Malês, Cabanos and Marimbondos: histories of black resistance in Alagoas (1815-1852)

Abstract

This text investigates how enslaved people resisted and sought, in different ways, to combat the institution of slavery in Alagoas in the first half of the 19th century. To this end, it takes as its guiding axis the life experiences of these historical subjects, emphasizing the dissonant voices of the enslaved, but also paying attention to the networks of solidarity and sociability established with freed and poor free people. In this way, we seek to study episodes of resistance to slavery carried out by this population that reinvented itself and developed, within the existing possibilities, various strategies to obtain their means of subsistence and oppose the slave institution, always having freedom on their horizon. The episodes of black resistance studied here are: the slave revolt of 1815, the Cabanos War (1832-1835) and the fight against the “Captivity Law” (1851-1852).