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

formal and informal, legal and extralegal structures and practices that shaped their
struggles for social and economic justice. Political discourse constructed notions of
formality and informality, the latter becoming the space of negotiation between
government authorities and the working poor, as exemplified in the works of
Fischer and Holston. The ambiguous status existence of street commerce in the
twentieth century reflected vendors‟ interaction with formal and informal practices,
resulting in an experience of citizenship that was differentiating and marginalizing
as public behavior was criminalized and street commerce became overregulated.
The dissertation is divided into six chapters which follow the transition
from slavery to freedom and the trajectories of slave legacies and modernist
visions surrounding street commerce. As Chapter One illustrates, in urban slave
society, ganhadores – both enslaved and free – were required a municipal license
to sell and work on the street. In order to attain such a license and thus register
them with the municipality as formal street laborers, masters paid a license fee for
their slaves whereas free workers required the sponsorship of a guardian, or
fiador. The fiador was usually an employer profiting from the ganhador‟s
earnings, which underlines the considerable overlap in the working conditions of
free and enslaved ganhadores as they might have enjoyed greater autonomy in
terms of their work process, but never captured all of their earnings, even of free.
The licensing of ganhadores became an official practice in the middle of the
nineteenth century, but, as had been customary, many enslaved and free
ganhadores sold on the streets of Rio without a license, and continued to do so.
The growth of the free black population alongside the gradual decline of slavery
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