Rebellious Enslaved Mothers: Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Southern Brazil

This paper examines how enslaved women in southern Brazil resisted slavery by killing their own children, by relying on a number of nineteenth-century criminal records. A particular attention is given to the case of Maria, an enslaved black woman born in Brazil, resident of Rio Pardo (Rio Grande do Sul), who killed her son Adão with a knife stab in the neck. During the interrogatory and the trial, Maria justified her desperate action by explaining that her masters forced her to keep her son locked in the bedroom and that she was physically punished every time he escaped. As a result, when her son was able to escape from his bedroom on October 29, 1824, she reacted by killing him. By highlighting elements from Maria’s testimony and from the discourse developed by her legal representative in her defense, the paper argues that although spontaneous, the defendant desperate act constituted an effective form of violent and individual resistance against the horrors of slavery, that were present not only in plantation settings, but also in the domestic environment.