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.