Identities in Transit: Criminalization and Deception at the Crossroads of Labor, Race, and Nationality in Rio De Janeiro, 1871–89

This paper explores the dialectical formation of the discursive categories of “vagabundo” (vagabond) and “desordeiro” (troublemaker) through late-Imperial Rio de Janeiro vagrancy laws, informed as much by public authorities’ investment in social control through criminalization as by targeted subjects’ evasion strategies. After the 1850 transatlantic slave trade ban, the Brazilian capital witnessed a revival of policing devices against idleness that targeted slaves, freedpersons, and immigrant populations, especially those of Portuguese origin. Among detainees charged with vagrancy and related contraventions, one common strategy against their typification as “vagabundos” involved imposture and systematic deception of police authorities, instrumentalizing the unstable boundaries of race and nationality. By relating this phenomenon to transformations in the region’s labor regimes and the demographic heterogeneity of the city’s “idle ones,” I inquire into processes of identity formation among criminalized individuals of disparate origins. I pay particular attention to the constraints and possibilities arising from their shared experiences and to the strategic value of fluid identities in a global age of racial and national reimagining.