Black and indigenous people in nineteenth-century Brazil were central to its tumultuous history yet produced almost no sources of their own.

This talk argues that historians can examine acts of violence by and against them as evidence of their legal claims on the Brazilian nation.

We will also discuss the law's limitations, inflected by race, class, and gender, in guaranteeing black and indigenous people's citizenship.  

Serving as evidence will be three, previously unknown episodes from the Brazilian archives: the mutilation and disappearance of a black slave who impregnated his white mistress; the spectacular execution of a slavemaster by his slaves; and colonists' massacre of an indigenous village.

Through these examples this talk will propose a new way of conceptualizing postcolonial Latin America as the intersection of African diasporic and indigenous histories.