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

debilitating legacy of slavery – marginalized blacks and mulattos in Brazil. 37
However, recent historiography on Brazil‟s transitional period goes beyond the
“legacies of slavery”/“problems with freedom” divide by instead focusing on the
interplay between the experience of slavery – not assumed to be inherently
damaging – and the problem of freedom. 38
Linking a non-debilitating "legacy of slavery" with the "problems with
freedom," my dissertation contributes to this emerging historiography since I argue
that urban slaves and free blacks dynamically created social and commercial
networks through street vending, which persisted among the post-abolition urban
poor as an alternative economy to formal wage labor. Formal wage labor was, on
the one hand, unavailable to many blacks who experienced racial discrimination by
employers; on the other hand, formal wage labor became unappealing to many
blacks because of low wages and/or working conditions analogous to slavery.
Maria Cecilia Velasco e Cruz‟s study of the 1906 coffee warehouse strike illustrates
the particular nature of labor activism among Rio‟s laborers of African descent, as
black wharf workers “came to form a workers‟ society outside of, but parallel to,
the already formally organized stevedores.” 39 Velasco e Cruz finds that the 1906
37 Cooper, Holt, and Scott did not consider the Brazilian case when they co-authored Beyond
Slavery, which is precisely the one with the richest bibliography on the “problem with freedom”
question. Reid Andrews, for example, bases his study Blacks and Whites in São Paulo (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) on a critique of the Fernandes thesis. Also see, Celia
Marinha de Azevedo, Onda Negra, Medo Branco: O negro no imaginário das elites – Seculo XIX
(Rio de Janeiro: Editora Paz e Terra, 1987); Lúcio Kowarick, Trabalho e vadiagem: a origem do
trabalho livre no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Brasilense, 1987); Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar, e
botequim.
38 Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz, “Puzzling out Slave Origins in a Freemen‟s Strike: The Rio de
Janeiro Coffee Strike of 1906” Hispanic American Historical Review; Thomas Holt, The Problem
of Freedom; Mary Turner, ed. From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labor
Bargaining in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
39 Maria Cecilia Velasco e Cruz, “Puzzling out Slave Origins in a Freemen‟s Strike,” 1. The author
identifies many stevedores as descendants of Mina slaves.
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