This article analyzes the configuration of a slave community in Castro, São Paulo, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It seeks to understand what it meant for these captives to live in a town directed almost exclusively towards raising and trading of animals. For that reason, slave owner's postmortem inventories were used as the main documentary body, and beyond them, Nominative Lists of Inhabitants and other documents from the judiciary. Through this documentation, it was possible to follow the trajectory of some slaves and examine aspects of the constitution of their families and their links with the agro-pastoral life. Their similar experiences, leading troops, taking care of livestock or seeking a better life outside the village of Castro, after receiving their freedom, it was made possible to shape a slave community with ideals, interests and particular world views.
Slavery; Freedom; Animal trade; Spatial mobility