health, and sanitation. According to José Antônio dos Santos, Theories of racial improvement and searches for rational explanations for racism, such as those advocated by Nina Rodrigues and Oliveira Vianna, which achieved considerable repercussion at the time, discouraged mestizaje or preached the cultural, intellectual and genetic inferiority of the Black. During the Getúlio Vargas government, the nationalist campaign of compulsory "sociocultural cysts" to homogenize society, erasing ethnic-cultural differences, aggravated the situation. In the words of Patrícia da Silva Pereira: Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, programs of urban sanitation and urban modernization sought to drive blacks to the outskirts of the cities. In Porto Alegre, in the 1950s, entire black communities, such as those of Cabo Rocha, Ilhota, Colônia Africana, and Areal da Baronesa, were removed from the center and sent to peripheral areas, forming neighborhoods such as Restinga and Vila Jardim. This process had an important reflection on historiography. Nineteenth-century writers tried to annul the peculiarities of the different black groups, homogenizing and stereotyping a culture that was originally dynamic and polymorphic, and throughout the twentieth century, for a long time, it was claimed that in the nineteenth century a "racial democracy" had existed in the state, where slaves were treated kindly and had a much higher quality of life than in other states. The speech of the province president on the eve of the abolition of slavery in Porto Alegre, in 1884, which established a form of freedom conditioned to additional compulsory labor for a number of years, stating that "the freedmen will prefer in their great majority to follow their former benefactors because in Rio Grande do Sul slavery was always a family institution, the slave participating in all the advantages of the masters, to whom they must be tied today by the bonds of gratitude and whose intelligence and experience they cannot do without." It was also claimed that the black presence had been insignificant and that the state culture had been built by whites. Recent studies have proved that these claims are myths and do not correspond to the facts, and have documented the inhumane treatment to which most slaves were subjected as well as the large contribution of blacks to the culture. In Rio Grande do Sul, the gaucho figure was praised by historians as the synthesis of a people formed mostly by Portuguese descendants and a campeiro ("camper"): A manly,