Memory Battles at the Turn of the Century
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Published:March 2024
This final chapter explores the memory battles that took place in the 1990s, focusing on three cases: books written about the column, monuments to Luís Carlos Prestes, and the drama that ensued when the family of a conservative tenente donated historical documents to an archive in Rio de Janeiro. A central thread in many of the debates about Prestes's legacy centered on an aspect of the column that had largely fallen out of mainstream discussions since the 1920s: the violent actions of rebel soldiers in the interior. Discussions of historical rebel violence against interior communities became enmeshed with contemporary debates about the political legacy of the Knight of Hope and who—and which regions of the country—had the right to shape public memory. The chapter also shows how, on the eve of the twenty-first century, reflections on the column's passage through the “old” Brazil of the 1920s served as way to lament the changes wrought by twentieth-century efforts to modernize the interior.