Naming Freedom: Enslaved Women, Newborns, and the Social Practice of Freedom in Eighteenth-Century Brazil

John Marquez
History
UC Riverside

This grant supports research in property inventories and Catholic parish records in Rio De Janiero, Brazil to excavate naming customs among enslaved families and kinship groups during the eighteenth century. By approaching naming customs as a social practice of freedom, this research promises to illuminate how enslaved women of African descent in colonial Brazil confronted the entanglements of their reproductive labor with their own struggles for freedom. This project compiles a dataset of family names and naming practices of enslaved families by looking for family naming patterns and cross referencing these in parish records in local church archives to develop a deeper biographical profile of individual families and their strategies for building freedom.