The purpose of this book is to record the daily life of black dockworkers in their port work space; their identity as black citizens, as well as their perception as manual labourers and the relationship between this condition and their blackness. We used the concepts of social space, blackness, sociability and daily life to acquire the information that led us to recognise the fact: parallel to the bonds established in a social place, and financial gain, there is also the cultural recognition of black people, which is restricted to the mentality inherited by Brazil from its patriarchal and slave-owning past. The accounts of dockworkers of African descent in Rio Grande - RS from the 1990s correspond to a time frame that includes the previous decades, referring to dockworkers, most of whom were men of African descent with less schooling, coming from a proletarian class in the urban-port context.