Within his structural model, Fernandes introduces a psychosocial dimension, something that decades later would be incorporated into what is conceptualized as «subjectivity» and «capacity for action (or agency)» of subaltern mobile phone number list subjects. Social action is not only driven by dark forces beyond human action (ie "structural"). On the contrary, Fernandes focuses his gaze on the (limited) options open to blacks and how their ways of acting –learned in the slave-owning past, what Zygmunt Bauman calls «class memory»– influence their process of integration into class society13. Black is seen as a mobile phone number list person who acts on stage and in social settings.

Faced with the conditions posed by free labor and the presence of European immigrants, black ex-slaves face difficulties of various kinds. Fernandes' attention focuses on the structural situation of the ex-slaves, whom he considers to mobile phone number list be subjects and against whom he raises the "moral condition of the person". He sees ex-slaves as rational people, facing an opportunity structure and strategizing to deal with it. Also as people with moral principles. Thus, the new condition of the labor market, «for the black or the mulatto (...) was secondary. What was essential was the moral condition of the mobile phone number list person and his freedom to decide how, when and where to work »14.

Thus, blacks and mulattoes are presented as subjects who have to face their freedom in an economic and social context for which mobile phone number list mobile phone number list their previous experience has not prepared them. In his model of analysis, Fernandes does not explicitly propose an analysis of gender relations (or of the relations of the sexes, according to the terminology of his time). However, by describing and interpreting the situation in São Paulo and by delving into a microsocial and interpersonal analysis, men and women acquire specificity. In the urban world of São Paulo, she concludes, life seems to be easier for black women. Her insertion in urban domestic work does not imply a deep rupture in her experience.