Between Memory and Erasure: Coloniality and the Politics of Forgetting in the Borba Gato Case

Abstract

Starting from the controversy surrounding the monument to Borba Gato in São Paulo, this article investigates the relationships between monumentalisation, forgetting, and public contestation. To this end, the study combines a Foucauldian-inspired qualitative discourse analysis of six documentary units, produced between 2021 and 2022 by activists, political-institutional and legal actors, with supplementary historical documentation. The corpus is examined in terms of the meanings ascribed to the monumentalised figure, the positions taken on the legitimacy and capacity to intervene in its public inscription, and the institutional criteria invoked in response to these interventions. In addition, the historical reconstruction situates Borba Gato within the expedition led by Fernão Dias, an undertaking associated with mineral prospecting and the capture and circulation of Indigenous people held in captivity. The contrast with the artwork’s representation thus reveals an asymmetry between the monumental image of the bandeirante (a member of a Portuguese colonial expedition in Brazil) and the colonial violence associated with the historical experience under examination. At the same time, the interventions analysed altered the meanings attributed to the monument and called into question both the capacity to act on this urban presence and the conditions under which it could be challenged. Accordingly, the findings suggest that the politics of forgetting can persist even under conditions of contestation, since transforming meanings does not necessarily eliminate inequalities in the public organisation of the past. Within this framework, coloniality provides an interpretive lens for understanding the persistence and historical rearticulation of these relationships.