ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A BLACK PATRON SAINT OF A RACIST COUNTRY:

THE whitening and blackening of Our Lady of Aparecida

Abstract

The article aims to investigate how Our Lady of Aparecida, the Catholic saint who is named the Patron Saint of Brazil, has a question mark over her colour: is her image white or black? In order to formulate conjectures that seek to answer the question proposed throughout the text, we turned to counter-colonial productions by mostly black women to analyse the history of black women in Brazil from colonial times to the present day, as well as bringing into dialogue authors who defend the idea that the saint was blackened, and that her image was never dark. Making use of the comparative method, netnography and semiotics as tools for data collection and cross-referencing them with the theoretical framework of authors, we found the conjecture that one possibility of what happens to Our Lady of Aparecida is a historical whitened aesthetic combated by a rescue of her blackness.