8 - Migrações ao sul

Summary

This chapter joins empirical research with theoretical reflections in order to explore the formation of post-emancipation narratives and memories in Brazil’s slaveholding southeast. It is possible, in that region, to reintegrate the histories of freedom, control, and autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. In various archives and other historical sources, we can find inscribed – albeit in multivocal form – important intersections in the histories of land, labor, mobility, migration, control, and power. Even though planters sought to maintain freedpeople on the plantations where they had long worked as slaves, freedpeople’s pursuit of autonomy, in the form of control over the rhythms of work and access to land, eventually changed the geography of labor in those areas. In that sense, their experience was common to many societies across the Americas after abolition.