User:MelhoraWKBR/Sertanejo people

Map of the Northeastern Brazil sub-regions. The Sertão is the one which is marked with the number 2 in the map.

The Sertanejo people are a people who inhabit rural fields and are linked to the agriculture and livestock in the Sertão, a sub-region of Northeastern Brazil, specifically in the Caatinga biome, which cover much of the territories of the states of Bahia, Ceará, Piauí, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Sergipe and Alagoas, and Cerrado, which cover parts of the Maranhão's state countryside, western Bahia and southwestern Piauí, in addition to the Agreste region, where occurs a transition between Atlantic Forest and Caatinga.

The Sertanejo people are basically the result of the admixture between Portuguese and Amerindians, especially the Jê peoples. The african slave was not very present in the Sertão, since cattle ranching normally used the free labor of the vaqueiros (the Brazilian cowboys).

Many consider the Sertanejo the stereotypical of the Northeastern Brazilian man, comparable to the caipiracaipira of São Paulo or the gaucho of the Pampas.

Sertanejo men in Caatinga, Bahia, engraving of the 1810s.

Origins and culture

In red, the currals in the left margin of the São Francisco River, a area dominated by the d'Ávila family. Map of the 17th century, by Jan Vigboons.

Bovine cattle were introduced in the sugar plantations of Northeastern's west coast in the beginning of the economic sugar cycle and the oxen served as animal traction for the cane fields and food. Over the decades, the cattle herds have multiplied and brought troubles to the sugarcane plantations. As a result, groups of Portuguese and mamelucos (Brazilian term for a people of European and Amerindian admixture, counterpart to the Mestizos of Hispanic America) deprived of financial resources and political power are pushed, along with the cattle from the sugarcane fields, to the Sertão region. These pioneers and their descendants came into constant conflict with the local Indigenous people, despite the strong admixture with them, and advanced, between the 16th and 18th centuries, through the Sertão, populating it, following the courses of the rivers.

Some parts of the Chapada Diamantina had a different historical and social formation from the rest of the Sertão. They were occupied in the 18th and 19th centuries because of the extraction of precious stones and their population was essentially formed by the miscegenation between Portuguese, indigenous and Africans. The mining in this Sertanejo region of Bahia employed African slave labor. Despite this, these Bahia's Sertanejos have a strong rural character.

There were two large estates that dominated the Sertão: Casa da Torre, owned by the Garcia d'Ávila family, and Casa da Ponte, owned by the Guedes de Brito family. These large estates were divided into smaller farms, which were rented to the vaqueiros.

The life of Sertanejos was difficult. There was only an abundance of milk and meat, and curdled milk and cheese were used only for their own consumption. Cassava flour was added to the meat, creating paçoca, a typical Sertanejo dish. From the leather of the oxen, several artifacts of the life of the Sertanejo were produced, such as huts, canteens, backpacks and clothing. Drought has always been present in the Sertão. Darcy Ribeiro compared Sertanejo cowboys and farmers to peasants in servitude in Feudal Europe, since both were born and lived in the region of their parents and grandparents, were trapped in land that did not belong to them and had to pay high taxes to the owner of the land they used.

Contacts between the coast and the hinterlands were sporadic and ocurred only at certain times of the year, through fairs of commerce, many of which were the origins of cities such as Feira de Santana (Bahia), Campina Grande (Paraíba), Pastos Bons (Maranhão), Serra Talhada (Pernambuco) and Oeiras (Piauí).

[[Category:Northeast Region, Brazil]]