Abstract
Excerpted From: Alexandre Pelegrino, From Slaves to Índios: Empire, Slavery, and Race (Maranh[o, Brazil, C.1740-90), 40 Law and History Review 789 (November, 2022) (87 Footnotes) (Full Document)
On June 6, 1755, the Portuguese crown enacted a law abolishing--once again--the enslavement of Indigenous Americans. The attempt to ban Indigenous slavery was integral to Portuguese imperial reforms in the second half of the eighteenth century for two reasons. First, it fostered alliances with Indigenous groups who played a critical role in the border-defining struggle between Spain and Portugal in South America. Second, Portuguese imperial reformers tried to pull Maranhão into the Atlantic economy by importing large numbers of African slaves to develop a cash crop economy of cotton and rice. These reforms combined to strengthen Portuguese rule over Northern Brazil. In Maranhão's colonial settlements, the abolition law produced contradictory effects. There, the century-long practice of raiding and trading Indigenous captives in the interior (sertões) left thousands of Indigenous people in bondage.
The present article explores ruptures and continuities in the enslavement of Indigenous Americans as importation of African slaves rapidly increased. The massive enslavement of Indigenous Americans in Northern Brazil has only recently started to receive scholarly attention. Historians of colonial Brazil have traditionally interpreted Indigenous slavery as an institution typical of the peripheries; that is, São Paulo and Amazonia, the peripheries of sugar plantation areas. New interpretations emerged when scholars overcame the tendency to analyze these regions in terms of what they lacked--sugar and African slaves--and started to take seriously what they had--different economic activities based on various forms of coerced Indigenous labor.
This scholarship has been essential to debunk the image of Amazonia as a region long neglected by the Portuguese crown and to expand the history of slavery beyond the African experience. In fact, both the recruitment of Indigenous labor and the enslavement of Indigenous people were central to Portuguese policies, which proved wrong the alleged incompatibility between Indigenous slavery and colonial system over the long term. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cocoa production and cattle raising, the primary local economic activities, depended almost exclusively on Indigenous labor recruited in multiple forms. The Portuguese crown responded to local pleas for additional labor and created conditions for this major population resettlement. The number of Indigenous workers recruited in the interior was estimated at 100,000-260,000. This figure is comparable to the number of African slaves laboring in the sugar industry in Northeastern Brazil and in mining operations in Southern/Central Brazil.
As scholars re-examine the number of Indigenous workers, the economic activities they supported, and the Portuguese policies regulating their recruitment, other historians have started to sketch the lives of Indigenous workers. Freedom suits have been an important source for understanding the lives of thousands of Indigenous workers forcibly displaced from the interior to colonial settlements. The pioneer work of David Sweet argued that Indigenous freedom suits were rare. More recently, Márcia Mello reconsidered the exceptionality of Sweet's case study and offered the first comprehensive explanation for the different forums that Indigenous people could access to reclaim their freedom. In the eighteenth century, Indigenous Americans frequently used the Board of Missions (Junta das Missões), a tribunal composed of ecclesiastical and secular authorities for Indigenous affairs. The Board of Missions operated under the dual charge of authorizing wars against Indigenous groups, and hence their enslavement, and deciding over illicit enslavements, and hence their freedom.
Recently, other scholars have delved into the extant documents of the Board of Missions. Despite the fragmentary condition of the archival collection, they were able to better understand the place of the Board of Missions in the monarchy's architecture of power and how Indigenous people navigated the legal system in colonial Maranhão. Most of the litigants were female slaves, who also won the freedom of their families. The success of those freedom strategies depended on the appropriate mobilization of witnesses, the selection of legal representation, the legal arguments and proofs chosen by them, and the balance of power in local politics, since the composition of the Board of Missions changed over time.
Taken together, this body of scholarship still relies on a rigid boundary between the periods before and after the imperial reforms. This reliance obscures the continuities in Indigenous bondage. The different forms of labor recruitment ranged from slavery to forced or peaceful resettlement of Indigenous peoples. Yet, the customary slippage, to use the expression of another historian, between one mode of conscription and the other was not limited to the recruitment side of this large-scale process of resettlement. The definition of Indigenous workers' legal status was hazy, and was disputed once they entered settlers' households.
This article focuses on the Indigenous population in Maranhão living outside the Indigenous villages and toiling in cities, settlers' houses, and farms. It analyzes the connection between mechanisms that allowed slavery (or forms of labor that resembled slavery) to persist and people's attempts to claim and preserve freedom or autonomy, through the strategic use of the índio status. Two of those mechanisms that kept Indigenous laborers in bondage were social dependencies created within households, and the use of socio-racial classifications by the colonial society.
Some historians have argued that the 1755 abolition law was a “political fiction” or a “false freedom” and that Indigenous people continued to live under the same regimes of exploitation with a new name. Based on baptismal records, wills, petitions, and legal cases, it is indeed possible to visualize the persistence of bonds of social dependency ranging from sex, intimacy, honor, and ritual kinship (compadrio). These bonds kept Indigenous workers and masters linked. Yet, to say that nothing changed is to overlook the years of legal activism by Indigenous actors. Indigenous people were moving away from the legal status of “escravo” towards “do serviço,” and this was not the result of colonial officials simply following the new abolition law of 1755. Instead, it was a bottom-up process of abolition. Indigenous workers learned how to use the channels offered by Portuguese colonialism, and the knowledge about the 1755 law, which circulated among the workers, was only another weapon.
The transition from one legal status to another was not seamless and not without conflict. It primarily involved public reputation; that is, being recognized as an índio(a) in the community. Whenever conflict emerged, one's ability to prove his or her free status through written documents or genealogy was essential. Under Portuguese colonialism, the status of índio offered some constraining obligations, such as the requirement to participate in labor drafts, and some special rights, like the payment for their labor, the freedom to choose whom one would serve, and mobility. The protection offered by the Portuguese monarchy and settlers could work both ways. Indigenous workers (or their masters) requested permissions to stay in the households that they served for years. They also used the índio status to delineate spaces of autonomy and independence from former masters.
Building on the work of Maria Resende, this article stresses how Indigenous people's legal activism forced masters to increase the use of socio-racial classification. In the decades of the 1760s and 1770s, with the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and the aftermath of the publication of the law abolishing Indigenous slavery, the status “slave” became closely connected to the socio-racial classification “black.” People classified with one of the several mixed socio-racial classifications could have their freedom endangered if their black maternal ancestry was emphasized and not their Indigenous one. Such was the case of the enslaved woman Rosa. In her freedom suit, Rosa tried to achieve her freedom by arguing that she descended from an Indigenous woman, but her master said that she was a cafuza, a descendant of an enslaved black woman. In that moment of structural economic changes and when several plaintiffs were seeking freedom by asserting their Indigeneity in local courts, settlers developed vernacular practices that entrenched the racial lines of slavery. Other written documents, such as manumission letters, demonstrate that those vernacular practices transferred into notarial language. By emphasizing the black ancestry of subjugated people, notaries could, in effect, legitimate their enslavement and hinder possible legal actions.
The article is divided into four parts. The first part explores the transformation experienced by Maranhão's society in the mid-eighteenth century, when the region transitioned from a frontier economy based on cattle ranching to cotton and rice plantations. The next two sections discuss the relations of dependency engendered between Indigenous workers and their masters. The strategic use of the category “índio” could limit their exploitation and create spaces of autonomy. The final part is lengthy and discusses every step of Rosa's freedom suit to understand the impacts of the transatlantic slave trade in the management of slavery and the post-abolition of Indigenous enslavement. The case illustrates the limits of the strategic use of the category índio.
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Imperial reforms around the mid-eighteenth century transformed Maranhão's socioeconomic structure. The rise of a plantation economy, the thousands of enslaved Africans disembarking, and the new imperial policies toward Indigenous subjects impacted the lives of ordinary people in São Luís. Yet, these new forces did not remove Indigenous workers from the city, farms, and ranches. They offered new challenges and opportunities for the strategic use of the índio category.
The presence of Indigenous workers in the city and around it destabilized the colonial order. Their existence puzzled imperial surveyors. “It is difficult to accurately separate the three mentioned classes of people [White, Black, and Mulato],” wrote one of them in 1799, “without a rigorous investigation. There are mulatos almost white; mamelucos that descend from white and índios; cafuzos of mulato and preto; and mestiços of preto and índio; they easily pass into the nearest class. The wandering índios, those living outside the villages, were counted in the mulato class in their Parishes.” The stories narrated in this article demonstrate that Indigenous workers were not as amorphous as the surveyors depicted them.
Histories of Indigenous enslavement described the process of captive commodification and the progressive transformation of Indigenous Americans into a servile population within colonial settlements. Because Indigenous enslavement was legally unstable, slaveholders concealed their workers' Indigeneity to transform them into slaves. The stories told here show the incompleteness of this narrative. Indigenous workers were resilient members of São Luís's community where they worked, socialized, formed friendship and romantic bonds, and attended the church. They restructured their lives and became índios within the colonial world.
For those Indigenous workers, many former slaves, representing themselves as índios involved mainly being reputed to be such. Three aspects comprised the índio reputation: genealogy, appearance, and labor. Over generations, the community formed knowledge about one person's lineage. A phenotypical assessment was as important as one's ancestors. Indigenous workers fought for their recognition as mobile wage laborers who had the right to serve whomever paid them better.
These transformations coincided with the growth of the transatlantic slave trade. The possibility of mass abolition and disruption of the order haunted slaveholders and colonial officials. During this period, vernacular practices-- including notarial formulas--stressed the maternal black origins of the enslaved population. Vernacular practices hardened the racial lines of slavery, showed the limits of the strategic use of the índio, and preserved the reproduction of slavery, the bedrock of the Portuguese empire.
Acknowledgments. The author acknowledges the help of Gautham Rao. The three anonymous readers at Law and History Review made this article immensely better. The author thanks Lauren Benton, Pedro Cardim, Celso Castilho, Rafael Chambouleyron, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Felipe Garcia, Carolina González, Jane Landers, Jorge Delgadillo Núñez, Ronald Raminelli, Heather Roller, and Victor Tiribás for reading and commenting on different versions of this article. Research for this article was funded by a James R. Scobie Award from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH); the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD); the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at Vanderbilt University; and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Alexandre Pelegrino is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University<
