Microhistory, identities and records: paths of the erasure of the indigenous presence on the south coast of Paraíba

Abstract

The southern coast of Paraíba was occupied until the mid-19th century by the Tabajara indigenous people, a group that lived in the Jacoca Sesmaria. In 1865, under the justification that they had mixed with the regional population, the lands of the settlement were sold to the agrarian elite that was consolidating there. The discourse of miscegenation served both the dispossession of indigenous lands and the 19th-century nationalist movements that sought to forge a Brazilian identity.  Based on the documentation produced by the engineer responsible for demarcating the lands, the nominal list of indigenous people who received plots was taken as a compass in the labyrinth of parish and registry documents. Through the individual records of two families living in the Jacoca village, as well as the 1872 census data, one observes the gradual disappearance of the category indian and its replacement by terms such as 'pardo', 'moreno' or 'caboclo' – generic categories that obscured the presence of these indigenous in records and in the collective imagination.