Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil

A Note about Brazilian Terminology, Currency, and Orthography

A Note about Brazilian Terminology, Currency, and Orthography Translating racial labels from Portuguese to English is a challenging task. For example, not all of the terms that Brazilians use to denote some form of African ancestry—negro, pardo, preto, crioulo, mulato, to name just a few—have clear parallels in English, and racial labels in any language are as messy, clunky, and potentially problematic as racial categories themselves . In the pages below, I frequently use “black” and “Afro-­ Brazilian,” familiar terms to most U.S. readers and ones with accessible Portuguese equivalents, negro or preto, and afro-­brasileiro, respectively. But neither English term represents a pristine reproduction of the language used by the men and women discussed here. Many studiously avoided assigning themselves racial labels. Others described themselves as preto, negro, pardo (brown), mulato (mulatto),1 or even crioulo, a derogatory term that one particularly bold musician sought to appropriate and make his own. As much as possible, I have preserved these (and other) labels in direct quotations, and in my own prose I have tried to employ terms that I think strike a balance between Brazilian and U.S. convention: in addition to “black” and “Afro-­Brazilian,” I use “African-­descended,” “men and women of color,” and so on.2 As if race did not present enough linguistic and conceptual dilemmas on its own, music complicates matters even more. This book’s focus on Afro-­ Brazilian musicians reflects their central role in creating samba and in the development of Brazil’s music market. But their centrality should not be taken as an assertion that samba, or any other music, may be accurately described as “black,” “white,” or any other racial label. As Karl Miller writes, “There is no a priori separation of musical expression according to racial or ethnic identity. Music practices are not ‘white’ or ‘black,’ ‘Mexican’ or ‘Cajun,’ until someone says they are, and even such a declaration opens rather than closes the debate.”3 In this book, I frequently place racialized musical labels (e.g., “black music”) in quotation marks, a somewhat cumbersome practice, but one that provides an im- x A Note about Terminology portant reminder that for all their power, racially defined musical genres are, like race itself, socially constructed and often misleading.4 Currency During the period covered in this book, Brazil used three units of currency : the mil-­réis until 1942, the cruzeiro until 1967, and then the new cruzeiro . (In the 1980s and 1990s, several new units were adopted. Currently the real is the national currency.) The mil-­réis, composed of one thousand réis, is written 1$000. (Six hundred réis is written $600.) One thousand mil-­ réis was called a conto or a conto de réis, denoted as 1:000$000. So, for example, the amount 35 contos, 543 mil-­ réis, and 250 réis would be written as 35:543$250. When the cruzeiro replaced the mil-­ réis in 1942, one cruzeiro ($1.00) became the equivalent of what had been one mil-­ réis (1$000), and one thousand cruzeiros ($1,000.00) the equivalent to one conto (1:000$000). In 1967, one new cruzeiro (NC$1.00) became the equivalent of one thousand cruzeiros.5 In hopes of consistency and clarity, wherever possible and practical I have provided contextual, cost-­of-­living figures, many of which are summarized in table 6 in chapter 3, and rough U.S. dollar equivalents.6 Orthography Brazilian Portuguese did not have a single set of orthographic standards during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the names of individuals I try to use the spelling that most frequently appeared in the contemporaneous documents that I read. This is, admittedly, an imperfect approach. For example, in the case of Benjamin de Oliveira, whom I discuss especially in chapter 3, most of my information comes from a secondary text published in Brazil in 2007 that employs today’s spelling. In the primary sources that I consulted about Oliveira, his name appears as “Benjamim” and “Benjamin.” When directly quoting those sources, I preserve the original spelling, whether with an “m” or an “n.” (I do the same for place names.) But when I write about Oliveira I have used the 2007 text (and today’s convention) to break the tie, so to speak, and therefore I use “Benjamin.” For facility in finding references that appear in the notes and the bibliography, I have preserved...