Mobilidade e diferenciação social em comunidades de escravos e negros livres:o caso da Freguesia de São José dos Pinhais, Paraná, Brasil passagem do século XVIII para o XIX)

• Main Author: Cacilda Machado
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2008-02-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: slavery; marriage; familia; family; social mobility; social hierarchy
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/23812

By means of data-crossings of marriages registry and domiciliary censuses, complemented with information of marriages solemnities, I intended to reconstitute the history of three generations of a family initiated by a couple of slaves; and also the history of some couples conformed by slaves and pardos or free negroes, and of whites and free pardos. These cases allowed me to mainly suggest that in that locality mixed-marriages were oriented through rules shared by everyone, which considered the legal condition, the color and the provenance of the spouses. I also noticed that the mixed marriage functioned as a social strategy to remove captive descendants, manumitted and free negroes out from of the stigma of slavery, despite the fact that this engagement produced differentiation at the interior of community and of the families, turning the participating group as part of the process of production and reiteration of the social hierarchies in proslavery Brazil. However, the amplitude of the historical Brazilian miscegenation was perhaps the most passionate testimony, even reiterating the social hierarchies, of this kind of struggle for freedom.