ABSTRACT
Lisbon’s colonial apparatus forbade foreigners to immigrate or settle although the Portuguese never enforced exclusionary laws to the extent that the Spanish did in their territory. Once resident in Brazil, however, individuals from places other than Portugal were subject to harsh repression if Crown authorities so willed. Gypsies, for example, who had been persecuted in Portugal before the sixteenth century and who sought refuge in Brazil, faced deportation and sentencing to the galley ships if they were convicted of vagrancy or other antisocial acts. Brazil’s Roman Catholic Church maintained pressure on authorities to expel gypsies refusing to marry in the Church or to baptize their children. Gypsies who managed to escape deportation were stigmatized as pariahs, as were the Jews who emigrated to northeastern Brazil during the seventeenth-century Dutch occupation. When Dutch Brazil fell in 1654, the Jews were deported from the colony, seeking exile in Jamaica, the Dutch islands in the Caribbean, and ultimately New Amsterdam. In time, gypsies managed to carve out a social space amid the tensions of a society dominated by slaves, thereby winning a better situation in Brazil than their relatives had in Europe, where they were subject to constant ethnic oppression.
