Bahia’s Independence: Popular Politics and Patriotic Festival in Salvador, Brazil, 1824–1900 by Hendrik Kraay (review)

On July 2, 1823, Portuguese forces retreated from Salvador da Bahia in northeastern Brazil, as a patriot army, mobilized to defend a declaration of independence from Portugal the previous year, triumphantly entered the city. In the decades that followed, as Hendrik Kraay shows in this engaging and meticulously researched book, dois de julho (July 2) became a focal point for commemorating the achievement of independence and an important terrain for a “politics by other means” that encompassed debates about nationhood and the scope and nature of nineteenth-century civic engagement (25).

Kraay’s book traces the history of dois de julho commemorations that over the course of the nineteenth century included the public announcement of a parade, the parade itself, a procession on its eve, theater galas, and, finally, a monument. Even though the commemorations initially drew on the traditions of colonial royal and religious festivals, they quickly acquired new and dynamic meanings within the politics of the independent Empire of Brazil and Salvador’s local political culture. Tracing the history of patriotic festivals, Kraay concludes, reveals an enduring civic life and a broad embrace of active citizenship rather than orchestration from above. Indeed, together with the commemorations themselves, the sources Kraay uses to understand festive practice—local and national newspapers, the work of public intellectuals and folklorists, the archives of civic organizations—attest to a broader and more complex public sphere than is represented in many histories of nineteenth-century Brazil.

Kraay explores how the dois de julho became associated with radical liberal ideas of equality and anti-Portuguese sentiment. By the 1850s, however, the festivities had lost their partisan edge. “Patriotic battalions” spearheaded an expansion of the festivities to include a procession on the eve of the main parade that attracted so much attention that it threatened to eclipse the parade itself (106). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as participation of the military and police diminished, festivities became even more popular and less clearly associated with a self-consciously urbane elite. With regard to how the festivities expressed Bahian patriotism, Kraay analyzes the forging of national imagery in the figures of the cabocla and caboclo, terms that Kraay defines as acculturated Indians (16), and the omission of references to the contributions of Bahians of African descent in the fight for independence.

Kraay also analyzes the predicaments of Bahian patriotism within the politics of Brazilian nationhood. Dois de julho was not a regional identity project. Its program did not express claims of distinctiveness. Rather Bahians sought to insert their history of independence into Brazil’s history of independence. They celebrated dois de julho as Bahians and Brazilians, and, in some moments, they campaigned to add the dois de julho to the calendar of “days of national festivity” celebrated across Brazil (a calendar that Kraay has written of in an earlier award-winning book) (60).

Bahia’s Independence excavates a historical record of festivities at times at odds with the work of early folklorists, an inquiry that, as Kraay remarks, is contingent on precariously preserved archives. This book will also be of great interest to scholars of historical memory. Theater and poetry were vital expressions of this memory, while the later nineteenth-century plan to displace what some perceived to be unwieldy celebrations in Salvador’s streets with a dois de julho monument renewed debate on national imagery and the history of independence and their relationship to projects to make a now republican Brazil modern. At the end of century, the Bahian commemorations of dois de julho split in two, as a popular neighborhood celebration preserved practices and images that official festivities around a new monument sought to suppress. Kraay concludes by considering the reverberations of the nineteenth-century dois de julho in the twentieth. Both the festivities and debates about their meaning...