ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: SLAVE LEGACIES, AMBIVALENT ...

lacks. Internal rural-urban migration also increased with the decline of slavery.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Rio was a “black city” (cidade negra),
described as such by historians today, which transformed with the shifting
ethnic/racial and urban landscapes of the turn of the century. 12 In the mid-
nineteenth century, slaves made up about one-third of Rio‟s urban population. With
the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1850, many of Rio‟s urban slaves as well
as slaves in the northeastern part of the Brazilian Empire were sold off and
relocated to the coffee-producing plantations of the Southeast. In 1872, Rio‟s
population of 228,745 was 16% slave, 53% Brazilian-born free people, which
included freedpersons (libertos) and free-born blacks (livres), and 30% free
foreigners. By 1906, the population had grown to 805,335 and migrants had
become a majority: 29% were foreign-born Portuguese and 26% were other foreign-
born immigrants and migrants from the countryside. The population continued to
grow in the first decades of the twentieth century, reaching 1,147,599 inhabitants (a
42% growth) in 1920. Population increase during this period developed with the
growth of neighborhoods in the northern urban periphery of Rio, a result of rural-
urban migration and the forced uprooting of the working poor from the city‟s
center. 13
Historians of urban slavery in Rio have given particular attention to the
dual nature of money-earning slaves (escravos de ganho) in the city‟s nineteenth-
12 Sidney Chalhoub, Cidade febril: cortiços e epidemias na corte imperial (São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 1996); Visões da liberdade: uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na corte
(São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990); Trabalho, lar e botequim: o cotidiano dos
trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Époque (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986). Important to
note is that during this period most free Brazilians in Rio were people of color who probably did
not think of themselves as “black.”
13 Mauricio de Alameida Abreu, Evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro, 4th Edition (Rio de Janeiro:
Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 2006 [1987]).
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