"without impediment of inequality of color": free mulattoes and the construction of citizenship in Brazil and in the Spanish Caribbean (1750-1824)

• Grant number: 14/24434-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: April 22, 2015
• End date: June 26, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Rafael de Bivar Marquese
• Grantee: Priscila de Lima
• Supervisor: José A. Piqueras Arenas
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universitat Jaume I, Spain
• Associated to the scholarship: 13/06438-8 - "Without impediment of inequality of color": free mulattoes and the construction of citizenship in Brazil and in the Spanish Caribbean (1750-1824), BP.DR

Abstract

The subject matter of this doctoral research is the participation of the free pardos in the political field of Iberian America in the course of the second half of the eighteenth-century and beginning of the nineteenth-century. They are considered agents reproducers and builders of a typical political culture of the Old Regime, but endowed with peculiars characteristics to the group in question. Methodologically, develops a comparative and integrated approach between the Portuguese America and the Spanish Caribbean, more specifically the Viceroyalty of New Granada and the Captaincy General of Cuba. It refers to a time of transition, in which the corporative society began to be reconfigured from of modern or illustrated benchmarks. Immersed and agents at this juncture, conceives the free pardos as a "pressure group" with specific identity, which was developed against the stigmatized socio-legal condition that was destined to them. Through examination of their demands for privileges such as appointment to public office, rise through the ranks of the military corps and entry into the religious corporations, aims to identify and analyze the rhetorical field built and managed by the free pardos in order to legitimize their aspirations. One of the hypotheses of this research suggests that these demands, in the long term, generated a politicization process of the parda identity in the Ibero-American world of the late eighteenth century. For the full development of this research is crucial expanding the set of documents relating to the selected Spanish spaces, which makes it necessary to research in the historical archives of Spain. (AU)