Mulheres em “Como se de ventre livre nascido fosse”, província de Mato Grosso (1830-1888)

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the presence of enslaved and manumitted women in notarial records produced in the southern region of the province of Mato Grosso between 1830 and 1888, drawing on the documentary collection Como se de ventre livre nascido fosse... (1993), organized by Yara Penteado. The central objective is to examine how these women are inscribed in notarial writing, identifying the patterns of naming, classification, and qualification made visible by cartorial acts, as well as the silences that official writing imposed upon their lives. The spatial scope encompasses the localities of Corumbá, Miranda, Nioaque, and Santana de Paranaíba, situated in a frontier region characterized by singular slaveholding, demographic, and administrative dynamics. The methodology consists of a cross-analysis of notarial documents — freedom letters, bills of sale, mortgages, donations, and usufruct deeds — alongside recent historiographical production on gender, slavery, and maternity in the Atlantic world. The theoretical framework articulates the contributions of Black feminism, intersectionality, and the social history of slavery, in dialogue with scholars such as Angela Davis, Lélia Gonzalez, Patricia Hill Collins, Joan Scott, Jennifer Morgan, Camillia Cowling, and Marília Ariza, among others. The findings demonstrate that women appear in the documentation predominantly as objects of legal and patrimonial administration, identified through criteria functional to the slaveholding regime — age, color, provenance, monetary value, and, recurrently, reproductive capacity. The systematic presence of expressions such as "produced," "crias" (house-born slaves), "daughter of the enslaved woman," and "has not yet procreated" reveals a language that transforms the Black female womb into a juridically administrable space, inscribing gestation, childbirth, and filiation within the logic of seigniorial property. A total of 183 records of enslaved women and 41 children were identified in the analyzed documents, demonstrating that maternal filiation operated as an axis of identification, transmission of legal condition, and reproduction of captivity through the uterine line. Analysis of the freedom letters indicates that manumission rarely constituted an effective rupture with structures of dependency, being frequently conditioned upon additional years of service, subordinated to discourses of recognition and gratitude, and subject to revocation on grounds of ingratitude. This research contributes to broadening the historiographical field on slavery beyond the coffee-producing axis, demonstrating that slaveholding practices in the southern province of Mato Grosso operated according to logics fully compatible with those of other regions of the Empire, while simultaneously presenting documentary and regional specificities that demand continued historiographical attention.