“‘Armaria’, ‘armaria’, ‘armaria’, the bubonic!”: behaviors and collective strategies in the face of an epidemic of bubonic plague that devastated Exu, in the pernambuco hinterlands, in 1935

Abstract

This article intends to identify the collective behaviors and survival strategies of a community in the municipality of Exu, state of Pernambuco, in the face of an epidemic of bubonic plague that devastated the region in 1935. Without access to information or health services, the population assumed the leading role in facing the lethal disease, using faith, beliefs and knowledge transmitted by ancestry. As a methodological practice to reconstruct this episode, we resort to oral history, in which the past is not presented as it was, as it cannot be rescued as if we operated a time machine, but woven from the reminiscences of the witnesses in their place of speech in the present tense. These reports, in addition to the support of the available documentation, allowed us to measure the vulnerability of a poor population, isolated and distant from the centers of political power in the face of a devastating and unknown evil.