In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

I Salvador da Bahia, Brazil In Salvador T he port city of Salvador, in Brazil’s state of Bahia, sits on a hilly peninsula with bountiful sweet, contaminated waters cascading through fractures in rocky cliffs and up through shifting dunes on to the streets, docks, drains, beaches, and remnant mangroves. The peninsula’s western contour follows the Bay of All Saints; its eastern contour faces the Atlantic Ocean, looking toward Angola. More than anywhere else in South America, Salvador nourishes its strong cultural affinities with Africa. Historically, the wealthier, whiter skinned built their homes and offices on the tops of hills and the poorer, darker skinned built into the forested hillsides and at water’s edge. Despite a shift in the valuation of beach property, racialized patterns of social inequality remain readable in the much expanded and more tightly juxtaposed urban landscape. With forests almost gone, the vast favelas (irregular settlements) with their higgledy-piggledy vernacular style compete visually with protected condo–shopping mall pastiche and towered clusters of glass and steel. These urbanized variations could hardly be imaginable to colonial ancestors, whose architecture remains, interconnecting contemporary scenes with romantic gravitas. Three neighborhood-sized waterscapes outline the main foci of fieldwork in Salvador. Between November 4, 2006, and March 4, 2007 (see Chapters 2–4), I took up temporary residence between two, a beach and a lake in the district of Itapuã. Until the 1960s, twentiethcentury Itapuã was a fishing village boasting sand, freshwater, lots of dende palms and coconut trees, and a few families who journeyed to city markets on horseback, along arduous river-crossing beach trails, or by sea. Today, as an international destination of desire within the 16 / Part I city’s outermost Atlantic edge, Itapuã claims its share of tourists. Although the place is connected by infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, sewage, and telecommunications) and its tourists land regularly at the nearby airport , it still communicates feeling-tones reminiscent of a genuine fishing village (but without much cooperatively caught fish). Salvador’s port zone on the city’s bayside below the dramatic escarpment separating upper and lower cities marks the third waterscape. Together with the adjacent Comércio district, the port has been a center of power and activity for traders and slavers from the 1500s. The Comércio struggles to come out of the steep decline precipitated in the 1970s when “ACM” (A. C. Margalhães, the Robert Moses of Salvador) built a highway into the peninsula’s interior, shifting development away from water’s edge for the first time. Opening up heretofore inaccessible land, the Parallel (as the road is called) pulled away old business and new construction from the Comércio. However, today’s new, international investment is revitalizing the lower-city harbor-front real estate, identified as little used or derelict, and prosperity appears imaginable again.1 With law and luck, the changes will not be as ruthless as ACM’s 1980s renovations, which included setting fire to indoor and outdoor markets as well as all the stilt homes (palafitas) of the poor that perched between urban coast and bay. As one BahianaAmerican remembered from childhood, people in the upper city gathered along the cliff edge to watch the fires in the city below, worrying that the refineries just beyond the palafitas would explode.2 Key Symbols and Rhythms A sculpture of a mermaid (Sereia), a metallic, white woman-fish rising from the sea, marks the entrance into Itapuã (see Figures 2 and 3). In one poised swoop, her breasts and fin point to sky, her face tilts up and back to look in a mirror held high by one human arm, her theoretical reflection an open, changing composite image of sea, light, and art; her other arm bends seductively toward her waist. As folkloric double of the Afro-Brazilian sea goddess Yemanjá, this mermaid’s sculpture is a central geographic reference point in daily life, as in “Meet me at the Mermaid.” In front of her deflected gaze, a busy intersection hums where the bus turns on to the main commercial avenue, named after the beloved musician Dorival Caymmi. In a small open market in front of an electronics store passersby can purchase fruit, roasted peanuts, cigarettes, and sundries; an HSBC bank squats on the corner across from the open market. During Carnaval and other crowded festival days, military and civil police headquarters, one on either side of the Mermaid, each vie for control over uncontrollable streets.3 As a key symbol...

Share