People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

3. African ‘‘Nations’’ and Provenience Groups

3 | african ‘‘nations’’ and provenience groups \ In colonial Brazil, as throughout the Portuguese Empire, there was not a clear distinction between civil and religious administration . This apparent ambiguity was part of the structure of the Padroado, a pact between the Catholic Church and the Portuguese Crown, which gave a religious dimension to the political bureaucracies of the king and also allowed the church to be active in civil a√airs.∞ Baptism records are an example of how the Catholic Church acted to order the social lives and identities of people (in large part because the church assumed that everyone in the population was or would be a Catholic). A baptism record is a written register of the occurrence of the religious ritual on suchand -such a date, at so-and-so a place. But more than that, in the absence of any secular civil registers, the baptism document often provided the only o≈cial written information attesting to a person’s identity. It listed such basic information as the names of parents and godparents or, in the case of slaves, the name of the owner.≤ These records can begin to reveal how informal, individual choice—in areas of personal names, selection of godparents , family relations—bumped up against or interfered with the o≈cial sphere of an obligation to abstract norms.≥ Slave names are a rich source for comprehending the personal values or social calculations of their masters, who gave them those names. There were innumerable slaves, many facing especially tragic destinies, who were baptized under the beatific designations of Felicidade (Happiness), Ventura (Venture), and Esperança (Hope). Another trend, emerging from the 68 | Chapter Three documents of the Parish of Sé, was the significant number of slaves baptized under the unusual name Hyeronimo. This was probably in homage to D. Hyeronimo Barbosa, an adjunct to the bishop, who was responsible for most of the baptisms at the time. Records for slaves who had come from Africa typically mention the provenince of the slave, what they usually refer as his or her nação (nation). In the case of slaves born in the city and baptized as infants, records regularly mention the provenience of the mother, that means, her nation. Thus, the parochial books are helpful not only for indicating how the size of the local slave population changed with the arrivals and births of new slaves, but for showing the categories by which each new individual is absorbed into the conceptual structure of Brazil’s slave society. Those categories, in particular gentio (heathen) and nação (nation) will be scrutinized in the following section ‘‘African Heathens and Nations.’’ As I have shown earlier, the criteria for identifying slaves started to be formed during the first years of the Portuguese presence in Guinea, with the preliminary organization of the Atlantic slave commerce. Those identities were o≈cialized in the parishes of Brazil, when baptisms were performed and recorded. The most fundamental point that distinguished slaves from each other in the colonial context is whether they were born within Brazilian territory or outside it, in Africa. The first group is categorized by color in the parish records, with three predominant terms: preto, pardo, branco (black, pardo, white). Two words that modern readers might expect, mulato (mixed-race) and negro, did not appear in the documents; but the distinctions of preto, pardo, and branco were widely recognized and socially accepted in the era under study. If their conceptualization and ascription may sometimes seem vague or inconsistent from our perspective, they were nonetheless carefully assessed by contemporaries and had meanings and ramifications throughout colonial society. For instance, the Brotherhood of Santo José (Saint Joseph) only admitted brancos; pretos and pardos had their own associations , such as the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosário and São Benedito of Black Men, or the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Conception and Boa Morte (Good Death) of Pardo Men. It was common to refer to Africans in Brazil as pretos, although the term was not only applied to them. An intensive study of the internal social relations, forms of identification, and broader social hierarchies that cohered around these divisions is beyond ‘‘Nations’’ and Provenience Groups | 69 the scope of this work. I focus on the other subgroup of slaves that colonial society created: those born beyond the reach of Portuguese colonial society, who arrived in Brazil by...