This chapter opens the second part of the book, devoted to forms of socialization surrounding carnival. It begins with the rise, during the 1920s and 1930s, of a diverse media landscape: the community press of European immigrant groups, the labor press, the Black press, bourgeois women’s publications, and illustrated magazines prescribing social norms, such as O Cruzeiro and Rio Ilustrado. The subúrbios were already present in these publications, with dedicated sections and a “suburban aristocracy” composed of businessmen, lawyers, and journalists who published their own newspapers and magazines.

Through a close reading of the report that Rio Ilustrado devoted to Madureira in 1937, this chapter shows how the magazine, an organ of the elites, highlighted the neighborhood while systematically obscuring race. A gifted Black student could be celebrated, provided that his racial condition—the enduring weight of the stigma inherited from slavery—remained unspoken. Two generations after abolition, Brazilian society was still governed by a “pact of silence” that maintained formal equality while allowing the stigma attached to skin color to persist.

The report nevertheless demonstrates that Afro-descendants were fully recognized as suburbanos: they attended churches and schools, frequented leisure spaces, and participated actively in neighborhood sociability. Yet it is precisely the transformation of carnival—both a privileged arena for these forms of sociability and an opportunity to gain access to the sphere of dignity—that the magazine leaves unmentioned. This omission becomes the focus of the following chapters.