ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the role of narratives in the process of rebuilding the memory of an area of vitality subsequently consigned to urban emptiness. During the twentieth century, two processes adversely affected the Brás district. One was the relocation of industrial activity in the 1950s to the 'ABC' region, the Greater São Paulo industrial cities of Santo André, São Bernardo and São Caetano. The second factor affecting the district was when, in 1976, the city started a series of demolition projects in the Brás designed to facilitate the construction of the underground line that today crosses the district, and which further accelerated the destruction and forced the eventual abandonment of the area. The funereal image itself revived unknown and anonymous urban memories, traces of which survive in the narrative as fiction and which, involuntarily, refer back to the principal image the cemetery and to the many mutated meanings that surround its name: Tombs Square.
