National Historical Museum

In partnership with the Social Service of Commerce/SESC, the National Museum of History produced and itinerant exhibition "Along the Streets and Sidewalks - Informal and Ambulant Commerce Yesterday and Today", with photographic reproductions from its Historic Archives, besides photos made specially for the exhibition. Who never heard of peddlers, the kiosk, the pack animal, the Bahiana woman with her coconut candy, of the buyer of empty bottles, the knife sharpener, the newspaper boys, the hawker of wares?

There are no cities or villages without peddlers, open-air fairs, street vendors, with its crowd, noises and shoutings, all exercising an old and informal means of commerce, in the struggle to survive. Intimately associated to the life and development of Brazilian cities, this kind of commerce is the topic of the exhibition.

With photographic reproductions taken from the Museum's iconographic collection, it documents aspects and moments of the commercial activity in streets, sidewalks and squares of the main Brazilian cities, with special emphasis to Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century up to our days. The exhibition still permits recalling one of the most traditional and picturesque forms of commerce in Brazil.

The exhibition is divided in three modules. The first one -"The commerce moves over the heads of slaves"… and also over the heads of imigrants" -shows that until the 19th century, the majority of the food commerce was made by slaves, and it was well documented by Debret. From door to door they sold most anything: milk, livestock, fruit, suggar cane, scented grease for the hair, smoked meats and tripes, cakes, sausages, roasted coffee and refreshments.

Also chairs, baskets were sold, as well as barber and porter's services. Marc Ferrez photographs, in 1895, the imigrants, or "gringos" - portuguese, spanish, arabs, italians and jews -, that came to work of the fields and ended up in the informal commerce, selling bread, onions, vegetables, walking sticks and umbrellas, gadgets and newspapers. Many dreamt and few managed to transform the ambulant commerce into a systematic and well established business.

Noises from the street and markets, merchandise carried in carts, in the back of animals and in the back or arms of sellers, the shouting to attract buyers ("look at the orange, who cannot write spells it out" "See the watermelon Maria, pan on the fire and empty stomach"), the kiosks where the people ate corn bread , fried food and drank cachaça… all this is shown in the second module "Open air markets, markets and kiosks"-, seen through the lens of Jean Gutierrez and Augusto Malta. Gutierrez pictured, in 1890, several aspects of an open air market installed in front of a market, in Rio de Janeiro, and Malta several kiosks spread all over the city.

In the third module -"Daily life in Our City": peddlers, traillers and pushcarts - we observe the permanence and/or the transformation of some of these modalities of the informal and ambulant commerce in our days, through the photos of Hugo Leal, that documented circa 150 vendors in activity in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. The original photos belong to the Historic Archives of the Museum. The itinerant exhibition is composed of 55 panels 60x50cm, and for further details call (5521) 550-9259.

	"Along the Streets and Sidewalks"	ITINERANT EXHIBITIONS