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110 3. Nationals Salvador da Bahia and São Paulo, 1930–1945 During the First Republic, the whitening ideologies that valued European immigrants above black workers had turned the word nacional into a derisive euphemism for pretos and pardos. To be a “national” in the Republic, as writers in São Paulo’s black press ruefully pointed out time and again, was essentially to be a second-class citizen, or in their terms, a foreigner in one’s own land. This situation changed dramatically after November 1930, when a bloodless coup by Getúlio Vargas put an end to the Republic and inaugurated a fifteen-year nationalist regime. Like other nationalist leaders taking power across Latin America in this period, Vargas vowed to do away with the political and economic structures and sharp social divisions of an earlier oligarchic regime. In Brazil, this meant that the nation would no longer be run by alternating groups of landholders from the agricultural powerhouses of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. It would be centralized in the national capital of Rio de Janeiro and would (in theory) respond to the collective will of an expanded electorate. The Republic’s model of export-led growth, unable to prevail against the effects of the international financial crisis of 1929, would be replaced by an industrial economy. In place of class struggle, Vargas would rule over the nation with a firm but fair hand, tending to the needs of the disadvantaged as a “father of the poor.”1 And instead of a citizenry divided by race, ethnicity, and language, Vargas would promote brasilidade, or Brazilianness—a sentiment that combined patriotism , nationalism, and a racially and culturally integrated national identity. “A country,” he proclaimed in a speech on May Day 1938, “is not just the conglomeration of individuals in a territory; it is, principally, a unity of race, a unity of language, a unity of national thinking.”2 In this spirit of nationalist unification, Vargas reversed many of the policies Nationals : 111 that had made black intellectuals feel like outsiders in the Republic. He curtailed immigration from Europe and passed laws to ensure that native-born Brazilians would be fairly represented in the workforce. Vargas also made many of the ideas about black belonging expressed in the Mãe Preta campaigns of the late 1920s, and espoused by black thinkers since the early 1900s, into an ideology of state. Africans and their descendants, Vargas’s speeches and cultural policies announced, were essential members of the Brazilian community—more so, in fact, than many European newcomers who still resisted full assimilation. The politics of brasilidade, meted out with an increasingly authoritarian hand after the mid-1930s, thus fulfilled two of the projects dearest to black thinkers in previous decades: casting doubt on the belonging of foreign immigrants, and affirming the place of black and brown Brazilians in a nation imagined as racially inclusive.3 In this context, black thinkers shifted the terms on which they argued for their belonging. Leaving behind sentimental appeals to fraternity, they found new meaning, and new pride, in boldly affirming their standing as “nationals.” This status, however, came at a price. The Vargas regime’s definition of a mestiço national race and culture drew primarily on the rich popular culture of Rio de Janeiro, and made that city’s particular mix of African and European influences stand for all of Brazil’s. Outside the national capital, black thinkers struggled to take advantage of the cultural politics that included them as “nationals” while resisting the homogenizing tendencies this term necessarily implied. In Salvador da Bahia, a majority black and brown city with a deep African cultural heritage, leading practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé developed, in tandem with regionalist intellectuals, a countervailing view of “pure” and unmixed African traits based on ongoing ties to Africa. It was these authentic, uncorrupted African traditions, they argued, that should be recognized as the cornerstone of a multiethnic Brazilian identity . In São Paulo, a city with a large white majority, a preto minority, and even fewer recognized pardos, where literate and economically stable pretos organized independent political journals and clubs around a distinctly black identity, black activists and journalists took the political opportunities opened by Vargas’s regime to found the institution that became the nation’s first black political party, the Frente Negra Brasileira, or Brazilian Black Front. The Frente’s politics of belonging, which stressed the idea of a separate, culturally unmarked negro...

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