Post-abolition in Brazil

Defined as a major break in the system practiced until then, the period triggered significant changes in the Brazilian economy and society, which depended largely on slave labor.

It was after a visit to a chapel in Massangana, Pernambuco, that Nabuco recognized a moral problem regarding slavery, sparking a genuine interest in putting his life at the service of the "generous race".

[5] Nabuco wrote several works about slavery, among them "Minha Formação"[6] and "O Abolicionismo",[7] claiming that "it is a crime, an attempt to civilization and to economic and political progress, it is responsible for the backwardness of the country, an obstacle to national construction.

The first, the progress of this movement could not go beyond the limits of monarchical legality, this should be a decision initially taken by the State and the slaveholding farmers, being solved within the institutional space, so that the situation would not have a dimension that the control could be lost.

This process occurred before abolition, and was intended to "arouse their gratitude... the slaves were to receive their freedom from his hands, not from the state, and perceive it as a lordly gift".

However, as the years went by, the mobility conquered by the slaves turned from an exercise of their freedom into a curse, taking into account the working conditions negotiated between the plantation owner and the free man who needed to survive.

The "study of this migration, in particular, as one of the elements of post-abolition history is that it originates from a context created both in the process of fixing the new forms of labor in the countryside, and from the absence of policies specifically aimed at ensuring some kind of access to land and credit for freedmen and their descendants".

[11] The abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888 condemned the blacks to continue living as victims of the system, since they were free, but without education, documents, money, housing, employment, schooling or any other kind of social assistance provided by the State.

Sociologist and political scientist Antônio Carlos Mazzeo, from the São Paulo State University (Unesp), explains that there was little investment in the integration of the blacks into the national economy.

After the abolition, the black population went through great socio-economic difficulties, ignored by various sectors of society, which marginalized them and in a certain way pushed them out of the urban centers because of a hygienist policy, being the genesis of the slumming process.

[13] However, it would not be wise to apply this pattern built by a traditional historiography with the purpose of establishing a universalization of the unemployed, illiterate, lazy, promiscuous black person, etc.

Dário de Bittencourt and Carlos da Silva Santos are two examples of blacks who were born in the beginning of the 20th century, who had two different social conditions, but were academic intellectuals who were successful in the political world, going against the stereotype established after slavery.

This historiographical current has been criticized for romanticizing this marginalization of the freedman who was replaced by the European immigrant, a view that places a Paulista context as a single national history, not presenting an explanatory potential for an entire period.

With the end of this slavery structure, a new social order was produced, which established hierarchy, racial category and conditions to access the new political and civil rights.