ABSTRACT
This chapter traces a handful of the uses of this icon in popular culture and public venues between 1889 and the 1930s. The various historical actors who deployed Sabina's image reveal, through their actions and words, the landscape of social possibilities in which they moved, and their hopes for altering that landscape. The chapter considers the radical potential of popular-cultural politics, and specifically of urban Afro-Carioca popular culture prior to the 1930s. Streetvending in Rio de Janeiro over the nineteenth century and through the First Republic was an occupation predominantly held by free and enslaved, mostly older, Afro-Brazilian women. The orange-lovers' procession seduced observers by invoking and reproducing already-familiar implications of blackness and Afro-Brazilian women in carioca public space and popular culture. The Black Mother may have been embraced by elites to make nostalgic a fictional aristocratic past, but she was re-signified in subaltern discourse into a source of racial affirmation.
