Vastas e ermas: mulheres não brancas no sertão do Rio Grande (Seridó, séculos XVIII e XIX)

Abstract

This work studies non-white women (“índias”, “africanas”, “pretas”, “negras”, “mamalucas”, “cabras”, “crioulas”, “mulatas”, “mestiças” and “pardas”) in the Seridó, the backlands of the Rio Grande, and analyzes the representations made about these women in the historical documentation of the 18th and 19th centuries. It mobilizes the concepts of quality and condition, and the investigation is developed in sesmariais documentation, parish document sources (baptisms, marriages and deaths registries) and judicial sources (post-mortem inventories, manumission letters and freedom actions) and it starts through the quantitative and qualitative cross-referencing of documentation, supported by the methodological instruments of the evidential paradigm and the onomastic method, in dialogue with a micro-historical approach. Analyzing the representations of the feminine in the backlands of portuguese America and in the regional historiography of Seridó, it demonstrates new possibilities about female participation in the historical past. It observes the qualities and conditions mobilized in the backlands of Seridó in the representations of non-white women, the uses and particular meanings of the miscegenation lexicon in this region. In an intersectional approach, it analyzes the mobility strategies activated by these women within a region with few resources, highlighting the work and formation of slave, egress, free and matrifocal families. Through the reconstruction of trajectories of non-white women, it observes their representations in historical records during the processes of social mobility and also investigates their properties and horizontal and vertical alliances established in their contact networks, sometimes reinforced by the establishment of spiritual kinship, and their judicial proceedings for freedom. By dealing with a theme still little addressed in the historiography about the backlands of Seridó, this work reaches the trajectories and places occupied by non-white women in the symbolic and material world in the Seridó between the18th and 19th centuries.