As I finish writing this book about the legacy of Leitão de Barros's film A Severa in the construction of class identity in Portuguese films of the 1930s and 1940s, I am reflecting on the legacy of all of these films in Portuguese popular culture. The characters (and the actors who play them), the songs, the dialogues, the gestures, the plots, and the themes of these films have all made a significant contribution to Portuguese popular culture's construction of the fadista. And since sound film is the first globalizing, national, visual-art medium, its role in creating our present understanding of the history of the fado is worth consideration in an afterword.

The legacy of Leitão de Barros's A Severa on popular culture beyond film is tremendous. My second book, The Reconstruction of Lisbon, deals with the construction of the Severa myth between 1848 and 2008 in Portuguese popular culture. The Museu Nacional de Etnologia's catalogue Fado: Vozes e Sombras [Fado: Voices and Shadows], for the L94 exhibit of the same name, contains illustrations of memorabilia related to Leitão de Barros's A Severa that appeared after 1931. And recently, the Universidade de Aveiro has received a generous donation of curiosities pertaining to Severa in popular culture, which I have not yet consulted. I shall summarize the impact briefly.

Since the debut of the film A Severa, we find Severa's myth reconstructed in fado lyrics, biographies, histories of the fado, musical theater, on television, in the plastic arts, and political cartoons. The Sociedade Nacional de Phosphoros issued Severa-brand matchbooks containing lithograph tricolor images of the major characters from Leitão de Barros's film in the 1930s. Severa's name still appears on a restaurant in the Bairro Alto and on a bar in the Mouraria, on Rua do Capelão, which now opens up onto Largo da Severa. The CD Ameritz Karaoke Português, Volume 9 includes the “Novo Fado da Severa” (Dulce Pontes's version, not Dina Teresa's).