'My mother was a slave, not I!': Black peasantry and regional politics in southeast Brazil, 1870--1940

The thesis analyzes the transition from slavery to freedom in southeastern Brazil between 1870 and 1940. The sources used include inventories, parochial registers, censuses and, particularly, oral narratives of descendants of slaves. Beginning with a discussion of the political implications of the era following abolition in the Americas, the study examines the formation and principal characteristics of the last generation of slave families and their networks of alliance and kinship. It shows that the prospect of imminent freedom directed slaves choices and strategies in the final year of slavery. In contrast, the prospect of the liberation of their slaves prompted slave owners to use a number of different strategies to face a world without slaves. One of them involved attempts to fix freed slaves on the plantations under a strongly hierarchical code of conduct.;The first decades following abolition show slave families in a variety of situations. Some of them obtained a significant degree of stability for successive generations in the regions and on the plantations here their parents and grandparents were slaves. Others experienced extreme instability with innumerable changes. This difference proved crucial for the strengthening of local power of "coroneis" and for the hierarchical differentiation of the rural black population.