Naming in order to remain: indigenous memory and the reinscription of urban territory in Daniel Munduruku

Abstract

This article analyzes Crônicas de São Paulo: um olhar indígena (2011) by Daniel Munduruku, focusing on the relationship between naming, memory, and urban territory. The analysis examines how the chronicles reinscribe Indigenous presence in the city through traces of collective memory, articulating walking, language, and landscape as practices of belonging and spatial reading. In dialogue with Graça Graúna (2013), Indigenous writing is understood as a gesture of transmission, resistance, and symbolic reappropriation of urban space, through which the city is reread as a lived and narratable territory. It argues that, in Munduruku’s work, names, rivers, and routes do not operate as residual marks of a past that has been overcome, but as active forms of ethical and narrative permanence, capable of confronting modern regimes of historical and cultural erasure. By reinscribing ancestry into the everyday life of the metropolis, the text demonstrates how contemporary Indigenous literature produces alternative ways of inhabiting, remembering, and signifying urban space.