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Over the past thirty years there has been increasing interest in the memory of slavery and ways of expressing the past, including places of memory, museums, and cultural heritage. By accessing slavery’s past, groups and individuals build their own narratives about it and break with places that, historically, have erased, even silenced and marginalized Africa and the Black diaspora. Given this demand for recognizing the legacy of the memory of slavery, this paper raises questions about the Cais do Valongo archeological site, [which came to be recognized] as cultural heritage of humanity, as a result of the agency of Black social actorsin the Pequena África district. It also examines the political uses of the past by these contemporary actors in the struggle for identification, recognition, and reparation, as well as in the fight against racism.

The reflections presented here are part of an ongoing broader research on theconcept of whiteness in Brazil during the time of slavery. The article seeks to analyze the meanings and practices involved in the emergence of captives described as white sold in Brazil after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850, attracting the attention of the press. Such cases lend themselves to research on the complex links between color, enslavement, and freedom. More broadly, the paper analyzes the racial aspects that defined the boundary between the enslaved and free population, placing the concept of whiteness at the center of racial analysis, an unusual approach among Brazilian historians.