Reverberations of manumission letters in ethnic discrimination

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to understand the narratives in the letters of manumission, as dynamics of production of intergenerational senses of people in situations of ethnic discrimination. We question the themes in the letters of manumission that mark narratives of ethnic discrimination in the current actions and activities. The search method was a documentary search in the city notaries for letters of manumission and family inventories with declarations of possession of one person over the other, from 1872 to 1888. Another method is the choice of 3 men from the same family in the cut of the corpus of narratives of twelve men, three generations, from the city of Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia. Forty-eight hours of audio and video recordings of the life history and episodic interviews were exacerbated. In the analysis of the thematic content of the narrative of the manumission letters were found reverberations of the same themes of discrimination, racism and ethnic prejudice in the narratives of the participants. The narrative of P32 was chosen because it presents several meanings that discriminate against the blacks inside the Quilombo Alto do Morro community, as "domestic work"; "My color like that". The focus of the narrative emphasizes the impact of education as a cultural practice over discriminatory processes to those of "my color". It is concluded that the number of laws against racism signals important intergenerational issues, as in the reverberations of meanings, the intergenerational sense production dynamics of freed blacks paralyzes some people, their ancestors and descendants. At the same time they constitute meanings of denials, of forgetting the episodes of people from the same treatment family as inferior, with all possible cognitive processes.

Keywords: intergenerationality, ethnic relations, production of meanings, black populations.