This paper aims a historical incursion into the formation of Cataguases-MG to understand how founding myths and invented traditions ascribe meanings to cities, which is an object increasingly present within the organizational studies. Invented traditions and founding myths constitute an indestructible link in that traditions represent a past that should be preserved as a way of regaining significant changes in society. This tradition demands ways to be recognized as the new status quo and rely on legal, political, cultural and economics apparatus, being stronger when tradition becomes more cohesive and institutionally supported. This study is based on the examination of local and national public collections dating from 1906 as well as the analysis of works recognized as official biographies of the city. Data were analyzed from a Marxist perspective, so that discourse could be viewed as an ideological element of a superstructure that holds dialectical relationship with the base, with issues of social life. The findings lead to the existence of three cores founding myths relating to the clearing, the foundation and the economic and cultural vocation of the city. The transition between these two last founding myths is central to this work, as it concerns a battle between representatives. The invented traditions are unveiled in this transition period, to the extent that the modernist calling delimits the change from the conservative to the progressive city. The imposed modernist tradition is a result of a dispute over political control of the city, in which one of the groups of participants consisted of industrialists. Thus capital sees in modernist architecture not only the possibility of taking over political control, but also of defining the foundation of a new town, distinct from the one inherited from a coffee economy run by old oligarchies.
Founding myths; Invented traditions; Meanings of cities; Materialism; Marxism