacements of the nineteenth century. As a result, my findings presented here are part of a study intended to understand the process of reclaiming the Tupi and Tupi Guarani territories, which led to the modern-day complex of villages.
Keywords
Tupi; Tupi Guarani; Identity; Oral memory; Archive