In July 1913, the members of the Family Dancing Club Anjos da Meia Noite required a habeas corpus to the
Supreme Court to secure their right to perform dancing parties in the port area of Rio de Janeiro. It was the end of a long legal battle, through which the low-income workers who were part of the club, mostly the Blacks and Mestizos, tried to maintain their recreational rights. They did so, however, from a kind of association whose objectives were far from the logic of the labor movement at the time. Tracking the case, analyzing its background and logic, is a way of reflecting on the passive image projected on the Rio de Janeiro’s workers of the First Republic by the historiography.
