Salvador's Modernizador Cultural: Odorico Tavares and the Aesthetics of Baianidade, 1945-1955

On January 14, 1954, Bahians gathered in the city of Salvador, in Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia, for the Lavagem do Bonfim, the annual ritual washing of the Church of Bonfim and its front patio and steps that was for them a highlight of the Festival of the Senhor do Bonfim.¹ The archbishop of Salvador, Augusto Álvaro da Silva, had recently banned the syncretic ritual, primarily because it combined elements of popular Catholicism and an important ritual obligation to Oxalá, a principal deity or "saint" in the religious practice of Candomblé, an African Brazilian religion that grew out of West and West Central African antecedents.² The water for the lavagem, for instance, was ceremonially prepared and transported in vases during a procession by African Bahian mães-de-santo (priestesses) and filhos-de-santo (initiates) of Candomblé, known together as "baianas" and dressed entirely in white.

The prohibition proved temporary, however. Two staged photographs from the local newspaper Estado da Bahia, taken during the Lavagem do Bonfim of 1954, illustrate who was most responsible for pressuring the archbishop to rescind the ban. The mayor of Salvador, Aristóteles Góes, was featured in one photograph. His attendance continued a role his recent predecessors had played in supporting the lavagem, support that gave politicians an opportunity to promote their political legitimacy. The second photograph includes two baianas; clearly, the Candomblé community was central to the lavagem. Candomblé worshippers met at the church each year to perform their obligations to Oxalá even during the years when the Catholic ritual was banned, and the police were obliged to turn them away. Bahian folklorist Antônio Monteiro attended these events, alongside the baianas. Monteiro headed the Permanent Committee for the Lavagem of Bonfim, a largely middle-class pressure group. Also present in the photograph was Odorico Tavares, a newspaper editor, public intellectual, and journalist-cum-author who was an important ally of the Candomblé community.

The two photographs illustrate the coming together of significant figures among the political, intellectual, and cultural elites in support of a wider process, begun in the early 1930s: the acceptance and inclusion of working-class African Bahian cultural practices within developing notions of regional distinctiveness. In this understanding, African Bahian practices were central to Bahian regional identity and Bahia's place within the Brazilian nation. This regional identity was known as baianidade. A number of scholars, including Vivaldo Costa Lima, Luis Parés, and Stephania Capone, have called attention to the role of Candomblé leaders in defining this identity in the 1930s, and Beatrice Góis Dantas and others have stressed the important contributions of social scientists to this process. Anadelia Romo has explored how official state support contributed in the late 1930s and early 1940s to the inclusion of African Bahian culture in Bahian regional identity, specifically in the collections work of the Bahia state museum and state-sponsored literature aimed at promoting tourism.³

This article explores Odorico Tavares's oft-heralded, albeit as-yet-unexamined contribution to the process of consolidating the association of Bahia with African Bahian culture. Although as Romo suggests, the impetus to this end among Bahia's political administrators during the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945) may have waned in the years immediately after 1942, Tavares began leading efforts during the mid-1940s, largely outside official channels.⁴ Those efforts consciously built on the changes of the 1930s, and Tavares played an important role in popularizing and disseminating African Bahian culture for a local and national audience.⁵ Examining his work reveals the modernist affinities and progressive intentions among certain intellectuals that characterized the immediate postwar period in Bahia. My analysis focuses on the editorial stance of Tavares's two newspapers, a close reading of the substantial body of work he wrote for Bahians and for a wider Brazilian audience, and an assessment of his contribution to the development of modern art in Bahia.⁶ A close examination of Tavares's intellectual concerns from 1945 to 1955 provides a clearer view of how, and in part why...