Raízes negras em terras dos sertões da Bahia: famílias e comunidades de africanos a quilombolas (Urubu, 1870-1930)

Abstract

This study is about African family social life experiences and their descendants, slaves, freemen, or free, in the formation’s process of black communities in the countryside cattle breeder farms locate in the backlands from São Francisco, has as spatial cutout the parish and division of Santo Antônio of Urubu de Cima, in Bahia, between the years 1870 to 1930. This research inserts itself in the emancipation conjecture with focus in enslavement fights in defense of their freedom, in the political changes after the abolition process and Republic and the recomposition of regional riches in front of conjunctural changes. In this context the Urubu’s defined as a country society with high land and wealth concentration under riches farmers domain, where the poor population faced serious difficulties trying to survive. Sought analyze fights strategies forged by black individuals for autonomy spaces resulting in the access and use of the land. Begins along a thorough read of a large and diversified documentation, which are composed of: post-mortem inventories, wills, civil lawsuits, crime lawsuits, ecclesiastic records (marriage, baptism, and death), accounting records, travelers’ books and memorialists, photographs, and oral sources. This documental set brings light to understanding the ancestral occupation of lands by Africans, freemen, and their descendants. Crossing manuscript sources with oral sources from the nominative link methodology made possible reconstruct genealogies that allows to understand the black families rooting in the old stockyard by successive generations, which ended up in the formation of the current quilombolas communities in the Velho Chico territory.