THE SHAPPING OF MATO GROSSO: STIGMAS, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY BASED ON LYLIA GALETTI AND OSVALDO ZORZATO

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the construction of identity and historiographical memory in Mato Grosso between 1904 and 1983, based on the doctoral theses of Osvaldo Zorzato (1998) and Lylia Galetti (2000). The analysis demonstrates how both researchers, trained under the same intellectual habitus at the Graduate Program in Social History at USP, investigated the strategies of Mato Grosso’s hegemonic elites to confront external stigmas of "backwardness" and "barbarism." While Zorzato focuses on the instrumentalization of memory as a device for political power and social exclusion at the regional level, Galetti expands the investigation to representations of the sertão and the frontier, situating Mato Grosso within the complex web of the Brazilian national imaginary. Utilizing theoretical frameworks from sociology and regional history, the text reveals that the historiography of Mato Grosso was established as an arena of symbolic struggles. The authors demonstrate how the narrative of a "civilizing identity" served to legitimize elite discourse, silence class contradictions, and erase the protagonism of indigenous peoples in the state’s formation.