Schacht Faculty Research Grant Proposal
Patricia Acerbi, PhD
Assistant Professor of History
March 2013
Tel: 518-703-5942
Email: acerbp@sage.edu
Summary/abstract
I am requesting funds to present a paper at a conference in June in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The
presentation is also part of my larger book-length project. As explained in the attached letter of
invitation, the conference will bring together historians in the United States and scholars in
Brazil who will be discussing new research and new approaches in the study of Brazilian history.
I will be presenting an abridged version of an article that is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban
History (2014) titled “‘A Long Poem of Walking’: Vendors, Flâneurs, and Chronicles of Postabolition Rio de Janeiro.” The abstract follows.
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-flâneurs 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 city’s 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.
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The conference paper described above concentrates on the issue of post-abolition
citizenship in Brazil, which is central to my book-length project (and dissertation revisions),
explained elsewhere in this proposal. As a panelist in the three-day conference bringing together
emerging and prominent US and Brazilian historians, I will have the opportunity to discuss the
broader implications of my work on citizenship, free labor, and race in post-abolition Brazil.
Background, purpose, and goals/aims
Presenting the paper “‘A Long Poem of Walking’: Vendors, Flâneurs, and Chronicles of Postabolition Rio de Janeiro” in the context of a specialized conference will allow me to discuss
research and historiography that is connected to my book-length project. The conference will
provide the opportunity to engage with Brazilian- and US-based historians who would otherwise
have an indirect influence on my scholarship. In addition to being a unique opportunity to
network with specialists in my field, participating in this invitation-only conference will generate
the opportunity for publishing my work in Brazil
My book-length project is a historical study of street commerce in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
during the last decades of slavery and the early post-abolition period (1850-1925). In the capital
city of the most enduring slave society of the Americas, street vending – long the province of
African slaves and free blacks – became a site of expanded European immigrant participation
and shifting state disciplinary policies at the turn of the twentieth century. During this
transitional era, street vendors used individually and collectively the language of citizenship and
free labor to claim legitimacy in the face of repressive measures that marginalized their trade.
My analysis of the bureaucratic, regulatory, legal, and associative worlds of Afro-descended and
immigrant street peddlers illuminates the social ruptures and continuities in Brazil at this crucial
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transitional moment. Examining Brazilian urban street vending during the age of emancipation
has far-reaching implications for the bridging cultures of American slave and post-slave
societies, cities and citizenship, and formal and informal economies.
My dissertation revisions stress how street vendors created relationships and engaged
ideas about citizenship and free labor, thereby participating in formal political and economic
structures of the new post-abolition urban environment. Of particular importance was the
cooperation among former slaves and African descendants alongside recent immigrants who
engaged in street commerce. Although an increasingly marginalized group, vendors negotiated
the conditions of economic liberty and political freedom through formal institutions, such as
courts and associations. A look at three crucial areas advances this argument: 1) vendor-supplier
relations before and after the abolition of slavery in 1888, 2) peddlers’ appeal to honor and
citizenship in post-abolition court records, and 3) the civic and labor associations that street
sellers formed to secure economic liberty and claim citizenship. My study contributes to recent
historical and anthropological scholarship that argues that the working poor, largely black or
diasporic in Atlantic port cities such as Rio, experienced liberty and citizenship as provisional or
contingent conditions. My project advances the current discussion of experience by exploring the
political responses of street vendors.
During the period of slavery, urban vendors solicited municipal licenses to legally sell on
the street. Masters, patrons, or employers, who were often suppliers, became the guarantors that
permitted slaves or free vendors to obtain a license. Such patron-client relationships shaped the
socio-economic networks of street commerce in urban slave society and the early post-abolition
period. My dissertation examines the profile of vendors and their guarantors by analyzing the
municipal registry of vendor licenses. My review of these documents outlines the urban
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geography of street commerce along vendor-supplier lines in order to illustrate how stores and
shops sustained a robust street commerce in central Rio. Patron-client relations were not only the
backbone of the urban slave economy but would come to shape vendors’ understandings of
participation and partnership in free commerce. A main strategy of one vendor association in the
post-abolition period, for example, was to create an alliance with suppliers in order to cement a
united front against the state’s overregulation of street commerce.
The new Penal Code of 1890 became an instrument in the regulation of street commerce
following the founding of the First Republic in 1889. Since criminal rather than municipalcommercial law regulated the public behavior of street sellers, vendors increasingly found
themselves arrested and detained for vagrancy and public disorder. In the court records that
followed, defendants used the language of citizenship and free labor to define vendors as
legitimate workers and honorable citizens. My rereading of their appeals seeks to deepen our
understanding of how post-abolition Brazilians defined citizenship and free labor. Vendors who
were detained negotiated with the law as individual citizens and as workers in a free market.
Street sellers were economic and political actors in a post-slave society who defended their
occupation as a practice of free commerce and republican citizenship. Court records illustrate
that they were aware of this distinction, which became more apparent in their collective
organizing in the early twentieth century.
Street vendors challenged increased policing and criminal law by converting their mutual
aid societies into civic and labor associations that organized vendors, waged newspaper
campaigns, defended vendors in court, paid the fines of those found guilty, and organized forms
of nonviolent protest. This issue is unexplored in my dissertation and constitutes a new chapter
in the manuscript. Street vendors’ associative activities and social networks demonstrate not only
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the connectedness of their economic and political lives, but the order and organization of an
“informal” economy that scholars have often deemed “chaotic” and “unstructured.” One civic
association of street vendors in 1912 shared similarities with the mission of mutual aid societies
while participating in the wave of labor organizing that swept the capital city in the early
twentieth century. Poor, black, and immigrant vendors, no less than other more economically
fortunate segments of society, resorted to formal institutions in the organizations of their
members, the articulation of their interests, and the redress of their grievances. As natural as this
may seem, this finding of connectedness is a major revision of the long-held myth of a formalinformal divide.
Methodology, timeline, and evaluation plan
As mentioned, I plan to present a paper that is an abridged version of an article that has been
peer-reviewed and approved for journal publication. In May 2013, I will be summarizing and
translating into Portuguese my paper for the conference. The presentation of this paper will also
take place in the context of dissertation revisions. The conference in June will open a one-year
period in which I expect to significantly revise three chapters of my book manuscript, and
conference participants will peer-review parts of my work and shape revisions.
While the transformation from dissertation to book will involve the revision of all
chapters, the grant would help support the rewriting of chapters one, four, and five, or
approximately half of the book manuscript. New evidence and new approaches will shape the
crafting of these three chapters over next year. The use of reference management software
Endote x6 will help organize the process from dissertation to book. My book manuscript,
currently titled Street Occupations: Urban Vending in Rio de Janeiro, 1850-1925, is outlined as
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follows: (Introduction) From Ganhadores to Ambulantes; (1) Between Slavery and Freedom; (2)
A Policed Workplace; (3) Inventing a New Street Commerce; (4) Being Citizens; (5) Vendors
Organize; (6) Enduring Types; Epilogue and Conclusion.
The first two chapters examine the practice of street commerce in urban slave society
during the gradual decline of Brazilian slavery (1850-1888). The last decades of slavery
witnessed a shift in the regulation of street commerce, as it came to be viewed as undesired
public behavior rather than commercial practice. Chapter three explores how inventors who
requested patents for new vending technologies also promised to improve the working conditions
that the abolition of slavery heralded. The shift to free labor and the ensuing changes in the
nation’s legal system, however, offered a less positive outlook on street commerce. Chapter four
analyzes how vendors who were frequently detained for vagrancy or public disorder used the
language of republican citizenship to resist criminal charges. Vendors also participated in mutual
aid societies and labor associations to claim their rights to the city, as chapter five explains.
Chapter six discusses the persistence of street commerce throughout this transitional era,
especially the representation of vendors in the city’s literary and visual tradition. The Epilogue
explains how vendor associations in the 1930s still reflected migrant and cooperative influences.
The twelve-month period of revisions dedicates three months of revision per chapter
(chapters one, four, and five) and three months to the review of the remaining chapters and the
manuscript in general. Chapter one introduces street commerce as an urban economic practice
that was rooted in slave society while adapting to the conditions of free labor. The in-between
character of street commerce had both structural and experiential dimensions during the last
decades of Brazilian slavery, as revealed in the collection of licenses that vendors solicited from
the municipal government. The system of ganho in the city organized licensing and the vending
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activities of both slave and free workers. The masters of slaves and the patrons of free workers
became the guarantors that vendors needed to obtain vending licenses. My dissertation explores
the patron-client relations that shaped street commerce, and my revision of license requests aims
to use spatial analysis using Microsoft Access to analyze the socio-demographics of street
commerce. The business locations of masters and patrons appearing in license requests help map
the connections between street vending and fixed commerce, such as stores, warehouses, and
small factories. These relations explain the persistence of vending in certain areas of the city and
associations with suppliers.
Chapter four examines the court trials that often followed the detention of peddlers for
vagrancy, public disorder, or physical assault. Court records involving vendors appeared only
after the passing of the 1890 Penal Code and the abolition of slavery in 1888. Vendors claimed
urban citizenship against alleged criminal charges, and defense attorneys and witnesses often
described them as honest and honorable workers and citizens. Analyzing these court records will
reveal how post-abolition citizenship was both experience and language shaped by liberal
ideology and redefined in everyday legal culture. Vendors negotiated with the law primarily as
individual citizens and then free workers. As a result, street vendors were economic and political
actors. Awareness of this distinction shaped many vendors’ understandings of citizenship, also
was also apparent in their associations of the early twentieth century.
Chapter five introduces new research that was supported by the NEH Summer Stipend
program in 2012. This is a new chapter in the book manuscript based on primary sources on
vendor organizing and their resistance to unfair municipal and police regulation. Vendors formed
three labor associations that were registered as civil societies. These records contain information
regarding the mission, the membership, and the funds of vendor associations, which operated
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like mutual aid societies. Members included immigrant and Brazilian street vendors and some
suppliers, illustrating the wide, multi-ethnic networks of street commerce. Newspapers even
reported the associative life of vendors, who were part of a larger world of organized labor in
early twentieth-century Rio. Vendors’ organizations, the practice of an occupation, and
resistance to unfair regulation all displayed their right to the city and citizenship.
The field research in primary sources for this project is complete. I am fluent in
Portuguese and thus able to read and understand the sources. A distinct group of primary sources
gathered in Brazilian archives form the basis of each chapter in the book manuscript. As
explained above, chapters one, four, and five require the most revisions according to new
primary source analysis. Access to relevant secondary sources supporting the process of revision
is available through Sage’s library service.
The revision of chapter one particularly involves the reorganization of quantitative data
using Microsoft Access and spatial analysis. Writing the dissertation refined my skills in
organizing and interpreting data using Access. The objective of the revision is to establish the
relationships between vendors and suppliers according to their residences and business locations
in the city. Correlating this data in Access illustrates the geographical connections between street
vending and fixed commercial establishments as well as vendor-supplier networks that persisted
into the twentieth century.
The revision of chapter four is based on the close rereading of approximately one
hundred court records, which I have transcribed. Vendors and their defendants used the language
of citizenship and free labor to legitimize street commerce as a line of work. Suppliers often
made positive statements about the reliability and work habits of vendors, for example. These
court cases will be revisited using qualitative analysis that counterpoints the experience of
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citizenship as individual rights with notions of citizenship rooted in urban membership and
community.
Chapter five further examines the vendor in the context of community, particularly
associative life. Thanks to the support from the NEH Summer Stipend program, I collected
sources from the registry of mutual aid and civil societies at the National Archive in Rio de
Janeiro. Recent scholarship has established connections between nineteenth-century mutual aid
societies and twentieth-century civic and labor associations. Organized street commerce at the
turn of the century was no exception. The reading of these sources along with many newspaper
writings that reported the activities of vendor and other labor associations forms the basis of this
new chapter.
Outcomes, significance, and future directions
I intend to publish my book manuscript with an English-language academic press and will be
sending a book proposal to potential publishers this summer. The article I will be presenting has
already been accepted for publication by the Journal of Urban History. The possibility exists for
the translation of my work into Portuguese and its publication in Brazil, as has often been the
case with academic works on Brazilian history first published in the United States. Participation
in the conference described above will create opportunities for publication in Brazil.
The book will focus on eighty years in Brazilian history during slavery and the First
Republic that witnessed the origins of modern street commerce in Rio as an economic activity, a
source for civic organization, and an issue in the visioning of the city’s future. The article
focuses on a particular experience of urban citizenship and sense of belonging in the postabolition environment. Conclusions will be drawn regarding the connectedness of urban
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formality and informality and the civic participation of marginal communities. The article and
book’s intended audience is academic and general with particular appeal for historians of
slavery, emancipation, civil rights, and labor, and readers interested in the rich heritage of urban
institutions like street commerce.
Budget
Travel dates: 6/17/2013—6/24/2013 (Arrival 6/18 morning; Conference 6/19-6/21; Brief visit to
libraries/archives and scholarly meetings 6/22-6/24; Departure 6/24 night)
Air travel from Albany to Rio de Janeiro
$1,254.75
Accommodations
$150/night x 6
Food
$300
Other travel (taxi, metro/subway)
$100
Endnote x6
$299.95
Software for maintaining reference libraries (supporting dissertation revisions)
TOTAL:
$2854.70
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