“Vivia sobre si” : histórias dos libertos da região do Santo Antônio de Propriá : (1888-1910)

Abstract

This end-of-course paper deals with post-abolition freedmen in the Santo Antônio de Propriá region. This subject has received little attention in historiography and only came to the fore at the end of the 20th century. For a long time, freedmen were reduced to marginality and idleness after the abolition of slavery. In this sense, this problem made it impossible to understand these historical agents as protagonists of their own histories and agents of their becoming, endowed with will and autonomy. Furthermore, historiography on freedmen is still scarce, especially when it comes to small regions far from the major economic centers of Brazil at the time. Thus, the main objective of this work is to understand the strategies used by freedmen and their descendants to insert themselves into the daily lives of the free, disregarding a reductionism of freedmen in relation to marginality and idleness. This work also has as its spatial and temporal focus the city of Propriá from 1888-1910, a city far from the economic center of the time. The main sources of this monograph are criminal cases from 1888-1910, demographic censuses and baptism records. The results of the research allowed us to understand the actions that freedmen used to integrate into the daily life of the free, such as the rejection of vulgos that referred to the previous condition of slavery, the possession of property and the networks of sociability.