Abstract
the mid-18th century, the Portuguese crown issued a set of policies that were designed to ease the integration of Amazonian indigenous populations into colonial society. Among these policies, marriage between “white” and indigenous people was to be promoted. Despite early reluctances, many of the soldiers at the frontier opted to marry native women. However, a complicated set of informal interethnic relationships between men and women continued to exist in the region. In this article we reconstruct a number of cases reported in the Rio Negro area, with the aim of analyzing the agency and resistance of both soldiers and native women, as well as the diversity of their social interactions. The reenactment of their personal trajectories, unfolding around the fortress of Rio Negro in the decade of 1760, is made possible through the analysis of unpublished sources produced in the region and are currently archived in the Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará (APEP).
Keywords:
Directory; Amazonia; frontiers