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

negotiating with municipal regulations that organized free and slave street labor
under one system – the ganho system. Street vending was associated with
“black” labor and slavery and municipal and police authorities discursively
racialized (white) European ganhadores, who peddled on the streets just like
blacks. In having to solicit “black ganhador licenses” and follow municipal
procedures that submitted Europeans to dependent relations with patrons,
employers, and the State, white immigrant workers participated in an Atlantic
experience of freedom that was not only connected to the nineteenth-century
political economy of free labor, but to the local legal practices of an urban slave
society that organized free and slave street labor under one system. Enslaved
street peddlers and free ganhadores of both African and European descent were
structurally and experientially situated between slavery and freedom, as they
negotiated with patrons and guarantors, police authorities, and consumers who
were habituated to the slave and African characteristics of street vending.
Chapter Two discusses the policing of street vendors during the last two
decades of slavery. The eve of abolition, specifically the years 1883 and 1886,
signaled a significant turning point in the regulation of street commerce as
authorities became more concerned with policing behavior rather than with
commercial activity per se (i.e., buying and selling on the street). In 1883, the
parish of Santana became notorious in newspaper discussions that narrated “Street
Occurrences,” with columnists noting that the high number of police arrests of
free peddlers was violating the very principles of the free market, and
commenting on the ambiguity of freedom and the excesses of policing.
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