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

citizenship. Street peddlers‟ dealings with the police and the judiciary system also
reflected the limits of citizenship and the “problem of freedom,” as well as the
challenges to those limits. 31
In the turn to free labor, the increasing responsibility of the municipality
toward the regulation of ganho labor and street commerce placed many vendors in
“legal contact zones” with the State. 32 The streets where vendors were arrested, the
detention centers where they were held, and the courtrooms where they were
processed for municipal infractions or penal violations were the legal areas that
helped create popular and hegemonic notions of civic membership, public order,
and legitimate labor. Under imperial rule, the Criminal Code of 1830 and
municipal legislation concerning ganhadores shaped the policing of street behavior
and commerce in Rio, to the extent that criminal law came to regulate some street
commercial activity. This trend further progressed under republican rule with the
establishment of the Penal Code of 1890. The ambivalent position of street
commerce at the turn of the century as formal labor yet vulnerable to discursive and
de facto modern cleansing practices that reorganized urban space and citizenry
shaped the gradual and uneven marginalization of street commerce into a matter of
citizenship building. Street vendors, for their part, united to struggle against the
31 Martha Abreu, O Império do Divino: festas religiosas e cultura popular no Rio de Janeiro,
1830-1900; Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, and Juliana Faria Barreto,
No labirinto das nações: africanos e identidades no Rio de Janeiro, século XIX (Rio de Janeiro:
Arquivo Nacional, 2005); José Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro e a
República que não foi (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987); Sidney Chalhoub, Visões da
liberdade: uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na corte; Thomas Holt, The Problem
of Freedom.
32 For Gilbert Joseph‟s discussion of the term “legal contact zones” see, Ricardo D. Salvatore,
Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert M Joseph, ed. Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and
Society since Late Colonial Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
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