Escritas narram histórias de liberdade: as cartas de alforrias de mulheres escravizadas (Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, 1850-1888)

Abstract

In the city of Pelotas, province of Rio Grande do Sul, 1,936 women conquered the letter of manumission between 1850 and 1888. Some of them took their children with them, others lived the reality of separation by legal condition and many did not have the experience of maternity in the middle The transition from slavery to freedom. This is just a mark of the intersection between gender, race and class that crossed the lives of black, brown, enslaved and released women, which I treat in this research. Considering its particularities, this dissertation deals with the paths that traveled to gain freedom for themselves and their in a city where the index of people in conditions of slavery was quite high even in the last decades when this system has been effective in the term in Empire. Through the analysis of the profile of the man in the pellets within this period it was possible to observe how their personal characteristics may have impacted in the process of their liberation and, also, how the context influenced this issue. Investigating their origins, for example, I noticed that women who were born in Brazil (Creole) have gained more manressions, but, on the other hand, Africans, especially the mines, led those obtained by paying some amount. Already those that were classified with some craft and therefore dealt with him in their daily lives had the possibility to appropriate these specific knowledge in their favor and their own. In addition to being a means of searching for better living conditions after emancipation. With this I mean that in all chapters of this work it is considered that the agencies they performed within an intersectional reality, so that they could obtain the letter of manumission, was within their possibilities and realities. Aiming to reflect on these issues in a deeper way, even in the traces left by the enslaved who “belonged” to three of the brothers Azevedo and Souza - Pelotense Elite Men of the first half of the nineteenth century. Through this more micro look it was possible to identify the bonds they constituted and the means they found to survive, and, in the daily life of hard work, to build the possibility of obtaining the document of freedom.