When I started writing my second book, The Reconstruction of Lisbon: Severa's Legacy and the Fado's Rewriting of Urban History (2008), I did not intend to study the cultural legacy of the Lisbon fado singer and prostitute Maria Severa (1820–46) in twentieth-century Portuguese popular culture. Rather, I wanted to answer the question of why Maria Severa's Lisbon neighborhood, the Mouraria, was such an important reference in fado lyrics of the late twentieth century, despite that much of the district had been demolished before 1974. Along the way, I discovered that to answer my question, I had to understand Severa's mythology, so linked are her biography and legend to the memory of her neighborhood.

I ended up writing a book about twentieth-century Portuguese popular culture's reconstruction of a material, however mythic, Mouraria linked to the neighborhood's identity as the home of Maria Severa, and as such, the birthplace of the Lisbon fado. The Reconstruction of Lisbon studies the Severa myth through history, biography, novel, drama, musical theater, painting, film, correspondence, advertisement, radio, television, and political cartoons to conclude that fado lyricists of the twentieth century reconstructed the demolished, absent Mouraria by rewriting its history in the aftermath of Júlio Dantas's novel, A Severa (1901) and play, A Severa: Peça em Quatro Actos (1901); and that our present understanding of Severa's mythology is due to the preservation of Dantas's character, rather than to the scant facts that remain of the singer's biography.

In this book I continue my examination of the impact of Severa's legacy on twentieth-century Portuguese popular culture by examining the relationship between Dantas's Severa myth, José Leitão de Barros's cinematic adaptation of Dantas's fictions in Portugal's first talkie, A Severa (1931), and the repeated portrayals of fadistas as the undesirable urban poor in films of the early Estado Novo period.

My research has drawn me to Portuguese cinema's compulsive repetition of Severa's story in its characterization of the Lisbon fadista as the representative of a marginalized or lower class: Leitão de Barros's story of Severa becomes the cinematic story of the Lisbon fadista and of the city's poor.