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2 The Revitalization of African-Bahian Culture On the sixteenth of September 1931, Juracy Magalhães arrived by steamer in Salvador, Bahia, to take up the office of interventor, or appointed governor. The Brazilian Revolution of 1930, which had catapulted Getúlio Vargas to the (provisional) presidency in the hope that he would break the grip of the old oligarchs, was still not a year old. Yet Magalhães’s appointment was already Vargas’s fourth attempt to establish political control over the most important state in northeast Brazil. The three previous interventors Vargas had appointed had been unequivocal failures. It did not look promising for Magalhães, either. A twenty-six-year-old tenente,1 Magalhães had no political or administrative experience. Worse, he was an outsider; he had been born in the state of Ceará and lacked any connection to Bahia’s traditional oligarchic families. Ominously, as his boat entered the port, not a single important political figure awaited his arrival at the docks to meet him, just several dozen people “rounded up by my tenente friends.” A welcoming speech was made by a “mulato inteligente,” whose language should have given the young military officer a fair inkling of the strength of regionalist intransigence the oligarchs would marshal against him. According to Magalh ães, the speaker’s metaphor for Bahia was “the Herculean heroine with the gigantic breasts [who] never gives in or sells out.”2 Sure enough, after a brief honeymoon period Bahia’s traditional elite brought out the knives. Expressing themselves largely through their own newspapers, the opposition to Magalhães employed the predictable regionalist rhetoric of past glories, past greatness, and the dignity and honor of Bahia as the colonial capital, or mater, of Brazil.3 In the early 1930s, this was the standard public discourse on Bahia, a discourse jealously guarded by the state’s self-appointed custodians, who disseminated it through speeches and print media. The Bahian elite based in Salvador also sought 6 7 6 7 The Revitalization of African-Bahian Culture · 41 to promote this longstanding image throughout Brazil and, in particular, in Rio de Janeiro, the nation’s capital and the locus of federal power, prestige , and largesse. In this discourse, what made Bahia worthy of distinction and privilege was its contribution to Brazilian civilization—its history of producing great orators, poets, statesmen, archbishops, educators, judges, and colonial administrators, individuals whose achievements were not just the pride of Bahia but also the glory of all of Brazil. Nevertheless, as the anecdote of Magalhães’s arrival reveals, there was already another discursive representation of Bahia that associated the city and region with blackness. The phrasing of the welcoming speech by the “mulato inteligente” referred to the classical figure of Hercules, but it also referred to the state’s AfricanBahian population. The heroine with the gigantic breasts was undoubtedly intended to conjure images of the Mãe Preta, the black nursemaid who was one of the few significant early-twentieth-century symbols of racial inclusiveness in Brazil.4 The black nursemaid was hardly a symbol of racial equality; although it acknowledged certain contributions of Africans and African Brazilians, it did so in a way that situated them in a subordinate position within the national narrative. Given the subalternity of the African-Brazilian wet nurse, it is likely that Bahia’s traditional elite would have preferred to bury the reference to her altogether and stick with the comparison to Hercules. Magalhães, however, refused to be intimidated. He went on to become one of the most successful interventors from the point of view of the Vargas regime. Magalhães’s political accomplishments allowed him the leeway and political capital to begin the process of reshaping social and cultural relations in Salvador. Using similar initiatives to those of Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, Magalhães redefined the relationship between official regime politics and workers in the city by introducing a number of administrative and populist measures that promoted bonds between Bahia’s working classes and himself.5 His early Vargas-era project of reaching out to the urban working class increased the support of government for popular cultural practices within the public domain, thereby underwriting the valorization of African-Bahian culture. Magalhães’s position on popular culture dovetailed with trends that were already gaining momentum in Brazil, such as the wider reassessment of the African-Brazilian contribution to the nation that was taking place in the artistic, intellectual, and...

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