Rio's Tenements
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the Empire, grew fast with the arrival of immigrants, above all Portuguese, and of freedmen and poor workers from other provinces. Collective housing, rows of little houses around a yard with tubs and taps, rented by the room, was the dwelling place of these people close to their work. The tenements became a subject for doctors and authorities, who saw them as breeding grounds for diseases such as yellow fever, which appears in the book carrying off two Italians (chapter XIII). In 1893, three years after the novel, the city government tore down the most famous of them, the Cabeça de Porco, in the city center. Botafogo, where the action takes place, was then a neighborhood in expansion, where townhouses of wealthy merchants coexisted with stores, quarries and tenements.
Portuguese in Commerce
João Romão, Miranda, Jerônimo and a large part of the residents are Portuguese, and the book records a real presence: in nineteenth-century Rio the Portuguese immigrants dominated retail trade, the groceries and the warehouses, and many, like Miranda, grew rich through import trade. The Portuguese government customarily honored wealthy emigrants with titles, and that is how Miranda becomes the Baron of Freixal (chapter X). The rivalry between Brazilians and Portuguese, which erupts in Piedade's brawl with Rita (chapter XVI), was also a matter of the street.
Slavery and Abolition
The novel is set when slavery was still legal, and that is why João Romão's deception works: Bertoleza believes herself free because of a false letter (chapter I) and, years later, can be claimed by the son of her former master in the name of the law (chapter XXIII). The book was published in 1890, two years after the Lei Áurea of May 13, 1888, which abolished slavery in Brazil, and its final scene brings together the returned enslaved woman and a committee of abolitionists who arrive in tailcoats bearing a diploma for the shopkeeper.
Naturalism
The Slum is the best-known novel of Brazilian naturalism, the school that, in the wake of Émile Zola, took characters as products of the environment, heredity and instinct, and described the lives of the poor and the body without the conventions of the romantic novel. Aluísio Azevedo's narrator explains actions through heat, through the land, through the fermentation of the place, and speaks of the tenement's people with images of animals, plants and machines (chapter III, chapter XX). This is the book's way of narrating, and much of its force lies in the contrast between this outside gaze and the precision with which it shows money passing from hand to hand.