Foreigners in Maranhão:

transition from the labor regime, immigration and the attempt to build an eugenic society in the mid -nineteenth century

Abstract

The  present  article  arises  from  the  need  for  a  critical  response  to  the historiographic model produced till then, about the immigration, a substitution of slave labor  and  a  "color  line"  employed  by  the  modern-colonial  philosophical  model.  The disturbing feeling that is reflection imposes the search, within the chest of silences sent by the colonizer, a new look and perspective, where the colonized appears as an active subject in the process of colonization in the mid-nineteenth. The objective of this article, for  example,  from  another  angle,  how,  in  the  national  sphere  and  more  specifically  in Maranhão, an entry of foreign immigrants and the substitution of slave labor for the free labor   within   the dominant   elitist   discourse   of   the   time,   which   comprehend   the Immigration as the solution to the alleged "incapacity” of the national to free work.