Desventuras de Hypolita: luta contra a escravidão ilegal no sertão (Crato e Exu, século XIX)

Abstract

This paper analyses the history of Hypolita Maria das Dores, mulatto woman, free born, was enslaved and, by an act of freedom, appealed to court to prove the illegitimacy of her captivity and regain their freedom and their children. The main scenarios of this social and legal struggle are Crato (Ceará) and Exu (Pernambuco), places where she lived in the 19th century. The main objective of this work is to understand how to set the tensions and alliances involving the struggle for freedom inside and outside justice, in differentiated provincial spaces. An approach that belongs to the field of the social history of slavery, we ll prioritize the narrative of life. In it, Hypolita is taken as the subject of her story, as she faces stately and patriarchal values in a slave society. The documentary corpus that allows such vertical investigative consists of parish registers, we examined the baptisms, marriages and death records; analyzed registry documents of postmortem inventories, petitions and crafts; reports of provincial presidents and, finally, the O Araripe s and O Cearense s journalistic information. The investigation of the case allowed the understanding of how, in space and time specific, freedom was understood, usurped and claimed by various social subjects in the frame of morals and justice institutionalized