“They can't demolish my school": an analysis of the cataloguing of the Marist School of San José in Rio de Janeiro/Brazil

This paper is an excerpt from an investigation into the assets of the Marist Brothers in Rio de Janeiro. More than 120 years ago in the city, they were invited by Archbishop Don Joaquim Arcoverde to run the Diocesan College of St. Joseph. Throughout the 20th century they acquired two plots of land in the Tijuca neighborhood and to this day they offer private Catholic education to the children of the Rio de Janeiro elite. The present analysis is a case study of the “era of the congregations” (BITTENCOURT, 2017), a time when many foreign religious arrived in Brazil (19th and 20th centuries). While researching the Marist heritage, we came across a cataloguing process of one of the school buildings in 1999. Paying attention to the clues, signs and traces in order to “read reality in reverse, starting from its opacity” (GINZBURG, 2004, p.14), when crossing written and oral sources we perceive that before the announcement of the sale of the Marist property on Barão de Mesquita Street, there was a movement by the students together with a deputy for the cataloging of the building. Chats such as “you can't demolish my school” added to the deputy's justification that the demolition of the school would bury the memory of many generations of students point to the use of heritage policy as a strategy for preserving a “place of memory” (NORA, 1993) in the face of a real estate issue (VELHO, 2006) that presented itself as an obstacle to the maintenance of the building that the former students consider heritage (GONÇALVES, 2003).