Eraldo Souza dos Santos

Eraldo Souza dos Santos is an assistant professor within the Poetic Justice Cluster at the University of California, Irvine. Their next book project is an (auto)biography of their illiterate mother and a meditation on the lived experience of Blackness and enslavement in modern Brazil. At the age of seven, their mother was sold into slavery by her white foster sister. It was 1968—eighty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and four years into the anti-communist coup d’état, during the month in which the military overruled the Constitution by decree. By weaving in extensive archival research and interviews, the book narrates their journey to Minas Gerais—where she was born and where German and Swiss colonization historically contributed to the persistence of Black forced labor—and Bahia—the Blackest state in Brazil, where she was enslaved for years—to investigate why the family that bought her has never been brought to justice. It also narrates their grandmother’s journey to find her missing daughter amidst one of the darkest moments in Brazilian history.