503946

research-article2013
JUH40110.1177/0096144213503946Journal of Urban HistoryAcerbi

Article
Journal of Urban History
2014, Vol 40(1) 97115
A Long Poem of Walking: 2013 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
Flneurs, Vendors, and Chronicles sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0096144213503946
of Post-abolition Rio de Janeiro juh.sagepub.com

Patricia Acerbi1

Abstract
Chronicle literature in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro developed in tandem with the
urban modernization that followed the abolition of slavery in 1888. Writers-flneurs strolled
city streets to observe human behavior in the new post-abolition urban environment. The
street vendor, a fellow traveler within the city, was quickly identified by chroniclers as an
integral component of the modern city. Ruling elites, however, viewed street commerce as a
blot on the modern urban landscape and sought to prohibit vending through a series of policies
that vendors often contested. Chroniclers and newspapers embrace of vendors therefore
reveals the ambivalence that marked the effort to define modernity. Although connected to
the citys slave past, street vendors came to represent a modern urban membership unique to
the Brazilian capital. The practice of street commerce and the intellectual culture surrounding
it reflects how walking the city carved an alternative urban citizenship and sense of belonging.

Keywords
street vendors, chronicles, post-abolition, citizenship, Rio de Janeiro

On February 7, 1904, readers of Rio de Janeiros esteemed Gazeta de Notcias waited with antici-
pation the latest newspaper chronicle by the celebrated poet and journalist Olavo Bilac. This time
Bilac chose to reflect on the method of chronicle writing, comparing the labors of chroniclers to
those of street vendors. He wrote the chronicler (cronista) was like a peddler and the chronicle
(crnica) like the vending container carrying lifes random and often disparate objects. The par-
allel and connections between peddler and chronicler illustrate a new sense of belonging and
urban membership, positioned within African slaverys legacy, Europeanized modernity, and a
self-assumed ownership of the right and privileges over urban space.

It is impossible not to mix, in this weeks column, the profane and the sacred. Cronistas are like peddlers
(bufarinheiros) who carry in their containers rosaries and safety pins, fabrics and buttons, soaps and
shoes, crockery and needles, images of saints and decks of cards, remedies for the soul and remedies for
calluses, prescriptions and ointments, potions and thimbles. Everything must count a little, in this
container of the Crnica: an assortment for serious people and an assortment for the frivolous, a little bit

1The Sage Colleges, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:
Patricia Acerbi, 17 State Street, Apt. 5F, Troy, NY 12180, USA.
Email: acerbp@sage.edu
98 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

of politics for those who only read the summarized debates of Congress, and a little of carnival for those
who only find pleasure reading the newspapers carnavalesque sections.

Here is the peddlers container, reader friend: insert your hand and serve yourself at will. It was not I
who filled it up with so many random and opposite things. I am merely the retailer, the seller of issues.
It is Life, the supplier of chronicle writers, who fills my containerLife which is never coherent or
methodical, Life which always has a million contradictions in only one minute of its accidental and
paradoxical journey.1

In this chronicle, Bilac also discusses events in state politics and comments on the status of
carnival with regard to its recent competitor, futebol (soccer). Bilacs pairing of formal politics
and popular culture reflected the larger Latin American intellectual climate of the era sur-
rounding literature and journalism, or literary journalism.2 The turn of the century, witnessing
the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the founding of the First Republic in 1889, helped create
a generation of conservative and liberal Brazilian writers who expressed sympathy, discontent,
and ambivalence toward Europeanized modernity.3 Bilac and other chroniclers discussed in
this article were no exception. Their deliberations about urban street vending were commentar-
ies on the Brazilian capital and citizenship in the early decades following the abolition of
slavery.
Chronicle writers often explored the tension between tradition and modernity. In this light,
practices of street commerce mirrored the dynamics of progress and became a unique manifesta-
tion of the Brazilian modern experience.4 By walking the city, the chronicler engaged with every-
day life, focusing on the little things that made up culture and society.5 He recognized the
peddler as a fellow urban traveler, transforming local street vending into a concept of the city,
or an urban identity.6 The street vendor incarnated enduring customs of buying and selling, con-
necting buyers and sellers who walked the city to exchange basic goods. Togetherbuyers and
sellersengaged in a market exchange that the municipality regulated through laws inherited
from the slave period. The regulation of street commerce depended on policing, and peddlers
commonly sought vending opportunities outside the repressive measures of the police. Many
street vendors skirted state regulation by selling on the margins, occupying a space that attracted
chroniclers because it was marginal to elite respectability yet central to urban provisioning.
Similarly, the newspaper chronicle was often positioned at the pages margins, informing readers
with accounts that many found more interesting than news about high finance or politics.
Life, an accidental and contradictory journey, was analogous to the process of chronicle
writing and street vending. To write or to sell were the purpose of walking the city, leading to
unexpected encounters and conflicting relationships with the urban environment. The city may
have charmed both chroniclers and vendors yet still aggravated harsh living conditions. Michel
de Certeau argued that such contradictory movements generated the practice of urban everyday
life.7 In walking the city, the long poem of walking manipulate[d] spatial organizations, no mat-
ter how panoptic they may [have been].8 The urban walking performed by both peddlers and
chroniclers thus involved successive encounters and occasions that constantly altered [space]
. . . like a peddler carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual
choice.9 Certeaus statement about the city echoes Bilacs earlier description of chronicle writ-
ing and Brazilian peddling. By walking the city, the everyday alteration of urban space demon-
strated a right to the city in an era coming out of centuries of slavery. Space shaped experiences
of belonging to the city. Chroniclers and vendors exercised the rights of the belonging they
assumed in their daily walking and peddling.10 Chroniclers were particularly attentive toward
street commerce, creating a sentiment of nostalgia around traditional vending practices. In admir-
ing the practices and traditions of street commerce, chroniclers were apprehensive or at least
ambivalent about the new post-abolition environment marked by urban renewal and deep social
stratification.
Acerbi 99

Most ruling elites viewed the urban peddler as a legacy of slavery and a blot on the modern
city. They envisioned street vendors and their line of work unsuitable for modern urban market
relations based in free labor. The regulation and policing of vendors revealed official attitudes
that considered street selling an inferior economic practice that had to be eliminated or at least
restricted. These points connect with recent historical studies on the development of unequal
Brazilian citizenship after slavery, which have focused on the formal and informal contingencies
of freedom as well as connections between the extralegal and legal.11 Building upon these, this
study on the construction of an urban membership rooted in walking the city aims to show how
chroniclers first engaged with the issue of post-abolition citizenship through narratives about
street vending and urban belonging, bridging the legal and extralegal. I argue that chroniclers
saw in vendors an authentic tipo carioca (native of the city of Rio) who was representative of
modern urban life and membership in the capital city. Popular vending practices revealed the
savoir-faire of the working poor, delineating an alternative citizenship through shared urban
space that chroniclers captured and included in their newspaper and memorialist writings.12
Walking the city was nearly universal for its residents. In a post-abolition society where the law
created and limited types of citizens, the street alternatively produced what Henri Lefebvre
termed the citadin, or the citizen formed out of the shared inhabitance of urban space.13 Both
chroniclers and street vendors shared spaces by walking the city that fermented a new sense of
urban belonging in post-abolition Rio.
Chroniclers viewed with nostalgia some of the old citys customs. Two citiescenter and
peripherywere shaping the Brazilian capital, which some scholars have described as the
divided city. But recent studies on post-colonial Brazil expose the elite ambivalence, even
desire, with regard to resilient popular culture, and increasingly emphasize the circulation of
cultural images between elite and popular contexts.14 In 1905, the municipal photographer
Augusto Malta (1864-1957) captured the street image of a greengrocers shop with several ped-
dlers hanging around its entrance. The municipality had hired Malta to use photography as an
instrument of urban renewal. The photograph contained penciled diagonal lines that sliced the
shop and peddlers from the larger picture, signaling their surgical removal in the operation of
urban renewal.15 Officials claim that peddlers sold spoiled food stuffs under unhygienic condi-
tions motivated, on the one hand, measures to erase street commerce from the city. On the other
hand, reformist attitudes led to proposed technological innovation in patent requests that prom-
ised improved and sanitized vending.16 The former, however, took precedence in the urban
reforms of early twentieth-century Rio as undesirability toward street vending involved more
than claims about hygiene. Enduring selling practices from the previous century were tied to
urban slavery and irreconcilable with the sanitized city that municipal authorities envisioned.
Reconciliation, nonetheless, took the shape of nostalgia in the works of many writers and pho-
tographers, a form of desire that bridged the elite and popular worlds of Rio. Resting on everyday
practice, street vending became part of an urban imaginary that connected both worlds.
Street vendors often appeared in the writings of Olavo Bilac (1865-1918), Oscar Pederneiras
(1860-1890), Joo do Rio (1881-1921), Lima Barreto (1881-1922), and Luiz Edmundo (1878-
1961), all of whom were literary journalists who also produced Brazilian canonical texts or
renowned literature. Their writings illustrate how urban life and street vending produced certain
vendor types who endured after slavery and were surviving the age of urban renewal. By the
1920s, customary vending practices persisted over restrictive regulation, and new municipal laws
reflected local cultures of street vending.17 Urban space generated types of street commerce that
officials would come to selectively regulate in order to meet the needs of particular neighbor-
hoods. For example, Edmundos The Rio de Janeiro of My Time illustrated that many customary
practices that chroniclers had written about in earlier periods had endured to 1938, the year his
book was published. Edmundo nostalgically incorporated traditional peddling and other local
customs into an image of the republican city, fueling an urban imaginary that located the origins
of street vending in the old Rio of the modern capital.18
100 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

The next section discusses the role of space in the generation of urban identities and member-
ship, followed by a discussion on the status of street commerce in the decades after the abolition
of slavery. Because street commerce was central to urban slave society, its endurance is reflective
of population and spatial shifts in a post-abolition city of the early twentieth century. The official
desire to erase legacies of slavery marked the early republican period in Rio and shared resem-
blance with other post-abolition urban environments of the Atlantic world. The article then pro-
ceeds to examine pertinent history of the newspaper, its relationship to the street, and the
development of the chronicle as a genre integral to mediating modern urban culture. The final
section analyzes chronicles about street vending written or published in the first decades of the
twentieth century, illustrating how walking the city was a practice that brought together writers
and street vendors in a new relationship of shared urban inhabitance.

Urban Space and Citizenship

By walking the city, chroniclers and peddlers exercised their right to the city. Lefebvres concept
of the right to the city and proposal of the urban inhabitant (citadin) versus the citizen (citoyenne)
formulates an alternative citizenship that results from inhabitants shared experience and produc-
tion of space. If socioeconomic inequalities divided the urban population, sociocultural practices
conversely connected diverse areas and peoples of the city.19 Entrenched in the citys economy,
however, street commerce was more than a cultural practice. Peddlers roamed through different
neighborhoods where customers purchased goods from them.20 Vendors long poem of walk-
ing linked the diverse and increasingly segregated urban populace from the city center to the
outskirts. Even as particular peddlers flourished in certain areas of the city, they were still mostly
dependent on the supply chains that passed through central Rio.21 Chronicle writers walked a
similar path, moving between popular and bourgeois spaces of socialization and finding cultural
authenticity in the former. They also depended on supply chains that passed through central Rio,
as newsprint, editorial services, and advertisements sponsored literary journalism and the weekly
publication of chronicles.
Examining the experience of citizenship through chroniclers discussions of street vending
practices is more than a study in cultural representation. The interconnectedness between chron-
icle writing and street vending practices, as Bilac ingeniously indentified, illustrates the develop-
ment of a right to the city through the everyday use of urban space. In a post-abolition city where
the law claimed types of citizens, the experience of urban inhabitants, or citadins, was not homo-
geneous. The movement between different worlds suggested a possible horizontality in differ-
ence and at the same time indicated social inequality. Chroniclers exposed conflicting images of
European progress and Brazilian underdevelopment, never fully embracing or rejecting the mod-
ern city that officials envisioned. Like a vendor walking through diverse neighborhoods, the
chronicler was a cultural mediator between the Europeanized elite and the other city inhabited
by the urban poor.22 Chroniclers urban exploration, comparable at times to the practice of slum-
ming, revealed the unequal integration of the working poor into the formal economy. Street
vending was another manifestation of unequal integration and, more importantly, of popular
resilience rather than anomie.23 Walking was also a result of the lack of adequate public transpor-
tation, itself a legacy of slavery.
The longing for shared experience, such as nineteenth-century carnival or traditional street
commerce, expressed discontent toward an impersonal or insipid modern urban life. The sanitiz-
ing of carnival, for example, met widespread resistance and continuously accommodated Afro-
Brazilian practices.24 Nostalgia conciliated tradition and modernity, allowing the
popular-traditional and the bourgeois-modern to be compatible, as exemplified in the crossing of
upper-class members to participate in Afro-Brazilian musical gatherings.25 In literary journalism,
nostalgia did not imply a celebration of the slave past but of the traditional cultural practices that
Acerbi 101

represented the old city of Rio. Nostalgia produced an old Rio (i.e., Rio antigo) that was inhab-
ited by popular figures, such as street vendors, who occupied the colonial center that urban
renewal aimed to dismantle.26 With nostalgia conciliating tradition and modernity, both popular
and bourgeois worlds acquired recognition in the citys press, creating a hybrid urban carioca
identity. By the 1920s, Afro-Brazilian culture had entered spaces of bourgeois production, regu-
larly appearing on the cover illustrations of fashionable magazines that propagated the latest
urban fads.27 The movement of peddlers and chroniclers between elite and popular spaces con-
tributed in part toward the construction of the cariocas urban hybrid identity.

Vendors and Authorities

Street commerce was central to the nineteenth-century slave economy of the Atlantic port city.
Free and enslaved vendors distributed basic goods to residents through door-to-door selling,
street peddling, and open-air markets. Many enslaved men and women of African origin and
free/d people of Afro-Brazilian descent plied their wares throughout the city, working alongside
each other in the public and private spaces that street commerce created over time.28 With the
gradual turn to free labor, poor immigrants of Southern European, Syrio-Lebanese, and Asian
origin increasingly entered the world of street commerce. They participated in vending as a way
to survive while adopting and transforming practices that had been traditional to urban slave
society.29 Chronicle writings captured this transition marked by Afro-Brazilian and immigrant
participation, illustrating an early post-abolition cityscape that would remain in the urban imagi-
nary, especially in the representation of old Rio.
Vendors of African descentslave and freedistributed basic goods to urban residents,
working alongside each other and selling a variety of products from fruit, vegetables, meat,
water, milk, and prepared foods to manure and flowers. Some urban slaveowners particularly
sought the commercial savvy of Mina women, known for their vending skills acquired in Africa.30
Slaves who sold on the street returned earnings to their respective masters, normally keeping an
allowed, small percentage. Wage-earning slaves, or ganhadores, were part of an institution of
urban slave society known as the system of ganho. The supervision of vendors under the munici-
pal codes that outlined the ganho system then became a template for the regulation of street com-
merce in the early post-abolition period. The slave origins of street commerce regulation
paralleled the slave origins of the citys vending practices.31 The culture of street commerce that
chroniclers observed thus reflected the post-abolition urban environment.
As the free/d urban population increased during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and
especially after abolition in 1888, the system of ganho came to regulate both enslaved and free
street vendors, using similar licensing requirements for both groups. A patron or master regis-
tered the free or slave vendor with the municipality, becoming responsible for any fines the
vendor accrued. Authorities increasingly arrested and forced compliance of vendors who worked
illegally on the street.32 However, many free vendors preferred to remain unlicensed and untied
to formal networks of patronage. Even if unlicensed, many peddlers still worked with suppliers
and maintained unofficial patron-client relations. The chronicler Edmundo explained how
Portuguese immigrants were instructed first in their homeland to take up a Portuguese patron,
even if this meant living and working under slavelike conditions. Such was the experience of
many vendors known as caixeiros de venda selling cured meats, cheese, and wine.33
License records of the 1870s and 1880s show that before the abolition of slavery, Brazilians,
Africans, and Portuguese composed the majority of the free street vending population in Rio,
while Italian and Spaniard participation steadily gained more prominence. By the early twentieth
century, about one-third of the citys vendors were Brazilian-born, half of them being migrants
from outside the state. A smaller number of vendors over the age of fifty were African-born and
probably former slaves. Reflecting the high immigration rates following the end of slavery in
102 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

1888, Portuguese and Italian immigrants made up the majority of the vending population at the
turn of the century, with Italians even outnumbering Portuguese immigrants. Spanish, Syrio-
Lebanese, and Asian immigrants were also of notable presence. This pattern maintained itself
into the early twentieth century, with the number of African-born individuals eventually disap-
pearing.34 The multiethnic vending landscape of a city in transition captured the attention of
chronicle writers and other artists at the turn of the century.
The robust presence of street vendors encountered official measures aimed at eradicating
vestiges of the citys colonial and slave past. Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos (19021906) inau-
gurated an era of urban renewal, paving the way for Rios belle poque. A presidentially appointed
mayor, Passos suspended the municipal council for most of his term and engineered the recon-
struction of central Rio after Haussmans renovation of Paris.35 The city Pereira Passos envi-
sioned had no future for street vendors, as he explicitly stated in a 1903 municipal report.
Associating peddlers with beggars, vagrants, and homeless dogs, and driven by fears of conta-
gion, Passos reproduced the ideology of vagrancy that shaped the eras ideology of labor, public
order, and criminality.36

I started prohibiting the street sale of meats, displayed on tables and surrounded by the continuous flight
of insects, such a repugnant spectacle. I abolished as well the rustic practice of milking cows on the
street, spectacles of waste that nobody, certainly, would qualify as virtuous of a civilized society. . . . I
also ordered the immediate extinction of thousands of dogs that wander the city giving it the repugnant
appearance of certain Oriental cities. . . . I have put an end to the plague of lottery peddlers who pester
people with infernal loud voices, turning the city into a gambling house. Much of my preoccupation has
[also] gone into the extinction of public begging, punishing false beggars, and preventing real beggars
from exposing their miseries on the street.37

By 1904, the Passos reforms prohibited most forms of street commerce in Rio, restricting ped-
dlers to the outskirts of the city. However, with a steady population growth of 552, 651 in 1890
to 811,443 in 1900 to over a million in 1920, persistent vending practices continued to meet
consumer needs. The demolition and reconstruction of central Rio pushed poor residents to the
edges of the city, where unserviced shantytowns emerged.38 Responding to this shifting geogra-
phy, the municipality built fixed, open-air markets (feiras livres) to assist growing neighbor-
hoods far from the citys commercial center.39 However, the opening of feiras livres and the
downtown Municipal Market inaugurated in 1907 did not replace unlicensed street commerce. In
continuing to allow peddlers to work throughout the citys outskirts, the municipality acknowl-
edged consumer demand. Interested in the strategies of the urban poor in the citys growing
marginal areas, the writer Lima Barreto wrote about the unique marketeering practices of feiras
livres.40 Decades later, in 1936, the National Institute of History and Geography published the
newspaper columns of Professor Magalhes Corra that described the traditions of street selling
in the serto carioca, or Rios backlands.41
In spite of Pereira Passoss plan to eliminate most forms of street vending, peddlers contin-
ued to ply their wares throughout city streets. They did so in the face of increased policing and
criminalization of popular practices.42 The Penal Code of 1890 put vendors in a vulnerable
position as the police applied criminal law to regulate street commercial behavior. As new laws
outlined proper uses of urban space and commercial activity, ordinances empowered the police
to further crack down on unlicensed vending as well as begging and vagrancy. The town coun-
cil even prolonged the hours of police work into the night, arguing that most violations took
place after sundown.43 The police regularly detained vendors for Penal Code violations of
vagrancy and public disorder instead of municipal infractions for unlicensed vending. The
empowerment of the police invigorated policing practices of the previous century and slave
period.44
Acerbi 103

The workervagrant dichotomy became fundamental to practices of criminal identification.

The creation of a special police identification bureau in 1907 aimed to perfect the pseudoscien-
tific classification of criminal behavior while the contingent meaning of vagrancy applied to
diverse public behaviors deemed antisocial.45 The arrest of poor individuals working or social-
izing on the street was so extensive that the issue received special attention in the press after
groups of immigrants appealed to their foreign embassies to resist vagrancy charges.46 Vendors
in general protested increased policing and growing license fees and penalties. In 1913, vendors
planned a citywide work stoppage and organized a civic association to protect their rights.47
Some observers defended current methods of regulation and police intervention while others
condemned the extensive policing of street sellers. In 1911, a letter to the editor of the newspaper
A Noite rebuked the irrational [police] persecution of street vendors. The writer claimed to
represent the majority of the urban residents who depended on street sellers for the purchase of
basic goods, unlike the wealthy political class supplied by the best shops and numerous ser-
vants.48 The ongoing fight between vendors and the police gained protagonism in Rios urban
folklore, as reflected in recent pamphlet literature and Brazilian popular music portraying the
vendor as both a victim of policing and a hero of the poor.49

The Press and the Street

The decades of 1870 and 1880 witnessed the birth of several newspapers that became important
discussants of the capitals political culture. Founded in 1875, Gazeta de Notcias particularly
innovated the merging of journalism and literature. Its mission to be an inexpensive, popular,
[and] liberal newspaper contrasted with the more conservative Jornal do Comrcio established
in 1827.50 If the newspaper was to contribute to the development of an inclusive modern nation
then reaching a wide readership was fundamental.51 In 1872, one-third of Rios urban population
was literate. From 1890 to 1920, literacy rates were approximately 50% for men and 40% for
women, increasing to 66% for men and 55% for women in 1920.52 With an overall literacy rate
of 50% in the Brazilian capital, the audience that popular newspapers aimed to reach mostly
received the news through individuals who customarily read to small crowds or newsboys shout-
ing out the latest headlines.
During its early years, Gazeta de Notcias published the weekly column Street Occurrences.
Situated on the papers front page, the column listed the weeks police arrests, usually noting the
reasons for the detention of enslaved and free poor individuals. Gazeta de Notcias was one of
several newspapers helping fuel the publics fascination with the criminal world, supplying read-
ers with fragments of the urban spectacle.53 According to chronicler Edmundo, the newspapers
police account (informe policial) even became a major feature of modern urban culture in the
nations capital. He explains how newspapers were in a frenzy looking for sensationalist crimes
because of the general belief that urban criminality put the capital city of Brazil at the level of
the great metropoles of the world.54 Columnists writing about Street Occurrences often
reported conflicts between street sellers and the police. For example, one summer night in 1883,
two Englishmen peddling cigarettes around Rios port area were arrested for selling alleged sto-
len goods. In light of the current debates surrounding the transition from slave to free labor, the
column writer sardonically proclaimed that definitively, the freedom of commerce has ended in
this country!55
The frequent arrest of vendors was often a criticism in the Street Occurrences of the mid-
1880s. Contrary to official attitudes about peddling and vagrancy, columnists often defended the
plight of free vendors and, as the previous example demonstrates, their right to economic liberty.
After the abolition of slavery and the founding of the First Republic, newspapers focus on the
street and its daily occurrences moved on to adopt a more literary tone. Emerging in the latter half
of the nineteenth century, the development of the chronicle as a genre of literary journalism was
104 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

crucial to newspapers new relationship with the street and modern urban life. Literary journal-
ism continued to indulge readers desires for the urban spectacle, becoming a means by which
writers channeled the modern experience. The newspaper chronicle reproduced the idea that
modernity was inherently urban, and chroniclers viewed themselves as mediators between the
modernizing world and a rising population eager to be modern.56 Street vendors were part of the
urban modern landscape, and chroniclers recognized them as legitimate workers and members of
the city, as earlier Street Occurrences had suggested.
Related to the serialized romance, known in Brazil as the folhetim (adopted from the French
feuilleton), the chronicle engaged readers in similar ways as sensationalist police accounts did. In
the 1850s, writer Jos de Alencar had already captured readers with his romance novel O Guarani,
originally published as a folhetim in the newspaper Dirio de Rio de Janeiro. While Alencar
romanticized Brazils indigenous past to underscore freedom and independence, the subsequent
development of the chronicles focus on politics and urban culture reflected the intellectual
bridging of bourgeois and popular culture (while urban renewal attempted the reverse). As Julio
Ramos argues, Latin American writers chose the chronicle to discuss the heterogeneity of Latin
American modernity vis--vis a uniform European modernity. In Rio, this particularly came to
light at the turn of the century with the writings of Machado de Assis and other chroniclers.
According to Ramos, the Latin American newspaper industry developed to a greater extent than
book publishing, and consequently journalists and serial writers became mediators of the mod-
ernizing world more than novels.

The chronicle emerges as a showcase for modern life, produced for a cultured reader longing for a
foreign modernity. Certainly this gesture of advertising the modern, . . . the travelers mediation between
a foreign modernity and a desiring public makes possible the emergence of chronicle.57

Furthermore, the chronicle showcased modern urban life and its members. The newspaper and
the chronicle were generators of new national subjects and a pedagogical intervention basic
to the formation of citizenship.58 This process was based in a dialectical relationship, or a two-
way street, between chroniclers and readers, setting up the popular democratic interpellations
that would elevate popular culture to the realm of national identity.59 Urban life hence created the
chronicle just as it had developed longstanding vending practices. Rios chroniclers represented
the street vendor as an urban social type who was an official member of the cityone who like
the chronicler could move between different worlds, experience urban interconnection, and con-
tribute to the life of the city. As Joo do Rio pointed out, Oh! Those small ignored professions
that are integral parts of the mechanism of big cities!60
Latin American literary journalism, and in particular the chronicle, resulted from the relation-
ship between literatures market expansion and the rise of mass consumption. The decline of
literature as high art and the growth of a literary movement that, in Rio, had origins in the citys
fin-de-sicle bohemians contributed to the development of the chronicle. The historical research
of Jeffrey Needell identifies literary consumer fetishism as a major characteristic of the new
intellectual elite, arguing that Olavo Bilac particularly personified this transition.61 Bilac belonged
to a generation that created unprecedented openings for intellectuals of middling and sometimes
racially mixed backgrounds. The mulattos Joo do Rio and Lima Barreto, for example, published
extensively in the expanding newspaper market of the turn of the century.
The alliance between literature and journalism reflected the connection between Rios repub-
lican political elite and the established intellectual class, for the most part abolitionist, liberal, and
antimonarchical. The politics of patronage of the nineteenth century had transformed the arts and
letters into a means for social ascent, as exemplified in the rise of the mulatto Machado de Assis
(18391908). In 1897, Assis became chair of the newly established Brazilian Academy of Letters
and is today Brazils principal canonical author. Nation-building created the ground for a national
Acerbi 105

body of literature to flourish, and newspapers contributed to this effort, adopting literature into
their weekly repertoire. Assis authored the first series of chronicles in the Gazeta de Notcias
during the 1880s and 1890sa position that Bilac later inherited in 1890 and Joo do Rio in
1903. Similarly, the reputable Correio da Manha helped incorporate writer Lima Barreto into the
world of literary journalism. Literary critic Nicolau Sevcenko contends that the eras writer-
citizens (escritores-cidados) transformed the nations capital into the lettered city of the
First Republic. The intellectual man even became a republican social type (tipo social) with
special leverage for social and political commentary.62 The elite practice of conversing about arts
and letters in fashionable caf-salons now incorporated the street.63 While the caf-salon contin-
ued to be a popular place of elite sociability, the street became a site of participant observation
for the early republics writer-citizen. The public intellectual even became an urban social type
like the street vendor. Memorialist narrative and caricature in Edmudos work portrayed figures
like Bilac and Joo do Rio in the same style it would then depict and reminisce about the citys
peddlers.64
If Life supplied the chronicler, as Bilac contended, then the street was his middle man.
Conscious connection to street culture shaped the chronicler as mediator, especially explicit in
the figure of the flneur. Like most intellectuals of their time, chroniclers admired French cul-
ture.65 Literature from the modern center, such as Charles Baudelaires work, also served to de-
center modernity. The European flneur grew out of bourgeois sociability, deliberately adopting
marginality as his location within the city and within his class.66 Walter Benjamin reintroduced
the French poet Charles Baudelaire as the first who made aimless wandering through the city
streets itself a method of productive labor.67 Just as Paris created the flneur as a type, Rio
produced both chronicler and vendor types as well.68 Benjamin writes, the street becomes a
dwelling for the flneur, where he goes botanizing on the asphalt.69 Such was the methodol-
ogy of the Arcades Project and much of the chronicle writing that appeared in Rio in the early
1900s.70 In the words of Ramos,

The chronicler systematically attempts to rearticulate the fragments, narrativize the events, in order to
recreate the organicity that the city had destroyed. This will to order and integrate modern fragmentation,
in its turn, is semanticized in what we might call the rhetoric of strolling. . . . The stroll orders for the
subject the chaos of the city, establishing articulations, junctures, and bridges between disjointed spaces
(and events). Hence, we may read the rhetoric of strolling as the on-site position for the principle of
narrativity in the chronicle.71

The stroll, like chronicle writing, was a long poem of walking that reorganized the incoher-
ent, accidental, and contradictory journey that Bilac described as Life. Walking in the city
involved moving with its natural flow and therefore establishing connection between what was
seemingly separate. This sense of connection was perhaps more real for both chroniclers and
vendors than what had been heralded in the death of slavery and the birth of a (semi-) democratic
Republic. Current social theory contends that the figure [flneur] and the activity [flneurie]
appear regularly for social and cultural commentators to get some grip on the nature and implica-
tions of the conditions of modernity.72 Chroniclers explorations of urbanity, or flneurie,
revealed to them another Brazilian modern city and urban membership with rights to the city.

Chronicles of Street Vending

Throughout the nineteenth century, street commerce and peddlers were already common motifs
in the visual and literary traditions of the Brazilian capital city. The widespread portrayal of
African street sellers in the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Debret (17681848) shows the centrality
of street commerce in the market relations of urban slave society.73 Photography and fashionable
106 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

cartes-de-visite continued to represent Rios street vendors in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. With studios in the heart of the city center, photographers Christiano Jnior (1830
1902) and Marc Ferrez (18431923) captured nearby African and immigrant street vendors who
for the most part worked side by side. In photography and cartes-de-visite, street vendors became
image-objects that contributed to the narrative of racial classification and social Darwinism.74
Earlier writers such as Manoel Antnio de Almeida (18311861) and Joaquim Manoel de
Macedo (18201882) also described customary life in the Atlantic port city where street scenes
and peddlers were regular subjects of the urban landscape.75 Both Almeida and Macedo wrote
popular folhetins that were published in newspapers, contributing to narratives of urban everyday
life that were not shaped only by sensationalist police accounts. The local fluency of these mid-
century writers set a precedent for subsequent chroniclers who wrote about the citys shifting
vending landscape and the urban reforms of the early twentieth century.76
Chronicle literature discussing Rios vending practices after the abolition of slavery is a lens
on the citys uneven transition to free labor. A significant portion of the urban poor continued to
work in temporary or informal occupations as the transition to freedom hardly altered the work
processes or webs of sociability among afrodescendetes.77 Chroniclers constructed portrayals of
vending and vendors that reproduced relationships of power and at the same time pointed at
social inequality. From the panoramic view of a passerby or a window scene to the street-level
engagement with the little things, the chroniclers gaze mirrored the increasing approximation
of the individual to the urban crowd. In the way that Edgar Allan Poes Man of the Crowd was
not an equal until the writer-narrator stood up, exited the caf, and entered the democratizing
crowd, Rios chroniclers walked the city alongside their fellow urban travelers, street vendors.78
Nonetheless, the slave past shaped the urban crowd, a difference that even the most progressive
of writers, such as Lima Barreto, did not entirely overcome.
While difference and hierarchy shaped chroniclers impressions of urban life, nostalgia was
the social glue that particularly held their admiration of street culture. Yesterdays Peddlers by
Adelino Magalhes (18871969) narrates the youthful memories of an author, who with nine
years of age woke up one morning to the hubbub of peddlers outside his grandmothers house.
Written in the early twentieth century, the author reminisced about the window scene outside his
room where sellers of bread, ice-cream, peanuts, sweets, and knick-knacks interwove a festive
and harmonious urban tapestry.79 His description of black, Turkish, and Chinese vendors echoed
the racialization of social types depicted in earlier nineteenth-century photography, as the vibrant
street culture of his Rio was presented as a scene of a lost era. In the form of nostalgic identi-
fication, the author reconciled tradition and modernity at a time when policies of urban renewal
deemed popular practices like street vending incompatible with the modern city. For Magalhes,
however, vending was not an anomic legacy of slavery but a testament of authentic culture, even
if racialized or projected to disappear.
Magalhess window on the past differed from other chroniclers will to capture life from the
ground floor. The shift from the literary panoramic view to the street-level engagement with
little things particularly characterized the development of the chronicle.80 Because this litera-
ture often dealt with the quotidian and ephemeral, some critics argued the chronicle was a
minor form of literature. But it was those same characteristics that made the chronicle an
appropriate genre for the discussion of urban street life, also transient and momentary. Like the
segmented layout of the newspaper, the chronicle reflected urban fragmentation. The process of
walking, in contrast, aimed to establish connection and reinvent urban space. Critics of the
minor literature considered the chronicler an idle intellectual akin to the pathologies of the
urban crowd.81 But for the flneur, it was precisely the alliance with the crowd and the engage-
ment with the present moment that generated the thrill and essence of modern life.
In 1903, the journalist and chronicler Paulo Barreto joined the ranks of the reputable Gazeta
de Notcias. He became the papers main cronista after Bilacs departure in 1908. Using the
Acerbi 107

pseudonym Joo do Rio, he willfully adopted the name of the city as his own and the identity of
the flneur. By walking the city (flanar), the flneur embodied intellectual vagrancy. He even
wore the part with dandy suits and a monocle.

To flanar (Portuguese equivalent of the French flaner) is to be a vagabond and reflect, it is to be babasque
and comment, have the virus of observation connected to the virus of vagrancy. To flanar is to wander
around, morning, day, and night, enter the turning wheels of the populace. . . . Is it vagrancy? Perhaps.
But the distinction is to perambulate with intelligence.82

On the one hand, Joo do Rio continued to reproduce the official discourse that walking with-
out legitimate purpose was vagrancy, and many street vendors were imprisoned for that reason.
On the other hand, he represented vagrancy in a new light: a practice that could be productive.
Identifying intellectual labor as vagrant, or even a virus, conformed to the eras beliefs about
disease, anomie, and work.83 Yet to declare that he was perambulating with intelligence illus-
trated his superiority over the ordinary vagrant.84 Joo do Rios walking through the citys mar-
ginal areas remapped urban space and cultural membership in his writings. His will to experience
the crowd reconfigured urban membership similar to Lefebvres concept of the citadin. Urban
membership rooted in shared spatial inhabitance was more profound and meaningful than legal
political membership. It was in fact matter of the soul.
Joo do Rios classic The Enchanting Soul of the Streets first appeared in book form in 1908
and continues to be republished today. The book brought together a series of chronicles written
between 1904 and 1907 for the newspaper Gazeta de Notcias. A metaphor for the undying city,
the soul of the streets was indiscriminate as it interconnected aristocratic streets such as Rua
do Ouvidor with the more miserable ones like Rua da Misericrdia. Modish articles such as
The Elegant Sidewalk in the literary newspaper A Rua or Rua do Ouvidors weekly newsletter
column (signed by an anonymous Flneur) focused on the trends of the citys Europeanized elite.
In contrast, Joo do Rio claimed to expose the popular and genuine soul of the street. As European
fashions won over the hearts of elites, Joo do Rios street vendors entered [the street] as if new
territory to conquer. 85 The coexistence of diverse urban walkers remapping the street mani-
fested a right to the city that both elite and popular classes asserted according to their tastes and
interests.86
By walking the city, Joo do Rio was able to capture dialogues between street buyers and sell-
ers. Admiring the bargaining skills of peddlers, even if deceitful, the chronicler-flneur exposed
the savvy of urban survival. Joo do Rios modernity was also incoherent, disorganized, and
contradictory. The widespread street peddling of prayer cards illustrated, for example, a city
dominated by religiosity rather than secularism. Uncanonized prayers unknown to the pope
appeased all types of worries and superstitions that coexisted with desires to be modern.87
Tradition and modernity intermixed on the street, even in spaces where the streets sometimes
end, or the prison.88 During visiting days, Joo do Rio observed, street vending even occurred
outside the prison. Chronicler Orestes Barbosa later described how sellers of bread, newspapers,
and milk spread throughout Rios detention center, where social inequalities continued to exist.
For instance, milk was only sold to wealthier inmates and not to poorer inmates. Accordingly, the
poor or the favela [did] not drink milk.89 Vending practices entering the prison exemplified the
freedom of movement that peddlers valued, walking the prison as an extension of the city.
Limitations on vendors ability to move and sell throughout the city were thus often met with
resistance.
Literary journalism conceptualized the street beyond the dangers of criminality, delineating a
new carioca identity. Emerging from the transitional period from slavery to freedom was a het-
erogeneous modern subjectthe chronicler and the peddlerwho rubbed elbows with rich and
poor in an increasingly segregated city. To be modern went beyond mimesis. Modernity involved
108 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

moving between worlds, a form of double consciousness.90 Both chroniclers and vendors trav-
eled between popular and bourgeois urban spaces. Experiencing both worlds could create ambiv-
alent feelings toward progress, as exemplified in Barretos simultaneous fascination with the
Europeanized boulevard and his mourning of the demolished colonial center, or his taste for
modish cafs and sympathy toward the marginalized urban poor.91 Popular and elite spaces were
not necessarily separate and homogenous but mixed in the natural dynamics of urban life. Barreto
noted how the introduction of the trolley (bonde) particularly exemplified the citys segregation
as well as the cross-class interaction and horizontality of the urban crowd.

As all of Rio de Janeiro well knows, its social city center was relocated from Rua do Ouvidor to the
Avenida [Central], which is the starting point for the trolleys going to Jardim Botnico. The most curious
[persons] of the city gather there: elegant dames, handsome young men, couples in love, lovers, badauds,
street peddlers, and the hopeless.92

Many chroniclers identified the street and the city as having intrinsic qualities that shaped the
individual. Joo do Rios I Love the Street; Lima Barretos I Am Rio de Janeiro and The
City Lives in Me and I in Her; as well as Orestes Barbosas declaration, I Am the Street and
Nobody Will Deny Me That Right, all exemplify how the street was a source of both literary
creativity and human subjectivity.93 The street created social types, such as the peddler, the trick-
ster, and the chronicler, who all enjoyed particular protagonism in Rios urban folklore. In turn,
these social types were creative beings by walking the city, whether exercising literary or sur-
vival skills learned on the street. As Barreto observed, carioca social types reflected the particular
street cultures that raised them.

In big cities, the street created its own type, displaying the morals of its residents, marking their tastes,
ethics, customs, habits, ways, and political opinions . . . each street has a special stock of expressions,
ideas and tastes.94

The classification of social types had origins in nineteenth-century social Darwinism and
racialization. For example, cartes-de-visite illustrated vendor typesslave and free, immigrant
and Africanwho were represented as artifacts of slave society and then the post-slavery period.
Similarly, in 1916, the trendy political magazine Revista da Semana categorized certain open-air
markets in Rio according to indigenous, rural Northeastern, and African characteristics, such as
the African market (feira Africana).95 The same magazine published two decades later a one-
page summary displaying photographs of typical Rio peddlers, such as the seller of bread,
umbrellas, sweets, ice-cream, poultry, and meats. Next to the image of each vendor was his
respective vending cry, also a recognizable feature of everyday street life.96 Nineteenth-century
racial thinking also resonated in other visual representations of peddlers, as exemplified in the
caricatures of the black laundress or the Chinese vendor in Edmundos memorialist account.97
Peddler caricaturization, however, did not merely function as denigration. The multiethnic land-
scape that writers and artists distinguished challenged official attitudes that aimed to erase vend-
ing from urban market relations.
In the 1909 chronicle Street Types, Bilac noted the types (tipos da rua) who were landmarks
of nineteenth-century Rio street life. He lamented the loss of popular street characters like the
African prince Ob and the Paraguayan-war veteran Vinte e Nove, who he claimed did not roam
the citys streets anymore. The only survivor he could identify was Grito de Sogra, an older ped-
dler who regularly roamed the citys commercial center. The last time Bilac had seen Grito de
Sogra was on the Avenida Central, whose location on the new boulevard seemed anachronistic
and forewarning his eventual passing. At the height of Rios Belle poque, Bilac argued that
fashion was societys ultimate regulator. Grito da Sogra was lamentably too old and worn out to
Acerbi 109

be somebody of importance to the new modish and celebrity-obsessed carioca elite. But rather
than doom the peddler to extinction, Bilac identified Grito de Sogra as a genuine street type, a
true celebrity, and a hero like any other great man.98 Grito de Sogra was a survivor among the
fittest in an environment where European style determined progress and urban renewal targeted
street commerce.
Oscar Pederneiras, the older brother of the caricature artist Raul Pedernerias who drew street
types appearing in Edmundos work, also published regularly in the capitals press, most notably
in Folha Nova and the Dirio de Notcias. In 1921, the Brazilian Bibliographic Institute pub-
lished his work Street Types, a book that collected a series of poems chronicling twenty-one
street types of the late nineteenth century. Originality and savvy connected all tipos da rua who
sold some object of urban necessity. Pederneiras described how peddlers sold to the rich, sold
to the poor; how the shoeshine resented the municipal street tax; how newsboys worked daily
without fail; how African Mina porters greeted boats from Portugal and punctually (like an
Englishman) sold the paper O Atlntico throughout the city; how the Spanish immigrant ped-
dled knives in distinct dialect, and why the flneur and news reporter were also inherent to the
Brazilian capitals diverse urban environment. Pederneiras did not present these figures as social
types of a Darwinian order but rather as individuals in a symbiotic relationship with the city and
rooted in the negotiation of urban space and the will to be free (as particularly personified in
the Chinese immigrant).99
The return to an even deeper nostalgia framed the memorialist writings of Edmundo. Another
classic of Brazilian literature, The Rio de Janeiro of My Time was a multivolume edition that
looked back on the citys traditions of the turn of the century and the early twentieth century and
in particular Rios belle poque. Depictions of life in urban tenements and the neighborhoods
crowding the citys hills illustrated picturesque and romanticized images of the urban working
poor. Poverty and hard labor were evident, but instead of condemning the politics or economics
that generated marginality, Edmundo portrayed individuals practicing their right to the city. Even
if the law defined certain practices as illegal, such as the informal selling of lottery tickets,
Edmundo recognized peddlers as valid members of the Brazilian capital city.100 The ethnic,
racial, and socioeconomic differences that Edmundo illustrated were indicators of cultural diver-
sity rather than a stratified and static post-abolition society. Depictions of urban street characters
reproduced notions of a differentiated citizenship yet still with the common denominator of
shared inhabitance and rights to creatively remake urban space.
Writing in the 1930s, Edmundos Rio mirrored the street commerce of the early post-abolition
period. Portuguese vendors perambulated through the citys narrow streets selling poultry and
milk; men of African descent sold ice-cream and sweets, and their female counterparts, the
baianas and pretas minas, sold Afro-Brazilian prepared foods, spices, and dend oil. Syrio-
Lebanese vendors, men and women, sold phosphorous matches, while the Chinese were known
to peddle fish and shrimp. Italian men sold fish too, and many Italian men and boys peddled the
days newspapers. Some Italians were also itinerant musicians who lightened up the faces of the
poor with barrel organ music and nostalgic songs. Edmundo noted the particular ethnic charac-
teristics of vending cries and songs shaped by African, Italian, Portuguese, and Syrio-Lebanese
inflections, which were also present in Magalhess Yesterdays Peddlers. The entrepreneurial
spirit of the vendor materialized in his voice, pierced through the chaos of urban life and occu-
pied its right to the city. By the 1920s, many urban intellectuals considered the citys street lan-
guage an authentic feature of carioca identity, as exemplified in the 1922 publication of Raul
Pederneiras popular dictionary, Gerigona carioca.101 Edmundos memorialist account is on its
own an index describing the types of characters who occupied the streets of Rio the first decades
following the abolition of slavery.
The chronicler Lima Barreto, himself the son of a peddler turned typographer, was particu-
larly sensitive to life in the citys marginal areas. Realism eclipsed nostalgia in his social
110 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

commentary of the city and its inhabitants. Published in 1920, the chronicle The Bargain tells
the story of an Armenian peddler who goes door-to-door selling Catholic saint statuettes.102
Roaming the dusty and sunbathed streets of a working-class suburb, the Armenian peddler
meets a confident Portuguese vendor who has been very successful at selling sardines. The
Portuguese immigrant then thinks to himself that the Armenian immigrant, who he derogatively
calls Turkish (turco), is simply not a capable seller. He decides to trade merchandise with the
Armenian vendor only to prove to himself that he is a superior seller. The Armenian vendor
agrees to give the prospect a chance, and, to his surprise, sells the rest of the sardines quite rap-
idly and profitably. In contrast, the calculating and self-interested Portuguese vendor ironically
comes across the same disinterest his Armenian counterpart had met among suburb residents,
unable to rid himself of the newly acquired yet unprofitable religious figurines.
Barretos chronicle The Bargain paints a common scene in the vending landscape of Rio,
interweaving the transitory paths of immigrant and Brazilian street sellers. The author did not
construct the street occurrence to intentionally evoke nostalgia or to identify social types that
made up the world of street commerce. Although those may have been characteristics or conse-
quences, Barreto was much more interested in displaying unequal relationships of power shaped
by ethnicity and social status. The archetypal, tightfisted Portuguese immigrant, jumping at the
chance of a bargain, closes the day with a market loss, while the humble Armenian immigrant
unexpectedly witnesses the tables turn in his favor. Thus was the beginning of a successful com-
mercial experience for the new Syrio-Lebanese immigrant and the decline of an older Portuguese
generation. In time, Syrio-Lebanese immigrants would come to dominate a central part of Rios
downtown commerce, where today stands the statue of the entrepreneurial mascate (peddler).103
Barretos chronicle also involves a passerby, a Brazilian black who walks with an air of
authority, a petulant creole, very black, a dark and unpleasant black. The Afro-Brazilian man,
who appears as the archetypal street trickster, addresses the Armenian immigrant with judgmen-
tal or vigilant airs, identifying him as an uncivilized man and a heretic of the Christian faith.
The Afro-Brazilian man then softens his tone and asks the Armenian vendor if he eats pork. At
that point the peddler looks into the distance and with great melancholia remembers his Armenian
village. Moments later, he explains that he does eat pork and is a Christian. The Afro-Brazilian
man then gives the Armenian immigrant a tip: the good Christian should not pronounce the
words to sell or to buy Catholic saints (considered to be a sacrilege), but should instead use
the term to exchange (saints for money). This, in fact, was the Armenians first lesson in the art
of street vending right before he met the Portuguese sardine seller. Although not a vendor, the
Afro-Brazilian man may have had vending experience given the tip he decides to share with the
Armenian immigrant. His local knowledge reflects a past when slaves and Africans were pre-
dominant in urban street commerce, while the transition to freedom, along with ensuing immi-
gration and urban renewal, contributed to the displacement of many African-descended
vendors.

Conclusion
In 1911, Rios municipal chamber finally approved the demolition of street kiosks that dotted the
city since the last decades of the nineteenth century. A landmark of Old Rio, as portrayed in the
photographs of municipal photographer Augusto Malta, most advocates of urban reform desired
the disappearance of kiosks because of their unsanitary conditions. One newspaper argued, for
example, that such specimen [kiosks] should go directly to the museum as authentic evidence of
Old Rios bad taste.104 Street peddlers occupied, in contrast, a privileged position in the publics
general view although many urban reformers desired their disappearance as well. Peddlers were
also remnants of the old city, as seen in the photographs of Ferrez, chronicle writings, and current
depictions of Old Rio. However, according to many residents of twentieth-century Rio,
Acerbi 111

peddlers did not deserve persecution or extinction like their fellow kiosks. By walking the city,
street vendors adapted to new conditions and provided urban inhabitants with basic needs, facili-
tating the circulation of goods in a city where most people did not have easy access to stores,
markets, and public transportation.
Through the process of walking the city, chroniclers themselves were vendors of stories of
urban life, supplying urban residents who eagerly waited for the weekly chronicle. Newspapers
contributed to the formation of carioca identity and urban belonging while chroniclers mediated
the modern experience in the early republican years. With modern embrace also came the threat
of tradition and popular practice delaying or subverting Brazilian progress. Municipal reformers
considered most forms of street commerce a blot on the modern urban landscape, whereas
working-class inhabitants and chroniclers defended peddlers importance to the city. Chronicles
narrating vending practices presented an urban membership alternative to the official citizenship
that considered the street as an inadequate place for worker-citizens. Participants of street com-
merce and their literary counterparts, chroniclers, claimed their right to the city through shared
inhabitance. In walking the city, the citadin as both chronicler and peddler demarcated citizen-
ship through everyday use of shared urban space, resisting official limitations imposed by post-
abolition law and carried out by the police.
Chronicles about Rios vending practices at the turn of the century and into the twentieth
century illustrate street commerces centrality to the post-abolition market relations of the capital
city. The period following the early twentieth century would witness the further growth of street
commerce as an informal economy of urban Brazil. The texts discussed here represent street
commerce at a crossroads, provisioning urban residents who were accustomed to buying basic
goods from vendors, on the one side, and enduring restrictive municipal measures that aimed to
eliminate or marginalize vending, on the other. Chronicles tended to illustrate the former as
newspaper reporting discussed the plight of vendors and consumers in the face of the ongoing
arrest and detention of street sellers. Today, frictions between peddlers and the police reappear in
the news, popular songs, and other visual and written texts often as examples of police repression
and the difficulty of urban survival.105 Fundamental to the marketeering of basic goods in the city
of Rio, street commerce continues to occupy a contested liminal space between convenient
necessity, inadequacy, and nuisance.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my anonymous peer reviewers whose contributions and comments undoubtedly made
this a better article. Teresa Meade, Stephen Schechter and participants of the symposium Brasil-EUA:
Novas Geraes, Novos Olhares also offered valuable insights, for which I am grateful.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author received a Fulbright-IIE scholarship that contributed to the research of this article.

Notes
1. Olavo Bilac, Crnica, Gazeta de Notcias, February 7, 1904; also in Antnio Dimas, Bilac, o
Jornalista. Crnicas: volume 1 (So Paulo: Editora da Universidade de So Paulo), 63134. Translation
by author.
2. Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans.
John D. Blanco (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
112 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

3. Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle poque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de
Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Nicolau Sevcenko, A literatura como misso
(So Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1983).
4. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
5. Sidney Chalhoub, Margarida de Souza Neves, and Leonardo Affonso de Miranda Pereira, eds.,
Histria em cousas midas: Captulos de histria social da crnica no Brasil (Campinas: Editora
Unicamp, 2005).
6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
This article does not aim to provide a gendered analysis of chroniclers and peddlers.
7. Ibid, 95.
8. Ibid, 101.
9. Ibid, 101.
10. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007).
11. Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Holston, Insurgent Citizenship; Olivia Maria Gomes da
Cunha and Flvio dos Santos Gomes, eds., Quase-cidado: Histriass e antropologias da ps-emanci-
pao no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Fundao Getlio Vargas, 2007); Wlamyra Ribeiro de Albuquerque,
O jogo da dissimulao: Abolio e cidadania negra no Brasil (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
2009); Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race,
Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000).
12. Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities.
13. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. and ed., Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996); Eugene J. McCann, Space, Citizenship, and the Right to the City: A Brief
Overview, GeoJournal 58, no. 23 (2002): 7779; Marc Purcell, Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to
the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant, GeoJournal 58, no. 23 (2002): 99108.
14. Zuenir Ventura, Cidade Partida (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994); Barbara Weinstein,
Postcolonial Brazil, in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, ed. Joseph C. Moya
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 233.
15. Fernando Gralha de Souza, Augusto Malta e o olhar oficial - Fotografia, cotidiano e memria no Rio
de Janeiro - 1903/1936, Histria, imagem, e narrativas 2, no. 1 (2006): 7293.
16. Privilgios Industrias. Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
17. Imposto de Comrcio Ambulante, Boletim da Cmara Municipal, Prefeitura do Distrito Federal,
Secretaria do Gabinete do Prefeito, 1924 (Rio de Janeiro, 1924), 7074.
18. Luiz Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Conquista, 1957).
19. Monica Pimenta Velloso, A cultura das ruas no Rio de Janeiro (1900-1930): Mediaes, linguagens
e espaos (Rio de Janeiro: Edies Casa Rui Barbosa, 2004); Carlos Maul, Pequenas histrias verda-
deiras do Rio antigo; o pitoresco e o ignorado da hisria carioca (Rio de Janeiro: Edies de Ouro,
1965).
20. Ambulantes, Revista da Semana, March 30, 1935.
21. Magalhes Correa, O serto carioca.
22. For a discussion of the other city (outra cidade) and the urban intellectual as mediator see Velloso,
A cultura das ruas; Amy Chazkel, The Crnica, the City, and the Invention of the Underworld: Rio
de Janeiro, 1889-1922, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de Amrica Latina y el Caribe 12, no. 1 (2001):
79105.
23. Jos Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro e a Repblica que no foi (So Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 1987).
24. Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha, Ecos da folia: Uma histria social do carnaval carioca entre 1880
e 1920 (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2001).
25. Roberto Moura, Tia Ciata e a Pequena frica no Rio de Janeiro, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Coleo
Biblioteca Carioca, 1995).
26. Gilberto Ferrez, O Rio Antigo de Marc Ferrez (So Paulo: Ex Libris, 1984), chap. 6.
27. Velloso, A cultura das ruas; Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha, Ecos da folia. Antonio Herculano
Lopes, Entre a Europa e a Africa: a inveno do carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Top Books, 2000.
Acerbi 113

28. Flvio dos Santos Gomes, Carlos Eugnio Lbano Soares, and Juliana Faria Barreto, No labirinto das
naes: africanos e identidades no Rio de Janeiro, sculo XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional,
2005); Zephyr Frank, Dutras World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004 ; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street:
The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988); Thomas Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro in a 19th-Century
City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro: 1808-
1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Luis Carlos Soares, O povo de cam na capital
do Brasil: a escravido urbana no Rio de Janeiro do sculo XIX (Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2005).
29. Gilberto Ferrez, O Rio Antigo de Marc Ferrez.
30. Ceclia Moreira Soares, As Ganhadeiras: mulher e resistncia em Salvador no sculo XIX, Afro-
sia 17 (1996). The term Mina is a Portuguese ethnic designation of enslaved Africans, men and
women, who were brought to the Americas from the African region of the Gold Coast. Mina is
the Portuguese word for mine and ships departing from the Costa da Mina (Gold Coast) carried
enslaved individuals of the designated Mina ethnicity.
31. Paul C. Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candombl (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 77.
32. Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 6-1-59, Escravos ao ganho.; also see the archives records
on Ganhadores livres.
33. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 359; Gladys Sabina Ribeiro, Mata Galegos: Os portu-
gueses e os conflitos de trabalho na Repblica Velha (So Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1989); Fabiane
Popinigis, Proletrios de casaca: Trabalhadores do comrcio carioca, 1850-1911 (Campinas: Editora
da Unicamp, 2007).
34. Arquivo Pblico do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Livros da Casa de Deteno, 1860-1925.
35. Jaime Larry Benchimol, Pereira Passos: Um Haussmann tropical: A renovao urbana da cidade
do Rio de Janeiro no incio do sculo XX (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Carioca, 1990); Oswaldo Porto
Rocha, A era das demolies: Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1870-1920 (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca
Carioca, 1983); Teresa A. Meade, Civilizing Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-
1930 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
36. Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle
poque (So Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986); Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Inteno e gesto: Pessoa, cor
e produo cotidiana da (in)diferena no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Aquivo Nacional, 2002).
37. Benchimol, Pereira Passos, 27778, quoted from Boletim da Intendncia (jul/set 1903), 3233.
38. Teresa Meade, Civilizing Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930 (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
39. Leis e Posturas Municipais, Legislao Distrital, Prefeito Dr. Francisco Pereira Passos, Boletim da
Intendncia Municipal (Rio de Janeiro, 1906).
40. Afonso Carlos Marques dos Santos, ed., O Rio de Janeiro de Lima Barreto (Rio de Janeiro: Rioarte,
1983).
41. Corra, O serto carioca.
42. Amy Chazkel, Laws of Chance: Brazils Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
43. Posturas e Leis Circulantes e Editais da Polcia Militar, Boletim da Intendncia Municipal (Rio de
Janeiro, 1903).
44. Queixas e Reclamaes, 1861-1889, AGCRJ; Flvio dos Santos Gomes and Carlos Eugnio Lbano
Soares, Dizem as quitandeiras . . . : Ocupaes e identidades tnicas em uma cidade escravista: Rio
de Janeiro, sculo XIX, Acervo: Revista do Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro 15, no. 2 (2002): 316.
45. Berenice Brando, A polcia e a fora policial no Rio de Janeiro (Srie Estudos PUC/RJ, 1981);
Cunha, Inteno e gesto, 32.
46. Marcos Luiz Bretas, A guerra das ruas: povo e polcia na cidade do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro:
Arquivo Nacional, 1997), 1012; Marcos Luiz Bretas, Ordem na cidade: o exerccio cotidiano da
autoriedade policial no Rio de Janeiro, 1907-1930 (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1997).
47. Ficar o Rio sem abulates? A Noite, January 8, 1913; Coluna Operria, A poca, 1913.
48. A perseguio aos vendedores ambulantes no razoavel. Uma carta A Noite, A Noite, November
24, 1911.
114 Journal of Urban History 40(1)

49. A briga do rapa com o camel, Literatura de Cordel (Rio de Janeiro, 2004); O Rappa, O que sobrou
do cu, Lado B Lado A (Rio de Janeiro: Warner, 1999).
50. Quoted in Clara Miguel Asperti, A vida carioca nos jornais: Gazeta de noticias e a defesa da crnica,
Contempornea 7 (2006): 4655; For a history of Rios newspapers see, Marialva Barbosa, Os donos
do Rio: imprensa, poder e pblico, 1880-1920 (Rio de Janeiro: Vcio de Leitura, 2000).
51. For further reading on the role of the press in nation building see, Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
52. June E. Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Womens Rights in Brazil, 1850-1940
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 22.
53. Marcos Luiz Bretas, What the Eyes Cant See: Stories from Rio de Janeiros Prisons, in The Birth of
the Penitentiary System in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control,
1830-1940, ed. Ricardo Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996):
10122.
54. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 88586.
55. Ocorrncias de rua, Gazeta de Notcias, January 23, 1883.
56. Ramos, Divergent Modernities; Velloso, A cultura das ruas.
57. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, 86.
58. Ibid., 78, 8889; Ramos draws from Andersons argument that newspapers were key to the formation
of new national subjects. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
59. Chalhoub et al., Histria em cousas midas, 15. On Louis Althussers concept of interpellation and the
role of popular culture in the national political language, see Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in
Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977).
60. Joo do Rio [pseud.], A alma encantadora das ruas (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 97.
61. Needell, A Tropical Belle poque, 200.
62. Nicolau Sevcenko, Literatura como misso:Tenses sociais e criao cultural na Primeira Repblica
(So Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985), 99.
63. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in
British America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
64. See the caricatures in Luiz Edmudo, O Rio de Janeiro do me tempo.
65. Needell, A Tropical Belle poque.
66. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1993); Keith Tester, ed., The Flneur (New York: Routledge, 1994).
67. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 185.
68. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 15152.
69. David Frisby, The flneur in social theory, in The Flneur, ed. Keith Tester (New York: Routledge,
1994), 93.
70. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2002).
71. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, 126.
72. Keith Tester, Introduction , in The Flaneur, ed. Keith Tester (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1.
73. Jean-Baptiste Debret, Viagem Pitoresca e Histrica ao Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Itatiaia, 1989).
74. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997).
75. Manoel Antnio de Almeida, Memrias de um sargento de milcias (New York: Luso-Brazilian Books,
[1852] 2005); Joaquim Manoel de Macedo, Um passeio pela cidade do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro:
Livrraria Garnier, 1862) and Memrias da rua Ouvidor (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Perseverana, 1878).
76. Other writing on street vendors and urban life during Rios belle poque not discussed in this article
can be found in the magazine O Malho.
77. Weinstein, Post-colonial Brazil, 218; Meade, Civilizing Rio; Livros da Casa da Deteno, Arquivo
Pblico do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro.
78. Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd (1840); Walter Benjamin, The Paris of the Second Empire
in Baudelaire, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,
Acerbi 115

MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) and The Writer of Modern Life; Joo do Rio, Vida Vertiginosa
(Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1911).
79. Adelino Magalhaes, Ambulantes de ontem, in Obras completas, vol. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria
Editra Valverde S.A., 1946), 47273.
80. Chalhoub et al, Histria em cousas midas.
81. Ibid., 98.
82. Joo do Rio, A alma encantadora das ruas, 5051.
83. See footnote 16; discussions about the over-policing of vendors appeared in several newspaper articles
in A poca and A Noite throughout 1912 and 1913. For court records involving street vendors, see
Processos das Pretorias Criminais do Rio de Janeiro, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
84. For a discussion about racial thinking in Joo do Rio, see Juliana Farias, Joo do Rio e os Africanos:
Raa e cincia nas crnicas da Belle poque carioca, Revista de Histria 162 (2010): 24370.
85. The column A calada elegante appeared in A Rua; and the column signed by the anonymous
Flneur in Rua do Ouvidor; Joo do Rio, A alma Encantadora das ruas, 97.
86. James Hoston, ed, Cities and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
87. Joo do Rio, A alma encatadora das ruas, 115.
88. Ibid., 313.
89. Orestes Barbosa, Bambamb (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Carioca, [1923] 1993), 10.
90. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Boston: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
91. Velloso, A cultura das ruas, 83 and 97; Beatriz Rezende, Lima Barreto e o Rio de Janeiro em fragmen-
tos (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ, 1993), 106.
92. Quoted in Rezende, Lima Barreto e o Rio de Janeiro em fragmentos, 104.
93. Quoted in Velloso, A cultura das ruas, 4346, 78. The self-embodiment of Rios marginal areas is
present in popular music, from Z Ketis Voz do morro (1955) to Seu Jorges Eu sou favela
(2004).
94. Quoted in Rezende, Lima Barreto e o Rio de Janeiro em fragmentos, 146.
95. Velloso, A cultura das ruas.
96. Ambulantes, Revista da Semana, March 30, 1935. For the classification of Rio neighborhoods in the
1916 Revista da Semana, see Velloso, A cultura das ruas, 25.
97. Raul Pederneiras (18741953); other Rio caricaturists of the era who drew images of peddlers are
Armando Pacheco, Calitxo, and A.D. The drawings appear in Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu
tempo.
98. Olavo Bilac, Typos de rua, Ironia e piedade (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Francisco Alves, 1916):
21517.
99. Oscar Pederneiras, Typos da Rua; K da China (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Bibliographico Brasileiro,
1921).
100. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 864; Amy Chazkel, Laws of Chance.
101. Velloso, A cultura das ruas, 65.
102. Lima Barreto, A Barganha, Lima Barreto: Contos completos (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
2010).
103. Susanne Worcman, Saara (Rio de Janeiro: Reluma Dumar, 2000). Statue O Mascate located on
Rua Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro.
104. Falta cair o ltimo kiosque, Noite, 27 November 1911.
105. Several newspaper articles have appeared in the past recent years about conflicts between vendors and
the police in the cities of Rio and So Paulo. See also footnote 49.

Author Biography
Patricia Acerbi is an assistant professor of history at The Sage Colleges in New York. Dr. Acerbis research
on urban street commerce during the last decades of slavery and the early post-abolition period in Rio de
Janeiro has received funding from the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.