Merenciana e a Liberdade Negra: raça e gênero nos campos de Palmas (1880-1900)

Abstract

The research starts from the possibility of studying and analyzing a social history of emancipations and post-abolition, in dialogue with the social history of slavery, of the black population in the southern region of Brazil. With access to documentary traces produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the fields of Palmas/PR, such as a petition for a complaint and a criminal case, ecclesiastical records of baptisms, marriages and deaths, it focuses on Merenciana's Prestes dos Santos trajectory and social relations, brown frees who resided in the village of Palmas/PR between approximately 1886 to 1891. Merenciana was born in Lapa/PR, earned her freedom letter in Guarapuava/PR and as a freed she started to live in Palmas/PR, working as a washerwoman and building links with black and poor women and men. Her experiences, investigated through the intersectionality between race and gender, show that in freedom the black woman in the fields of Palmas had to face tensions and norms about performing femininity, motherhood and marriage, as well as having places of transit, home and controlled relationships in a society structured on race and gender inequalities. Contrary to thinking that this region of Paraná is composed of a small number of black men and women, what this final course work shows is that the Palmas fields, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were constituted by a black freedom that, although precarious, moved, building black sociability that is part of the history of southern Brazil.