Between Peasants and Slaves: (Un)Rooting Race, Ethnicity, and Labor in Amazonian Soils (1755 -1850)
My research positions Atlantic Amazonian fugitivity and marronage as divergent peasantry-making processes. Portuguese and Brazilian authorities began enforcing parallel peasant and slave economies in 1755 with the abolition of Indigenous slavery and the state-sanctioned commercial trafficking of enslaved Africans. This project links a codified Indigenous peasantry, coerced Afro-Amazonian labor force, and disenfranchised communities of self-liberated Africans and their descendants. Black and Indigenous peoples created shared notions of freedom rooted in access to land and water in the tropics–even as imperial administrators reinforced colonial categories of race and Indigeneity to engender distinct peasantries.
Professional Biography
Manoel Rendeiro Neto holds a BA in History from the Federal University of Brasília (UnB) in Brazil, where he studied early colonial history of Brazil and Indigenous history. During undergrad, he researched politics of mixed marriage, Indigenous women, and colonization in the Amazon region in the eighteenth century. Currently, Manoel is a PhD Candidate at the University of California-Davis specializing in Latin American history with a Designated Emphasis in African Diaspora Studies. His dissertation project revisits the Amazon basin, and particularly the lower lands and Atlantic coastal floodplains as a region of environmental knowledge formation in empire building, ethnoracial stratification, and autonomous territorialization ca.1750-1850s.