Benedita da Silva, the first black vice-governor of Rio de Janeiro, is profiled. Through her efforts to keep hope alive for impoverished Brazilians, laws were recently enacted to protect the rights of Rio's street children and domestic employees.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
326 p., Shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published: London : Latin American Bureau, 2006., 205 p., Relates the story of Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, an organization based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that employs music and an appreciation for black culture to inspire residents of shantytowns to resist the drugs that are ruining their neighborhoods.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
226 p., A cultural history of Rio de Janeiro's Cidade Nova from the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808. The area became identified with Afro-descendents and Ashkenazi Jews, but it was also inhabited by Spanish, Italian and Portuguese immigrants. discusses intersections between literary imaginaries and urban experiences, involving topics like social segregation, cultural memory, spatial porosity, cognitive mapping, and the idea of the city as a palimpsest.
