História e historiografia do trabalho indígena em São Paulo colonial: balanço, categorias e novos horizontes

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is discuss the founding and structural role that the exploitation of indigenous labor played in the historical formation of the São Paulo region, colonial frontier of Portuguese America. Starting from a historiographical review of the problem, five concrete historical events (drawn from documental sources like as letters of missionaries, court claims and parliamentary records) will be exposed and presented as representative of a variety of conjunctural situations that can nevertheless be read as moments of a same long-duration process: the permanence of the indigenous compulsory labor in the regional mechanisms of social reproduction. Based on a conceptual demarcation so far not explored by Americanist historiography (which seeks to distinguish the categories of “regime”, “system” and “modality” of work), we suggest a periodization of the São Paulo’s Colonial History having as privileged criterion the different employment patterns of the indigenous labor. We conclude that indigenous slavery would have been a kind of “elastic” institution that, through four centuries, has undergone numerous legal, political and social changes, but it has never ceased to be an integral part of the hegemonic relations of sociability in that region.