“A Long Poem of Walking”

Urban Space and Citizenship

By walking the city, chroniclers and peddlers exercised their right to the city. Lefebvre’s 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 production of space. If socioeconomic inequalities divided the urban population, sociocultural practices conversely connected diverse areas and peoples of the city. ¹⁹ Entrenched in the city’s 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 walking” 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 chronicle writing and street vending practices, as Bilac ingeniously indentified, illustrates the development 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 homogeneous. The movement between different worlds suggested a possible horizontality in difference and at the same time indicated social inequality. Chroniclers exposed conflicting images of European progress and Brazilian underdevelopment, never fully embracing or rejecting the modern 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 slumming, 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 transportation, 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 sanitizing 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 represented the old city of Rio. Nostalgia produced an “old Rio” (i.e., Rio antigo) that was inhabited 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 city’s press, creating a hybrid urban carioca identity. By the 1920s, Afro-Brazilian culture had entered spaces of bourgeois production, regularly 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 contributed in part toward the construction of the carioca’s 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 imaginary, especially in the representation of “old Rio.”

Vendors of African descent—slave and free—distributed 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 municipal codes that outlined the ganho system then became a template for the regulation of street commerce in the early post-abolition period. The slave origins of street commerce regulation paralleled the slave origins of the city’s 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 registered 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 city’s 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 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 disappearing. 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 city’s colonial and slave past. Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos (1902–1906) inaugurated an era of urban renewal, paving the way for Rio’s belle époque. A presidentially appointed mayor, Passos suspended the municipal council for most of his term and engineered the reconstruction of central Rio after Haussman’s renovation of Paris. ³⁵ The city Pereira Passos envisioned 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 contagion, Passos reproduced the ideology of vagrancy that shaped the era’s 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 peddlers 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 geography, the municipality built fixed, open-air markets (feiras livres) to assist growing neighborhoods far from the city’s 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 city’s outskirts, the municipality acknowledged consumer demand. Interested in the strategies of the urban poor in the city’s 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 Magalhães Corrêa that described the traditions of street selling in the sertão carioca, or Rio’s backlands. ⁴¹

In spite of Pereira Passos’s plan to eliminate most forms of street vending, peddlers continued 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 council 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

The worker–vagrant dichotomy became fundamental to practices of criminal identification. The creation of a special police identification bureau in 1907 aimed to perfect the pseudoscientific 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 socializing 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 servants.” ⁴⁸ The ongoing fight between vendors and the police gained protagonism in Rio’s 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 capital’s political culture. Founded in 1875, Gazeta de Notícias 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 Comércio 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 Rio’s 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 shouting out the latest headlines.

During its early years, Gazeta de Notícias published the weekly column “Street Occurrences.” Situated on the paper’s front page, the column listed the week’s police arrests, usually noting the reasons for the detention of enslaved and free poor individuals. Gazeta de Notícias was one of several newspapers helping fuel the public’s fascination with the criminal world, supplying readers with fragments of the urban spectacle. ⁵³ According to chronicler Edmundo, the newspaper’s police account (informe policial) even became a major feature of modern urban culture in the nation’s 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 Rio’s port area were arrested for selling alleged stolen 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 crucial to newspapers’ new relationship with the street and modern urban life. Literary journalism 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 José de Alencar had already captured readers with his romance novel O Guarani, originally published as a folhetim in the newspaper Diário de Rio de Janeiro. While Alencar romanticized Brazil’s indigenous past to underscore freedom and independence, the subsequent development of the chronicle’s 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-à-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 modernizing 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 traveler’s 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. Rio’s chroniclers represented the street vendor as an urban social type who was an official member of the city—one who like the chronicler could move between different worlds, experience urban interconnection, and contribute to the life of the city. As João 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 relationship between literature’s 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 city’s fin-de-siècle 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 João 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 Rio’s republican 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 (1839–1908). In 1897, Assis became chair of the newly established Brazilian Academy of Letters and is today Brazil’s principal canonical author. Nation-building created the ground for a national 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 Notícias during the 1880s and 1890s—a position that Bilac later inherited in 1890 and João 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 era’s “writer-citizens” (escritores-cidadãos) transformed the nation’s 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 café-salons now incorporated the street. ⁶³ While the café-salon continued to be a popular place of elite sociability, the street became a site of participant observation for the early republic’s writer-citizen. The public intellectual even became an urban social type like the street vendor. Memorialist narrative and caricature in Edmudo’s work portrayed figures like Bilac and João do Rio in the same style it would then depict and reminisce about the city’s 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 flâneur. Like most intellectuals of their time, chroniclers admired French culture. ⁶⁵ Literature from the modern center, such as Charles Baudelaire’s work, also served to de-center modernity. The European flâneur 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 flâneur as a type,” Rio produced both chronicler and vendor types as well. ⁶⁸ Benjamin writes, “the street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur,” where he “goes botanizing on the asphalt.” ⁶⁹ Such was the methodology 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 incoherent, 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 [flâneur] and the activity [flâneurie] appear regularly for social and cultural commentators to get some grip on the nature and implications of the conditions of modernity.” ⁷² Chroniclers’ explorations of urbanity, or flâneurie, 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 (1768–1848) shows the centrality of street commerce in the market relations of urban slave society. ⁷³ Photography and fashionable cartes-de-visite continued to represent Rio’s street vendors in the latter half of the nineteenth century. With studios in the heart of the city center, photographers Christiano Júnior (1830–1902) and Marc Ferrez (1843–1923) 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 Antônio de Almeida (1831–1861) and Joaquim Manoel de Macedo (1820–1882) 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 midcentury writers set a precedent for subsequent chroniclers who wrote about the city’s shifting vending landscape and the urban reforms of the early twentieth century. ⁷⁶

Chronicle literature discussing Rio’s vending practices after the abolition of slavery is a lens on the city’s 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 chronicler’s gaze mirrored the increasing approximation of the individual to the urban crowd. In the way that Edgar Allan Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” was not an equal until the writer-narrator stood up, exited the café, and entered the democratizing crowd, Rio’s 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. “Yesterday’s Peddler’s” by Adelino Magalhães (1887–1969) narrates the youthful memories of an author, who with nine years of age woke up one morning to the hubbub of peddlers outside his grandmother’s 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 identification, 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 Magalhães, however, vending was not an anomic legacy of slavery but a testament of authentic culture, even if racialized or projected to disappear.

Magalhães’s 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 literature 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 flâneur, it was precisely the alliance with the crowd and the engagement 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 Notícias. He became the paper’s main cronista after Bilac’s departure in 1908. Using the pseudonym João do Rio, he willfully adopted the name of the city as his own and the identity of the flâneur. By walking the city (flanar), the flâneur 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, João do Rio continued to reproduce the official discourse that walking without 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 era’s beliefs about disease, anomie, and work. ⁸³ Yet to declare that he was “perambulating with intelligence” illustrated his superiority over the ordinary vagrant. ⁸⁴ João do Rio’s walking through the city’s marginal areas remapped urban space and cultural membership in his writings. His will to experience the crowd reconfigured urban membership similar to Lefebvre’s 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.”

João do Rio’s 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 Notícias. 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 Misericórdia. Modish articles such as “The Elegant Sidewalk” in the literary newspaper A Rua or Rua do Ouvidor’s weekly newsletter column (signed by an anonymous Flâneur) focused on the trends of the city’s Europeanized elite. In contrast, João do Rio claimed to expose the popular and genuine soul of the street. As European fashions won over the hearts of elites, João do Rio’s “street vendors entered [the street] as if new territory to conquer.” ⁸⁵ The coexistence of diverse urban walkers remapping the street manifested a right to the city that both elite and popular classes asserted according to their tastes and interests. ⁸⁶

By walking the city, João do Rio was able to capture dialogues between street buyers and sellers. Admiring the bargaining skills of peddlers, even if deceitful, the chronicler-flâneur exposed the savvy of urban survival. João do Rio’s 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, João do Rio observed, street vending even occurred outside the prison. Chronicler Orestes Barbosa later described how sellers of bread, newspapers, and milk spread throughout Rio’s 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 heterogeneous modern subject—the chronicler and the peddler—who rubbed elbows with rich and poor in an increasingly segregated city. To be modern went beyond mimesis. Modernity involved moving between worlds, a form of double consciousness. ⁹⁰ Both chroniclers and vendors traveled between popular and bourgeois urban spaces. Experiencing both worlds could create ambivalent feelings toward progress, as exemplified in Barreto’s simultaneous fascination with the Europeanized boulevard and his mourning of the demolished colonial center, or his taste for modish cafés 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 city’s 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 Botânico. 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. João do Rio’s “I Love the Street;” Lima Barreto’s “I Am Rio de Janeiro” and “The City Lives in Me and I in Her;” as well as Orestes Barbosa’s 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 trickster, and the chronicler, who all enjoyed particular protagonism in Rio’s urban folklore. In turn, these social types were creative beings by walking the city, whether exercising literary or survival 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 types—slave and free, immigrant and African—who 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 Edmundo’s memorialist account. ⁹⁷ Peddler caricaturization, however, did not merely function as denigration. The multiethnic landscape that writers and artists distinguished challenged official attitudes that aimed to erase vending 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 Obá and the Paraguayan-war veteran Vinte e Nove, who he claimed did not roam the city’s streets anymore. The only survivor he could identify was Grito de Sogra, an older peddler who regularly roamed the city’s 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 Rio’s Belle Époque, Bilac argued that fashion was society’s ultimate regulator. Grito da Sogra was lamentably too old and worn out to 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 Edmundo’s work, also published regularly in the capital’s press, most notably in Folha Nova and the Diário de Notícias. In 1921, the Brazilian Bibliographic Institute published 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 Atlântico throughout the city; how the Spanish immigrant peddled knives in distinct dialect, and why the flâneur and news reporter were also inherent to the Brazilian capital’s 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 city’s traditions of the turn of the century and the early twentieth century and in particular Rio’s belle époque. Depictions of life in urban tenements and the neighborhoods crowding the city’s 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 diversity 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, Edmundo’s Rio mirrored the street commerce of the early post-abolition period. Portuguese vendors perambulated through the city’s 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 dendê 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 day’s 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 characteristics of vending cries and songs shaped by African, Italian, Portuguese, and Syrio-Lebanese inflections, which were also present in Magalhães’s “Yesterday’s Peddlers.” The entrepreneurial spirit of the vendor materialized in his voice, pierced through the chaos of urban life and occupied its right to the city. By the 1920s, many urban intellectuals considered the city’s street language an authentic feature of carioca identity, as exemplified in the 1922 publication of Raul Pederneiras’ popular dictionary, Gerigonça carioca. ¹⁰¹ Edmundo’s 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 particularly sensitive to life in the city’s marginal areas. Realism eclipsed nostalgia in his social 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 rapidly 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.

Barreto’s 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 consequences, 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 commercial 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 Rio’s downtown commerce, where today stands the statue of the entrepreneurial mascate (peddler). ¹⁰³

Barreto’s 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 “judgmental 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 Armenian’s 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 predominant in urban street commerce, while the transition to freedom, along with ensuing immigration and urban renewal, contributed to the displacement of many African-descended vendors.

Conclusion

In 1911, Rio’s 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 Rio’s bad taste.” ¹⁰⁴ Street peddlers occupied, in contrast, a privileged position in the public’s 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, 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, facilitating 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 commerce 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 citizenship through everyday use of shared urban space, resisting official limitations imposed by post-abolition law and carried out by the police.

Chronicles about Rio’s vending practices at the turn of the century and into the twentieth century illustrate street commerce’s 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.