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

Since colonial times, street and market vendors legitimized their work
through municipal licensing procedures, which allowed them to legally sell goods
on the streets. Not all street vendors, however, held licenses or sought licenses,
thus becoming a problem for urban authorities to regulate. After the Portuguese
Court settled in Rio in 1808, new policing measures continued to develop
throughout the century, as the government (at least in Rio) became increasingly
involved in controlling the movement of the urban slave and free black
population. 18 Licensing procedures and new laws concerning wage labor were
also linked to the legal changes taking place in the second half of the nineteenth
century concerned with administering slave emancipation and the emerging “free”
class of workers. Elites supported the gradual approach toward slave
emancipation in Brazil as a means to preserve the dominion of ex-masters over
their ex-slaves, and prolong relationships of dependency and paternalism. 19
Licensing and guardianship were required for free and freed blacks (libertos) to
identities created by African-born individuals and Brazilian-born individuals of African descent,
arguing place of birth rather than race or color was the primary formative aspect of their identities.
Additionally, new ethnic and gender identities were created at the workplace resulting in
ethnicized and gendered urban spaces. Nishida notes most escravos de ganho in Salvador were
African-born, hired out by their masters or able to market their craft skills on the street, whereas
the majority of Brazilian-born slaves were primarily domestic servants. Moreover, the presence of
gendered urban spaces in Salvador further complicates the notion of a “linear” construction of
ethnicity. For example, African-born slave women monopolized the exchange of foodstuffs as
market-stall keepers, market vendors, and street vendors. As such, they were likely to create and
develop, as maintained by Nishida, “a stronger collective gender identity, beyond ethnic identity,
in New World slavery than their male counterparts,” p. 46. On gender and street commerce in
Salvador, Bahia, see Cecília Moreira Soares, "As Ganhadeiras: mulher e resistência em Salvador
no século XIX.”
18 Thomas Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a 19 th -Century City
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
19 Joseli Maria Nunes Mendonça, Entre a mão e os anéis: A lei dos sexagenários e os caminhos da
abolição no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora da Unicamp, 1999). The author analyzes the Sexagenarian
Law of 1885, and the parliamentary debate surrounding the indemnification of ex-masters for the
loss of slave labor, and argues that because of the incapacity of the State in the 1880s of
controlling the emerging free working class, the State itself promoted the maintenance of exmasters‟
powers over their ex-slaves.
10