The river of remembrance: the rivers of the city of Recife and the intellectuals from Recife of the first half of the XX century.

Abstract

This article tries to rebuild the meanings that the rivers take upon the intellectuals born in Recife (Pernambuco state), who maintain strong links with the traditional  agrarian society of the producers of sugar, the “lords of the sugar mill”. These intellectuals who wrote on the first  half of the XX century, seem to be linked in a net of common references that determine the image of an idyllic world which suffers serious blows when, on one hand there is the modification  of the methods of sugar production in the region  and on the other hand, when the city of Recife is going through a process  of modernization that modifies the traditional relations. We will deal here about the ways how  they express the changes that – following the process of transformation of nature, the introduction of new relations of production and the decline of its traditional  social leading circles in the ensemble of the national economy and politics – the rivers undergo  in the XX century.