The Crossroads of Sin and the Collision of Cultures: Entertainment, Commerce, and Pleasure in Rio de Janeiro (1860-1930)

In his Academy project, Green examines the multiple layers of interactions and sociability that took place in the Tiradentes Square in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s largest city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This public space—a district of bars, brothels, vaudeville reviews, highbrow theatres (and later movie houses) — shaped popular and elite cultures, as well as influenced forms of entertainment, business, and leisure activities. Above all, it was an area where social classes, races, genders, and occupational groups intermingled to create a unique and lively environment. Green traces the transformations that reconfigured broader Brazilian society and urban life at a time of transition from slavery to freedom, mass immigration from abroad, migration from the hinterland, and a revolution in gender norms. Originally an elite venue, this district became a space visited by all social classes and racial groups: newcomers experienced life in a big city; the desperate became thieves or prostitutes; working and middle-class women accessed a vibrant public sphere. In this way, Tiradentes Square in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century experienced “overlapping uses by members of bourgeois society, working-class men and women, Bohemians, slaves and free people of color, rogue figures, and prostitutes, which led to tensions in the social fabric,” Green writes. By studying these intersecting worlds, he reconsiders Brazilian notions of urban social boundaries and their permeability in times of dramatic transformations.