This issue explores efforts by those outside the boundaries of privilege in twentieth-century Latin America to claim the dignity and resources to which they believed themselves entitled — despite elite rhetoric and official practice to the contrary. The carioca, cubano, and caraqueño protagonists of these stories were not ineffective: their efforts reshaped national culture, jurisprudence, and municipal regimes. Yet the formalities and informalities that shored up marginalization in their societies proved remarkably resilient, for reasons that have much to tell us about the interdependence of symbolic, material, and institutional privilege.
Marc A. Hertzman reconstructs the professional trajectories of multiple Afro-Brazilian musical entrepreneurs, contrasting the actual lives of pioneers of samba to the images that their contemporaries, and they themselves, chose to construct. Afro-Brazilian musicians at the turn of the century created personae that contrasted sharply with the destitution with which vagrancy laws and associated ideologies tarred Brazilians of...
