De C. Roy Harper e Evelyn Douglass Harper para família na América: experiência do lugar em cartas

Abstract

The American couple Charles Roy Harper (1895-1975) and Evelyn Douglass Harper (1899-1989), missionaries of the Presbyterian Church of the United States, landed in Brazil on September 10, 1925. In the period in which they lived in the country (until 1962), they wrote an impressive amount of letters to the family residing in America or even elsewhere in the world. My interest is to interpret this volume of more than 700 missives, which I call Harper Letters, and attest to the couple's relationship with Brazil and the places they have traveled and lived. This primary source has not been published. It remains unpublished, without propagation in any medium or medium. That said, in the encounter with the letters, undertakes an effort of interpretation - understood as creation -, detecting what can be understood as geographied affects. And why do I use this material? This study is justified by taking a path using letters to understand the places of Harpers. In this trail, the spatial cutting brings together municipalities traveled / lived by the family, agglutinating, under the remittance of the epistles chosen for the research, Rio de Janeiro, Jandira and São Paulo. Instead of study the period between 1925 and 1960 or even a referral in other periods, I have adopted, I might say, a thematic grouping that aims not the years but the experiences of the place narrated on the correspondence studied. The missives thus gather in "Place that enchants / place that is strange" and in "Fusion with the place". In the process of reading, grouping, and selecting these letters, a question was drawn: what kind of experience of Evelyn and Roy with the places they lived and traveled expressed in these correspondences?