Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay

4 Today Everyone Dances Candombe, 1950–2010

c h a p t e r f o u r today everyone dances candombe, 1950–2010 It was a balmy summer night in late February 1956. Under a brilliant full moon, one hundred thousand spectators jammed the streets of the Barrio Sur and Palermo, awaiting the first-ever Llamadas, the parade of the comparsas de negros.∞ By 1956 the comparsas had been marching through Montevideo for almost a century; but they had done so either individually or in larger parades that combined Carnival groups of all sorts (sailors , gauchos, murgas, etc.). Now, for the first time, the city had devoted a night exclusively to the sociedades de negros, and the public anticipation was enormous. As they waited, the crowd was buzzing, lively, and expectant. But as the sounds of drumming were heard in the distance and then drew closer, ‘‘an absolute silence fell over the crowd, as though at a religious rite.’’ The comparsas, reported El País, ‘‘gave the sense that they were arriving from the sea, that they had landed from an invisible ship, beneath the magic of a full moon, not like one hundred years ago, as slaves, but rather as they are today, free, masters of their own destiny and of that unforgettable rhythmic sound that comes to them from centuries past, never flagging, never weakening.’’≤ Galvanized by the thunderous drumming, the comparsas’ female dancers danced ‘‘frenetically,’’ like ‘‘spinning tops, crazed with joy.’’ As each group passed, ‘‘the black women swayed back and forth . . . as though possessed by Lucifer’’; they writhed ‘‘like serpents on whom a rain of flowers had fallen, imprinting the madness of fire and night’’ on the scene. In short, concluded the paper, ‘‘it was jungle in the city.’’≥ The illustrated weekly magazine Mundo Uruguayo concurred. ‘‘From time to time Carnival has these incredible resurrections that make up for everyone dances candombe 113 long periods of languor and decadence,’’ and this first Llamadas was such a night. ‘‘The streets of Palermo . . . never saw such crowds, or heard such shouts of admiration and applause.’’∂ Years later, Tomás Olivera Chirimini , today a veteran candombero, recalled that first parade, which he saw as a teenager: ‘‘It was something I will never forget for the rest of my days. The cheering and applause were like an earthquake; . . . with the thundering of the drums, the shouts of the spectators, the bombs and rockets shooting up into the sky, one had the sense that the buildings on each side of the street were about to explode into thousands of pieces. The joy and enthusiasm were overwhelming, completely out of control.’’∑ The Spectacle of Carnival The Llamadas were the Uruguayan variant of a phenomenon taking place throughout midcentury Latin America: the creation or ‘‘nationalization’’ by the state of folkloric festivals and holidays that, through lavish pageantry and symbolism, defined the place of nonwhite peoples in the nation. In doing so, national governments sought two complementary goals: to market the black and indigenous past as a potential source of revenue from tourism; and to project an ‘‘o≈cial story’’ of how that past and these people had been peacefully and successfully integrated into modern, twentieth-century republics. Thus in Brazil and Cuba in the 1930s, national and municipal authorities imposed tight control over the Rio de Janeiro and Havana Carnivals, mandating the instruments to be played by Carnival comparsas, the costumes to be worn, and the types of songs to be sung. In Guatemala, state o≈cials added a Maya beauty contest and a model indigenous village to the annual celebrations of independence day. In Peru, municipal authorities in Cuzco resurrected the Inca Festival of the Sun in 1944; eight years later, the national government took control of the event to ensure an ‘‘accurate’’ representation of the Inca past. And in Venezuela, the National Folklore Service inaugurated an annual Festival of Tradition in 1948, aimed, in the words of its founder, at ‘‘attain[ing] a perfect synthesis’’ of national popular culture.∏ The anthropologist David Guss reflects on some of the pitfalls of ‘‘nationalizing ’’ folkloric festivals and turning them into core symbols of national identity: Events that were not only structured by local histories and conflicts but that also celebrated them now become symbols for a nation at 114 everyone dances candombe large, a purpose for which they were never intended. To accomplish this has required that the hallmark of festive behavior, its superabundance of...