By the late 1920s, the suburban population had become the majority, at the very moment when the political transition leading to the Vargas dictatorship (1937) was beginning to unfold. The inhabitants of Madureira and Casa Verde consequently gained greater visibility in the media. Political, society, and crime-reporting columns provide valuable material for reconstructing both representations of suburban residents and their demands.

Two major developments emerge. On the one hand, the press contributed to consolidating the notion of a “suburban class,” defined by the constraint of distance and commuting, as well as by dependence on municipal authorities for access to urban services. This shared condition is particularly evident in the accidents to which suburban populations were structurally exposed—railway accidents, river crossings, floods, and electrocutions.

On the other hand, within this common suburban condition, the arrival of populations displaced from city centers by the urban redevelopment projects of the late 1930s led to the formation of neighborhoods identified as “Black.” These neighborhoods are reconstructed through the history of land subdivisions, marriage registers, the archives of the dockworkers’ union (Resistência), and residents’ narratives.

The chapter also examines the use of the categories preto and pardo. Absent from the 1920 census, reintroduced by São Paulo sociologists, and officially reinstated in the 1940 census, these categories remained largely institutional, being used primarily by the police and census authorities. In São Paulo, the Frente Negra Brasileira (1931) contributed to the racialization of identities, whereas in Rio de Janeiro the term “Black” referred to a broader and more diverse range of social trajectories. Social mobility consisted precisely in changing one’s position within this post-slavery framework of classification and social reference.