Manoel Rendeiro Neto

 I am an international PhD student in the UC Davis History Department. I started studying History in Brazil, my home country, at the University of Brasília, where I studied early colonial history of Brazil and Indigenous history. Now at UC Davis, I am specializing in Latin American history, with an emphasis in the Amazonian region. I like to study mobility, mapmaking, and spatial occupation in the formation of political identities and communities, where racialization features as a fundamental process to claim, access, or deny over land.  My present project analyzes the scope and significance of fugitive settlements, Maroon communities, and Indigenous groups' establishment of alternative sovereignties that challenged European empires' claims (French Guiana and Portuguese Grão-Pará) on Amazonia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this way, I would like to bring awareness to the diversity of the Amazonian region and its inhabitants, especially an Afro-Amazonia and its indigeneity.