Police, Enslavers, and Labor Contract Strategies in Pelotas, Brazil 1870-1888

Patrick Buchanan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Brazilian enslavers found ways to retain their labor force during and after the final years of slavery. Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, offers an interesting case study. For instance, one enslaver manumitted his enslaved workers but placed them under contract to retain his labor force. Another enslaver manumitted enslaved workers without a contract but records indicate that ties remained between him and the formerly enslaved. Legal and police authorities accepted their de facto relationships so long as the former enslaver was in control of the newly-independent Afro-Pelotense. Above all, enslaver and police authorities ensured that one or the other supervised the formerly enslaved. Thus, the police surveilled and punished the social deviance of one Afro-Brazilian freed from birth and without a former enslaver. Criminal cases coupled with scholarship on Pelotas and Brazil situate the nature of freedom and control in abolition-era Pelotas. This presentation provides interpretations of the transition to freedom, as demonstrated in documents like the ones above. These are the fruits of an ongoing inquiry into the afterlives of slavery in Pelotas. I will expand upon this work by visiting archives in the region this summer. In this talk I will place my previous research into conversation with this field experience. This presentations contributes an interpretation of the changes in social and labor statuses, as well as social control, of formerly enslaved people. It also contributes to a larger conversation about Afro-descendants and their access to legal, economic, and political freedoms from generation to generation up into the "modern" day. A historical analysis of the transitions from slavery to freedom, with labor contracts at the center, is a significant point of embarkation for confronting and understanding legacies of enslavement in Brazil and other regions of the world.

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 Presented in Session 167. Labor Coercion and Class Formation in Global and Colonial Contexts