This is an exciting book, indeed a pathbreaking book, for it opens new vistas in the history of colonial Latin America. . . . Metcalf skillfully uses the history of one frontier region to illuminate the history of southern Brazil. . . . She masterfully links her region to the general growth and development of the Portuguese colony thereby demonstrating the strengths which local history, case study, demography, and quantitative techniques can make. This is an outstanding contribution to frontier history, family history, and the social history of rural zones.
(Americas) Metcalf’s excellent, carefully researched case study of rural life in colonial Portuguese Latin America analyzes the process of family adaptation to a changing agricultural frontier in what is now the prosperous state of SaÕ Paulo. . . . The book should interest not only students of Brazilian history but all those concerned with such themes as slavery in the Western hemisphere, the role of women, men, and children in a changing frontier society, and the fate of indigenous populations.
(Choice) . . . meticulously researched, pioneering work . . . The importance of Professor Metcalf’s description and analysis of family and society transcends Santana de ParnaÍba in the colonial era, adding more tessera to the mosaic of the economies and societies of Portuguese America and providing an excellent historical framework for an understanding of modern Brazil.
(Ethnohistory) Historians of Brazil, rejoice! This pathbreaking study of family strategies in rural colonial Brazil is back in print.
(The Historian)
