"Without impediment of inequality of color": free mulattoes and the construction of citizenship in Brazil and in the Spanish Caribbean (1750-1824)

Abstract

This project proposes a comparative research concerning the politics culture of free mulattoes of the Portuguese and Spanish Americas in the second half of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century. Through analysis of theirs demands sent to the King, aims to identify and to analyze the self-representations of them against the segregated juridical condition that was imposed to them. My goal, in a broad sense, is to understand the process of construction of citizenship in the atlantic world. The analysis will be made within the comparative perspective between the Portuguese America and the Spanish America, following the cases of the New Granada and Cuba. In these regions, the African slavery had a significant weight and the practice of enfranchisement produced a large population that came from slavery, a situation very resembling to the case of the Portuguese America. Moreover, the Iberian Monarchies integrated the same historical system, called "Iberian atlantic system", essential feature for the comparison that I propose. In the period of the General Cortes (1810-1824), however, Spaniards and Portugueses have chosen completely distinct solutions for the question of the citizenship of african descents. Understanding the basis of this disagreement is fundamental for to test the main hypothesis of this work: I propose that the concession of citizenship for the free African descents in the Constitution of the Brazilian Empire (1824) was consequence of the politics weight acquired for them in a road that goes back to the last decades of the eighteenth-century.