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The repercussions of Portugal's colonialism are not widely discussed. The marks of colonialism in the public space are still present in the urban landscape of Portuguese cities. Despite the growing activity of the Black movement's in the country, they are still not being systematically considered in the design of public policies. Moreover, the Portuguese census does not include any data collection on ethnic belonging. Therefore, it is difficult to deepen the knowledge of the Black communities. The Black community has been growing in Porto, the second-largest city in Portugal and it remains highly invisible. Starting from a collaborative project between Portuguese and American professionals, acting in the fields of sociology and socially engaged curatorial and contemporary art practices, an experimental approach was developed to map and cocreate with the Black community in Porto. By using digital tools while collecting, analyzing, and sharing data, and by applying an ethnographic approach and techniques of exploration from documentary photography, the team developed a collaborative project side by side with the community. An exchange between disciplinary knowledge and “various subject positions,” with all participants engaging in an exploration of how to begin decolonizing the city through those tools took place at the project TRAVESSIA. This chapter explores how the Black nonelite is expressing and questioning race and ethnic inequalities in Porto by discussing the results of this collaborative project.

The central hypothesis of the chapter is that Brazilian colonialism and slavery produced different material conditions or different governmentalities, from those at the base of the disciplinary project of the Global North, conditions that re-signified the penitentiary reform proposal. This chapter is structured into five sections: the first section introduces the hypothesis that the houses of correction were not the institutions that originated the Brazilian penitentiary system. The following section develops this idea based on an analysis of the social and economic dimensions of Brazil’s colonial formation. Unlike the global North, which officially envisioned the penitentiary as the institutional foundation of a democratic society, the penitentiary in Brazil was first envisioned as a mere symbol of modernity, then as an instrument for preserving order. The third section describes how the first prisons emerged without industrialization and how the material conditions for a prison reform discourse based on discipline remained absent. The fourth section indicates the inapplicability of the original conception of discipline in a context without Protestantism, presenting the Jesuit experience as the one closest to a project of moral reform and constraint to work. Being absent the category of disciplinary power in its original form, at least regarding its economic dimension, the national penitentiary project was born from the dungeons where public and private power overlapped for the corporal punishment of the enslaved. The last section analyzes the importation of the penal reform discourse and its adaptation in the context immediately following the abolition of slavery in 1888.