Mixed-race children were freed and inherited property while their slave mothers stayed enslaved

Evidence

In contrast to the US, mixed offspring were freed in Latin America, even as their mothers remained enslaved and ensnared in desperately unequal and iniquitous relationships. Indeed, “mottled” offspring, not to put too crude an exclamation on the practice and product, were written into paternal property inheritance, while their slave mothers were excluded, thus creating as much a bifurcated regime of wealth accumulation as psycho-emotional identification and its attendant melancholia. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1082

Categorization

• XREF: This bifurcated regime of freed mixed offspring versus enslaved mothers parallels the skin-tone stratification in contemporary Brazil and the US one-drop rule; connects to racial hierarchies discussed in earlier chapters on racial neoliberalism.
• SEED: An article angle: how property inheritance in Latin American slavery created a free mottled class while freezing the enslaved mother’s status — the origin of the region’s racial gradient versus the US binary.