The introduction sets out the central challenge of the investigation: measuring the weight of Brazil’s slaveholding legacies through what remains unspoken, as illustrated by the portrait of two women living in Madureira, one Black and the other White, whose grandparents, arriving around 1920, occupied unequal social positions. Situating its object within the historiography of the pós-abolição (post-abolition period)—a field that considers the 1930s a decisive turning point in production relations and in the social position of Black people—the study examines the concurrent processes that shaped this social transformation in southeastern Brazil: the accelerated metropolitan expansion of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, industrialization and the rise of organized labor, the crisis of the coffee oligarchies, the accession of Getúlio Vargas to power and his labor-oriented policies, a new valorization of the mixed-race povo (“the people”), and the emergence of Black movements.

The introduction distinguishes between two questions that are often conflated: the trajectory of the social group composed of freed people and their descendants, and the evolution of skin color as a factor of discrimination, the latter posing significant methodological challenges.

To address this issue, the study adopts an empirical and comparative approach based on two field sites, making no prior assumptions regarding racial identity and privileging the analysis of concrete life trajectories.