“Indesejáveis necessários”: os ciganos degredados no Rio de Janeiro Setecentista.

Abstract

The circulation of banned populations in the societies connected by the Portuguese overseas expansion was accompanied by the need to transform the condemned to the banishment in forced settlers in the Portuguese Atlantic Empire. In this role, the gypsies, who constituted a stigmatized segment and suffered systematic prison and detention penalties in the coastal zones of Brazil and Angola, stood out. During century XVIII the American colony counted on the constant mobility of gypsy by the frontier regions of the captaincies of Bahia, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. Especially in the second half of that century Rio de Janeiro started to house in its urban nucleus a sizeable gypsy population that settled in the heap of swamps known at that time as Field of Gypsies (present Campo de Santana) and also counted on the flow of gypsy ranches in the districts of the sertões. Taking into consideration the efforts to insert the gypsy problem in colonial historiography, this paper will focus on the discussion of the conflicts between the local authorities and the gypsies in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro during the 18th century. Based on the analysis of documentary sources of administrative content (especially in the form of laws, licenses, correspondence and official letters), we will try to demonstrate that, through ethnic reorganizations and fixed and mobile regroupings in the port city and in the sertões of Rio de Janeiro, the gypsies became the target of control of the colonial authorities and built different forms of survival and integration in 18th-century society.