Research Paper on:
Queiros Mattoso's To Be a Slave in Brazil

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
other words, African slaves. Mattoso, in her definitive work on the Latin America slave trade chronicles in great detail the day to day conditions of the slaves, from the  point of capture, to transport to final assimilation on the farms, plantations and in the homes of their masters. Of particular note, and what makes this work different than many  of the other books on the Latin American slave trade, is that she goes into the psychology of the African captive as the loss and restructuring of a new culture  within the slave group took place. This two-fold adaptation, it can be said, enabled the slave to survive and later to adapt quickly to life as a freed individual.  Mattoso states that slaves in Brazil were viewed quite differently than they were in any other part of the world. This was because in Brazil, slaves were seen as commodities  and not necessarily workers. In other words, they were a human crop. Therefore, to be a slave in Brazil was to be dehumanized worse than one would be if one  were sold to work on a plantation in America or on the plantations in Portugal. In short order the indigenous population was dominated and overcome by the European influence  and were forced to work on plantations and large land holdings owned by the Spanish. Unfortunately, the Spanish had not the foresight to spare the lives of many of the  Indians and thus wiped out most of their forced slave labor. Not to worry, they imported more slaves from Africa. Some estimates place nearly five million Africans working on land  in Latin America between 1518 and 1870(Latin America, 2002). In addition, with the import of Africans the culture was impacted by yet another foreign set of ideas and parameters.