Identity, Historical Memory, and Families of Mixed Race, on a Brazilian frontier: Bahia, 1810-1910

• In Event: Black resistance in Latin America: Identifications, strategies, alliances

Abstract

In Latin America, indigenous and Afro-descended peoples frequently occupy the same spaces and belong to interrelated families, although they are usually discussed separately in the historical literature. In Bahia’s cacao region, mission Indians, freed slaves, quilombolas, European immigrants, northeastern migrants and others settled the coastal lands between the Cachoeira and Almada Rivers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of the Brazilian Empire in 1889, therefore, a population of mixed race that combined Native Brazilians, Africans and their descendants, as well as Europeans had emerged in the area. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authorities described the members of these families as “pardo” or “parda”, in other words, mixed, a category usually used in Bahia to refer to people of mixed African and European descent, rather than “caboclo.” In using the term pardo, the authorities obscured the indigenous ancestry of cacao-area residents, but that does not mean that the people described forgot their family ties to an indigenous past. This paper explores the processes of racial mixing and the retention of historical memories within mixed families through the case study of a group of families descended from both Africans and Native Brazilians, particularly the nation known as Gueren, often referred to as Botocudo.

Author

• Mary Ann Mahony, Central Connecticut State University