O Rapa vs. The People: The Order of the Streets

On a weekday morning in Rio, the streets breathe heavy. Sweat, frying oil, sea salt, exhaust. The kind of air that sticks to you while you walk past plastic buckets stacked like neon totems, chargers dangling like jungle vines, and broom heads bobbing above the crowd. The vendors — camelôs, ambulantes — call out in a rhythm that’s part hustle, part hymn.

To the municipal government, this is “disorder.” To the upper-middle class sipping overpriced espresso a block away, it’s “visual pollution.” But the street doesn’t care about their vocabulary. It knows these stalls as lifelines — feeding families, keeping rent paid, and holding together a culture that’s older than Brazil’s zoning laws.

Artist and researcher Vitor Henrique Guimarães Lima’s Trilogia do Ambulante (via LatimLove Magazine) makes the case plain: street vending isn’t just an economy. It’s a frontline of cultural survival, rooted in amefricanidade — Lélia Gonzalez’s word for the Black diasporic muscle memory that colonialism tried to erase. These stalls are where African knowledge systems get passed down in the open air, where resilience isn’t some TED Talk buzzword but a daily transaction.

Hustle as Heritage

The negros de ganho knew this hustle long before “informal economy” was a line item in an NGO report. Enslaved and later freed Black men and women in the 19th century sold sweets, baskets, fruit, and firewood — not just to live, but to buy their own freedom and, sometimes, the freedom of others. The quitandeiras turned street corners into kitchens, serving food that fed the body and the gossip that kept communities alive.

After abolition, the chains got swapped for permits and police harassment. Suddenly, selling on the street without a piece of paper became “vagrancy.” The city wrapped racism in bureaucracy and called it “public order.” Enter o rapa — municipal sweeps that still happen today, where cops dump a vendor’s entire livelihood into the back of a truck, no compensation, no questions.

Whose Order Is It Anyway?

Rio has always been obsessed with looking good for someone else — colonial governors, foreign investors, Olympic tourists. Beautification meant clearing the “undesirable” from the view. Translation: no stalls, no tarps, no hustlers cluttering the postcard. But here’s the thing: the so-called “disorder” is the city. Without it, Rio’s streets would feel like an airport lounge — sterile, expensive, soulless.

The Trilogia do Ambulante throws the question back: what kind of “order” demands erasing the people who give the city its pulse? Who gets to decide which colors are “too loud”? And why do broom handles and stacked phone cases bother the elite more than poverty itself?

Parallel Economies, Real Lives

This is not the “shadow economy” — this is a daylight economy. It’s cash-in-hand, face-to-face, no receipts, no corporate middleman. The camelô selling knockoff sunglasses might be funding his kid’s school uniform. The woman frying pastéis could be covering her mother’s medication. The beach beer vendor is moving more product than half the bars in Ipanema on a slow Tuesday.

It’s also a living archive. The goods change — pirated CDs give way to USB cables, selfie sticks to portable speakers — but the logic stays the same: meet the people where they are, give them what they need, keep prices human.

Resistance, Not Romance

Don’t mistake this for romanticized grit. Every day as an ambulante is a risk: the police sweep, the weather, the grind of standing for hours, the low-grade anxiety that today might be the day your cart disappears. But staying visible is its own form of protest. The stall says, “I exist.” The transaction says, “We belong here.”

That’s why the slogan hits like a brick: Ambulante não é bagunça. Ambulante é cultura. Street vending isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s the city refusing to disappear itself for the comfort of the privileged.

Because without the vendors, Rio doesn’t just lose a market — it loses its memory. And a city that erases its memory isn’t just empty. It’s dead.