Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia

Conclusion

In 1950 the newly constructed Hotel of Bahia unveiled a fresh mural for its “typical restaurant.” As José Valladares described it for the newspaper A Tarde, the mural presented scenes from “historic and picturesque Bahia,” with the Candomblé deity Iemanjá joining Baianas in the ritual washing of the church of Bomfim. Yet in his phrasing Valladares revealed one of the central tensions in Salvador and Bahia as a whole: the traditions described as “historic” were still alive, occupying a space in the present dynamic of the city.1 Twoyearsearlierhehadsimilarlyconflatedpastandpresentinpromoting Salvador to a foreign audience in the Pan American Union Bulletin. There he elaborated the offerings of the Museu do Estado in the larger context of the city itself. He wrote: “The visitor to Bahia, after seeing the old section of the city, a veritable architectural museum—churches, convents, mansions , winding and narrow streets along which walk the famous Bahianas in their picturesque dress—will find in the State Museum a fair representation of the wealth of the city’s past.”2 The city was an architectural museum, but Valladares casually placed living people there as part of the city’s past. The folklorization of Afro-Brazilian religious cults still forms part of the strategies of the apparatus of domination. Those who insist on this practice in order to favor the cash register of tourism insist on presenting us as followers of a canned, outdated religion. . . . Blacks have been marginalized from the political and productive process. —Bahian Candomblé initiate maria josé do espírito santo frança, “Candomblé and Community,” 1993 Conclusion 152 conclusion Meanwhile, Bahia’s inhabitants suffered the continual neglect of state authorities in terms of welfare, social mobility, and basic democratic access to education and to the vote.3 Today, Afro-Bahian culture, viewed as “canned” or static, still wins attention from Bahian officials, but the political and economic incorporation of blacks remains neglected. While the past has been privileged, contemporary opportunity has not. Although Valladares was surely sympathetic to an image of a multicultural Bahia, his comments reveal the early tensions that developed as tourism officials began to promote Bahia as traditional, picturesque, and static. In concluding our tour of Bahia as living museum, let us turn to how its contradictions have played out since the 1950s. Touring Tradition: Bahia’s Living Museum Bahia’s first state-sponsored tourism initiatives emerged in the late 1930s, sponsored by the Estado Novo regime and Interventor Landulfo Alves.4 Guided by the goal of preserving Bahia’s traditions, the program set the tone for subsequent efforts. Though state-led plans stalled after Alves was dismissed in 1942, the municipality of Salvador took up the project in the early 1950s, with a municipal tax to support tourism efforts for the capital in 1951 and the creation of a council of tourism in 1953. In 1954, a publicity firm provided a program for the promotion of Salvador, which was put into practice the following year.5 The new priority given to tourism continued into the 1960s as part of an ambitious plan of economic development led by Governor Juracy Magalhães (1959–63). A new economic planning commission created a separate division for tourism and consolidated an early link between the promotion of Afro-Brazilian culture and the promotion of Bahia itself. The commission explicitly promoted Afro-Brazilian and popular culture as part of the state’s attractions.6 A state planning report in 1966 noted with approval that Salvador’s municipal authorities had led the way by privileging “the primitive and ornamental arts of the povo [and the] . . . recuperation of popular and traditional festivities of the city.”7 This focus was embraced by heightened state-wide efforts as well. “Recuperating” tradition became a mantra under the paternalistic rule of Antônio Carlos Magalhães, who served first as Salvador’s mayor (1967–70) and later three terms as governor (1971–75, 1979–83, 1991–94). Magalhães established tourist promotion offices in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo that conclusion 153 advertised cultural attractions as the heart of Bahia’s offerings.8 An official retrospective of Bahia’s tourist board, first created in 1968, wrote that Magalhães had supported “dying” festivals and worked to resuscitate them as part of Bahia’s tourist offerings.9 This rhetoric of revitalizing the past culminated in what would be one of Magalhães’s biggest...