Two persistent distortions attach to Pomba Gira, and both should be named. The first, inherited from hostile Christian observers, identifies her, like Exu, with the devil, because she is dark and red, keeps company with the dead and the crossroads, and refuses respectability. This is the same mistaken framing that has long been imposed on the Afro-Atlantic crossroads spirits, and the traditions themselves reject it: Pomba Gira is not a figure of evil but a morally complex intermediary who can help or harm and who deals frankly in the real business of life. The second distortion is reductive rather than hostile: because many Pomba Giras are understood as the spirits of women who lived at the margins of a respectable Catholic society, among them women who worked as prostitutes, she is sometimes dismissed as merely a "spirit of prostitutes."
Scholars and practitioners read her more seriously than that. Precisely because she speaks for women whom society condemned and cast out, Pomba Gira has become, for many of her devotees, women especially, a figure of feminine power, autonomy and defiance, one who stands outside and against the constraints of patriarchal and respectable morality and who is invoked for confidence, protection and control over one's own life and desires.
Umbanda and Quimbanda are living Brazilian religions with many millions of adherents, and Pomba Gira is among their most sought-after and most misunderstood spirits, the woman at the crossroads, too often maligned as a devil or dismissed as a harlot, and better understood as a fierce intercessor for those the respectable world refused.