The introduction chapters set out the book’s purpose to explore issues such as race relations, indigenous struggles, and the black consciousness movement in Brazil that intersect or even reshape the law and its effect on the lives of people that resides on the banks of Sao Francisco River in Mocambo and on Sai Pedro Island. French developed a theoretical model she called legalizing identity. This model is demonstrated in this book through the examples of the Xoco and Mocambo, but it is intended to be broadly applicable everywhere such changed takes place. French uses it as an analytical tool for understanding the process by which national legal and political institutions interact with local identity transformation, the concept of legalizing
