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6 7 6 7 5 Carnival of the People Batucadas and Afoxés In 1942, Salvadoran poet, journalist, and magazine editor Áureo Contreiras wrote a piece for the conservative daily A Tarde titled “The Value of the Cordões and Batucadas to Carnival.” In his article, which was reprinted the following year in the Diário de Notícias, he argued that the small clubs from the poorer neighborhoods (the pequenos clubes), including the African-Bahian batucadas (small percussion-based carnival groups), were the “truest aspects of the festivities” and the “authentic core of the carnivalesque soul.”1 In making his case, Contreiras appealed to the nationalist discourse coming into vogue in the 1940s that Brazil was a mixture of Indians, Africans, and Portuguese—“the three sad races”—whose “shouts and songs” filled the streets during carnival. The cordões and batucadas, popular carnival institutions that paraded during the three days of carnival, were born in reaction to both the joys and the bitterness of everyday popular life. “Real carnival,” Contreiras was saying, was carnival as practiced by the working classes. Contreiras also singled out these groups’ use of the pandeiro, cuíca, and reco-reco2 “and all the barbarous instruments evocative of the old slave quarters and of the Candomblé terreiros” as links to a bittersweet Bahian past that was nevertheless central to Brazil’s formation. Contreiras’s praise illustrates the larger discursive shift toward celebrating working-class African -Bahian contributions to carnival as the truest, most authentic component of this Bahian festive institution. Contreiras’s appeal reveals a number of things. It emphasizes the presence of African-Bahian agency in pushing cultura negra—the batucadas, in particular—to the forefront of Bahian carnival. In a manner similar to that described in the above discussion of the popular festivals, African Bahians took advantage of the transformative power of carnival to push for and receive greater cultural and symbolic relevance within the city’s carnival 144 · African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil and beyond. Carnival’s ludic (playful, transgressive) nature holds a capacity for individuals or groups to transcend, expand, or magnify themselves and their social condition in public spaces.3 The batucadas institutionalized and ritualized the presence of working-class African-Bahian musical practices and sociability. The afoxés, groups whose carnival participation was deeply influenced by the culture and cosmology of the terreiros, were perhaps an even more forceful (re)assertion of the right to coexist of Salvador ’s long-marginalized and persecuted African-Bahian religious institutions , subcultures, and values. These assertions deepened the process by which African-Bahian practices were incorporated into notions of regional identity and Bahianness, as Bahian carnival came to the fore as another venue of cultural political mediation and the creation of a common cultural framework for political negotiation and disputation. Finally, Contreiras’s appeal also reveals the relevance of the Vargas-era project of creating a national Brazilian identity and how that project gave impetus to the contributions of journalists, authors, and public intellectuals, among others, to the ideological reappraisal of the place of African-Bahian culture in Bahia. The reappraisal of African-Bahian contributions to carnival, part of the focus of this chapter, was largely carried out in the articles and editorials written by members of the Association of Carnival Chroniclers such as Contreiras. This association of reporters, which included one or two from each of the city’s major newspapers, spent the greater part of January and February and sometimes March organizing and encouraging participation in the various dances, dress rehearsals (ensaios), and ceremonies leading up to carnival. The Association of Carnival Chroniclers assumed responsibility for publicizing carnival, mobilizing participation, and generally livening up the festivities. Their newspapers were a primary source of awards and prizes during carnival alongside those from the mayor’s office, thus wielding a degree of fiscal leverage to influence carnival performance. The Carnival Chroniclers were also the principal commentators on the events of the three days of carnival and thus actively participated in constructing the meanings of the festivity for the city. Their efforts played a fundamental role in shaping the structure of carnival, how people and groups participated (or did not participate), and the dominant interpretations of carnival. The standard historiographic narrative on Bahian carnival barely recognizes the period from 1930 to 1954. The story typically begins in the 1880s, when the largely white “official carnival,” with its grand parades, emerged alongside a “popular carnival” made up of a wide variety...

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