Although in Brazil “Black territory” is a notion that has historically served activist and scholarly purposes, there has been little work to theorize specific Brazilian meanings for the concept. As a result, scholars often treat “Black territory” as a self-evident, even timeless idea. In this lecture, I will present results of ongoing research that aim to sharpen this discourse and explore the concept’s historical foundations. I argue that, in the 1970s and 1980s, Brazilian Black activism, the debate on the authenticity of São Paulo samba, and the critical studies about the inequities of São Paulo’s urban growth converged to frame the meanings of “Black Territory.” I develop this idea by focusing on the creation of Coleção Carnaval Paulistano at the São Paulo Sound and Image Museum, a fundamental archive to understanding how narratives of “Black territories” and “Black culture” in São Paulo were intertwined. Biography: Renata Siqueira is the Werner Baer Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies for the Spring 2022 semester. She is interested in urban and cultural history, with an emphasis on race relations. She has her doctoral degree from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Universidade de São Paulo (2021). Her dissertation discusses the relations between processes of urbanization and racialization embedded in the narratives about Largo da Banana, an informal plaza consecrated as São Paulo’s “cradle” of samba and as a “Black territory” from the 1970s onward. Currently, she investigates the role of the São Paulo Image and Sound Museum’s Coleção Carnaval Paulistano in fashioning São Paulo’s “authentic Black territories” in the neighborhoods of Liberdade, Bexiga, and Barra Funda