John Monteiro's Negros da Terra is a classic in ethnohistory that launched significant research on the indigenous peoples of Brazil. This translation introduces English-speaking readers to a complex history of colonial São Paulo that challenges an older historiography that celebrated bandeirantes in the exploration of the interior and discovery of gold. Monteiro reveals how they invaded indigenous lands and took war captives, describing them as negros da terra, that is, “blacks of the land.” In the colonial period, the usage of “negro” often signified slave, thus ‘slaves of the land’ as opposed to enslaved Africans.
Besides integrating the indigenous into the history of Brazil, this book is fundamental to understanding the social foundations of colonial São Paulo, including early patterns of settlement, Luso-indigenous relations, and enslavement. While sugar plantations of the Northeast and Rio de Janeiro depended on the African slave trade for enslaved labor, the settlers of São Paulo, as Monteiro demonstrates, traveled deep into the interior to capture thousands of indigenous captives. Their bandeiras, sometimes consisting of little more than roving corsairs, and at other times state-funded expeditions, also included indigenous slaves and allies. Using inventories, Monteiro documents some of the captives held by property owners between 1600 and 1729, as well as the high cost in lives of the predatory bandeiras.
Another significant theme is the expansion of landholdings with coerced indigenous labor, which was needed in agriculture and cattle husbandry. Once a commercial market developed with the coast, wheat, meat, and vegetables were sold to many markets in Brazil. With the aid of inventories, Monteiro also clarifies the role of captive men, women, and children in wheat production and documents that indigenous slavery was the basis of the agricultural economy in São Paulo in the seventeenth century.
Of particular interest to scholars of comparative slavery is Monteiro's contrast between indigenous slavery as it developed in São Paulo and African enslavement elsewhere in Brazil. But he also recognizes the similarities between African and indigenous slavery. Using legal documents, he describes how masters treated their captives, freed them in wills, transferred them to a daughter in a dowry, or willed them to their heirs. Even the term “indios forros” for manumitted Indians appears in seventeenth-century documents.
Transforming the “Indian” into a slave was but one objective of the Paulistas. They also intended to convert a pagan into a Christian and had new arrivals from the interior baptized without much indoctrination. Such baptisms Monteiro traces through parochial registries. He also focuses on their indigenous ethnicities and changing identities, and the difficulties of their lives after arrival in São Paulo that led to resistance and flights. The impact of smallpox and measles, as well as malnutrition, was often responsible not only for such flights but also for high mortality.
In the last chapter, Monteiro challenges yet another myth about the bandeira leaders and their descendants. As he demonstrates, frontier bandeiras did not lead to an egalitarian society; instead, what emerged in São Paulo was great social inequality with an acute division of wealth, even within the free population, which led to rural poverty by the end of the seventeenth century. Thus, this book is more than just an ethnohistory; it is also notable for the breadth and depth of its sources and socioeconomic analysis. For readers of the Portuguese edition, this translation will be a welcome addition to an understanding of Monteiro's classic, since the translator-editors incorporate material from his dissertation and add biographical insights. The index is also quite useful. Highly recommended for classroom use due to its readability, it is also a scholarly comparative analysis of slave societies and the formation of colonial Brazil.
