This paper analyzes the relations between oral and written words in a black community from the northern littoral of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, during the 20th century. For that, we had in focus an extended family that owns written documents since the end of the 19th century. Although they are illiterate, they conserve those documents carefully. This situation raises the question of what were the meanings of the written word and its relations with the oral speech. We also analyze the presence of their ancestors through the written documentation and we propose the role of the guardians of those documents as interpreters, by the notion of "historical consciousness". This analysis itself is done through the intersection between the written and the oral, since it is supported by the interlacement between interviews, that documental collection, the reading of those documents to the family and the interpretation of their reactions.
orality; production of presence; historical consciousness.
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