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.
In "Conceiving Freedom," Camillia Cowling examines how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the slow process of emancipation in Cuba and Brazil. Slavery in those countries ended only after the rest of Latin America had abolished the "peculiar institution" and even after the American Civil War.
