This book documents an attempt during the final decades of the twentieth century and first years of the new millennium to produce a social formation called Bahia that might stand as an origin of the Brazilian nation so as to be reworked for profit and the education of consent. Essential to this project has been a working-class neighborhood, officially delimited a red light district, that, due to its ongoing association with producers of commodifiable culture, required cleansing. Here, the new technologies that might produce a “real Bahia” that is palatable to planners and seemingly enjoyable to locals and tourists alike produce dangers and benefits for the state and the identities it seeks to engender. This has led to the meticulously planned yet haltingly orchestrated expulsion of the majority of Pelourinho residents to those far-off neighborhoods where, in the logic of the state that is and is not their own, they belong. This has factored into contemporary shifts in Brazilian racial politics in a number of complex ways.