Land and work in the south of Mato Grosso - considerations about enslavement, struggle for land, economy pastoral and advent of free labor-19th and 20th centuries

Laws were prepared to reformulate politics of lands and of work hand, including for all of the Provinces of the Brazilian Empire, starting from 1850. To approach this theme we tried firstly to detach the distinguished form of organization of the material and social life of the area of the swamplands, located in the Brazilian west, for then to consider about the process to overcome the slavery, the occupation of the interior of the Paraguay river and the advent of the free labor. Enslaved workers and poor farmers were invisible in the discourse of regional history, undressed of scientific reflection, because the writings about this social segment were restricted to the isolated depositions, memoirs of the local elite, dispersed data in the inventories, documents of registry offices or almost imperceptible details or softly registered in the travelers' narratives that went by Mato Grosso in the centuries 19 and 20. We tried in this reflection to break the silence of the historiography and of the reports based on memoirs on the segments turned subordinate, participants of the tensions and daily fights during the occupation process and settlement of that geoecological space.