Drawing on a newsworthy police case—the arrest, in Rio’s northern suburbs, of a "fakir" and a "macumbeira" accused of exploiting public credulity—this chapter reconstructs the trajectories of the two protagonists, Georgina Coutinho and Elyseu Sant’Anna, using press archives dating back to the early 1920s. It situates them within the Serrinha subdivision, a socially mixed area linking the morro (hillside favela) with a bourgeois avenue, and home to some of the first samba schools as well as the Resistência trade union. The case extends far beyond the repression of quackery alone: it reveals the social aspirations of suburban working- and lower-middle-class residents, especially women. These religious activities provided a sphere of social mobility, autonomy, and emancipation, helping to explain both their repression by public authorities and their disqualification by elite groups. By appropriating and adapting religious practices from diverse traditions, popular classes effectively established a form of religious freedom that they associated with access to legal rights, education, healthcare, and participation in the destiny of the nation. The chapter thus highlights what was at stake in these religious spaces for both the Catholic Church and Vargas's Provisional Government.