From the last years of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth, the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro witnessed a new social phenomenon: the proliferation, in every neighbourhood, of small dance clubs formed by workers. Noteworthy among them was the Flor do Abacate, a recreational society founded in 1906 by a group of men and women of African descent. Far from making any claim to ‘being African’, this association promoted balls and parades in which African cultural heritage was shown in conjunction with other cultural logics valued as modern and cosmopolitan. As a consequence, it constituted a model of recreational society, black and modern at the same time, which its members tried to associate to a national profile. The objective of this article is to analyse both the logic that explains the organisation of this dance society and the challenges that its members faced in consolidating it.
