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1 Salvador, Bahia, 1930–1954 Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930) witnessed extraordinary transformations associated with urbanization, immigration, and industrialization in the southeastern states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and, especially, São Paulo. In 1930, Salvador, by contrast, remained very much unaffected by the factors and consequences of modernization. The only significant visual differences in the city between 1850 and 1930 were the gradual “urban improvements ” made under Governor J. J. Seabra in the 1910s, the tramlines that had sprung up along the principal streets, and the disappearance of the more obvious markers of urban slavery (which had been abolished in 1888). The long decline of Bahia’s sugar industry and the rise of coffee in the southeast cemented the shift in the national balance of power away from Salvador, which had been Brazil’s colonial capital until 1763. The Revolution of 1930 reoriented Brazil’s federal politics toward a centralized program of nation building based on industrial growth in the southeast. In Salvador and its hinterland, however, the old colonial social and economic structures continued largely intact until the slow development of Bahia’s petroleum reserves from the mid- to late 1950s. Bahian elites lost most of their political influence as Salvador struggled to attract benefits from Rio de Janeiro’s and São Paulo’s progress and growth. Brazil’s northeast lacked its own internal dynamism. The emergence of a cacao industry in Bahia in the late nineteenth century was some consolation, but it by no means matched the transformative power of coffee in the southeast.1 This socioeconomic stagnation and decline of political influence provides the backdrop for the changes in Salvador’s cultural politics and the reformulation of its regional identity after 1930. Given the weak economic basis for cross-class cooperation (based, for example, on a belief in the shared benefits of modernization and economic progress) and given the 6 7 6 7 18 · African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil small size and relatively low levels of organization within the Salvadoran working class, it would have made sense for African Bahians to channel their political initiatives into cultural politics. It also would have made sense for political and cultural elites to emphasize a project of cultural inclusion . Consequently, a closer look at Salvador’s economic and political developments and attendant social structures after 1930 is worthwhile both for context and to better appreciate the historical relationship between an incomplete process of modernization and the incorporation of AfricanBahian cultural practices within Bahian regional identity. Economic and Political Developments During the first half of the twentieth century, Salvador’s political and economic realities profoundly influenced the lives of the working class. The city where Salvadorans were born, worked, played, raised families, and died was the principal urban center of a vast agricultural hinterland that produced tobacco, sugar, salt, piaçava fiber, leather goods, and cacao, the state’s big earner.2 This extractive rural economy was characterized by manioc, tobacco, and sugar in Bahia’s Recôncavo region, the hinterland of Salvador and the Bay of All Saints. To the south of Salvador were the principal cacao - and coffee-growing regions, while to the north and west of the capital lay drought-stricken scrub, brutal poverty, and semifeudal social relationships . Salvador, as the state capital, the region’s financial center, and its only significant port, benefited greatly from linking the agricultural production of the state with the industrializing economies beyond Bahia, in Brazil’s southeast and the United States and northern Europe. To illustrate the city’s dominance in this respect, even as late as 1954, 80 percent of the state’s commercial tonnage went through the ports of Salvador.3 That the financial negotiations that governed the cacao industry (and every other sector of the economy) were transacted in Salvador sealed the city’s dominance over the hinterland. Both the regional headquarters of the national bank (which set prices and exchange rates) and the Bahian Cacao Institute (established in 1931) worked out of Salvador. Moreover, export houses in Salvador also functioned as banks, binding rural producers to the dictates of the metropole by lending money from the capital at high rates.4 Bahia in 1930 was still a provider of commodities to industrialized and industrializing economies of the North Atlantic and the southeast of Brazil . Even though late-nineteenth-century Bahia had experienced moderate industrialization—the region had even briefly been at the forefront of [3.16.66.206] Project MUSE...

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