This article examines the experiences of the Afro-Brazilian coffee transport workers of Rio de Janeiro's port district in the generation following the abolition of slavery in 1888. While they have been condemned by some scholars as reformist and placatory, this article argues that these Afro-Brazilians aggressively contested the new ‘free labour’ regime and the thousands of immigrant labourers who arrived to compete with them. Indeed, far from marking them as passive recipients of state paternalism, the subsequent decision of the port workers to seek an alliance with the state points to the importance of nativism as a middle-ground upon which successive Brazilian governments and Afro-Brazilians could meet.

The article analyses two delegated governance projects carried out in Ecuador's Amazonian south-east in the twentieth century. In collaboration with the military and public institutions, two Catholic missions, the Salesian and the Franciscan, were central actors in the colonising of an area inhabited by the Shuar. Considering the wider historical and ethnographic regional context and focusing on practices of cultural translation and territorial politics, I discuss the two missions’ divergent governance sensitivities vis-à-vis the Shuar. ‘Governance sensitivities’ refers in this context to the colonial actors’ capability to recognise colonised subjects as culturally distinct. I combine new empirical material from the historical archive of the Franciscans in Zamora with secondary sources in order to analyse how differences between the two missions’ sensitivity and insensitivity to Shuar otherness became especially prevalent in the 1960s and 70s. The divergent ways the Salesians and Franciscans perceived the Shuar colonial subject had consequences for how they engaged in the protection of Shuar land and for how they contributed to facilitating or holding back indigenous political organisation.