Historical and social study that aimed at obtaining the social representations about associative practice present at the collective memory of the members from ABEn-PI. Its primary source were 94 minutes of ABEn-PI created from 1959 to 1970 and from 1995 to 2005 and analyzed according to a thematic analysis of categorical content. The social representations obtained were about knowledge, positioning and feelings about nursing teaching, religiosity and honoring and political fights of ABEn. The dissemination of these knowledge, positioning and feelings among the members of the association, showed the spread of social representations determining the behavior of these nurses as ABEn-PI members.