Terms

Tenement Popular collective housing, made up of small houses or rented rooms around a shared courtyard, with shared tanks and latrines. It was the typical home of poor workers, immigrants, and freed people in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. The name comes from the... Shopkeeper Owner of a venda, the small shop of dry and wet goods that sold everything retail: provisions, kerosene, tobacco, and cachaça. In nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro it was a typical trade of Portuguese immigrants, who often started out as clerks, sleeping on... Quarryman A worker who digs and extracts stone in a quarry, breaking the rock with pick, drill, and gunpowder and cutting it into blocks for construction and paving. It was a heavy and dangerous trade, subject to collapses and accidents with explosives, practiced by... Capoeira A fight of Afro-Brazilian origin, made of kicks with the legs, sweeps, and headbutts, practiced in the streets of Brazilian cities in the nineteenth century. In Rio de Janeiro, capoeiras gathered in rival groups, the maltas, and were hunted by the police; the... Carapicus Nickname of the residents of João Romão's tenement in the novel, as opposed to the cabeças-de-gato, the residents of the rival tenement that appears in the neighborhood. Carapicu is the name of a small, common fish on the Brazilian coast. The rivalry between... Manumission Freedom granted to an enslaved person by the owner and recorded in a letter of manumission, or bought by the enslaved person with his or her own savings. In Brazil, the Free Womb Law of 1871 guaranteed the enslaved the right to accumulate a peculium to buy... Milreis Unit of Brazilian currency in the Empire and the First Republic, written 1$000. The real, in the plural réis, was the unit of account: a thousand réis made one milreis, and a thousand milreis made one conto de réis, the measure of fortunes. In the novel,... Pagode Popular festivity with music, dance, food, and drink, held in houses, backyards, or courtyards, common in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. The word designated the festive gathering, not yet the genre of samba that, at the end of the twentieth century, came... Parati Popular name for cachaça in Brazil, taken from the city of Paraty, on the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro, whose sugarcane distilleries had been famous for their cane spirit since colonial times. In the nineteenth century the word served as a synonym for... Wet nurse A woman who nursed another family's child, for pay or out of obligation, and who for this had to have given birth shortly before. In slaveholding Brazil, enslaved women were hired out as wet nurses, and the newspapers carried advertisements offering or...