"Indigenous Women in Colonial Rio de Janeiro: Space, Society, and Environment, 1550- 1800"

My doctoral project focuses on the spatial history of Indigenous women in colonial Rio de Janeiro, the second main institutional centre of Portuguese America. I intend to trace their familial, laboural, and religious histories across different social institutions and environments in the urbanizing Carioca landscape. This research aims to revise prevalent hypermasculine models of gender relations that marginalise Indigenous womanhood in the period.

It also draws on an extensive literature on Indigenous social life in Spanish American cities. Thus, it addresses the following questions: How did Indigenous women experience and construct the urban space of the city? How did they negotiate distinct institutional norms and environments in colonial Rio de Janeiro?

How does the history of Indigenous women in urban context challenge our writing of Brazilian Indigenous history?

Delineating how Indigenous women experienced Carioca urban spaces corrects their erasure and reactivates women's roles in the construction of colonial society. Through its urban lens, the project de-essentializes Indigenous history in Portuguese America, which is usually situated in borderlands and the interior - and centers a vastly understudied macroregion in Indigenous history, compared to Spanish America.

The project aims to elicit the multiplicity of Indigenous experiences across spaces and ethnic groups even within one city, through a microhistorical approach. Microhistory allows me to negotiate a relatively silent source base on the intersection of gender and Indigeneity, by focusing on select, relevant testaments, judicial cases, estate inventories, or parish records.

Conflations of Indigeneity with static cultural origins erase Indigenous women from analysis upon entering colonial cities, as if this spatial shift severed their identities. To challenge this, my research pays particular attention to the transition to the city. I investigate how distinct spaces, like central and peripheral neighbourhoods, transformed and were transformed by the everyday interactions Indigenous women maintained with environment and society.

Together, the cases account for and resituate Indigenous women's marital, economic, and religious lives in varied institutional contexts (farms, villages, elite households, parishes, and a port) and across three centuries, reinvigorating the literature on marginalised voices in colonial Brazil.