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This article interrogates the problematic relation of whiteness and servitude in mid to late-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, when a fast-growing number of Portuguese female migrants, mostly from the Azorean islands, sought employment in households where domestic service had been hitherto associated with black slavery. As I argue, the accounts of elite domestic lives in popular print cultures at the time reveal a nascent narrative of ‘servant crisis’—e.g. the conviction that reliable servants were disappearing in Brazil – in reaction to the alternative work arrangements and new types of servants, which began defining domestic service over the decades leading toward the abolition of chattel slavery (1888). In fact, the vicissitudes of labor during these pre-emancipation decades set the stage for the earliest version of the ‘servant crisis’ trope that has characterized the national elites’ discourse about domesticity up to this day.

White criadas and the ‘servant crisis’ in pre-abolition Rio de Janeiro