Historians generally agree that, under slavery, the designation of colour of people, in Brazil, had more relation with social insertion than ethinic ascendence. Therefore, in this article I expose many aspects of process of social diferenciation through designation of colour, in a group of slaves and poor free that lived in Paraná from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth, region with a small slave population, predominance of owners with few slaves and househoods of white and pardos poors without slaves.
slavery; social hierarchy; colour.