I often point students to the Oxford English Dictionary when we discuss colonialism and race in the Atlantic World: looking at how the use of terms like “white” and “black” have evolved over time can make my arguments about race as historically constructed make more sense.
In the same way, I often rely on 19th century Brazilian dictionaries when talking about racial terms in Imperial Brazil. The Universidade de São Paulo’s Brasiliana Digital collection offers an easily accessible way to look at the standardized definition of racial terms in the 1830s, providing a searchable scan and full-text pdf of Luiz Maria da Silva Pinto’s Diccionaryio da Lingua Brasileira (Ouro Preto: Typographia de Silva, 1832). Pinto was a native of Goyaz, and his dictionary claims to be representative of nineteenth-century Brazilian local usage.
The most common designations of qualidade, or individual social status, I find on 1830s Brazilian censuses are pardo, branco, preto, and cabra. Luiz Maria da Silva Pinto’s definitions are fascinating. First of all, he makes no mention of branco as a racial or color term, but defines it as “De côr semelhante à de neve, etc.” (“of a color similar to snow, etc.”). This is interesting because record keepers in notarial and parish registries frequently use branco to describe people. Pinto’s dictionary is not silent when it comes to terms suggesting African descent. Pinto defines preto as “Negro (como subst.) Homen preto” (Black. Preto man); pardo as “Adj. “De cór entre branco e preto. Mulato.”; and cabra as “Filho do pai mulato e mai negra, ou ao contrario.”
Douglas Cole Libby’s BRASA X presentation “Quitéria Moreira de Carvalho, Mina Forra, and Six Generations of Her Descendants in 18th and 19th century Minas Gerais” made big impression on me, and provided a valuable reminder of the need to carefully historicize racial terms. In a remarkable piece of archival work, Douglas painstakingly reconstructed six generations of a freed Mina slave woman’s descendants as recorded in parish and notarial records.
In addition to thinking about life histories of former slaves and their descendants in Minas Gerais, Douglas considered how colonial record keepers applied color designations like crioulo and pardo to successive generations. His findings suggest that we should think of these as color designations, or markers of status, rather than “racial” designations. He found that pardo, in particular, could imply a broad ranger of mixture, including indigenous ancestry. Douglas argues the records for colonial Minas, pardo served as a social signifier implying a slave past, rather than merely indicating the child of a branco and a preta.
This might imply that the early Brazilian Empire was a period where “racial” terms became – at least in theory – less flexible in their use as Brazilians paid greater attention to questions of descent and ancestry.
