"Negro," "Indio," Neither, or Both? Negotiating Race and Ethnicity on a Twentieth-Century Agricultural Frontier

This paper explores the experiences of Amerindian and Afro-descended individuals and families on the twentieth-century cacao frontier in Bahia.  Taking up the major theme of the panel, it first describes relationships among independent Amerindians, the residents of Indian missions and Afro-descended settlers along Brazil's expanding cacao frontier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The paper then demonstrates that decades of contact among these three groups led to the development of groups of families whose roots lay both in Amerindian and Afro-descended communities.  The paper then follows the trajectories of those families and explores the complex identities they developed, as most of them joined the rural working class, but a few grew into successful planters who based their claims to the land on their indigenous ancestry, while others emphasized African descent or an ethnic background based on regional origin.