Robson Pedrosa Costa wins LACS-SHA’s Kimberly S. Hanger Article Prize 2024

19.09.2024

Cassia Roth (University of Georgia) and Robson Pedrosa Costa (Instituto Federal de Pernambuco/CH-ULisboa)'s article “'Maria Simoa, Who Birthed Twenty-Four Children'": Slavery, Motherhood, and Freedom on the Benedictine Estates, Pernambuco, Brazil, 1866–1871” (Hispanic American Historical Review 103:1) received the 2024 Kimberly S. Hanger Article Prize awarded by the Latin American and Caribbean Section (LACS) of the Southern Historical Association. LACS-SHA was established in 1998 to promote the study of the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly in the U.S. South. Each year the Associaton awards a prize for the best article published in the previous year in the fields of Latin America, Caribbean, American Borderlands and Frontiers, or Atlantic World history.

In the words of the selection committee, "Cassia Roth and Robson Pedrosa Costa examine the slaveholding and manumission practices of monks on different Benedictine estates in Pernambuco Brazil during the final decades of slavery. Through close readings of monastery records, the authors show how monks made paternalistic calculations about women's reproduction, specifically that if they freed some, but not all, of enslaved women's children, they could naturally increase slave populations and tether family members, whether enslaved or free, to the monasteries. As the authors explore some of the first institutionalized strategies of gradual manumission in Brazil, their findings demonstrate that line between slavery and freedom always remained tenuous. The Benedictines’ projects, the authors argue, preceded and served as a test case for future national abolitionist policies only a few years later. Even as they mine historical sources created by a corporate enslaver, Roth and Pedrosa Costa reveal enslaved people’s ideas about family, love, and freedom. In so doing, the authors point to the agency of enslaved individuals and particularly enslaved mothers. The authors makes a powerful case for the continued importance of microhistories to shed light on larger historical processes of slavery and the past more broadly."

An honorable mention was also awarded to Alfredo Luis Escudero's “The New Age of Andeans: Chronological Age, Indigenous Labor, and the Making of Spanish Colonial Rule” (Hispanic American Historical Review 103:1).