Everyday chronicles: labor relations and sociabilities among women of color with the occupation of Quitandeiras in Rio de Janeiro, from 1870 to 1888
Quitandeiras. Labor relations. Gender relations. Sociabilities. Rio de Janeiro.
This research aims to understand the experiences of women of color who worked as street vendors, called quitandeiras: their labor relations and arrangements, and their struggles for spaces and permanence in the areas that now comprise the downtown of the city of Rio de Janeiro and its surroundings, in the period from 1870 to 1888. To find out aspects of these women's daily lives, we used widely circulated daily newspapers in the city, especially the advertisement sections, dictionaries, the “Almanak Laemmert”, censuses, photographs, travel narratives and maps. In dialogue with these sources and the historiography, it was possible to perceive some configurations of the supply and demand for their services, discuss gender relations, and the diversity of possibles labor arrangements – and we suggest that these women played an important role in reinventing them. Furthermore, we noticed that there was a growing demand for their services, and the renting might have been the most common arrangement for employing quitandeiras throughout the city. We emphasize their role in the “cidade negra” (or “black city”) by investigating the construction of communities and the importance of the occupation for their sociabilities, and by providing potential interpretations for the so-called “casas de quitandeiras”, also for the struggles and disputes these workers faced. Through these discussions, we seek to insert enslaved and free women with this specific occupation into the debates on the reorganization of labor in the context of the end of slavery as a system in Brazil.