When nineteenth-century French artist François-Auguste Biard first set foot in Bahia in 1858, he expected to see beautiful Black women in the city’s streets:
“I have heard that if you want to see beautiful Negresses you must go to Bahia. Indeed, I saw several who were not bad-looking, but all of them were swarming in the narrow streets of the low town, where French, English, Portuguese, Jewish, and Catholic merchants lived in an insalubrious atmosphere.”1 This passage of his illustrated travelogue, briefly mentioned in chapter 8, is one of the many references to the preponderance of Black women in Brazilian urban areas.
Although nearly two-thirds of the enslaved Africans who had disembarked on the country’s shores during the era of the Atlantic slave trade were young males, enslaved women were generally concentrated in higher proportions in cities. This concentration of bondswomen in urban areas, mentioned in chapter 8, can be explained by the overall sexual division of enslaved labor in Brazil and Latin America. Slave owners purchased enslaved men to toil on plantations, whereas they acquired enslaved women to perform domestic work. For example, in Rio de Janeiro, the city with the largest enslaved population in Brazil and the Americas as a whole, most bondspeople performed domestic tasks that were assigned to women. Therefore, among domestic laborers, bondswomen predominated.2Enslaved women in the Americas incorporated social and cultural practices from West Africa and West Central Africa, regions where women were often in charge of cooking and also occupied relevant positions as traders, peddlers, and vendors in urban markets before and during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Yet, in African ports and the hinterland, as well as in the urban areas of the Americas, marketing activities were not performed exclusively by enslaved Black women. In several cities of the Spanish Americas, Indigenous women dominated the marketplace. In cities such as Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and Charleston, Black women street vendors could be free, freed, or enslaved. Wills, travelogues, engravings, and photographs shed light on the activities of bondswomen street vendors and marketeers, including the products they sold, their customers, the areas of the cities where they were established, the material culture involved in their activities, and the specific arrangements they had with their owners and enslaved peers. These enslaved women greatly contributed to the economies of cities that could not have survived without their tireless activity. Whereas in urban areas, bondswomen prepared and cooked meals in the domestic space, both enslaved and freed Black women sold food in the markets and streets. Ultimately, in their various social, cultural, and economic roles, enslaved women had a visible, if not preponderant, presence in urban areas of the Americas. They literally fed the population of cities of the coastal and mining regions of the Americas, especially in the West Indies, in Brazil, and even in some cities of Latin America and the United States.