Existências vendidas, infâncias vigiadas

o controle de crianças negras entre a escravidão e a liberdade tutelada

Abstract

From the end of the slave regime onward, the use of child labor became a common practice among rural landowners and members of Brazil’s elite. In several provinces, during the final years of the 1880s, representatives of the dominant classes, supported by legal provisions, signed contracts or assumed legal responsibility for the children of formerly enslaved individuals, offering in return clothing, medical assistance, education, and symbolic compensation. These childhoods, once regarded as innocent, began to be identified as belonging to the so-called “dangerous classes”—a concept constructed through medical, legal, and journalistic discourses of the time, which framed Black children in vulnerable conditions as threats to social stability. Through legal service contracts or guardianship mechanisms, many of these children were placed in domestic or agricultural labor, within a system that the contemporary press itself described as a new form of servitude. Among these trajectories, the cases of Modesto and Francisco stand out, whose legal records preserve traces of these experiences.