Coercion, legislation, and dependency on the history of vagrancy, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Lourenço Marques (Mozambique), 1890–1930

This project aims to analyze how the history of the repression of vagrancy between 1890 and 1930 in Brazil and Mozambique, a colony of the Portuguese Empire at the time, relates to elements such as coercion, legislation, and dependency in an intersectional perspective, which pays attention to the connection between aspects of class, race, gender, and sexualities.

The objective is to investigate, in this context and these locations, the laws that repress vagrancy and the processes of discussing and constructing them, examining the various regimes of normativity present in the debates and their relationship to the readings on workers’ agency. The research also contributes to the investigation of how workers interpreted and dealt with anti-vagrancy legislation in these spaces, as well as the normative knowledge they drew on. It covers the post-abolition period in both contexts, more specifically from 1890, with the implementation of the first republican Penal Code in Brazil, until 1930, a time of sweeping changes in the politics of Brazil and the Portuguese Empire.

From the perspective of Global Legal History and Global Labor History, this project analyzes the connections and comparisons between the worlds of labor and the production of normative knowledge in Brazil and Mozambique. The intention is to collaborate to develop and consolidate a field that seeks to renew the study of Social Labor History by exploring multiple connections between labor experiences in Africa and Brazil.

Description of the image: This is a photo of Febrônio Índio do Brasil, a black man and considered a homosexual, who was several times prosecuted as a vagrant in Rio de Janeiro, in the 1920s. He is an important character to discuss how, in the persecution of vagrancy, class, race, gender, and sexuality were intertwined.