As memórias dos sertões: as práticas de cativeiro, escravidão e liberdade de índios e mestiços na Amazônia portuguesa (séculos XVII-XVIII)

Abstract

This thesis analyses the captivity, slavery and freedom practices of indigenous and mestizo descendants in the Portuguese Amazon during the 17th and 18th centuries. Since the seventeenth century, the Amazon region has been part of the global routes of slavery, in which the trans-Amazonian routes provided indigenous people for settlements, villages and also for the ports of the Caribbean and Europe. Faced with the trafficking and injustices of captivity, the Portuguese conquests established normative regimes that regulated the practices of recruitment - descent, rescue and just war - of indispensable indigenous workers. These normative regimes, in addition to the dichotomies of free and slave, ally and enemy, free or unfree, established a series of legal conditions that regulated the insertion of indigenous and mestizo peoples into colonial society, such as free, captive, prisoner, slave and given condition. These normative regimes were dynamic, and their reformulations were linked to the multifaceted processes of the region and to the transformations that took place in the global conjunctures of the Portuguese kingdom. Among these processes, the dynamics of mestizaje played a central role. It was a constitutive aspect of the laws relating to indigenous peoples and their descendants. Irrespective of normativities, indigenous women and men were active subjects of mestizaje and also producers of new categories of social qualifications through their interactions with people of different qualities and legal conditions. Thus, I argue that this set of legal normativities, in conjunction with the qualifications of social identities, affirmed the asymmetrical dependencies into which indigenous people and mestizos were inserted within the social hierarchies of colonial Amazonia. In turn, these subjects, through their interactions with other social agents, also knew how to use the prevailing laws and make them intelligible in their favour. Therefore, this research examines, through the actions of freedom of the Court of the Junta das Missões and the civil actions of freedom of the Private Judge of Freedoms, the access of indigenous people and mestizos to the spheres of justice to denounce the unjust captivity to which they were subjected and to obtain recognition of their freedoms. Prisoners in court used family memories to (re)affirm their indigenous origins and/or to denounce the illegality with which their relatives were rescued and imprisoned in the sertões and floodplains of the Amazon and taken to colonial spaces. This strategy, in addition to a social qualification, had a legal and socio-political dimension, since indigenous origin could guarantee them rights, especially their freedoms.