Surviving the Concrete Jungle: Indigenous Children in the Brazilian Amazon (1860-1910)

Taking Manaus as a focal point of analysis, this dissertation intersects legal studies with anthropology of childhood and a history of child labor conditions to build a historical analysis of forms of inequality and racialized labor practices. Drawing from Brazilian legislation, I assert that orphanhood status involved more than a situation of abandonment and destitution, but rather of women’s incomplete citizenship status and racialized ableist discourse to define who, where, and how children and some adults would be working. The distribution of free workers under the umbrella of orphanhood had strong ties with Brazilian slavocracy, paternalism, and patrimonialism following the logics of relational power often orchestrated by the Orphans Judges. Indigenous peoples were not considered Brazilian citizens unless they lost their Indianness and abode to the standard of “civilization,” becoming “useful” to the Nation. Brazilian indigenist laws vaguely defined Indigenous people’s legal standing based on the differentiation between “wild” and “civilized Indians.” The latter status depended on subjective evaluations of the fulfillment of civilization markers, subjugation, and loss of Indianness, which I argue made citizenship fought over in a case-by-case manner. This situation ended up creating a permanent position of Indigenous people as “becomings” and never as full citizens in the nineteenth century Brazil, in which, in practice, even the fulfillment of the “marks of civilization” would not prevent their abuse like child separation, forced conscription to work regimes, and denial of rights. This vague Indigenous people’s legal standing and the broad definition of orphanhood opened a discursive space around the “problem of orphanhood,” which targeted Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race children as “at risk” under the guardianship of their Black and brown parents and “a risk” to the future of the recently inaugurated Brazilian nation requiring fast, early, and arbitrary intervention to insert them in a Western labor routine and strict discipline to avoid future idleness and poverty. My research takes historical evidence and considers it anthropologically, contributing to contemporary conversations and theoretical developments in cultural anthropology and Latin American history.