From Being Slave to Becoming the Owner: The trajectory of African Emily Soares do Patrocínio in the nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

African slave from Costa da Mina who lived in Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the nineteenth century, in this article, it is tried to scrutinize the professional, marital and cultural experiences of this black Mine woman and of other men and women of the same African “nation” with whom she lived in the Praça do Mercado in Rio and in other social spaces. Therefore, a diverse set of sources including wills, inventories, baptism documents, marriage and death records, manumissions, and a copious documentation on the main municipal market staples of the city of Rio are examined. Along the way, it is not intended to simply highlight individual lives, but to realize collective experiences and contexts and still try to illuminate broader and more complex historical processes.