Redes clientelares, sucessão e herança em Guarapiranga – 1715 a 1820

Abstract

The current study investigates the processes of succession and inheritance, the clientelistic connections, the marriages and the family alliances instituted by individuals and their relatives in the Guarapiranga´s village (MG) between 1715 and 1820. Therefore, we privilege the analysis of four main families: Pinto Alves, Alves Ferreira, Freitas Guimarães and Gonçalves Fontes, stipulating the principles and devices applied by these relatives for the purpose of enrichment, nobilitation and mastery. To define these family groups we established some main characteristics that identified them as the region's elite: participation of one or more members in the City Council of Mariana, as councilman, official captain among other positions; physical, financial and political permanence of these groups in the region of Guarapiranga and surroundings; acting in offices in Ordinances and Militias; and, finally, the material wealth. Experiencing the precepts of the Old Regime in a markedly hierarchical and slaver society in the eighteenth century and the ideals of privileges, status, power and benefits in the nineteenth century, these individuals defined different strategies for advancing socially, politically and economically, while preserving their perks over the generations. By forming alliances and connections they established "fantastic sales", the privilege of a particular child, endogenous and consanguineous marriages, negotiations between relatives and similar, priesthood and celibacy to second-born children and other mechanisms to perpetuate the land ownership, distinction and power. In order to analyze the social conjuncture of the parish applied, so, the method that defines and privileges the individual and his genealogical links, allowing to illuminate the family cycles and serving not only for purposes of demographic investigation, but also for social history. Equally we also base the research on the ideals of scale reduction based on methods of micro-history. In this way, we try to identify by means of post-mortem inventories, wills, memo books, matrimonial proceedings, documents of the Overseas Historical Archive and the Torre do Tombo National Archive, and the strategies that were applied by these individuals and relatives in order to establish and preserve prerogatives, power, patrimony, favors and graces throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.