Keisha-Khan Perry's intimate look at the grassroots struggles of black women for urban land rights in Salvador, Bahia, is an important reminder of the need to examine the relationships between material need, personal identity, and political action. Perry focuses on women's leadership, and argues that these struggles should be understood as “an important facet of the historical struggle for social and territorial belonging as black citizens in Brazil” (p. 12).

Perry's ethnography draws from her long-term participatory engagement with the organizers in Gamoa de Baxio, a neighborhood located on the coast of Salvador, on the edge of areas with high levels of state- and market-supported gentrification. Gamoa de Baxio is defined in the media and general discourse as a place of disorder, home exclusively to sex workers, drug dealers, gangs, and squatters. Attention to a decade's worth of media reports, and to her own relationships in place, allow Perry to re-represent the neighborhood through the actions, histories, and ideals of its resident leaders. For the women who organized to defend their community, Gamoa de Baxio is a place of familial roots, where they can fish professionally to connect and sustain the community, and where people are surviving under conditions of racialized state-sponsored violence. The violence ranges from violations of health and safety concerns to infrastructure neglect, fear of aggressive police raids, and even the threat of being bulldozed out of your home.

A key contribution is Perry's rich description of the evolution of women's organizing around land rights. She begins by establishing the history of Salvador as a black and Afro-Brazilian city, and documents various urban development policies that displaced and erased black bodies from the center of the city, while making blackness visible as a cultural trope to sell to tourists. The majority of the book covers the lives and activism of the group of black women who lead the neighborhood association. Perry documents their protests at the offices of urban development agencies, their emergency mobilizations in the neighborhood, and their ongoing negotiations with municipal government actors. She also highlights the importance of the seemingly quieter moments between visible actions. Perry describes how trust is built over time between family, friends, and neighbors. She attends and reports on weekly neighborhood association meetings, which the women attend between laundry, jobs, and meal preparation. Finally, Perry discusses the ways in which the women's perceptions of themselves and their circumstances change, including an increase in personal and sexual freedom and a stronger sense of themselves as the appropriate leaders within political spheres. She considers the women's analysis and growing awareness of the connections between the conditions in their neighborhood and racial injustice.

Perry begins with a personal narrative about being searched in a bank in Salvador because of her race and color. Her companions, including one of the black women leaders, are not searched. This leader's words and actions assert her identity as a black woman, but the book starts with the suggestion that this leader is perhaps not identified as black within Brazil at all times, or in all places. I don't bring this up to rehash the idea of a raceless Brazil that Perry so handily rebukes in the book, but to ask instead about the possibilities that would be opened up for analysis if the book had a stronger engagement with what Perry herself describes as “the possibility of discussing gendered race and racism within a diasporic continuum” (p. xiv). Because, while Perry is successful in situating the lives and organizing of the women she studied and worked beside within a larger pattern of black and African diasporic organizing, some of the specificity of Brazil is lost, along with an opportunity to understand the ways in which these women's place-specific understandings of their blackness might contribute to our understanding of the larger movement.

Nevertheless, this is an important contribution, providing much-needed additions to our perspective on social moments in Brazil, and linking black women's organizing within their home spaces to parallel movements in many other countries.