Cururu: the corners of the lived-in space in the song

Abstract

This article presents one of the most typical inhabitants of the interior of the Brazilian «sertões» and one of its cultural practices, the «caipira» and «cururu». An individual in great contact with nature and fruit of the miscegenation between Portuguese and Indians, he was one of the main settlers and explorers of the sertões from the caravans articulated by the Portuguese government in search of gold and indigenous slave labor, the so-called flags. After the Portuguese crown, it was not interested in the already decadent and scarce gold economy and by the ill-fated attempts to implant the sugar monoculture in the sixteenth century, gradually it would be fixed in the old stops formed along the paths that traveled, becoming some of these in parishes, towns and cities. In this way, the article aims to present, from a succinct exposition of the caipira, not only the importance of the cultural inheritance incorporated by the peoples that gave rise to it, but also the relation with the space that nurtured during the course of the exploration, especially the Paulista. In this way, the article sketches a little of the culture of this human type through cururu, its most typical and still resistant musical manifestation in urbanized environments of the interior of the state of São Paulo, making this socio-spatial representation still live in this corner. Cururu would then be understood here not only as a tool that evidences an existing past, but a link between tradition (identity) and memory that still highlights its importance in the present.