Women Street Vendors in Rio de Janeiro

During the nineteenth century, European travelers spent much more time in Rio de Janeiro than in Salvador. This preference is partially explained because, beginning in 1763, Rio de Janeiro was Brazil’s capital.

Figure 9.1. Les rafraichissemens de l’après dîner sur la Place du Palais (After-Dinner Refreshments on the Palace Square), in Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1834–39), vol. 2, plate 9.

When French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret published his travelogue Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil in 1834, nearly 40 percent of the enslaved population of Rio de Janeiro was composed of women. In the 1870s and 1880s, on the eve of the abolition of slavery in Brazil, women composed nearly 50 percent of the city’s population who lived in bondage.⁵² Not surprisingly, Debret’s travel account features numerous lithographs representing bondswomen street vendors in Rio de Janeiro.

Debret’s lithograph offers an accurate portrait of the large square where the palace and other official buildings housing the royal government were located. Two enslaved women street vendors occupy the center of the image. Although barefoot, each woman is elegantly dressed, wearing a long skirt, a blouse, and a headscarf. The first bondswoman in the foreground is wearing large earrings. A typical Afro-Brazilian shawl (pano da costa) wraps one of her shoulders as well. Each enslaved woman holds a tray with sweets and a clay jar with water or other refreshments that they offer to white customers sitting on the pier parapet. The site where the busy square faced the wharf and where officers, sailors, and traders circulated all day long was an excellent spot for enslaved women to sell food and drinks.⁵⁵ Moreover, it was also an excellent spot to meet and gossip with other enslaved women street vendors and domestic servants. As depicted on the left side, in the background of the image, one of the main features of the square was its water fountain. As also represented on the lithograph, bondswomen visited the fountain, where they daily filled containers with water and carried them on top of their heads to their owners’ households.

Visual and written descriptions of women street vendors and marketeers in Rio de Janeiro rarely indicate whether they were enslaved or freed, but in the early nineteenth century among freeborn and freed ones, most were Black women.⁵⁶ Likewise, the references to their birthplaces in Africa are often vague.

Although in smaller numbers, Black women also worked in permanent rented stalls of the Market Square, a public marketplace, next to the Palace Square in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century. Here bondswomen were prevented from renting a stall, but they could work in the stands rented by their owners. Freedwomen, however, were able to rent a permanent place in this market, where they sold vegetables, legumes, eggs, and poultry. Existing records show that most of these freedwomen occupying permanent booths were born in the Bight of Benin in West Africa, and regardless of their actual specific ethnic origins, they were identified as Mina.⁵⁹ The presence of this specific group of African women marketeers who were able to purchase their own freedom and lease a permanent stand in the most important nineteenth-century public market in Rio de Janeiro reveals their great sense of resilience by also suggesting that their activities as sellers had deep connections with market traditions they brought to Brazil from their homelands.

Travelers who visited Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century noticed the presence of Mina women street vendors. Elizabeth Agassiz, the naturalist from the United States who accompanied her husband, the naturalist Louis Agassiz, in an expedition to Brazil between 1865 and 1866, visited Rio de Janeiro’s Market Square in 1865. In an entry of her journal, later published as a travelogue, she commented how she loved to visit the market not only to see oranges, flowers, and vegetables but also to enjoy “watching the picturesque negro groups selling their wares or sitting about in knots to gossip.” According to her, “the fine-looking athletic negroes of a nobler type, at least physically, than any we see in the States, are the so-called Mina negroes.” Agassiz emphasized the “quite... dignified presence” of Mina enslaved women as marketeers and street sellers. The couple’s pseudoscientific and racist views on the alleged racial superiority of women labeled as Mina reflected the racial hierarchies created by the slave market. Still, despite using the term “Mina,” Agassiz also suggested that these women street vendors were Muslims, but more probably she was rather implying that in fact they were Yoruba speakers.

Agassiz’s detailed description is accompanied by one wood engraving based on a studio portrait (figure 9.2) taken by French photographer Théophile Auguste Stahl (alias Augusto Stahl) who worked with him during his trip in Brazil. The photograph clearly shows the woman’s facial scarifications, and identifies her as Ijesa, a term referring to a subgroup of Yoruba speakers in the region of today’s southwest Nigeria. Similar to the women street vendors depicted in Debret’s engraving (see figure 9.1), she wears a headscarf, and a huge shawl (pano da costa), a garment discussed in chapter 8. According to Agassiz, “the women always wear a high muslin turban, and a long, bright-colored shawl, either crossed on the breast and thrown carelessly over the shoulder, or, if the day be chilly, drawn closely around them, their arms hidden in its folds.

Figure 9.2. Augusto Stahl, Studio Portrait: Mina Igeichà, Rio de Janeiro, 1865. Louis Agassiz Photographic Collection. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 2004.1.436.1.73, Cambridge, MA, United States.

As in Bahia, the ages of Black women street vendors in Rio de Janeiro varied. They could be as young as in their twenties or as old as in their sixties. Selling food allowed them to accumulate resources, opening paths for social mobility. Historian Juliana Barreto Farias explored two interesting cases. For example, the freedwoman Emília Soares do Patrocínio, who rented stalls in the Market Square, also owned several enslaved women, who probably worked for her in the market as well. Like their owner did, these bondswomen were able to purchase their own freedom by the middle of the nineteenth century.⁶¹ Another freedwoman, Maria Rosa da Conceição, made good profits with two vegetable stalls that she rented at Rio de Janeiro’s Market Square. After her death, her postmortem inventory, opened in 1868, included real estate, jewelry, and nine bondspeople, including five quitandeiras who certainly worked for her selling food.⁶²

The examples of these two freedwomen are not isolated or unique. The wills of several West African–born freedwomen in Rio de Janeiro show that once they purchased their own freedom, they acquired enslaved African-born women to work for them.

But what is certain is that either in Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, or other cities in Brazil, enslaved and freed African-born women often appear in existing visual and written records performing marketing activities. For example, Portuguese photographer Christiano Junior, who was active in Brazil in the 1860s, took studio photographs of Black women street vendors in Rio de Janeiro. Although staged, these pictures evoke their activities, including their way of dressing and their work tools. One photograph (figure 9.3) features a woman organizing the items on her wooden tray stand. Although wearing a shawl and earrings, she is modestly dressed. We do not know if her legal status is that of a free, freed, or enslaved woman, though the absence of facial scarifications can be an indication that she was born in Brazil. But another photograph (figure 9.4) featuring a boy and a barefoot woman street vendor clearly shows the woman’s facial scarifications, allowing viewers to identify the sitter as a Yoruba speaker. Although her clothes are not elaborate, she is wearing silver or gold earrings as well as a voluminous headscarf similar to those worn by women labeled as “Mina.”

Figure 9.3. Christiano Junior, Studio Portrait: Woman Standing Wearing Shawl, Brazil, 1864–66. Albumen silver print, 3.4 × 2.1 inches. The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2017. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States.

Figure 9.4. Christiano Junior, Studio Portrait: Seated Woman and Standing Boy Street Vendors with Vegetable Baskets, Brazil, 1864. Albumen silver print, 3.6 × 2.1 inches. The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2017. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States.

Nevertheless, despite the visibility of West African women born in the Bight of Benin in travel accounts and existing licenses allowing them to operate in Rio de Janeiro rented stalls of the Market Square, nineteenth-century newspaper ads show that a huge number of enslaved street vendors were born in West Central Africa. This information is not surprising because this area provided the largest number of enslaved persons exported to Brazil in general and to the country’s southeast region in particular. In addition, there were hundreds of runaway ads and daily announcements seeking to sell and rent enslaved African-born women street vendors identified by ethnonyms such as Congo, Benguela, Monjolo, Cabinda, Rebolo, Libola, Casange, and Moçambique, all of them evoking regions of provenance in West Central Africa and Southeast Africa. Sometimes indicating how much money these peddlers made on a daily basis, the ads reveal that enslaved women street vendors of all ages were active in Rio de Janeiro. Most ads underscore that bondswomen for sale were also good cooks and washerwomen. One advertisement, for example, announced the sale of an African-born woman aged between twenty-six and twenty-eight, identified as Benguela, who was being sold because her owner had died. Among her abilities described in the ad, she knew how to “well refine sugar, make sweets, and almonds” as well as to cook, take care of the house, and look after the children; she was also described as loyal and diligent.⁶⁴

As in other cities of the Americas, public authorities constantly targeted Rio de Janeiro’s enslaved women marketeers and hawkers. Their presence in the streets and the marketplace was often associated with disorder. Bondswomen street vendors were arrested for a variety of reasons during the nineteenth century, but especially because city officers suspected they had run away. Other enslaved women were also arrested with the accusation of failing to carry the appropriate permission to sell food or for vagrancy and alleged inappropriate public behavior.⁶⁵ Despite these hindrances, in a society where white women were prevented from going out unattended, enslaved women understood their ability to work as street vendors as a form of resistance against slavery and the Brazilian patriarchal system.