Contemporary quilombos in Brazil claim for social, territorial and cultural rights.As social movements they take ethnicity and cultural differentiation as their political agendas leading to several political contradictions.Claims for land demarcation in urban contexts attempt to separate actors marked ethnically from urban dwellers that do not appeal to ethnic labels to validate their rights as citizens.I will analyze the case of the Quilombo da Pedra do Sal in Río de Janeiro to discuss the weight this culturalist legal framework has on people´s struggles and uses over culture, memory and local history as legitimizing markers of cultural difference, and its effects when used as a promotional image of the gentrification process that is taking place in the port region of the city.