The aim of this text is to reflect on what has been agreed to be a post-abolition period in an analysis derived from studies on the black associations and mesties of the city of Victoria da Conquista (Brazil) between political and cultural transits in the process of carnising in the second half of the 20th century. The methodology consisted of an analysis of iconography collected in the doctoral research, mainly photographs of the carnival, and analysis of the reports of people whose memory formation was linked to the groups making the street carnival, from the predicates of oral history, articulating postulates from various disciplines in the field of coalescent social sciences to the multimodality of memory. Research leads to the conclusion that it is possible to change the academic use of the post-abolition category in the epistemological field of history, by subtracting its sense of periodicity, by investing in the thematic sense of memory of the struggles by freedom and citizenship of black and mestician, making use of a new category: the historical memory.