4 - Disciplining Children and Engendering Racialized Citizenship

Summary

This chapter investigates the creation of the Instituto de Menores Artesãos at the Casa de Correção in 1857 out of the politics of regulating the circulation and containment of liberated Africans at the penitentiary. It demonstrates that the existence of the apprentice school was deeply rooted in the process of disciplining the posttraffic period, between 1850 and 1865, through disciplining the children of liberated Africans into free wage workers for postabolition labor relations. The story of the Instituto de Menores Artesãos is a history of the education of minors and that of governing women’s productive and reproductive labor from slavery to freedom. The Casa de Correção’s incorporation of the reformatory school shows how the education of poor children, including orphans and delinquent minors, attended to the project of engendering postemancipation society between the end of the slave trade (1850) and the gradual abolition of slavery initiated with the 1871 free womb law.