Racialized bodies, naturalized classes: Moving through the city of Salvador da Bahia

In this article, I describe racialization processes in Brazil's third-largest urban center, Salvador da Bahia, focusing on a broadly defined field of social practice. In a cross-class ethnographic portrait of the city, I examine the situated, embodied production of meanings about the body, as subjects move through urban space and time. I trace the emergence of racialization from residents' microhistorical passages through the metropolis as these sediment into a shared, if partial, knowledge about difference and identity. I argue that it is such knowledge, borne by subjects as they ceaselessly reconstruct themselves, that grounds the mutual constitution of whiteness and of blackness in the city. Further, these processes generate knowledge of the naturalization of class. Thus, if a uniting factor underlies the diversity of discourses circulating in the city, it is the embodied by-product of subjective experience.