Black Brotherhood Urbanism / Urbanismo Confrarial Negro: Forms of Urban Expansion Designed by Mutual Aid Societies of Freedmen and Slaves

Mutual aid societies of Black freedmen and enslaved individuals, particularly Bantu-speaking groups from what is now Angola and Mozambique, came together to build municipal welfare and self-governance organizations known as brotherhoods or confraternal organizations. These groups emerged in the cities of coastal Brazil to build and maintain churches, with a spectrum of political, economic, and social functions. Black brotherhood, here, challenges the idea that urban modernity and contemporary city geography were colonial by-products—images of social hygiene imposed from above by Iberian or French planners. This chapter features Black brotherhoods’ role in urban expansion and resists dominant white narratives of the contemporary city’s formation. It offers Black individual spaces not solely defined by subalternity or reification. Churches built and operated by Black mutual aid societies made essential contributions to the expansion of Rio during the first half of the eighteenth century and continue to shape the fabric of Rio today.