The Lives of the Transamazonic Slave Trade: Labor, Marriage, and Kinship, Maranhão, 1740s–70s

This presentation focuses the lived experiences of indigenous workers in a colonial city, São Luís, through an analysis of labor relations, marriage patterns, and fictional kinship relations. It engages the broad issues of Indian slavery and colonization. Regarding colonial Amazonia, most analyses have centered questions on governance, tribute, elite socialization, indigenous labor recruitment, and even a quantification of the Indian slave trade. Yet, despite this soaring output, we still know very little about indigenous workers, who they were and how they lived. Contrary to old assumptions, indigenous workers did not simply die after a few weeks in colonial settlements. After a long canoe journey from the interior of Amazonia to the coastal settlements, indigenous workers reconstructed their lives using Catholic marriages and compadrio. They also played a critical role in every economic activity developed in the city and its hinterlands. This presentation, thus, analyzes how the cultural background of indigenous workers shaped labor relations, marriage patterns, and kinship. Finally, by focusing in Maranhão, the presentation offers a fine-grained analysis of different degrees of freedom/unfreedom. It was there, where over a thirty-year period (1740s-70s), that the massive enslavement of indigenous people transpired; and it is also by looking at Maranhão that we can carefully consider the transformations wrought by the prohibition of Indian slavery in 1755 and the subsequent importation of thousands of enslaved African people. Nevertheless, my research underscores that aspects of previous indigenous labor practices persisted well into the late eighteenth-century, taking shape in connection with the rise of African slavery.