Creativity under Constraint: Enslaved Afro-Brazilian Families in Brazil's Cacao Area, 1870–1890

This article follows the stories of men and women who live the experiences of enslavement in Brazilian emerging cacao area in the last two decades of slavery there. It focuses particular attention on their efforts to construct and maintain family ties, as well as the significance of those ties in the transition from enslavement to freedom. It shows the connections between the internal economy of slavery as practiced in the cacao area and parents' efforts at retaining the integrity of the family group despite efforts on the part of slaveowners to manage their property without regard to emotional and biological connections between and among them. This argument dialogues, and indeed confronts, a lengthy historiography that has tended to ignore or even dismiss the possibility of the creation of families among the enslaved in Brazil until quite recently.