“Unwanted but necessary”: the gypsies banished in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro in the eighteenth century
gypsies;banishment;colonization; Portuguese Atlantic Empire;Portuguese America;ethnic-racial relations.
The circulation of deprived populations in the societies connected by the Portuguese over seas expansion was accompanied by the utilitarian 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 Braziland Angola, stood out. During century XVIII the American colony counted on the constant mobility of gypsy plundering by the frontier regions of the captaincies of Bahia, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. Especially in these cond half of that century Rio de Janeiro started to house in its urban nucleus a size able 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, mainlyof Santo Antônio de Sá and São Salvador of Campos dos Goitacazes.
Taking into consideration the effort stoinsert 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 formoflaws, permits, portfolios, over seas correspondence and official letters), we will try to demonstrate that throug he thnic reorganizations and fixed and mobile regroupings in the portcity and in the sertões of Rio de Janeiro, became the target of control of the colonial authorities and built different forms of survival and integration in thes eventeenth century society.