"Urban reforms" were aimed not just at modernizing cities' infrastructure but at transforming their class and racial composition. Over the course of the 1800s, workers had crowded into decaying colonial-era mansions and houses that had been subdivided into tenements that went by different names in different countries: Conventillos (little convents) in Argentina and Uruguay; corticos (beehives) and cabecas de porco (hogsheads) in Brazil; solares (mansions) in Cuba. As the export boom attracted growing numbers of migrants to the region's cities, these urban slum communities grow as well. Their overcrowding and crude sanitary conditions contributed to high urban death rates, crime, and occasional outbreaks of epidemic disease that threatened all city dwellers. And throughout Afro-Latin America, they were heavily black and mulatto. In Brazil and Cuba, where thousands of recently freed libertos sought to escape their recent servitude by moving to the cities, they were overwhelmingly so. Surveys of Havana slums found that 9S percent or more of their inhabitants were black and mulatto. In Rio de Janeiro, black migrants from Bahia streamed into the center-city neighborhood next to the docks, which became known as Little Africa. As that neighborhood filled up, other Bahian migrants buill Rio's first favela, a community of makeshift huts and shacks on a hill behind the Ministry of War. Over the course of the 1900s, favelas spread throughout the city and became a ubiquitous form of housing for the poor, who, as at the turn of the century. were predominantly Afro-Brazilian. It was largely in order to remove poverty and blackness from the city center that the federal government demolished and rebuilt much of Rio's downtown in the early 1900s, expelling the corticos' inhabitants to squalid, remote suburbs along the railroad line north of the city. Center-city residents fought back with the Vaccine Revolt, a week of urban riots in 1904. The immediate cause of the rebellion was a government campaign to vaccinate the population against smallpox, in which health officials entered working-class homes, often without permission, and inoculated every member of the family. Poor families reacted angrily to this aggressive state intrusion into the home, and they protested as well the destruction of inner-city neighborhoods that had provided affordable housing near their places of work. Many, perhaps most, of the rioters were Afro-Brazilian. As one such protestor was carried off to jail. he shouted to the crowd that he was fighting "to show the government that it can't put its foot on the people's neck .... Every now and then it's good for black folk to show that we know how to die like men!" Federal troops and police easily put down the Vaccine Revolt, and the government pushed on with its program of urban renewal. Ultimately, however, Latin American governments' ability to rebuild their urban centers was limited.