Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia 9781477324202

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Selling Black Brazil

Selling Black Brazil Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia

A na deli a A. Romo

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Publication of this book was made possible in part by support from the Pachita Tennant Pike Fund for Latin American Studies. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Romo, Anadelia A., author. Title: Selling Black Brazil : race, nation, and visual culture in Salvador, Bahia / Anadelia A. Romo. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021020084 ISBN 978-1-4773-2419-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2420-2 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4773-2421-9 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Culture and tourism—Brazil—Salvador—History—20th century. | Tourism and art—Brazil—Salvador—History—20th century— Pictorial works. | City promotion—Brazil—Salvador—History—20th century. | National characteristics, Brazilian. | Blacks—Brazil—Social conditions. | Indigenous peoples—Brazil—Social conditions. | Salvador (Brazil)—Guidebooks—History—20th century—Pictorial works. | Salvador (Brazil)—Guidebooks—History—20th century. Classification: LCC G155.B6 R66 2022 | DDC 338.4/7918142—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020084 doi:10.7560/324196

For Lily and Emmett

Contents

Preface

ix

Glossary

xiii

Introduction: Race, Identity, and Visual Culture in the Americas 1 1. Precedents and Backdrops: Racial Types and Modern Ports 2. Colonial Churches and the Rise of the Quintessential Black City: Modernism, Travel, and the Pathbreaking Guide of Jorge Amado 58 3. Pierre Verger and the Construction of a Black Folk, 1946–1951 93 4. Festive Streets: Carybé and Bahian Modernism

138

5. “Human and Picturesque”: Consolidation in the Bahian Tourist Guides of the 1950s 183 6. All Roads Lead to Black Rome: How the Religion of “Secrets” Became a Tourist Attraction 210 Epilogue: Reflection and Refraction Acknowledgments Appendix Notes

267

268

Bibliography Index

318

299

262

253

22

Preface

This book began its life as a very specialized study of one capital city in Brazil’s Northeast: São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, more commonly known as Salvador or, simply, Bahia. As I began to write, however, I soon realized that my initial framing was far too limited: this was not just a story of Bahian identity or regionalism in Brazil, two well-respected themes in Brazilian history to which I had intended to contribute. It was, rather, a story familiar across the Americas, even the United States. It was a story of making the local national and of using native elements to build a larger national identity. And it was a story familiar across the diaspora, one that spoke to the deep power of racial stereotypes and the difficult trajectory of Afro–Latin Americans in the larger visual register. I have written, therefore, a book that I hope speaks to these broader concerns, and a book that I believe expresses the larger trajectory of the Americas rather than of Brazil alone. I have also written the type of book I like to teach. I place Bahia and Brazil fi rmly within the trajectory of Latin America, rather than as regions best treated apart. I show that ideas of race permeate everything, and I make Blackness, not just Indigeneity, a part of the conversation. I use a close case study to bring texture and life to larger regional trends, with vibrant images as primary sources. And I have tried throughout to write concisely in a language free from jargon and unnecessary complications so that students as well as specialized scholars may follow along. Equally important to this book is my treatment of images as central to the argument itself. This too came gradually. I started off interested in the many tourist guides written within Salvador, works that I had

x

Preface

discovered while writing my fi rst book on racial thought in twentiethcentury Bahia. But as I prepared to give a small talk on what I assumed might eventually make an interesting article, I realized that the fascinating part of the story depended upon the guides’ powerful illustrations. Why were some of the top cultural figures in the city wasting their time on these seemingly prosaic projects? And why did some of the most prominent modernist artists of the region join in? Why did Afro-Bahian religious leaders prove so sympathetic to these efforts? And why did the ideas and the images of these works read as so familiar? These guides, I realized, were about more than tourism: they were potent tools for crafting identity. Perhaps more importantly, they had been successful. Understandings of Salvador today, I argue, can be in large part traced to the tropes and patterns developed in the guides of the 1950s. This focus on images has placed me in unfamiliar but exciting territory, as I am not an art historian. But I have brought art into the narrative because these images are critical to the work undertaken in the crafting of identity, and because Salvador has a particularly vivid and fascinating iconography that deserves more critical attention. Few outside of Bahia know much about this iconography, while those inside Bahia have often taken it for granted or viewed it as a particularly Bahian development. Yet placing this visual culture within the larger story of the Americas allows us to uncover broader parallels and showcases the way in which the visual world has both reflected and driven social change. This particular narrative has much to tell about how incorporation into a national symbolic realm may reveal disturbing limits and how ethnic and racial populations have been simultaneously included and excluded across the hemisphere. The tension between inclusion and exclusion has deep parallels elsewhere. Descendants of African and Indigenous peoples all across the Americas have spent much of the twentieth century battling for inclusion and equal rights, an elusive outcome far from complete today. Yet the dynamic that has puzzled historians and frustrated activists is not only that progress in these arenas has failed to proceed in linear fashion but that it has advanced unevenly across legal, political-economic, and cultural spheres. More to the point, moments of cultural acceptance have not always mapped on to political and legal rights. This dialectic—this critical disjuncture between national imaginations and political rights—is everything in the Americas. It makes up the central contradiction of the Americas, from US insistence on its

Preface

xi

democratic foundations in the midst of slavery to Brazil’s celebrations of racial democracy in what has long been one of the most unequal countries of the world. This book captures this dichotomy in Latin America, where the gap between cultural inclusion and political rights has been particularly stark, and in Salvador, where this gap is key to any understanding of the city and of Brazil.

Glossary

atabaque. A tall, wooden hand drum with origins in West and Central Africa. Yoruba-based Candomblé rituals often employ a trio of the drums, while a single drum is often used as accompaniment to capoeira. Baiana. Literally, “woman from Bahia.” The term has come to be more closely associated with Afro-Bahian women and usually references a woman who wears a particular type of clothing: long, full skirts, a shawl, and a wrapped head scarf. That style may often correspond closely to the ceremonial clothing of Candomblé, but in reality women known as Baianas dress in a variety of styles. baiana de acarajé. A woman who owns or operates a street stall and often wears a traditional Baiana form of dress; an acarajé is a fritter made of black-eyed peas, fried in a West African red palm oil known as dendê, and frequently cooked by Afro-Bahian female food vendors at small stalls on the street. Candomblé. An African-based religion that gained new roots in Brazil under slavery. It has been particularly associated with the state of Bahia and especially with the city of Salvador. The term refers broadly to a diverse set of practices, although the Yoruba-based practice of Salvador has come to enjoy the most prestige. I capitalize the term when referring to the religion as a whole and use the lower case when referring to one temple, or terreiro, in particular. capoeira. An African-based form of martial defense that developed under slavery, utilizing rigorous physical movements that are most commonly accompanied today by acoustic instruments and chants or singing. It became more systematized in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly among Afro-Bahian men in Salvador. Although the practice became an important element for Brazilian nationalism, be-

xiv

Glossary

coming appropriated as a form of national gymnastics, Salvador is often seen as the most important site for its development. mestiço. A term that serves a similar function as the Spanish word “mestizo,” conveying mixed heritage. It has also been used as a racial term, most often to refer to individuals with heritage from both Europe and Africa. Obá. A title given to individuals who serve within the Salvador candomblé Opô Afonjá as one of twelve ministers of the god Xangô, a particularly important deity within Yoruba religions. The leadership of Mãe Aninha inaugurated use of the title in Salvador in the early 1930s, situating the practice as a continuation of African traditions. Under the leadership of her successor, Mãe Senhora, the twelve ministers each gained two additional posts, also broadly defi ned as Obás, for a total of thirty-six Obás. Ogã. An ally or sponsor of a particular candomblé who may assist with fi nancing of religious rituals or with navigating relations with outside authorities. Most Ogã go through initiation but do not undergo any religious possession (a privilege reserved for true initiates). An Ogã may serve as an Obá. Orixá. A god worshiped in Candomblé; the term comes from Yoruba practice. Paulista. An adjective used to describe someone or something from the southeastern state of São Paulo. Pelourinho. In general terms, a pillory or whipping post used for public punishment of enslaved people. Salvador’s historic preservation zone is known today as the Pelourinho, in reference to the whipping post once located at the center of its colonial streets. A district dominated by colorfully restored colonial mansions, the Pelourinho was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985 and is the leading tourist attraction in the city. povo. Although this word refers literally to “the people,” it carries a more particular nuance that often references Brazil’s popular classes or the underclass. Recôncavo. The crescent-shaped territory that surrounds Salvador’s bay and surrounds Bahia’s capital city of Salvador. Historically it represented some of the richest sugar land in colonial Brazil and a center for enslaved labor. terreiro. Translates literally as “yard” but has a different set of meanings in relation to Candomblé; most often used as a synonym for “temple,” or a particular candomblé, but can also refer to the religious buildings and properties belonging to a candomblé.

Selling Black Brazil

Figure 0.1. Map of Brazil.

Introduction: Race, Identity, and Visual Culture in the Americas

At the close of the nineteenth century, Latin American elites regarded European culture as the ideal, despairing that their differences, especially the racial makeup of their populations, would never allow them to become truly great nations. Yet in a remarkable shift in the early decades of the twentieth century, this same upper class, and national identities more broadly, began to reflect a new sense of pride in their distinctive cultures, ushering in changes that have persisted until the present day. Such efforts were not without precedent: the nineteenth century had also unleashed efforts by newly independent nations to embrace their native roots.1 Yet the twentieth century witnessed an intensification and consolidation of these trends. In fits and starts, Mexicans turned to Indigenous symbols with new interest, Peruvians began to celebrate their Incan traditions, Cubans embraced the Africanbased rhythms of the rumba, and Brazilians moved samba into their national playbook. At their core, all of these changing national identities depended on evolving ideas of race and ethnicity, the rise of mass politics and populism, and new political priority granted to nationalism. 2 In addition, however, the process relied upon deep changes in visual culture. Making race and nation in Latin America depended not only on transformations in the world of ideas and politics but also on seismic shifts in the world of images: visual culture was central to the forging of new national ideals. In the following pages, I examine the complexities of nation making and race through both text and image, with a particular case study of Brazil, one of the most fascinating cases of national reinvention. Although Brazil began the twentieth century as a nation intent on whitening its population, it shifted in the next decades to bill itself as a

2

Selling Black Brazil

nation with its origins in racial mixture and, ultimately, as a racial democracy. This last ideal, forged through the 1930s, posited that the three foundational components of Brazil—the Indigenous, the European, and the African—had come together in a society free from prejudice. Though patently false, this idealistic vision proved useful in unifying a diverse country riven by deep inequalities and regional divisions, and Brazil’s supposedly unique capacity for racial democracy became a national mantra by the 1950s.3 Even as this mantra became central to Brazil, however, it was always regionalized. Thus, as the twentieth century unfolded, the southeastern state of São Paulo billed itself as the European, or white, element of this triad; the Amazon in the North became known as Indigenous; and the northeastern state of Bahia, and especially its urban capital of Salvador, came to represent the African, or Black, heart of Brazil.4 In this book, I turn to the last part of the triad and give close attention to the importance of visual culture in crafting a Bahian identity around Blackness in the postwar era. More specifically, I use a once growing body of illustrated tourist literature, one that peaked in the 1950s, to trace the changing visual register. Locals came to depict the region as a racial paradise as well as the preserve of Brazil’s most authentic Black practices, even as the city struggled to emerge from deep poverty and stark racial inequalities that had deep roots in slavery. A developing visual culture proved critical to establishing these tropes. Images not only spoke louder than words, as the aphorism goes; they also spoke to a much broader audience in Brazil, where literacy rates remained exceptionally low for most of the twentieth century, than words ever could. Whether in photographs or pen and ink, these depictions consistently portrayed Salvador’s Black majority as festive, as engaged in extensive practice of leisure, and as congregants in a colonial streetscape that limited the portrayals of Blackness to a very precise and narrow geographic location. I demonstrate that the intersection of tourism and a new visual landscape of the city shaped and consolidated pernicious stereotypes of Blackness and exoticized visions of African culture in Salvador. The racialized visual archetypes that developed through the 1950s made Black bodies a foil to urban white space, solidifying the city’s image in corporal, racialized forms that have persisted to the present day. The early years of tourism promotion in Salvador and the concurrent development of a set of visual archetypes laid the foundations for Salvador’s modern racial landscape and reveal the central contradictions of Brazilian racial ideology.

Introduction

3

This visual cityscape, like the built landscape of skyscrapers used to depict São Paulo, or the natural crescent of coast used to represent Rio de Janeiro, is often deemed a simple reflection of reality. But just like any landscape, these scenes have been carefully framed to reflect particular social and political needs. As Simon Schama proposes, “It is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape.”5 Though Schama here is addressing natural landscapes, his words ring equally true for examining the construction of urban landscapes. Likewise, it is this constructed ideal I wish to draw upon to emphasize: while the “raw matter” of Salvador might have been itself real, the artists who portrayed the urban landscape of the city inevitably used their own shaping perceptions to do so. This is important to stress because many of the artists treated in this work have claimed to be, and have often been treated as, documentary recorders of reality and even ethnographers. One of my most basic interventions in this book is to call attention to a fundamental point long taken as a given for social art historians: that images provide a reflection of society’s anxieties and concerns rather than a mere reflection of reality itself. Far from accepting such images as natural, then, or as inevitable, we must question the social, economic, and political forces that created these icons and allowed them to persist. Salvador’s constructed landscape is both typical and exceptional, revealing all of the complexities of forging identity in the Americas, even as it permits a window into one of the few cases where Blackness became imagined as central in the larger African diaspora. The story of Salvador provides yet another example of how the colonial collisions of race in the Americas have been continually renegotiated and how ideas of race themselves have changed. It provides a microhistory of the way in which nations in Latin America turned to more diverse origins for their national image, even as they remained mired in many older ways of racial thought. Yet at the same time, Salvador’s focus on Blackness has been relatively uncommon in Latin America, where Indigenous rather than African roots have been most commonly drawn upon for national identity myths. With the exception of Haiti, identification of a space with Blackness has been limited to regions rather than nations.6 This is not simply a reflection of a heavier Indigenous presence in Latin America. Africans, uprooted by slavery in massive numbers, spread across Latin America beginning with the earliest conquistadors, establishing the foundations and a critical population base for New World societies.7 While the contributions of Africans in the

4

Selling Black Brazil

Americas have been deep and critical, their visual representations often barely register in the production of images in Latin America, or they have been treated as a racial type isolated from the larger whole. The visual presence of Afro–Latin Americans has been uneven, structured by power relations that simultaneously sought to make Blackness invisible while asserting Black servitude and Black presence as critical to life in the Americas. Indeed, the process of coming to terms with Blackness in the visual representations of Latin America is still very much under way and incomplete.8 The trajectory of Salvador shows how deep legacies of slavery continue to surface, even as ideas of race are rethought. The rethinking of race and aesthetics there gained inspiration from other Black movements across the Atlantic, whether the Afro-Cuban ideal of writers such as Nicolás Guillén, Francophone celebrations of negritude, the art of the Harlem Renaissance, or the diasporic studies of African connections led by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits. Salvador also reveals fascinating comparisons with other former sugar zones that have sought to reinvent their economies after the collapse of the plantation system. Unlike the British Caribbean, which has focused on images of the islands as tropical paradises empty of people, Salvador aligns perhaps more closely with New Orleans, where colonial mansion tours often celebrate a whitened sugar past even as they exploit contemporary notions of Black revelry for tourists.9 These brief comparisons raise interesting questions of how zones formerly defi ned by violence, exploitation, and slavery reinvent themselves in modern terms. The case of Salvador reveals, then, the long shadows of the system of Atlantic slavery, one that brought together broad swaths of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in vastly unequal terms.

The Bahian Setting Salvador began its life at the center of Brazil’s colonial project. The fi rst Portuguese arrival to Brazil landed on Bahian shores in 1500, some two hundred miles south of Salvador, and the foundation of Salvador in 1549 marked it among the colony’s earliest cities. Portuguese settlers intruded into territory long inhabited by Indigenous groups, especially the Tupinambá, creating conflicts that were smoothed over by the marriage of the Portuguese-born Diogo Álvares Correia to a woman known as Catarina Paraguaçu, an Indigenous daughter of a

Introduction

5

local leader. These alliances, however, could not stem the devastating effects of European illnesses. As was true across the Americas, the Indigenous population in Brazil suffered steep decline due to disease, and Portuguese colonists turned instead to bringing in Africans as their new choice for forced labor. Salvador rapidly emerged as one of the largest ports of entry for enslaved Africans in world history, bringing in over 1.5 million souls.10 So heavy was the dependence on enslaved labor that foreigners who walked Salvador’s streets in the nineteenth century marveled at feeling as if they were in Africa itself. Among these was the traveler Avé Lallement, who wrote in 1859, “If one did not know that Bahia is located in Brazil, one could easily imagine it to be an African capital, the residence of a powerful Black prince. . . . Everything looks Black: Blacks on the beach, Blacks in the city, Blacks in the low part, Blacks in the high city. Everything that runs, shouts, works, everything that transports and carries is Black.”11 This slave economy, which persisted in Brazil until 1888, served to bring enormous wealth to the colonial settlers. The sugar plantations that surrounded Salvador’s bay grew to support opulent churches and a bustling city center and port. Meanwhile, the wealth of the enslaved and their descendants—poor in material terms but rich in heritage from West Africa—allowed for the building up of dynamic cultural traditions even in the midst of a brutal slave regime, from the martial arts and dance of capoeira to the new African-based religions that would become known as Candomblé.12 Salvador’s fortunes changed with the rise of new sugar zones in other areas of the world and with the declining productivity of its soil. Furthermore, the discovery of gold in central western Brazil and the rising importance of areas of the coastal Southeast meant Salvador found itself quickly displaced from its role as center of the colony, an insult consolidated with the move of the capital to Rio in 1763. Industrialization, dawning slowly in Brazil’s Southeast at the turn of the twentieth century, largely bypassed Bahia, which continued to rely on primary exports such as minerals, cacao, and hemp. Bahia remained important due to its bustling port and its agricultural bounties. But, increasingly, it faced the scorn of the rest of Brazil, particularly Brazil’s Southeast, which deemed the state backward and outside of modernity itself. Such assessments were of course racialized. Moreover, they were formed within a jockeying for power that was taking place among Brazil’s regions, one in which each strove to insist on its dominant place in the nation.

6

Selling Black Brazil

Bahia’s regional dominance had been assured in the colonial era by its slavery, but as slavery ended and scientific racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gained sway, elites increasingly worried that the capital’s Black population had become a liability. Despite the central importance of Black life to the city, Salvador began the twentieth century much like other regions of Latin America, and very much in the vein of Brazil itself: insisting instead on its whiteness, its modernity, and its progress.13 This deliberate crafting of whiteness calls attention to the fact that a Black majority has not always equated to a Black identity for the city, nor an easy acceptance for Black cultures. Indeed, at the dawn of the twentieth century, whites, who made up only 30 percent of the city’s population but monopolized most of its wealth and power, fretted about how best to divert attention from (and repress) the continued, undeniable presence of the city’s large Black population.14 These calculations began to shift in the 1930s and 1940s as Brazil as a whole began to privilege official celebrations of racial mixing and Brazil’s African roots; Bahia joined, if sometimes reluctantly, in these trends.15 As pseudoscientific ideas of inferiority lost ground in international circles, as the national sphere embraced an idea of a multiracial Brazil, and as local actors reconfigured understandings of race and space, Blackness became the centerpiece of Bahian identity. The process of shaping Salvador’s identity around Africa or Blackness had its origins in a variety of sources and groups. Afro-Bahians pushed back against the racism of the nineteenth century to forge their own values in religion, in carnival, and in daily life. The religious space of Candomblé, a religion fusing African beliefs and Brazilian realities, took an especially important role in asserting the value of African roots, as did early Afro-Bahian writers such as Manuel Querino.16 By the 1930s, academics further endorsed this view, with scholars such as Edison Carneiro, Arthur Ramos, Roger Bastide, Ruth Landes, and Melville Herskovits declaring Bahia a preeminent source of Black culture and African continuities.17 By the 1950s, the question of regional identity in Salvador was in the midst of significant change, with Black culture seen as a new potential draw for visitors. The next decades brought remarkable consolidation of these trends, as Black cultural manifestations became key not only to official tourist promotions but also to a new countercultural tourism: hippies and leftists flocked to Salvador for a vanishing “authentic” or “primitive” culture within Brazil.18 As institutions of historical preservation expanded their purview

Introduction

7

during this period and beyond, the largely Black population of the Pelourinho historic center came to be viewed (and to view itself) as just as essential to Bahia’s historical patrimony as the city’s colonial buildings.19 By the late twentieth century, Salvador had become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, famed equally for its colonial preservation and its role as the cultural capital of Brazil’s African diaspora. It has become a central tourist destination for Brazilians as well as for a much wider international travel circuit. Today over 80 percent of the state’s population, or roughly twelve million people, identify as nonwhite, and the state—itself the size of France—hosts the largest population of Afrodescendants outside of Nigeria. 20 While Bahia’s Black culture and African roots have been widely celebrated, material conditions for Black residents have lagged far behind. The result is a city that has often been inclusive in terms of its identity but profoundly exclusive in terms of basic welfare. Recent statistics from 2015 show that Salvador had the highest income inequality between Blacks and whites of any of Brazil’s largest cities, with Black workers receiving only 48 percent of what white workers earned. Within Brazil, horrifying levels of police violence have killed Black citizens in numbers almost unequaled across the Americas; the state of Bahia ranks third in the country for police killings. Even as numbers continue to increase, the shattering 2015 police massacre of twelve young Black men remains a symbol of the vulnerability of Black lives in the city. 21 Salvador’s inclusionary ideal has concealed the realities of racial exclusion, racial inequalities, and widespread racial violence. In contrast to its projected image of racial harmony, the region has yet to fi nd meaningful solutions for these problems.

Definitions It is important to consider what Blackness meant in Bahia for the period I address here. Such defi nitions, though apparently simple, are difficult to resolve, especially in Latin America, where race, long understood to be a social construct, has historically been used in more flexible forms than in the United States. In Bahia, like much of Latin America, color, class, and culture have formed important mediators to identity, mediators that may be deployed or understood differently depending on the situation. And the sheer number and diversity of the Bahian population with some African heritage has meant that there

8

Selling Black Brazil

have necessarily been a great many ways that people have defi ned their race and color over space and time. There were always tensions, for example, between those who privileged an African-based identity and those who defi ned Blackness in Salvador as based on local culture. In general terms, Candomblé practitioners tended to highlight African roots as key to their identity and to their religious legitimacy. This emphasis was not always shared by other members of the Black population in the city, however, particularly its small Black upper class, many of whom rejected any association with Africa to integrate more fully into a mainstream culture that often denigrated such connections. Meanwhile, many white elites sought to defi ne Black culture as a distinctively Brazilian creation, minimizing African influence for a more nationalist vision that all might share and participate in. Their billing of African-based culture as “folklore” should surely be read as an effort to harness these cultural manifestations to a shared national heritage rather than a racial one. Yet these broad divisions cannot capture the frequent overlaps between the aspirations of all parties, who ended up in many cases working together to build an image of Salvador centered on its Blackness. Although I cannot possibly do justice to all of the nuance within the activities of these individual actors, I draw out some of these distinctions when relevant. My ultimate argument, however, is that regardless of the complexity of the central actors I treat in this narrative, they all ultimately agreed that Black cultural practice was central to Salvador. Although less is known of the broader popular reception among Salvador’s Black populations, available evidence suggests that, at least for some members of the Candomblé community, such portrayals met with approval. I should note here that some have worried that scholars from the United States impose a binary vision of race onto Brazil in ways that betray the complexity of complex color and class hierarchies. I agree that race is culturally determined and certainly reject any notion that the complexity of race today may be reduced to mere binaries. Not only does the history of Latin America make such an assumption untenable, but on a personal level, as a scholar with both Mexican American and white heritage, I well understand notions of nuance and complication. Yet while I agree that there is a fundamental flexibility of race and color categories in Latin America, I also recognize the important scholarship by anthropologists such as Robin Sheriff who have found that Brazilians, despite their panoply of racial and color terms,

Introduction

9

generally categorize people in binary terms of either Black or white. Demographers too have revealed that despite the popular idea of pardo (brown) or mestiço (mixed) as independent categories, the largest gap falls between whites and everyone else, with Black, pardo, and mestiço populations all suffering similar levels of exclusion in terms of health, education, and income. More recently, it has also become painfully clear that while gradations of color might matter in some social settings, or in the academic realm, they disappear in the sights of the police, where binary divisions of Black and white have clearly held sway with devastating effects. In this sense, police have not stopped to question gradations of color and instead have unleashed violence on nonwhites more broadly, with Brazil’s nonwhite population decimated by police killings. 22 With these larger patterns in mind, I thus follow the practice of the Black movement in Brazil, which groups those of African heritage together. I refer to populations of African descent alternately as Black, as nonwhite, and as Afro-Bahian or Afro-Brazilian, striving throughout to uncover the particular ways in which race became used and understood by inhabitants of Salvador itself.

Space, Region, and Nation The idea that the texts and images in tourist promotions played a critical role in racializing Salvador relies, of course, on notions of space and place. In the framework of spatial geographers, and within the new “spatial turn” in history, scholars have worked to separate the physical space of a location from the meaning and identity imbued in a particular location, which may instead be termed a sense of place. The critical element here is that a sense of identity for a city is constructed socially, rather than representing the simple result of its geographic parts. In a similar vein, within the realm of art history, Krista Thompson has drawn upon the concept of a “place-image,” or the images that come to represent a given area, to uncover how a particular site may gain a particular visual, and racialized, association.23 Whatever the terms we use to describe it, the point is that various actors played creative roles not only in refl ecting the reality of Salvador, which they surely did to some extent, but also in creating that reality in both discursive and visual terms: together they helped fashion a highly visualized sense of place that is now accepted as commonplace and natural.24 Historians of Brazil have stressed this creative process more broadly

10

Selling Black Brazil

as critical for the formations of regional identities. As Durval Albuquerque Júnior—one of the earliest scholars to ponder these regional inventions—reminds us, the task for historians is to “denaturalize regions, to problematize their invention, and to search for their historicity among layers of practices and discourses.”25 With this emphasis of region making as a historical process in mind, we can better frame Bahia’s own invention of itself as one among many. Regional promoters across the nation sought to build up a distinct sense of the regions’ own identity, but always in relation to national discourse in place at the time. A rough sketch would show that the modern shaping of Brazil’s regions took root for most in the 1920s, escalated during the nationalistic years under the leadership of the dictator Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945), and continued to build through the 1950s and 1960s. In this process Salvador has often been regarded as the ultimate symbol of Bahia, as well as, more recently, one of the most significant markers of the region known as the Northeast.26 Racial ideas of difference became central to regional identities early. As Barbara Weinstein demonstrated for São Paulo, the region worked hard to portray itself as the embodiment of whiteness and modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, while the Northeast was set up as its backward, darker counterpart. Such portrayals went further than being merely discursive. As she proposes, such frameworks not only depended on ideas of difference but helped develop “policies and decisions that consolidate and exacerbate regional inequalities.”27 To put it bluntly, ideas, just as much as any economic reality, have mattered in the creation of the starkly polarized realities of welfare faced by inhabitants of São Paulo and those of the Northeast. In a parallel vein, my study here draws upon Weinstein not only for her insights into how ideas of race and region were critical to one another but also to highlight how the ideas of difference developed in Salvador that I trace here have had lasting, real implications for the racialized divisions of the city today. Although Weinstein is correct in stressing the importance of the binary opposition posed between Paulistas and Nordestinos (residents of São Paulo and the Northeast), the racialization of the Northeast in broad terms conceals a more complex story. Although it is true that the Northeast was inevitably generalized into notions of a racialized other, it was Bahia, and Salvador in particular, that had long been understood as Brazil’s Blackest region and the darkest foil to the whiteness of the South. Moreover, as I argue here, we must turn especially

Introduction

11

to visual culture to understand how regional identities, national tensions, and deep inequalities have been crafted in Brazil. Across Latin America, historians attuned to shifting ideas of region and race have often left aside visual components that have been remarkably powerful in reshaping these understandings. This book brings these elements together to show how understandings of region and race, long intertwined, have depended upon and fashioned particular visual registers that have perpetuated spatial and racial exclusions.

Native Modernisms The most important artistic influence for these visual registers came from the development of modernism across the Americas. As art historians have emphasized, modernist interest in native ethnic and racial roots was particularly strong in Latin America, where it was harnessed to nation-making efforts in the early twentieth century. The timing of these nationalistic movements varied but broadly gained steam through the 1920s and 1930s. In Brazil, new creative efforts came out of São Paulo and the Northeast in the 1920s, where poets, writers, and artists began to seek native inspiration for their national visions. While the term “modernism” is notoriously slippery, I use it here to link Salvador with the movements of artistic renovation across the Americas, movements that themselves were varied in terms of timing and framing. In this vein, “modernism” refers to the cadre of artists, intellectuals, and government officials who came to challenge traditional ways of understanding and drew upon native histories to do so. This cultural nationalism was radical enough that it was generally resisted in Bahia for some time, but it would fi nd new life there in the 1950s. 28 Bahia’s modernist movement had much in common with its predecessors in São Paulo and beyond. To begin with, it was primarily representational as opposed to abstract: modernists needed recognizable figures to narrate their stories of identity and origins. Equally important, it looked to ethnic themes to represent a “native” reality in contrast to a European ideal. While traditional framing of Salvador by a white sugar elite had posited it as a city of colonial grandeur, the modernist framing that developed saw Salvador as a city distinctive for its contemporary life, with the culture of the povo, the people—or the Black majority—as its driving force. All of these trends fit neatly

12

Selling Black Brazil

within the larger meanings of modernism across Latin America, but they were translated into a particularly local language. Salvador’s modernists and its elite certainly could not have crafted regional traditions and practices alone, and they relied most often instead on a variety of sometimes unacknowledged cultural actors who had forged dynamic practices of their own making, largely outside the realm of elite power or approval and sometimes in direct opposition to it. The faithful of Candomblé were one such group, as were adepts at capoeira (capoeiristas) across the city. Afro-Bahian fishermen, with communal forms of casting their nets, also attracted the attention of modernists during this time in their eternal search for the “authentic” roots of the region. The focus of this book is not on these groups, the inevitable tensions within them, or their own trajectories at gaining acceptance, a project that would depend on other sources. But one select group does emerge as an especially powerful agent for altering meaning in Salvador in the texts I examine here. This was the community of Candomblé, a group long accustomed to fighting for legitimacy and tolerance. Their interactions with the modernists, interactions they used strategically for their own purposes, emerge with particular power and clarity in chapter 6. As was the case with many of their peers across Latin America, these interactions brought both increased prestige as well as distortions of their practice, with the balance continually teetering between the two. The case of Salvador, where modernists turned especially to celebrating Candomblé as one of the most representative elements of the city, shows in rare relief how the underclass of a region might be active agents in crafting race and region even outside the realms of elite power. In a broader sense, what remains striking about Bahian modernism is that its actors were so engaged in promoting tourism. While such efforts have parallels in modernism more broadly, they also appear to be particularly tied to the local scene. As the artist Mário Cravo, a figure central to the movement, remembered, “In the Bahia of 1940 the elite didn’t know, didn’t participate in any kind of popular culture, capoeira was a thing for lower-class Blacks. The elites rejected it. . . . What our generation did was to reappropriate these values, dynamizing them in an international language. Each with his own vision of the universe. We discovered the city and placed our own individualistic style on it.”29 Modernists, then, saw themselves as legitimizing and uncovering Bahia’s Black popular culture while also “discovering” and stylizing the city itself. As I reveal in the following chapters, literary

Introduction

13

and artistic members of the modernist movement became perhaps the most active cadre in serving as boosters and promoters for Salvador. In the process, they helped to reshape ideas of race and Blackness as they set about promoting Bahia as the premiere tourist destination for all of Brazil. The result was a palliative modernism, serving to romanticize race relations at a pivotal moment and to smooth over disruptions that threatened to disturb Bahia’s economic status and its cityscape itself. In my discussion of this modernist moment, I draw upon work being done in other areas of Latin America to emphasize deeper artistic continuities. Scholars of Mexico, for example, have begun to point to the ways in which casta hierarchies—colonial racial categorizations that spawned various visual depictions of race mixture—remained influential into the modern era. Indeed, the legacy of casta ideology can be seen in the depictions of national types in the nineteenth century as well as the importance granted to ideas of mestizaje in the twentieth. Likewise, in Peru, drawings by nineteenth-century foreign observers and costumbrista artists distinguished national types that bled into later photographic visiting cards, which in turn informed visual racial categorizations important for turn-of-the-century racist thought.30 These deep artistic precedents have been less explored for Brazil, yet Brazil generally followed the rest of Latin America in these broader trends. Just as the nineteenth century brought a new emphasis on the “types” that would make up a nation in the midst of flux and modernization—a development in Latin America known as costumbrismo— a new wave of modernization in Bahia and Brazil in the 1950s brought many of these same anxieties to the fore. And in a curious manner, many of the same forms of representation persisted.31 Indeed, nineteenth-century precedents continued to reverberate within the “innovations,” almost a century later, of Bahian modernism in the postwar period. In this way, the visual culture that developed created archetypes with a deep and troubled past. As I reveal, although modernists broke new ground in some respects, they often remained mired in the racialized portrayals of earlier eras.

Sources To understand these changing and racialized portrayals, I rely on a genre of sources hitherto largely neglected by historians: the numerous illustrated tourist guides written in Portuguese. These sources open up

14 Selling Black Brazil

a treasure trove of information about how locally based writers and illustrators wished for their city to be portrayed to their national compatriots and beyond. More than mere pamphlets—indeed, often book length—such guides formed an eclectic and increasingly popular genre and, equally important, provided a new forum for provocative Bahiathemed art. With more than forty guides produced for exclusively national tourists from the 1930s through the 1960s, these sources provide a telling barometer of changing local conceptions of a place and an ideal way to chart changing visual understandings of Blackness over time. Analysis is complicated, however, by the fact that these guides have not been gathered together in any one archive or collection but are scattered across libraries and archives in the United States and Brazil. In fact, because of their ostensibly practical nature, many of the guides were difficult to fi nd in Bahia itself, surely discarded once their information was presumed outdated. When studied together, however, these sources offer a moving lens into the projected hopes and dreams of people who sought to promote their often-maligned hometown in the best possible light. While these tourist guides have not yet been analyzed as a genre or received focused attention from historians, several scholars have pointed to select guides in defi ning the cultural framework of Salvador or have highlighted the potential that such guides might offer. Osmundo Pinho made the early, critical proposition that many of the foundational elements of Bahian identity, or baianidade, were to be found in the works of the novelist Jorge Amado and in tourist guides spanning the 1940s to the 1960s. Miriam Riggs’s study of Salvador’s colonial center highlights municipal guides from the early 1950s as key to a cultural politics that viewed Black people primarily as “folkloric” elements. And Scott Ickes argues that tourist guides of this time revealed a new enthusiasm for African-based rituals and further helped create a broader Afro-Bahian aesthetic. 32 As these authors would no doubt agree, Salvador’s tourist guides revealed a pivotal arena in which race and identity were reconfigured within the city and its elite. A consideration of the guides together, as a body of work, allows us to see how deeply this impact extended. And focusing on the art within the guides, an element largely neglected so far, allows access to a critical arena of meaning making, one that ultimately became more important than the texts themselves.33 As I emphasize here, Bahia not only led the way in publishing guides for Brazilians to come and visit but also led the way in produc-

Introduction

15

ing guides that depended upon illustrations, often in massive numbers. Considerable time, effort, and most especially expense were dedicated to providing visual guides to Salvador at an early period. The insistence, then, by these various boosters that the city of Salvador should be understood in both textual and visual form is important and needs to be probed. The visual culture I treat here is not one that can typically be seen in museums, although its artists are now well known. Instead Salvador developed a print culture produced to accompany the tourist guides in published form as books or magazine features. As a rule, these artworks were small in size—fit to pages, not walls or easels. It was this format that allowed them to be so transportable, so accessible, and so widely circulated in their time. They were further made possible by a print revolution in the 1950s that made higherquality images possible and made photography newly accessible to the Brazilian public. All of this combined to bring a much broader circulation of these images than would have been possible with more rarified and elite museum showings. The artistic renderings that came to symbolize Salvador during this era certainly had good company within a rich and varied artistic world. Artistic production in many forms came to symbolize the state as a whole, and many of the artisans involved were Afro-Bahian. Pottery produced in Maragogipinho, a city across the bay from Salvador, was heralded by guidebooks as representing the popular artistry of Bahia, as were carved wooden figureheads used to decorate the prows of small river boats until the 1950s, especially along the waterways of the river São Francisco. In other traditions shared across the Northeast of Brazil, Bahian artisans also set themselves apart. Bahian lace makers helped to establish a visual symbol of the region, as did the poets who published chapbooks with vibrant covers. Bahian lace became iconic as part of the regional dress of Baianas and as part of the religious wear of female Candomblé practitioners. Chapbooks, or cordel literature, brought narrative rhymes to wide audiences in small, inexpensive newsprint pamphlets with arresting woodblock prints on their covers. These forms are not treated here, but they serve to further highlight how important the genre of the tourist guide and its modernist sketches became in a dynamic artistic field. Easily circulated, easy to print, and promoted relentlessly by a particular modernist cadre, the genre established the hegemony of one particular type of visual culture and became the most formative in marking the city. I have selected the sources I treat here based on a few criteria. First,

16 Selling Black Brazil

I was interested in the self-promotions of Brazilians, not the outside gaze of foreigners. This has meant that while I have read widely in US and European travel writing about Bahia, which was also extensive, I generally do not analyze its focus here. In part, this decision comes from the fact that the two streams of guides were often moving in different directions. From colonial observers to nineteenth-century travelers to Good Neighbor visitors of the twentieth century, race in Bahia was central to outsiders’ stories, although always subject to the prejudices and limitations of the author at hand. In this way, outside writers came to emphasize Salvador’s Blackness earlier than many insiders were comfortable with. Marveling at the unfamiliar, they aimed to reveal a culture or geography different from their own.34 My focus instead is on travel or tourist guides, works defi ned for my purposes as written by individuals who purport to have some existing knowledge of the city and the attractions at hand. To some degree or another, these are local writers who know the area and want to explain its attractions to others. My criterion, then, has been to focus on Portuguese-language guides so as to better capture the fraught process of regional identity making within Brazil and an often more reluctant process of acknowledging the city’s Black populations. The idea of a local perspective, however, immediately raises questions. To begin with, many of the authors and artists I treat here were not born in Salvador. Some might protest that two of the central figures in this study, the French-born Pierre Verger and the Argentineanborn Carybé, tilt the balance back toward outsiders.35 I include them here, however, because they worked closely with key Bahian intellectuals and because their work was clearly aimed at a Bahian and Brazilian audience. What perhaps raises more questions is that the authors of these sources and their artists were most often elites, most often men, and most often presented as white. This bias unveils the power dynamic that enabled these travel guides to be made. It should not be surprising that in a deeply hierarchical and racially unequal city, the most important political and cultural brokers were often white—power that came in large part from their whiteness, not despite it. These sources, then, reveal changing conceptions of race and the city as conceived of by some of its most powerful intellectual and cultural brokers. While their view is certainly not representative, it is undeniably important. Moreover, while it might not have been their intention, careful reading of these works gives new insight into the activism of some of Bahia’s Black community in crafting a new identity for Salvador, as I reveal in

Introduction

17

chapter 6. While a fuller account of Black understandings of these visions would require different sources, these guides open up new and provocative avenues for exploration that I take up here. Another question is whether these travel guides were intended as practical guides to be put to use or rather as intellectual essays or musings on a given region. It is certainly true that these works emerged before a true tourist economy had developed. Early local guides began in the late 1930s in Salvador, at a point when few tourists had arrived. By the 1950s tourist initiatives began in earnest, with a flurry of energy and reforms. Indeed, Bahia’s leaders were ahead of the national scene, mobilizing early to promote tourism as an answer to the region’s long-standing economic decline. Nationally, this postwar period corresponded to a new freedom in movement after long wartime restrictions, as well as to the rise of the automobile and air travel. It was only in this decade that tourism within Brazil began expansion, a trend that gained particular appeal due to the size of Brazil itself. 36 Unfortunately, the authors did not produce any statements that might speak to their hopes for the guides to be used in particular ways. It is impossible to know whether the authors or the publishers truly believed that readers would pull these books out on street corners, or whether they hoped the volumes might open the minds of readers to a distant world they might never visit. My own interpretation veers more toward the latter view, particularly for the guides of the 1950s. It is significant, for instance, that many of these tourist guides wasted little time on practical concerns. Many of them omitted any information on hotels, transportation, or restaurants altogether, or included such details only in sarcastic, brief terms, berating the poor infrastructure of the city even while playing up its cultural attractions. Whatever their practical shortcomings, however, publishers printed enough of these books to indicate that they expected a wide readership for the time. Indeed, many of the works were widely acclaimed, reprinted quickly in second editions, and have come to be known as authorities on life in the city. In the end, it is clear that these were successful sites for locals to show off Bahia’s contributions to other Brazilians, whether they ever traveled to Bahia or not. A deeper concern is to what degree boosters in these texts were simply promoting what was there: in other words, whether authors and illustrators promoted Black culture in the 1950s because it was a faithful rendition of reality, simply working with what they had. Yet even if boosters turned to Black culture because tourists came to expect an

18

Selling Black Brazil

“authentic” folk experience in a particular moment, it is important to acknowledge the many other possibilities available. Other options for defi ning the city included a focus on natural beaches, modern commercial zones, and colonial church architecture: these last two options especially were prioritized in guides from earlier eras, as I will show. Strictly Catholic celebrations were never prioritized, nor were Indigenous traditions that might have been resurrected in some form despite widespread demographic collapse. And, significantly, rural folk traditions—from populations considered more mestiço than Black— were written out of the tourist literature and rarely mentioned. It is important to understand, therefore, that the turn to Black culture as the center of the city was a choice, carefully considered, crafted, and constructed. Along these same lines, tourist literature as a source raises some final considerations. Isn’t it true, we might wonder, that all tourist promotion necessarily exploits and distorts what is deemed most picturesque or most exotic? In this sense, why should it be surprising that tourism’s texts and images created distorted visions of Blackness? These are important questions. But my argument is not based on the element of surprise, as racist and limited ideas of Blackness are unfortunately, depressingly widespread. Rather, I explore here this distilled notion of identity in all of its complexity. The interesting question is therefore not whether these texts or images were promotional or distorted in some form; of course they were. Instead, I turn to the deeper questions of how, and why, these sources fashion their self-promotion in very particular ways and what is included and what is left out. Though these texts and their iconography are invented as much as any other form of promotion, they are revealing precisely because of this process. A fi nal look at this genre brings out a series of ironies: whites played a critical role in asserting Bahia’s Blackness, and foreigners helped draft Bahia’s regional and national image. Yet the most painful irony may be that just as enslaved Africans provided the core of the sugar and port economy of colonial and nineteenth-century Salvador, here again their descendants were envisioned as the crux of a new tourist economy that would profit from their presence. Not only that, but it was in some ways because of slavery that Salvador was now able to pull upon this richness of Black traditions, even as generations of slave owners and masters had worked to extinguish them. Despite this painful history, it was also the case that these representations of the

Introduction

19

city, although limited and essentialist in many ways, created some further symbolic space for Black culture, space that was seized upon by a Black population who now saw their culture represented, albeit in distorted ways, in the city’s framing.

Cast of Characters and Chapters My analysis privileges the postwar period of 1945 to 1964, a period that corresponds to important political markers in Brazilian history and encompasses one of the nation’s most important experiments with democracy. It is bookended on one side by the close of World War II and the collapse of the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas in 1945, and on the other by the military coup of 1964 that inaugurated authoritarian rule for more than twenty years. I also step back in time to acknowledge the larger patterns and archetypes that originated in the nineteenth century and continued to circulate and resonate in uncomfortable ways. The core of the narrative is structured around the promotional work of three key personalities, a device I use here both to distill the narrative into more personal terms and to give the chronology a structure that moves beyond a mere chronicling of texts. I give close attention to the tourist guides produced by the novelist Jorge Amado, the photographer Pierre Verger, and the artist Héctor Bernabó (known as Carybé). The choice of these three figures will come as no surprise to those who know Bahia well: it has become a truism to credit the trifecta of Amado, Verger, and Carybé (often joined by the samba lyricist Caymmi) as chief architects of a Bahian regional identity. Roger Sansi deemed Carybé and Verger’s visual works a “trademark of the city,” and, even for the casual visitor, the power of these white figures to mark Bahia remains still very much in evidence.37 As a New York Times travel writer mused in 2019: “As powerful and integral as Salvador’s African heritage is, it’s almost contradictory that outsiders like me still mostly discover it through the eyes of the white people it fascinated.”38 In fact, the role of these figures shows no sign of abating after their deaths: Amado not only willed his house as a museum but also established the highly visible Casa de Jorge Amado Foundation at the center of the city; Verger’s legacy continues through the energetic efforts of his own foundation to publish and display his work posthumously in a storefront nearby; and Carybé’s art not only graces the

20 Selling Black Brazil

most central museums of the city but also reverberates in mass-produced T-shirts, in the tourist art produced in workshops that line the historic center’s streets, and in governmental promotions of the city itself. All three have left behind family and followers eager to continue to promote their work, guard their reputations, and consolidate their legacy. As with many truisms, however, while the centrality of Salvador’s trifecta is often repeated, it has gained little sustained historical analysis.39 More broadly, scholars have failed to take a close view of how and when this “trademark” developed, often collapsing the long-spanning efforts of these three figures into the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. I move this timeline back to reveal that the roots of their efforts were established by the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the midst of Bahia’s regionalist modernist movement. In addition, the most uncritical eyes have often portrayed these men as the mere chroniclers of Salvador’s reality, paying little attention to the nuances of the constructions of Salvador that they helped usher in. I highlight the way in which all three were instrumental not only in inventing new depictions of Salvador but in constructing and promoting Salvador as a tourist destination. Finally, Bahian scholarship has often viewed these figures as so deeply engaged with the Black population of Salvador that the racial and power dynamics at work have been curiously underplayed and the limits of their visions have not been fully considered together. In the three chapters dedicated to their works, I seek to address these gaps and to take a closer look at the crafting of their foundational role in the 1940s and 1950s. My point here is also to insist, however, that while these figures were indeed central, the crafting of Salvador’s identity cannot be summed up simply as a story of three white men, a point already made powerfully clear by historians of Black life in the city. As I reveal here, whether among other tourist promoters or within the Candomblé community, the point remains that these men did not act alone. The chapters as a whole trace the changing depictions of Salvador in both thematic and chronological terms. Chapter 1 begins by stepping back to the nineteenth century to develop a baseline for understanding the visual culture of the city. It traces the importance of foreign travel illustrations and early photography in setting up a limited array of urban types to describe the city during this time. Further, it looks forward to the early twentieth century to emphasize how modern architecture and empty streets became the visual centerpiece for

Introduction

21

the earliest boosters within Salvador itself. Chapter 2 explores how modernism shifted this focus and how conceptions of the city in the Vargas era began to change, with a new focus on colonial churches as central to Salvador’s native traditions. It then turns to examine the path of a regional Bahian novelist, Jorge Amado, who, in concert with a São Paulo modernist artist, produced in 1945 one of the earliest and most formative guides to the city of Salvador. The work both borrowed from and broke with earlier precedents, making Blackness a dominant visual trope for the city and bringing in a new focus on Black cultural practice while retaining the street-based focus of many of the nineteenth-century depictions. The next chapters turn to the heart of the story, the late 1940s and 1950s. Chapter 3 turns to the promoter of the city who would be most prominent in the early part of this era, the French photographer Pierre Verger, and his representations of the city in the Brazilian national press. Verger’s romantic view of urban Black life in Salvador in the late 1940s brought a new individuality to depictions of Black folkways and culture, yet the emphasis remained on the streets and on urban tropes. Chapter 4 shows how the Argentinean-born artist Carybé picked up these ideas and developed them further in his illustrations when he moved to the city in 1950. While Carybé’s Latin American background shaped his depictions of the city, his immersion in the budding regionalist movement in Salvador was also key, making him critical in redrafting the city’s lines in even more folkloric terms. Chapter 5 shows how a variety of guides emerged in the 1950s as part of this regionalist modernist project, intent on making Blackness central, but with many of the same limits of these other image makers. Chapter 6 turns closer attention to the back-and-forth that took place between Candomblé practitioners within the Black community and the producers of the guides. As I reveal, there was surprising interplay between the two, as many religious leaders acted strategically within the realm of tourist promotions to ensure a greater security and acceptance for their faith. The epilogue considers the dilemmas posed by one of the few Afro-Bahian artists of the 1950s, Rubem Valentim, and how he interacted with this movement and forged his own ways of depicting Blackness. It further examines how the dictatorship of 1964 took up ideas of Blackness traced here and, in the process, consolidated a very limited vision of being Black in Bahia.

CHAPTER 1

Precedents and Backdrops: Racial Types and Modern Ports

The state of Bahia is one of the most conclusive demonstrations of the productive capacity and fertile energy of the Brazilian nation. Its progress, undeniably affirmed in statistics and figures, is, in truth, admirable and surprising, from no matter what point of view we look at it. This great northern state that gave birth to our nation is still today a center that radiates considerable propulsive force, a prodigious source of vital sap, which animates, strengthens, and advances the economic expansion of Brazil. L au ro Sa m pa io, I n dic a dor e gu i a pr at ico da cida de do Sa lva dor-Ba h í a (1928)

As Lauro Sampaio’s over-the-top claims reveal, by the early decades of the twentieth century, promoters of Salvador sought relentlessly to identify the city with notions of progress. Ideas of modernity figured large in such accounts, and they relied upon a visual array of modern architecture to boost their authority. Such claims, and the images they drew upon, were far from unique across Latin America, where elites insisted upon Latin American conformity with European ideals of civilization. Often forgotten in assessments of this rhetoric of progress, however, is how the visual register of such claims was precisely calibrated to counter earlier nineteenth-century images, which had aimed instead to foster nationalism by highlighting the nation’s unique traditions and customs. In this chapter, I juxtapose these two moments of image crafting to show that while Salvador in the nineteenth century became associated with Black figures deemed representative urban “types,” the imagery of Salvador in the early twentieth century would portray empty, modern streets intended to convey progress. Both sets

Precedents and Backdrops 23

of images were equally constructed, and both revealed the political and racial regimes in place at the time. The nineteenth-century fashioning of national types, known as costumbrismo, was a trend common across Latin America. Guided by the growing nationalisms of the nineteenth century, and perhaps also in reaction to modernization that seemed to threaten older ways of life, costumbrismo set out to defi ne the customs native to a particular region, with emphasis on delineating distinctive “types.”1 While historians of art have pointed to the force of costumbrismo in Latin America as a whole, its local and particular paths still demand further attention. For instance, although São Paulo largely resisted trends to create regional types in photographic studios, Bahia became the subject of intense focus for photographers intent on documenting the types of Salvador, an effort invariably focused on Afro-Bahians. The racialization of types in Brazil, therefore, had much to do with racialized regional identities at an early point, used to express components of a national whole. As I argue here, although image makers in Salvador and beyond sought to visually defi ne representations of regional types, numerous practical obstacles prevented any real consistency of definition, including the choice of models and their poses and expressions. Although these efforts might have ultimately failed to ever consistently portray the racial and regional categorizations they sought to delineate, they do, nonetheless, reveal much about the tensions of the era. Perhaps most significantly, historians have not yet fully plumbed the ways in which the timing of the genre coincided with tensions in Brazil’s slave regime, parallels that I call new attention to here. In this chapter I uncover both the political and the racial background that propelled the making of types forward, as well as its very concrete limitations as a didactic or explanatory tool for Bahian identity. I begin by briefly establishing the roots of costumbrismo in traveler accounts of Brazil and then emphasize the domestic circulation of costumbrismo lithographs that were likely more formative in the national imagination. The continued legacy of such domestic lithographs can be seen clearly in the rise of Brazilian photography through the 1860s, including a remarkable series of posed types by the photographer Christiano Júnior in Rio. All of these influences later came together in the photographic studios of Rodolfo Lindemann in Salvador, which produced types as both photographs and postcards in the last decades of the century. Although these sets of images are not tour-

24 Selling Black Brazil

ist literature in a strict sense, they do provide a baseline for early visual tropes of Salvador, and they also show the work of promoters who sought to depict the city for Brazilian compatriots and international correspondents. As I show, their narrative was countered, in interesting ways, by photographs that leaders in Candomblé chose to make for their own use. I then turn to how the political pressures of Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930) mobilized a different group of Bahians to promote Salvador in new terms, this time based around sober representations of modern architecture. People no longer formed the center of the city’s iconography, and modern city streets, devoid of any hint of Blackness, instead formed the new visual standard. As such transformations reveal, Blackness ebbed and flowed in promotions of the city, reflecting shifting national ideas of race and the priorities of different political regimes. As I will show, Salvador’s elite—like the rest of Brazil— proved much more reluctant to acknowledge Black Brazilians in the urban life of the city once the hierarchical assurances guaranteed by slavery had disappeared. 2

City of Types: New Modes and Deep Continuities in the Nineteenth Century The Illustrated National Type: Foreign and National Pens Latin America in the early nineteenth century faced a pivotal moment as new nations, forged in tumultuous independence wars, sought to defi ne themselves and to distance themselves from their colonial past. Brazil, however, sought less distance than most. Rather than creating a republic, the path followed by most of Latin America on the eve of the region’s independence in the 1820s, Brazil instead chose to create an independent monarchy. Pedro I, the son of the Portuguese royal family, occupied the head of this new empire, a transition designed to sidestep the disorder brought by independence struggles elsewhere and to prevent any disruption to the largest slave regime in the Americas. Indeed, such efforts proved largely successful, as full abolition of slavery came only in 1888, and Brazil’s empire resisted republican incursions until 1889. Despite such continuity in Brazil, however, the nineteenth century did bring some changes across Latin America as a whole. One was a rush of European naturalists and artists, eager to visit and to docu-

Precedents and Backdrops 25

ment areas that colonial restrictions had kept closed to outside eyes. Yet although the arrival of visitors for study and commerce increased during this time, tourism itself remained almost nonexistent over the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Brazil’s distance from both Europe and the United States—the two regions perhaps most willing and able to conduct long-distance travel—meant that it received fewer international visitors overall than did areas such as Cuba or Mexico. And the country’s immense geographic span meant that most Brazilians themselves had little chance of traveling from one end of their country to another unless by steamship along the coast. Domestic tourism remained limited until the rise of the automobile in the 1930s and the growth of air travel in the 1950s, eras I will discuss in the coming chapters.3 All of this meant that in the absence of widespread domestic travel, image making of distant regions proved especially important in Brazil through the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Salvador attracted some of the most important of Brazil’s foreign visitors during the nineteenth century, many of whom came equipped not only with their pens but with artist’s tools and brushes. All of these European artists granted special attention to the bustle of enslaved peoples on the street and to defi ning national types for curious readers in their armchairs across the Atlantic. As a whole, though sometimes critical of slavery, these artists contributed to the vision of Brazil as a multiracial site of largely harmonious interactions and, in the terms of Ana Lucia Araujo, helped fashion a tropical romanticism.4 Maria Callcott, a British visitor, published an illustrated account of her travels in 1824 as Journal of a Voyage to Brazil but later also expanded her artistic record into a series of watercolors depicting Salvador and its types that appears to have circulated in Brazil in 1848 (see figs. 1.1 and 1.2). 5 The two most formative of these artists, however, were the Germanborn Johann Moritz Rugendas and the French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret, both of whom followed similar paths. Rugendas arrived as part of a scientific expedition in 1822, remaining until 1825 to travel on his own. He published his illustrated impressions in his Picturesque Voyage to Brazil (Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil [1827–1835]). The trajectory of Debret was in many ways parallel, although he spent a more extended time in Brazil as part of a French artistic commission from 1816 to 1831. He published his drawings and paintings of natural life and daily scenes in three volumes entitled Picturesque and Histori-

26 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 1.1. Maria Callcott, Bread Seller–Bahia, watercolor, undated. Published in Vistas e costumes da Bahia, 1848. Lady Maria Callcott Collection, National Library of Brazil.

cal Voyage to Brazil (Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil [1834– 1839]). While these artists’ works remain important, and were perhaps influential for those in contact with them as they traveled, scholars have not yet confi rmed whether these expensive volumes, printed in Europe for European eyes, attracted a significant viewing in Salvador until their national reprinting in the 1940s and later.6 In the meantime, an active domestic circulation of similar illustrations depicting daily life in the nineteenth century was perhaps even more important. Indeed, as Deborah Poole argues, while Latin Amer-

Precedents and Backdrops 27

icans might have disputed the nature of the types detailed by European traveler artists, they never questioned the value of types themselves, and the visual was integral to both creating and consolidating this genre.7 One of the most important figures in this movement was the Brazilianborn lithographer Frederico Guilherme Briggs, a pioneer in lithographic production. Briggs became the most important lithographer within Brazil, and his images would come to be recognized as some of the most representative of the nation, as evidenced by their wide inclusion in a national exhibition of 1888. While Briggs worked prolifically in a variety of pursuits, one of his most important contributions was his documenting of national types of Brazil (see figs. 1.3 and 1.4). Advertisements

Figure 1.2. Maria Callcott, Fruit Woman–Bahia, watercolor, undated. Published in Vistas e costumes da Bahia, 1848. Lady Maria Callcott Collection, National Library of Brazil.

28 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 1.3. Frederico Briggs, Preto vendendo Agôa (Black man selling water),

lithograph with watercolor, based on drawing attributed to Joaquim Lopes de Barros Cabral Teive, 1840. Martha and Erico Stickel Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles.

in Rio for an 1840 lithograph series, Customs of Brazil (Costumes do Brasil), stressed that subscribers would gain “a collection of customs of the country” of a sort that had not yet been published.8 More important was his widely circulated 1846 volume that he titled in English, The Brazilian Souvenir: A Selection of the Most Peculiar Costumes of the Bra-

Precedents and Backdrops 29

zils, which consisted of drawings by the recently arrived German artist Eduard Hildebrandt, transformed into lithographs by Briggs.9 While circulation information about these works in Salvador is unknown, and their impact might have been most important in Rio, these works nonetheless indicate that Brazilians themselves sought and appreciated the documentation of national types and customs just as much as, or more than, foreign readers.

Figure 1.4. Frederico Briggs, Quitandeira (Sweets vendor), lithograph with

watercolor, based on drawing attributed to Joaquim Lopes de Barros Cabral Teive, 1840. Martha and Erico Stickel Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles.

30 Selling Black Brazil

In fact, Briggs’s efforts drew from inspiration that spanned Latin America as well as the Atlantic. To begin with, these images, generally full-length portraits that highlighted particular types of urban figures, hewed closely to a much earlier model established in England, Marcellus Laroon’s The Cryes of London, which portrayed street types in 1687 and was itself perhaps derivative of an anonymous work, Cries of Paris, from 1500.10 The correspondence of such works with Briggs’s output is too close to be mere accident, and it is known, for example, that Briggs traveled to England just before he published his fi rst set of national types, a moment in which the Cryes of London remained in active circulation.11 More recent inspiration might have also come from a newly popular genre developed in Europe that Mey-Yen Moriuchi has termed “an album of types,” fi lled with illustrations of figures deemed typical or representative of the nation. These albums developed fi rst in Britain in 1841, spread to much of continental Europe, and arrived in Mexico in 1854 or 1855.12 While their arrival in Brazil has yet to be confi rmed, the parallels make it almost certain. In a similar vein, Natalia Majluf points to the ways in which early costume books, dedicated to detailing typical dress of different people and regions, provided an early template for the genre of types in Latin America.13 Such efforts also fit neatly within a longer trajectory of racialized portraits in Latin America. Eighteenth-century casta paintings in Mexico and Peru that sought to document and order racial mixture formed an important predecessor for costumbrismo, for example.14 Although it is unclear how influential such works were in Brazil, the visual evidence as a whole points to a rich chorus of such art across both Europe and the Americas, making the development of albums of types less innovative than familiar and more of a genre than an expression of any one artist. This interest in types would gain new life once harnessed to the medium of photography and to the growth in racial science that sought to document racial difference and ultimately to attempt to prove white superiority.15 And while Rio had been perhaps the center of the early production of national lithographs, Salvador would come to play an important role in this next stage. The Photographic National Type: The Carte de Visite Photography gained an enthusiastic and early introduction in Brazil: Emperor Pedro II himself adopted the daguerreotype only one year af-

Precedents and Backdrops 31

ter its invention in 1839, and Brazil produced more photographs than anywhere else in Latin America over the nineteenth century.16 While such immense production led to a fair amount of variety, several patterns developed that are relevant to understanding how Salvador was promoted and visually represented in the nineteenth century: most particularly, the carte de visite and, later, the postcard. Cartes de visite, or small visiting cards printed with formal black-and-white studio portraits, became wildly popular internationally in the 1860s. Individuals and families most often used them to distribute their photographs to friends, but depictions of famous figures were also widely collected as well; in either case, their possession or distribution served as a type of social currency for members of the upper class to show their status and belonging. In Latin America these studio portraits also ushered in a genre of types, one that relied on images of anonymous Black and Indigenous figures rather than acquaintances or recognizable celebrities.17 Indeed, while the carte (and later the postcard) relied upon new technologies of the camera and created new genres, it also relied substantially on already existing tropes of race and slavery established in the earlier lithographic tradition. The visual continuities with earlier eras are striking, and these photographs, though using a new technology, drew upon a longer tradition of national types. In this way, as Dawn Ades observes, the persistence of older “types, poses, and costumes popular among the travelers” reveals the “extent to which the ‘documentary’ art of photography constructed its subjects according to existing stereotypes.”18 Likewise, Marcus Wood argues that photographers approached their Black subjects with an insistent visual conservatism, drawing deeply on earlier archetypes and visual cultures to produce cartes that were less innovative than reductionist.19 Such an emphasis on continuity, however, neglects the introduction of photography as a complicating factor. Despite the limited array of urban and racial tropes developed fi rst in lithographs and illustrations and recycled in the new genre of cartes de visite, the medium of photography nonetheless allowed the humanity of the enslaved to come through the lens, whether intended or not. Scholars have called attention to the way in which these studio portraits simultaneously reinforced stereotypes and contributed to objectification while also, often in spite of themselves, granting the sitters a level of respect and individuality. 20 Though the images were undoubtedly created in part for the European gaze, they also give testament of the undeniable power

32 Selling Black Brazil

of the enslaved to gaze back. 21 Even as the photographer tried to depict a type, the camera itself, perhaps bedeviling the photographer, had the potential instead to reveal an individual. Europeans as an intended audience were undeniably important. The genre of types has most often been depicted as created for foreign markets, whether as demonstrations of racial difference for racial scientists elsewhere or as mementos of exoticism for foreign tourists visiting Brazil. In fact the studios that developed the genre in Brazil were supervised primarily by European immigrants, who most likely viewed questions of difference from Europe in sharp relief. Yet we must also remember that there were not enough international visitors at this time to enable such studios to subsist on tourists alone. In fact, contemporary evidence points to the fact that this genre of cartes was intended for the domestic market, allowing Brazilian consumers to distinguish themselves abroad. According to advertisements in 1866, the studio of Christiano Júnior offered a “varied collection of customs and types of Blacks [pretos], an item very suitable for those who withdraw themselves to [se retira para] Europe.”22 Clearly, whether produced for national elites readying for travel or for other domestic consumers, these types had enough resonance with Brazilians to be lucrative for studios and to circulate widely. Salvador boasted its own studios already in the 1850s, but Brazil’s early center of photography was undoubtedly in Rio de Janeiro, where Christiano Júnior played a critical role in the medium’s development. The Portuguese-born photographer José Christiano de Freitas Henriques Júnior is today remembered for producing one of Brazil’s earliest and perhaps most striking collections of urban types. Christiano Júnior, as he became known, immigrated to Brazil in 1855 and produced in 1865 close to a hundred portraits of the enslaved that survive today. 23 Neutral backdrops call attention to the typology at the heart of his efforts: staged representations of various forms of urban Black labor and Black types (see figs. 1.5 and 1.6), even including a recreation of a scene of a Black barber shaving a client. After his relocation to Argentina in the 1860s, Christiano Júnior set to work on a series of volumes published in 1876 as Album of Views and Customs of the Republic of Argentina from the Atlantic to the Andes (Album de vistas y costumbres de la República Argentina desde el Atlántico a los Andes). Although his short time in Brazil might have prevented a volume along the same lines, it seems likely that his vast archiving of urban types had been envisioned with similar principles in mind.

Precedents and Backdrops 33

Figure 1.5.

Christiano Júnior, unknown models with vegetable baskets, carte de visite studio photograph, 1864. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Little is known about the models who posed for Christiano Júnior in his studio. Jasmine Alinder has uncovered that one female subject photographed by Christiano Júnior in the 1860s was photographed again a few years later by the Louis Agassiz scientific expedition, indicating perhaps that Agassiz had relied upon Christiano Júnior to draw upon long-standing contacts with former models. 24 Despite such intriguing fi ndings—fi ndings that have their parallels in Salvador— records do not exist to indicate whether these individuals were enslaved or freed, Brazilian or African, much less their names or family stories. Most likely they were urban escravos de ganho, enslaved individuals for hire who performed a variety of different types of labor to

34 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 1.6.

Christiano Júnior, unknown models with baskets on heads, carte de visite studio photograph, 1864–1866. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

keep the city running, paid this time to come into the studio and pose for the camera. We cannot know what such individuals thought of the endeavor, whether they were familiar with the genre of cartes de visite and were proud to have their likeness registered, or whether they resented the idea that others should profit from images of their labor. Whatever their individual histories, their labor and expertise were critical for the success of the images. Christiano Júnior surely could not have brought in just anyone for such scenes, for they would have been unable to duplicate the skills and knowledge demanded for such labor, whether in

Precedents and Backdrops 35

the strength needed to carry oversize water jugs on their shoulders or the grace to balance trays of goods on their heads. To do such labor, and to maintain these poses for long early-camera shutter speeds, was itself a skill that few would have been able to duplicate. Christiano Júnior, himself far from an expert in such tasks, ultimately had to depend on the knowledge and skills of the models. The setting of the studio drew deeply upon the visual repertoires popularized by Briggs and others. In the case of Peru, Natalia Majluf has called attention to the deep similarities between early lithographic costumbrismo that framed single figures on a blank background and the later development of photography, raising the question of whether Christiano Júnior might have used a white backdrop in part to evoke the same background by which earlier drawings had been framed. 25 In this way we can better understand the decision of Christiano Júnior, who surely could have developed a painted backdrop if he had wanted to, to leave the studio background almost completely blank. Other choices were also clearly at work in terms of studio props. If the individuals depicted were freedmen or freedwomen, which is possible, their images were certainly intended to evoke enslavement, as they were posed without shoes, an important, if not formalized, marker in Brazil for the enslaved. Other markers studiously inserted into portraits of the elite—umbrellas, luxurious carpets, and intricately carved chairs—were also conspicuously absent. The blank background of the studio not only echoed earlier representations but also brought the details of the dress and the expressions of the models into higher relief. It seems likely that the models wore their own clothes, although the quality and appearance might have been modified in the studio. Part of the intention in this choice was perhaps to call attention to the otherness of the poverty revealed by such clothing, or to the particularly ethnic forms of dress adopted by Africans in Brazil. As for expressions, most of the models appear to have been posed facing at a sideways angle, allowing a profi le of the face but not a direct look into the camera. Perhaps in part because of this, the expressions of those photographed in this series are often ambiguous. In the case of the fruit vendor (see fig. 1.5), her mind appears to be elsewhere, perhaps as she was caught in thought by the camera or resisting the demands to adopt a particular expression. The small boy next to her, staged to be buying fruit, appears perhaps with the hint of a faint smile, possibly amused by the staging of the scene or by the vendor’s blank face. Meanwhile, another female vendor (see

36 Selling Black Brazil

fig.  1.6), shown frontally with a tray of goods on her head, bears a somewhat labored expression, as if wondering how much longer she will need to stand still. Her companion, holding a basket on his head while balancing a tray of food, carries himself with such erect posture that the task appears effortless. None of the individuals has a particularly submissive posture or gaze, instead coming across as either selfcontained or slightly weary of the exercise. While Christiano Júnior might have captured the enslaved on fi lm, their faces betray stolen moments that reveal their humanity or, perhaps, even their sense of the absurdity of the endeavor. The rare commissioned portraits that survive of freed Black Brazilians, and the very different studio props and settings for such photographs, make their contrast with the types undeniably clear. Indeed, paying for such a portrait might well have been a strategy for freed Black citizens to provide further evidence of their freed, respectable status. 26 Candomblé leaders in Salvador recognized this power, for example, commissioning their own portraits in the early decades of the twentieth century. Maria Júlia da Conceição Nazareth, the religious founder of one of the most prestigious candomblés of the time (the terreiro of Gantois), had her portrait taken (see fig. 1.7), as did her daughter, and successor in 1910, Pulchéria Maria da Conceição Nazareth (see fig. 1.8). Both relied upon their own carefully appointed apparel as well as on studio props to convey their respect and their status. 27 The former stands facing the camera directly, confident, with her hand upon an ornately carved and upholstered chair. Further props to her side might have included a potted plant and a bookshelf of some sort, although the image remains unclear. Her jewelry is simple, drawing attention instead to her long and luxurious dress, as well as to the beautifully draped shawl of fi nely woven African cloth she wears over her shoulder, known as pano-da-costa. 28 Her expression is inscrutable but direct and seemingly no-nonsense. Mãe Pulchéria’s expression is somewhat more ambiguous. She stands looking to the side, with her posture somewhat relaxed and her expression perhaps caught slightly unaware. Her white slipper peeks from under her long skirts, an indication of status. She is adorned with jewelry, and her shoulder too is carefully draped with luxurious pano-da-costa, perhaps of silk. Her hand rests upon a large leather-bound book on a table, a symbol surely of her wisdom and knowledge. A patterned rug and a painted background typical of the time evoke an elegant ordered landscape behind her. Both women appear elegant and immersed in the luxurious setting evoked in the studio.

Precedents and Backdrops 37

Figure 1.7.

Photographia Diamantina Studios, portrait of Maria Júlia da Conceição Nazareth, founder and leader of the Gantois terreiro, studio photograph, early 1900s. Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia.

Stamps on the reverse of the photographs indicate that they were taken by Photographia Diamantina, a studio that was located outside the neighborhoods occupied by most of the studios in Salvador at the time, and one that also chose not to advertise widely in the almanacs that other studios relied on for their publicity. 29 While the studio left little historical record, its stamp is also evident on the back of other photographs taken at the candomblé at the time, images that were used for a publication by the Afro-Bahian intellectual Manuel Querino in 1915 to emphasize the tremendous contributions that Africans had made to Bahia. Querino had deep contacts with the candomblés of Salvador and had surely earned their trust. It might have been this trust, and his

38

Selling Black Brazil

Figure 1.8.

Photographia Diamantina Studios, portrait of Pulchéria Maria da Conceição Nazareth, leader of the Gantois terreiro, studio photograph, early 1900s. Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia.

larger agenda to challenge racist dictates of the time, that allowed him to borrow and use such photographs. Nonetheless, it appears that permission was probably granted with some intention of restricting the circulation of such images. One of these photographs, granted to a local archive by private donation in 1934, bears the instruction on the back “duplication not permitted,” an indication that when Candomblé practitioners chose to engage with photography, they sought also to tightly control its use, fearful, perhaps, of their religion being denigrated within the press or postcards of the era. 30 Recognizing the pow-

Precedents and Backdrops 39

erful visual culture dominant at the time, they seized upon it for their own purposes, which were carefully policed and guarded. The Photographic Regional Type: Postcards and the Lindemann Studio The carte de visite would continue to be important for decades to come, but in the meantime, at the turn of the twentieth century, a further international innovation changed the visual culture of Brazil once more: the postcard. While this genre had begun developing in the late nineteenth century, advancements in printing technology, as well as the more rapid capacity of cameras to capture outdoor landscapes, brought its popularity to new heights in Brazil. Studios produced postcards in massive numbers by the last years of the 1800s. Many portraits of Black figures were printed on postcards in various forms, but Black models, posed as urban types, remained important. Photographers in Salvador dedicated themselves to the new format of the postcard, especially the Frenchman Rodolfo Lindemann, who arrived in Salvador in 1879.31 While scholars have argued that the Lindemann studio was uniquely dedicated to the dissemination of an exoticized view of Brazil aimed at foreigners, I draw attention back to evidence of Brazilian postmarks and Portuguese handwritten text on his preserved postcards of the time, indicating an important domestic circulation and following as well.32 The most remarkable production to emerge from the Lindemann studios involved a collector’s series of urban types in Salvador published as postcards in 1900. This series featured indoor staged portraits of Black models, most notably a sizable number of portraits of female workers, as well as a few outdoor portraits of urban labor. Using these portraits, Lindemann produced postcards with labels, each given a letter to indicate its place in the series (see figs. 1.9, 1.10, 1.12, and 1.15). Within this series, I have been able to locate the postcards labeled as follows: A. Wet Nurse—Bahia; B. Domestic Servant— Bahia; C. Street Vendors—Bahia; E. Washerwoman—Bahia; H. Fruit Vendor—Bahia; J. Creoula—Bahia; and R. African Laborers— Bahia.33 While Lindemann followed in many ways the depictions of urban Black labor established by Christiano Júnior, he was more intent on labeling and ordering the scenes and persons depicted, a possibility perhaps opened up by the nature of the postcard, which often bore a caption identifying the scene.34

40 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 1.9.

Rodolfo Lindemann Studios, unknown models, labeled “C. Caixinheiras [street vendors]— Bahia,” unknown date for photograph, postcard printed 1900. Courtesy of the Oliveira Lima Library at the Catholic University of America.

The background and props used by Lindemann raise questions. While Christiano Júnior had used a stark white background with assorted props, Lindemann turned to a painted studio background for several photos in his series (see fig. 1.10). He retained the use of props to mark the models in their particular labor, but curiously his backgrounds put them not in the urban city, where such labor was most often located (and which had been such an important background for early lithographs), but rather outdoors, on the edge of what appears to be a lake. Such painted natural backgrounds were not uncommon, and Nancy Stepan has shown that in many cases such styles were painted to indicate the particular tropicality of Brazil. 35 Yet the lake, bounded at its sides by reeds, was a freshwater aquatic landscape marginal to

Precedents and Backdrops 41

Figure 1.10.

Rodolfo Lindemann Studios, unknown model (same model as depicted in fig. 1.9), labeled “B. Uma Creada [domestic servant]— Bahia,” unknown date for photograph, postcard printed 1900. Courtesy of the Oliveira Lima Library at the Catholic University of America.

Salvador’s urban visual symbolism, which was most often marked by its seascape.36 While many conclusions may be drawn here, perhaps it is most relevant to think about how this landscape, clearly unsuited to and unrealistic for the type of labor being performed, instead served to link Black individuals with nature, a tried-and-true trope that implied a hierarchy of urban civilization over primitive nature. In terms of Lindemann’s selection of models, the research of Isis Santos raises some intriguing possibilities. Santos has mined archival sources to show that Lindemann lived in a mixed neighborhood, with many freed African women of some means living on his street. As she shows, these women’s wills left a record of a rich assortment of clothes much like those depicted in his photos. Santos also fi nds that Linde-

42

Selling Black Brazil

mann employed at least one Black domestic servant, Apolonia Maria da Conceição, and she concludes that his experience with Black women and the array of their wardrobes came not only from anonymous encounters in busy streets but also from a close circulation among those he lived with and encountered on a regular basis.37 Could any of these women have been the models for his work? Although it is impossible to know, such evidence raises the question of whether some of these models, acquainted with his studio and with his displays of photos in the galleries he maintained at his storefront, might have chosen to pose for his photographs as a means to obtain their own likenesses from the process, buying, as it were, their own images on postcards. Lindemann used several models repeatedly in his series. As Isis Santos points out, for example, one woman posed both as an urban vendor and as a domestic servant (the woman on the right in fig. 1.9 and

Figure 1.11.

Rodolfo Lindemann Studios, unknown model, labeled for postcards as “Vendedora de bananas [Banana vendor],” photograph 1884, postcard (not shown) printed 1900. Courtesy of the ÜberseeMuseum Bremen; archival photo by Volker Beinhorn.

Precedents and Backdrops 43

Figure 1.12. Rodolfo Lindemann Studios, unknown model, labeled “H. Vendedora de fructas [Fruit vendor]—Bahia,” photograph 1884, postcard printed 1900. Courtesy of the Oliveira Lima Library at the Catholic University of America.

Figure 1.13. Marc Ferrez, photograph

of unknown model (same model as depicted in figs. 1.11 and 1.12), later labeled for postcards by Ferrez Studios of Rio as “Negresse de Rio” (Black woman of Rio), photograph ca. 1884, postcards (not shown) printed ca. 1900. Gilberto Ferrez Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles.

the sole subject in fig. 1.10).38 Another model captured by the lens of Lindemann posed as a seated banana vendor in one Lindemann postcard (see fig. 1.11) but posed standing up in Lindemann’s postcard series on labor (see fig. 1.12). This same model was further employed in 1884 by the Rio-based photographer Marc Ferrez, dressed in the same clothing and standing in an almost identical pose (see fig. 1.13). Scholars have questioned how this model came to be photographed by both men in the same clothes and with the same pose but have not been able to come to a consensus. The most likely explanation is that Ferrez, who frequently borrowed studios from peers when traveling, set up in Lindemann’s Salvador studio in 1884 and that Lindemann commissioned a model for a photo shoot in which both photographers

44 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 1.14. Marc Ferrez, photograph of unknown model, later labeled for postcards by Ferrez Studios of Rio (alongside the photograph shown in fig. 1.13) as “Negresse de Rio” (Black woman of Rio), photograph ca. 1885, postcards (not shown) printed ca. 1900. Gilberto Ferrez Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles.

Figure 1.15. Rodolfo Lindemann

Studios, unknown model (same model as depicted in fig. 1.14), labeled “J. Creoula—Bahia,” undated photograph, postcard printed 1900. Courtesy of the Oliveira Lima Library at the Catholic University of America.

participated.39 A further question arises, however, when considering the case of another shared model, one that has not yet been explored by scholars. As I discovered, an 1885 print by Ferrez of a seated Black woman resting her elbow upon an ornate carved table (see fig. 1.14) almost certainly features the same model who would later appear in a 1900 postcard by Lindemann, perhaps in an image taken some years later (see fig. 1.15). The model poses seated, wearing the same jewelry and similar clothes in both images, but her face and arms appear somewhat fuller in Lindemann’s portrait, perhaps the benefit of added years. This woman clearly communicates respect and a serene sense of self, while her lace shirt and extensive jewelry clearly indicate wealth

Precedents and Backdrops 45

and luxury. Whether such images were intended to depict an individual in respectful terms, which they certainly did, or as an exoticized type, which they also certainly did, may in the end be unknowable. Whatever the image makers’ intentions, this more formalized depiction of Black respectability never won out in the visual realm. In this particular case, although both photographers relied upon the same model, with similar poses and dress, they chose to label their photos in very different regional terms. Where Ferrez later used the image in a postcard in Rio marketed as “Black Woman of Rio” (“Negresse de Rio”), Lindemann used his photo for his series on types and labeled it “J. Creola—Bahia.” While the strategies employed by these photographers to play to their regional markets are themselves fascinating, they call attention to the importance granted to particular models in the studio, models deemed photogenic enough and skilled enough to be called in repeatedly to represent different scenes. Ironically, in searching out portrayals of types, photographers clearly sought out particular individuals whom they deemed most appropriate but then diverged widely in how they chose to label the same image, in this way belying the category of type itself. Indeed, although such postcards increasingly focused on depictions of particular regional types, even the most basic accuracy of such efforts was betrayed by other realities. Another example comes again from a model used by both Lindemann and Ferrez for seemingly identical postcards that were nonetheless labeled and marketed in very different ways (see figs. 1.12 and 1.13). Lindemann labeled his postcard “Fruit vendor—Bahia” (“Vendedora de fructas—Bahia”), while Ferrez labeled his “Black Woman of Rio” (“Negresse de Rio”).40 Ferrez, working out of Rio, found it convenient to market a local type to his audience there, while Lindemann did the same for Salvador. Such divergences serve as reminders that far from being true depictions of regions, these images were studio constructions that fit the whim of the photographer and the market he wished to serve. Such framing was evident not only in the competing regional labels but also in the failure to indicate the child in the labeling. Both men, rather than treating the image as a family portrait or as one indicating the close bond between mother and child, instead chose to avoid the emotional content of the models and their relationship and to focus on the mother alone as a regional type, whether as a racial type or as a type of urban labor.41 Who this woman actually was, and how she might have identified herself, remains an open question. But it is known that Lindemann re-

46

Selling Black Brazil

lied upon her for another set of images as well, this time seated and wearing slightly different dress (see fig. 1.11). She maintained an elegance and grace about her posture that must have inspired the photographers to bring her in to the studio repeatedly, while her child charmed the viewer with the plump cheeks of an infant and the eyes of an old soul. The graceful lines of the mother’s neck and the regal hold of her head reveal a contained sense of self that remains arresting. Was it her own sense of style that was showcased with the beautifully striped skirt and wrap, set against the shocking whiteness of her blouse?42 Her sense of self emerges again in her pose, where although perhaps directed to stand in profi le, her sidelong glance indicates an awareness of the photographers and, ultimately, of the viewer. Again, the knowledge of the portrait sitter herself proved critical: her seemingly effortless carrying of her child, even while balancing a tray of artfully arranged bananas, would have been impossible for most and was surely posed according to her own knowledge rather than any dictates of the photographers. Contributing to the confusion brought about in documenting different regional types with the same model was the fact that while the terms used at the time held some gradations of meaning, several of them were often used interchangeably. The word “baiana” referred literally to a female from Bahia, although in practice it was used to designate female street vendors of African descent and might also be further specified by the term “baiana de acarajé,” in reference to the bean fritters that many Baianas cooked and sold. The dress of the Baiana was understood as distinctive, and many of these vendors dressed in starched, full white skirts and blouses, broad sashes or shawls of African patterns (using fabric of pano-da-costa or intended to replicate its effects), ropes of beaded necklaces, and white turbans. Yet this wardrobe also had significant overlap with that used by practitioners of Candomblé in public and private festivals.43 Likewise, the term “creoula,” or creole, also indicated a female of African descent but in practice had nothing to distinguish it from the term “baiana,” although it had originally functioned in colonial times to mark someone born in Brazil in contrast to Africa. While “creoula” might refer to someone with the same skin tone as “baiana,” it might also carry a connotation of higher status or wealth, and it didn’t always bear association with the white dress of the Baiana. Finally, a third label was also used, “negra da Bahia,” a term that translated literally as “Black female of Bahia”; this label again had little to distinguish it from the others, al-

Precedents and Backdrops 47

though its terminology was more racially grounded. While “negras da Bahia” were generally associated with a particular dress, that of Baianas, nothing marked them in formal terms as different from either “baianas” or “creoulas.” Such a panoply of terms surely contributed to the fact that even as postcard labels tried to identify types, they did so with little consistency. The studio of Alberto Henschel (headquartered in Recife, with offices in both Salvador and Rio by 1870) sidestepped all such distinctions by labeling photos of Afro-Brazilian women simply “Bahia,” feminizing and racializing the state as a whole.44 As the divergent labeling strategies traced here reveal, the attempt to systematize types with consistent labels exposed the very arbitrary and constructed nature of supposedly stable categories. While the postcards that developed in this vein seemed clearly intent on emphasizing racial categories and difference, ironically, they also betrayed the arbitrary nature of such categories, as they relied upon a variety of different racial labels—“baiana,” “creoula,” “negra da Bahia”—for individuals who often bore seemingly minimal differences in their physical appearance, or even for the same model.45 While photographers might have ignored the irony that one model could be used to represent multiple, supposedly fi xed types, that perverted logic should not be hidden to us today. The postcards that ostensibly sought to label and categorize such types could not do so in any one consistent way, or even with the use of any one consistent term. As this chapter reveals, in their attempt to reinforce racial logic, photographers confronted the very illogic of the system. Despite this categorical failure, however, their focus on Afro-Bahian women did play an early role in feminizing and racializing the city, as well as in making Black bodies the embodiment of the city itself. High Anxieties: Bringing the Timelines of Slavery and Photography Together While these images encourage attention on a variety of fronts, I’d like to stress especially their static framing and their timing: not only were the Lindemann postcards of 1900 almost exactly the same in composition and type as those made by Christiano Júnior some forty years earlier, but they had an even longer life span, as they continued to circulate as postcards at least until the end of the 1910s.46 Thus the trope of urban Black types, developed early by nineteenth-century illustrators, was taken up by studio photographers for cartes de visite in

48 Selling Black Brazil

the 1860s, recycled by studios producing postcards in 1900, and continued to circulate through the mail for more than a decade more.47 Moreover, it remains striking that the genre itself remained so static at a time in which the technology of photography itself had taken off, with new possibilities for outdoor depictions, more active scenes, and the potential for new genres altogether. As Kossoy and Carneiro emphasize, while abolition introduced a new political context for Black labor, Black workers continued to be treated visually “with the same appearance as in the past.”48 Even though a long visual inspiration for depicting Black working figures is clearly at play, however, it is important to think about why they continued to be relevant at particular moments: in other words, the social context for such visual conservatism. To begin with, the photography of types came of age in the midst of rising scientific racism, which intensified the racialist elements of such types and gave the genre new relevance in museums as well as universities. Equally important, moreover, was the background of Atlantic abolition. It has rarely been noted, for example, that Christiano Júnior dedicated himself to portraying the urban enslaved in 1865, just as slavery gained its fi nal abolition in the United States with the end of the US Civil War. Such international comparisons were immediate to the wider Atlantic slaving elite and, I argue, undeniably part of the context in which Brazil chose to emphasize the stability of its own slave system, attempting to literally freeze it in studio poses. What is equally critical is how important the genre became in the decade following abolition in Brazil, this time printed on postcards. The post-abolition era in Bahia, as elsewhere, sparked new efforts by authorities to restrict and control labor, whether in far-reaching vagrancy laws or in urban commercial codes.49 Lindemann’s photos, then, like those of Christiano Júnior, attempted to order and contain the Black underclass in a moment of particular anxiety about slavery. It is striking, then, that although Brazil had modernized, abolished slavery, and been a republic since 1865, the same types of images continued to be seen as representative thirty-five years later in 1900, and even later as consumers continued to purchase such postcards and circulate them to friends. The process reveals how Brazilian elites drew upon such images to attempt to marginalize Black presence and political power as slavery came under increasing attack through the last half of the century and ended finally with abolition in 1888. For those fearing mass vagrancy and disorder in abolition’s aftermath, these im-

Precedents and Backdrops 49

ages put Black individuals fi rmly back into their former place, grounding them in a timeless studio of servitude.

City of Ports: The Ideal of Progress in Brazil’s First Republic Brazil gained its fi rst republic in a fairly bloodless coup in Rio in 1889, spurred in part by the fi nal break between the Brazilian empire and slavery one year earlier. The new regime, tied to positivist rhetoric, emblazoned its flag with the motto “Order and Progress,” a claim that any cynical observer might well question, since “order” came to mean elite control over the poor more generally, and “progress” came to be tied to racist hopes for an increasingly white nation. Embranquamento, or whitening, was Brazil’s own particular racist version of Latin American notions of mestizaje, notions similarly built upon racist premises. The theory promised that Brazil would eventually gain strength through racial mixing already in place, as well as through mixing encouraged in future generations: Black blood, assumed to be inferior, would be overcome by white blood, assumed to be all powerful.50 Within this narrative, European immigrants, imported for their skin color as much as their skills, could further hasten this progress. Progress and whiteness were intimately connected in Brazil, as in much of Latin America, to a Eurocentric ideal that saw European whiteness as the pinnacle of civilization. 51 If one wanted to speak of Brazilian progress, then, one spoke either without reference to race at all or with an emphasis on racial mixing. This posed problems of course, for Bahia, a state that counted whites as a minority. Bahia’s nickname at the turn of the century was “a Velha Mulata,” or “the Old Mammy,” a feminizing name that managed to disparage both Bahia’s racial makeup and its connection to the past. The Bahian lettered elite, still hailing primarily from old sugar clans, countered this by portraying their homeland as a veritable Athens, emphasizing Bahian political oratory and naming their children after Greek philosophers. In their view, the less one discussed Salvador’s Black population, the better. Although many of Salvador’s oldest families remained intent on living within this vision of European (white) classical glory, a rising commercial and political elite sought to break from the past and instead to tie themselves to the national rhetoric of progress. For this local elite, progress would mean a shift of priorities and a rebranding of the city that sought to break from both

Unknown photographer, postcard of Salvador showing the modern ideal typical of Latin American cities at the turn of the century, printed in Salvador by Gustavo Mullem, ca. 1902. Courtesy of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 1.16.

Precedents and Backdrops 51

Lindemann’s Black types and the ideal of the sugar past. The promotional materials developed by state officials, as well as a limited number of guides to the city written in the 1920s and 1930s, show off these efforts. Within these texts, and especially in the visual records that they showcased, race took a central role precisely because authors chose deliberately to omit any mention of Salvador’s racial makeup, its history with slavery, or its culture more generally. Such a framing took careful editing, in both written and visual terms. Within the latter, texts achieved their aim with urban scenes that emphasized orderly, empty streets and a focus on the modern built environment rather than the human makeup of the city. Black-and-white photography, itself a symbol of modernity, was the medium chosen to communicate this visual agenda. Moving outside the domain of the studio, photographs instead highlighted the recently completed nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury architecture of the city, generally ignoring Salvador’s colonial center. In this formulation, the city’s grandeur could best be displayed by architecture, a focus that would persist into the Vargas era, although colonial constructions came to take on new relevance in this later era. Lindemann and other photographers of the nineteenth century had certainly not ignored these trends; postcards produced by Lindemann’s studio included the series on types but also featured many other urban scenes intended to denote the progress and modernity of Salvador’s city locale. Postcard depictions of progress were common all across Latin America during this time and served as critical indicators of modern belonging for the region’s anxious elite. A typical postcard of the time for Salvador showcased orderly streets and late nineteenth-century architecture modeled upon Parisian ideals (see fig. 1.16). In this example, a graceful botanical sketch hinted at the agricultural potential of the state, even as the photograph itself focused on the modern commercial bustle of the streets. Lampposts, trolley tracks, and electrical wires, far from being distractions to such scenes, were critical indicators of progress carefully framed within the foreground. Unless a photograph was intended to evoke the typical, the figures depicted in such images were largely middle- and upper-class pedestrians, representatives of elite respectability. Such was the case in this postcard, where men with top hats and elegant black suits almost completely obscured a lone worker, dressed in white and pulling his cart through the street, and downcast faces ensured that an illusion of whiteness might be preserved. Human figures were largely absent in other street scenes of the era, indicating a labor force that remained efficient and unseen.

52

Selling Black Brazil

These portrayals were parallel in many ways to the self-aggrandizing portraits Bahian elites fashioned for national and international expositions during this time. Brazil held a series of such events during the Empire (1861, 1866, 1873, and 1875) and the First Republic (1908 and 1922). As historians have highlighted, the priority at such events was to portray the nation in decidedly modern terms of industry and progress.52 Bahia attempted to follow this lead but had painfully few concrete demonstrations of its industrial prowess to contribute. For the 1875 exhibition, for example, it submitted overwhelming numbers of agricultural samples but mustered no submission at all in the category of industry.53 Bahia corresponded more closely to national dictates with a silence on matters of race. The broader efforts to portray Brazil as modern and progressive led exhibition officials in the nineteenth century to downplay the role of slavery, while their twentiethcentury counterparts dedicated themselves to concealing the presence of Afro-Brazilians more generally.54 In these respects, Bahian promotions matched very well with the national ideal, a strategy adopted to place Bahia as a central part of the nation, and in line with international and national ideals of progress. Climate in the Early Promotion of the City One persistent worry for state officials attempting to sell Bahia’s appeal was proximity to the equator. In reality, the state’s varied climates spanned arid backlands, temperate mountains, and tropical coast in Salvador itself. Despite this variety, and to the despair of its promoters, the state’s location between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn established it well within the formal defi nition used to delimit a tropical climate. While any billing of Bahia as tropical was therefore technically correct, state officials nonetheless sought to avoid the host of damning stereotypes it brought, as tropical regions were often deemed decadent, outside of civilization, and even deadly during this time. One governmental publication in 1897, intended to attract European immigrants to the region, assured readers that Bahia’s climate was “of the healthiest type” and that “in spite of being tropical,” Salvador boasted ocean breezes that cooled and “considerably modified the effects of Bahia’s planetary position.”55 In a similar vein, the description of the state sent to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 noted Bahia’s “sweetness of climate.”56 Most repeated was the phrasing of the Afro-Bahian engineer Theodoro Sampaio, author of a 1925

Precedents and Backdrops 53

state report that insisted Bahia’s coastal climate was “without excessive extremes” and was “made sweeter by the action of the prevailing winds.”57 Skirting any mention of tropicality, Sampaio grounded the city as a temperate metropole ready for continued commercial and economic success. The theme of the tropics was embraced, however, when authors wished to draw upon notions of tropical vegetal excess to build up their claims of the exceptional fecundity of the land. Immigrants in 1897, for instance, were promised “certain profits” and “marvelous production at a level unknown in Europe,” returning “double or triple of what they would obtain in the old world using the same amount of land and using the same effort.”58 Tropicality, then, was a tool to be deployed strategically, downplayed in terms of disease but embraced for its evocation of lush agriculture. A Modern Built Landscape Beyond the promotions of agriculture, the built landscape of Salvador took new priority during this time. The port of Salvador, for example, was a central focus in guides of this time. Material sent to the Chicago World’s Fair highlighted this in its fi rst pages, stressing that Salvador hosted “one of the best ports in Brazil and, generally speaking, in the world.”59 Such superlative language was frequently employed, and Sampaio in 1925 stressed proudly that the port maintained direct contact with the principal centers of the Americas and Europe, reinforcing these claims with detailed tables of exports and port statistics at the end of the text.60 The port, and its presumed connections to the global world of trade and exchange, made it a lynchpin in portrayals of Salvador that sought to face a commercial future rather than merely an agricultural past. More broadly, Salvador’s modern architecture was at the center of promotional works of the First Republic. Sampaio’s work for the state was lavishly illustrated by black-and-white photographs of Salvador’s built environment as well as many public works projects outside of the city. Many images had no clear correspondence to the text and never gained even passing mention.61 While much of Sampaio’s volume treated agricultural production, for example, the photographic representation in the work focused on monuments, schools, roads, factories, and even water treatment plants, with an eye for expressing order, modernity, and civilization in clearly recognizable visual terms (see

Figure 1.17. Unknown photographer, factories of Salvador. Theodoro Sampaio, O Estado da Bahia: Agricultura, criação de gado, industria e commercio (1925).

Precedents and Backdrops 55

Figure 1.18. Unknown photographer, nineteenth-century and colonial architecture of Salvador (with ad for banking). Lauro Sampaio, Indicador e guia practico da cidade do Salvador-Bahía (1928).

fig. 1.17). These images, though often of poor quality, were included at considerable cost for the time and were intended to reinforce even further the claims of Bahian progress. In addition to the promotional materials produced by Bahian government offices, two independent texts surfaced that aimed to orient long-term visitors in terms of commerce, one in 1928 and another in 1939. Although both are titled as guides, they read as busy compilations of facts more akin to almanacs and were aimed at elites engaged in commerce, many of whom might have been arriving from Bahia’s interior. Lauro Sampaio’s guide of 1928 was careful, for example, to inform those Bahians arriving from outside the capital about their designated port of arrival and included charts with the distance to other cities across the state.62 A long appendix on the nature and scale of Bahian agricultural exports gave little doubt as to the commercial nature of his audience, while advertisements further reinforced this business focus, centering on insurance and banking needs (see fig. 1.18).63 Intended as practical references for those who might relocate to the

56 Selling Black Brazil

capital, these types of texts left aside any mention of hotels for detailed discussion of neighborhoods, schools, and even cemeteries. In these guides, again, Salvador was portrayed as a bustling and industrious port city with rich investment opportunities. Lauro Sampaio, anxious throughout the work to portray Salvador as a civilized, progressive city, devoted extensive text to the commercial zone and its multitude of stores and vendors. Here, he proclaimed proudly, was significant movement as well as modern and progressive commerce. In his view, “the state of Bahia is one of the most conclusive demonstrations of the productive capacity and fertile energy of the Brazilian nation. Its progress, undeniably affi rmed in statistics and figures, is, in truth, admirable and surprising, from no matter what point of view we look at it. This great northern state that gave birth to our nation is still today a center that radiates considerable propulsive force, a prodigious source of vital sap, which animates, strengthens, and advances the economic expansion of Brazil.”64 Writers like Lauro Sampaio used Brazil’s mantra of order and progress to excellent effect, placing Bahia fi rmly within the standards of progress and productivity most esteemed by the nationalism of the time. While Salvador’s appeal for leisure activities received discussion in these early guides, it did not represent the principal attraction of the city for these authors. Lauro Sampaio’s imagined visitors were so busy with business and daily life that they had little time for leisure: his section dedicated to tourism was only ten pages long, and it primarily listed historical monuments. Meanwhile, Severo José dos Anjos organized his guide of 1939 alphabetically by service and theme. The prosaic focus of both of these works left no room for discussion of the culture of the city, its festivals, or its practices. Furthermore, the population as a whole received no mention, nor did its racial makeup. In sum, these guides sought to orient a long-term visitor and to sell the city in terms of its progress, but they neglected altogether the population and the culture of the city itself as any part of that equation. Although they drew upon the mantra of progress, they disregarded other budding trends across Brazil, where new interest in the unique culture of the nation was brewing, fueled by the rise of modernism.

Conclusion As I have traced in this chapter, Salvador had a long trajectory of selectively embracing changing national ideals and changing ideas of race

Precedents and Backdrops 57

to fashion its own sense of belonging in the nation. If Brazil as a whole embraced a search for national types in the nineteenth century, so did Salvador, with its stylized representations of Black servility. And as the timing of such representations indicates, these images had as their backdrop very real concerns on the part of the elite about the end of slavery. With the national turn to mantras for progress in the First Republic, Salvador too took pains to emphasize its belonging in the most progressive terms possible, as a city temperate, dynamic, and white, made clear in its promotion of its port and built environment. The portraits of Salvador in this part of the twentieth century used empty streets, devoid of human life, to represent the city, attempting to show off a city without any trace of Blackness. Intended as a potent counternarrative to the types of Salvador circulating through the mail, these portrayals sought to delete the presence of Black citizens in the city’s life, even as the formerly enslaved struggled to fi nd new space for themselves after abolition. As such portrayals made clear, the modern city of Salvador harbored no such space.

CHAPTER 2

Colonial Churches and the Rise of the Quintessential Black City: Modernism, Travel, and the Pathbreaking Guide of Jorge Amado

Have you been to Bahia yet, girl? No? So, go! Dor i va l C ay m m i, “Voc ê já foi a Ba h i a?,” sa m ba ly r ics used to ope n Jorge A m a do’s 1945 gu idebook

Bahia awaits you for its daily festival. . . . Do you hear? It is the insistent call of the Candomblé drums [atabaques] in the mysterious night. . . . Young girl, Bahia awaits you and I will be your guide through its streets and its mysteries. Jorge A m a do, Ba h i a de Todos os Sa n tos: Gu i a da s rua s e dos m ist é r ios da cida de do Sa lva dor

As a young author who would later become one of Brazil’s most translated and most widely sold novelists, Jorge Amado dedicated himself to an unorthodox tourist guide for Salvador in the last years of World War II.1 In his meandering text Amado sought simultaneously to attract new visitors to a romanticized, festive Black city and also to denounce the city’s social problems. Veering between the practical and the literary, with vivid evocations of African drums permeating the night, Amado’s guide led the way in billing Blackness as one of Salvador’s chief attractions. His narration was paired with illustrations by a communist artist of working-class background, Manuel Martins, whose evocative woodcuts portrayed a city focused on female labor and dominated by Black life lived in the streets.2 The guide, groundbreaking in many ways, also crystalized the rising interests of the modernist movement in popular culture, as well as the links be-

Churches and the Rise of the Black City

59

tween travel and modernism that had been building through the Vargas era. Popular culture gained new priority in the nationalistic Vargas regime, helped by the expanding mass media of radio and film and the spread of samba. Samba, the most popular musical genre of the era, in fact proved an unexpected ally in the promotion of Salvador, encouraging listeners across the country to make the journey to a city that encapsulated Brazil and its popular Afro-Brazilian culture. Lyrical references to the city’s enchantments hinted at the role of Candomblé, while the figure of the alluring Baiana personified the city’s attractions.3 The nostalgic sambas of the native Bahian Dorival Caymmi established audio odes to Salvador, urging listeners to visit, as in his 1941 song “Have You Been to Bahia Yet?” (“Você já foi a Bahia?”): Have you been to Bahia yet, girl [nêga]?4 No? So, go! . . . Everything, everything in Bahia Makes people adore it. Bahia has a way That no other land has!

Although Caymmi left Salvador to pursue a music career in Rio, his songs throughout the 1930s continued to praise Bahia as an idyllic and festive land. Jorge Amado would pen his tourist guide to the city in 1945, opening the volume with lyrics from Caymmi’s song, and the verses would continue to be a reference for tourist guides for the next two decades, useful for promoting Salvador as the preeminent site of festive popular culture. Domestic tourism established its fi rst real roots during the years of the Vargas regime, encouraged by a series of connected developments. To begin with, budding nationalism dictated that Brazilians know their own country. A patriotic Brazilian, it was assumed, should seek out native explorations rather than venturing abroad. In addition, higher salaries and labor benefits from populist policies allowed the model of vacation and travel to take on a broader character over the 1930s, especially in the industrializing Southeast. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, changes in transportation helped make domestic travel easier. The expansion of the automobile was critical, accompanied as well by the rise of a Brazilian touring club dedicated to mak-

60 Selling Black Brazil

ing car tourism more appealing.5 Improvements in steamship travel allowed faster trips up and down the Brazilian coast, and promotion of international cruise lines meant that visitors from outside Brazil began arriving in the region in new numbers before the outbreak of war. The dynamics of fuel shortages and closed oceans inevitably made travel more difficult during World War II. Nonetheless, the war also created its own flood of exiles, many of whom gave special attention to Salvador, such as the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, who wrote a high-profile travel narrative of Brazil in 1941. Although his praises of Salvador as the heart of Brazil evoked envy from the nation’s other regions, his portrayal of the city as Black and his descriptions of Candomblé, the African-based religion, were more controversial.6 Like Debret and other European and American travelers before him, Zweig made Blackness central to the city. He wrote, “There is nothing more picturesque than the Negresses of Bahia; nothing more colorful, more genuinely animated than the streets of this town. Here, and only here, can one know and understand Brazil.”7 In the eyes of Zweig, Baianas defi ned the city, and thus the nation, an assumption that had gained credence in other realms abroad. Zweig’s volume became important enough that local residents referred to his portrayals of the Baianas’ picturesque appeal to protest new sanitation measures restricting the ability of Baianas to sell food on the streets.8 As such incidents reveal, however, Black culture and Black people continued to meet with racially based restrictions in Salvador, despite any ostensible gains made in outsider depictions or national culture. Such restrictions had parallels elsewhere, to be sure. The embrace of Brazilian cultural forms, such as samba, met its limits on national screens, where mainstream visual culture remained resistant to portrayals of Black Brazilians in even minimal roles. Although Salvador benefited from promotions on film through the 1930s and 1940s, such portrayals were most often filtered through white actors. Carmen Miranda, for instance, popularized a whitened representation of the Baiana to establish herself as a national and international icon. Miranda’s feature-length 1939 film Banana da terra had early showcased a tune by Caymmi, “What Is It That the Baiana’s Got?” (“O que é que a baiana tem?”), with a catchy call-and-response refrain that drew attention to her dress as a sexualized Baiana. Walt Disney’s Good Neighbor initiatives similarly took up a whitewashed promotion of Baianas and Salvador in the 1944 fi lm The Three Caballeros, renamed in Brazil as Have You Been to Bahia Yet? Although Salvador gained prom-

Churches and the Rise of the Black City

61

inence in the fi lm as the true center of Brazil, Hollywood norms and Brazil’s own segregated screen culture ensured that samba numbers with Carmen Miranda’s sister and Donald Duck took place in a technicolor (but whitened) cartoon set of Salvador’s streets.9 More daring in the international realm was the African American choreographer Katherine Dunham’s dance interpretation of the Baiana and traditional Afro-Bahian fishermen by Black, rather than white, performers. Dunham choreographed the piece, Bahiana, for US audiences early in 1939, and it gained significant popularity, remaining in her repertoire at least through the next decade. Though in many ways groundbreaking, Dunham’s interpretation was ultimately refracted through US understandings: inspired by African diasporic traditions, she had not yet been to Brazil.10 In the end, interpretations of Bahia by Black actors or performers, whether in Brazil or beyond, continued to remain rare. In this chapter I turn to this complicated cultural arena, one in which Black culture gained more frequent textual celebrations, even as visual culture resisted such incursions. The guidebooks of the era certainly reflect well the national tensions of the time. The Vargas era witnessed both the birth of the fi rst true tourist guides in Bahia as well as a dramatic alteration in their form by the end of the period. I begin by examining how the rise of modernism brought new interest in travel and native roots. Modernists gained strategic roles in the Vargas regime, developing a cultural politics that privileged both modernity and tradition, with new priority given to popular culture as the 1930s progressed.11 New guides in Salvador sought to situate the city within this national framework but resisted at fi rst the turn to popular culture, instead placing an early focus on tradition, as expressed through Bahia’s Catholic and colonial architectural traditions. By the 1940s, Salvador became more deeply integrated into national interest in popular expressions. Such priorities came to the fore in the transformative but peculiar guide from the modernist and novelist Jorge Amado. The heart of this chapter turns to his effort.

Modernism and Travel Across Latin America in the 1920s, modernist artists and intellectuals inspired by European transformations of the visual arts moved to experiment with new forms of understanding. For Mexico, the early

62 Selling Black Brazil

cubist experimentations of Diego Rivera were one manifestation of this trend, and in Brazil, the movement gained its most cohesive public display in the organization of a Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 1922. Modernists there saw the making of a national identity as a matter of urgency that needed to draw on Brazilian symbols and to break from slavish imitation of European ideals. As Mário de Andrade wrote anxiously in 1924, “We will only be civilized in relation to wellestablished civilizations the day we create the ideal, a Brazilian orientation. Then we will pass from imitation to a phase of creation. And then we will be universal, because we are national.”12 Andrade captured well the yearning for international acclaim and respect, as well as the calling felt by modernists to construct a true sense of an authentic Brazil. This calling met its counterpart in Brazil’s Northeast, led particularly by a circle of intellectuals around Gilberto Freyre. Freyre, the aristocratic son of a former plantation owner in Pernambuco, would gain a national profi le as an intellectual and writer in the 1930s, stressing that Brazilian race relations, based on fusion among Africans, Portuguese, and Native Americans, made for a particularly harmonious society.13 Before this, in the 1920s, however, he and others in Recife had taken an antagonistic position to the São Paulo movement of 1922, encapsulated with a conference and a grand publication entitled Book of the Northeast (Livro do nordeste). The Regionalists, as they called themselves, insisted that the traditions of the Northeast were precious, in danger, and the true foundations of the nation. More aggressively, they also posited that the Southeast, especially Rio and São Paulo, had lost their own connections to Brazil through foreign influence and modernization.14 Despite such antagonisms, Freyre’s Regionalism too formed part of the modernist movement, although both the São Paulo and the Recife movements were ultimately grounded in their regions of origin.15 Whatever their origins, all agreed that Brazil’s national identity owed itself to traditions found in the folk, or the povo (people), the “popular” elements of society. Such ambiguous terms became critical for the era, often serving as shorthand for talking about Black culture more broadly, a trend that would become magnified in Bahia. For modernists of all stripes, travel became central for its promise to expose tourists to Brazil’s folk and popular traditions. With this in mind, modernists in the Southeast turned for inspiration not only to a racial other, or to the popular classes, but also to a geographic other, most often located in the Amazon or the Northeast. Using the lan-

Churches and the Rise of the Black City

63

guage of exploration and discovery, intrepid modernists stepped out of their “modern” urban stomping grounds and set out to discover the true Brazil.16 The travels of the modernist writer and intellectual Mário de Andrade were some of the earliest iterations of this tendency. As he wrote in 1920, although he did not condone those Brazilians who sought to visit Paris, he wished for all Brazilians to at least consider a visit to Rio, Bahia, or Minas Gerais as a viable alternative.17 He led the way with two highly publicized journeys to the North and the Northeast, in 1927 and from 1928 to 1929, narrated with his own photographs in his widely read newspaper columns for São Paulo’s Diário Nacional. In coming years other modernists would take up Andrade’s mission with more formal travel guides, but with independent publications rather than press columns, and with illustrations rather than photographs. All of these guides had literary pretensions more than mere utilitarian objectives, and all were by figures critical to the modernist movement in Brazil. They too located the heart of the nation outside of the industrializing Southeast, focusing instead on declining colonial centers, such as Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, or the old sugar cities of the Northeast. Gilberto Freyre penned a guide to his northeastern hometown of Recife in 1934 and a guide to neighboring Olinda in 1939; both of these illustrated guides went to second editions in the early 1940s.18 Similarly, Freyre’s friend the Recife-born poet Manuel Bandeira wrote a guide to the historic mining city of Ouro Preto in 1938, published by the newly established federal patrimonial organization for Brazil. These modernists wrote with the intention of promoting Brazil, but they proved uncomfortable at fully embracing popular culture. Even Freyre, famous for his celebration of Brazil’s traditions elsewhere, dedicated more time to yacht clubs and golf courses than to popular culture or Afro-Brazilian culture. Bandeira, in turn, treated the former mining town of Ouro Preto as a historic rather than a living town. The ambiguities of the authors were echoed in the illustrations.19 Both the Recife and the Ouro Preto guides were illustrated by the Pernambucan artist Luís Jardim with a visual conservativism, alternating between a nineteenth-century-style portrayal of urban types and the empty streetscapes favored during the First Republic (see figs. 2.1–2.3). Modernists had turned to travel guides as key to defi ning the nation in new terms, but their authors and illustrators remained uncertain during the 1930s about how to follow through on their own aims and priorities.

Figure 2.1. Luís Jardim, street scene in city of Recife, Pernambuco. Gilberto Freyre and Luís Jardim (illustrator), Guia prático, histórica e sentimental da cidade do Recife (1934). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Figure 2.2. Luís Jardim, “Negra de xale” (Black woman with shawl). Gilberto Freyre and Luís Jardim (illustrator), Guia prático, histórica e sentimental da cidade do Recife (1934). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Churches and the Rise of the Black City

65

Figure 2.3. Luís Jardim, street scene in city of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais. Manuel Bandeira, Guia de Ouro Preto (1938).

Tradition and Modernity In Salvador, modernists would not turn their attention to the promotion of the city until the 1940s, with the guide of Jorge Amado. In the meantime, however, other city boosters strove to portray the city in terms that meshed with the Vargas ideals of tradition and modernity. In 1934 the nationally based Touring Club of Brazil released a guide

66 Selling Black Brazil

to Salvador that offered an extended tour of the city.20 A haiku on the back cover of the guide captured a central metaphor for Salvador in the Vargas era, describing the city as “tradition inlaid in progress,” a theme that dominated almost every guide that followed. The touring guide’s emphasis on modernity came through in the photographs of the city and the use of Art Deco motifs and fonts. Advertisements likewise promoted hotels in terms of their “modern and hygienic rooms,” highlighting restaurants named the American Bar and the Grill Room. Tradition was represented by Salvador’s colonial churches, the sights that gained the most detail and photographs in the touring club guide. Like other guides of this era, however, it resisted any of the modernist focus on popular culture or any real mention of race in Bahia. The text noted only in passing that the “habits and race” of market vendors would interest the tourist, obtuse language that sought to avoid any extended mention of Black life in the city. 21 Indeed, international comparisons were more important for this guide, which recommended a “really charming” view that would remind the visitor of Venice, Italy, as a fitting conclusion to the tour of the Brazilian city. 22 Despite the early effort of the touring club, within Bahia itself, interest in tourism lay dormant until the tenure of a particularly activist mayor and governor under Vargas’s semifascist dictatorship known as the Estado Novo (1937–1945). 23 Salvador finally gained its fi rst tourist guides produced by city authorities, one in 1939 and one in 1941, both of which continued to make tradition and progress central motifs. Tradition in these guides was most consistently represented in terms of the city’s colonial churches. The 1939 guide led off with eighteen photos of churches in its fi rst six pages, offset by only one image of a city street scene. The guide of 1941, in a similar pattern, dedicated the fi rst fi fteen pages to churches, with two to three photographs on each page. Interrupted briefly by photos of historical monuments and forts, church images resumed some pages later. The focus on churches was surely stimulated by the formation of the national heritage organization during this time period.24 Bahia was in fact the center of activity for the fi rst national preservation agency, founded in 1937, the National Historical and Artistic Patrimony Service (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional [SPHAN]). Thanks to energetic actions by the director of Bahia’s regional office, a modernist poet named Godofredo Filho, hundreds of colonial buildings gained listing on the national registry of heritage sites, in numbers that vastly outpaced efforts elsewhere (as I will show further in

Churches and the Rise of the Black City

67

Figure 2.4.

Luís Jardim, Salvador cityscape juxtaposing a traditional Baiana and the modern Lacerda Elevator. Original in color. Cover of the state promotional publication Bahia: Tradicional e moderna 1, no. 1 (1939).

chapter 3). Within Salvador, Filho’s well-publicized local efforts certainly furthered Bahians’ sense of importance to the nation’s history, one centered in the architecture of the colonial world and, especially, its churches. 25 These tropes of tradition and progress gained a somewhat different orientation in the cover art of another promotional publication prepared by the state in 1939, Bahia: Traditional and Modern (Bahia: Tradicional e moderna). The cover posed a Baiana against the Lacerda Elevator, intended to represent, respectively, the tropes of tradition and modernity (see fig. 2.4). As I have noted elsewhere, this cover was groundbreaking in some ways for bringing an Afro-Bahian figure into official representations of the city after long years during the First Republic in which such depictions were frowned upon. Nonetheless, the image was still troubling for its implication that Blackness remained as

68

Selling Black Brazil

the antithesis to modernity. While the juxtaposition of the Baiana and the elevator implied that tradition and modernity might coexist, they were framed as two very different elements in city life. 26 Despite such limitations on its cover, the text of this publication revealed that by the late 1930s, at least in some official circles, Salvador was beginning to be promoted in ways that celebrated its popular culture as much as its colonial roots. Issued from the state’s Department of Propaganda, Bahia: Traditional and Modern interspersed large pages of glossy black-and-white photographs promoting the state’s investment possibilities with a variety of articles focused on Bahia’s unique culture and its legacy of racial mixture.27 Guest authors were commissioned to write special articles on popular festivals and to compose poetry about Bahia’s “rustic” sea fishermen. One article invited Brazilians as well as those across the world to experience the city of festivals and happiness. 28 Although such texts resisted discussion of “Blackness” or African roots, they generally celebrated the city’s mestiço heritage and its “tropical” nature. The historian and politician Pedro Calmon represented such trends well, proclaiming Salvador to be the most Brazilian of all cities, with its festivals and its hybrid, “melting pot” society.29 Pedro Calmon also played a starring role in the 1941 guide, where he continued to highlight racial mixing and harmony. Playing upon the early union of the Portuguese sailor Diogo Álvares Correia and the Indigenous princess Catarina Paraguaçu, Calmon argued that “love preceded the state in creating society” through “racial confraternization.”30 Calmon’s narrative prioritized Indigenous and Portuguese mixture rather than any African presence, and his origin story neatly sidestepped the contribution to state building by enslaved Africans. In fact, Calmon, the historian most often called in as an expert for Salvador’s guides in the 1930s and 1940s, had been embroiled in a very public debate just previously, in 1939. In a standoff with the Northeastern Regionalist novelist José Lins do Rego, Calmon insisted that samba could not serve as a true national form because it made the nation appear too Black. In Calmon’s view, the link between samba and national identity “might be plausible if we were Haiti or Liberia, but it is biased, ingenuous and futile to want Afro-Brazilianism to stand in for all of Brazilianism.”31 Although narratives of racial mixture might be celebrated by leading intellectuals, many remained uncomfortable with admitting extended Black influence in Brazil. Turning to the national level for comparison, we can see that such

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tensions were undeniably at play in the tourism efforts of federal authorities. For instance, the glossy Travel in Brazil, published in English in 1941 by the national Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP), attracted the allegiance and participation of some of the nation’s most important intellectuals and modernists, but the publication remained remarkably uncomfortable with Blackness as a national symbol.32 Mário de Andrade, who contributed to the magazine, predicted such an outcome in a letter he wrote to the publication’s editor, his friend the modernist poet Cecília Meireles. With biting wit, he cut to the heart of the matter: “I vaguely remember, didn’t you tell me only articles about music and folklore, isn’t that right? Photographs of folklore without the indispensable attendance of our brothers in St. Benedict [i.e., Black Brazilians] are almost impossible, and probably Travel in Brazil obeys the diplomatic law that affi rms that there are no Blacks in Brazil with a z. If you have some time, explain the DIP’s Aryanist projects and the limits of my topics for me.”33 Clearly Andrade worried that national images for export would be whitened in what he sarcastically termed “Brazil with a z” (referencing the English spelling for the country instead of its native Portuguese spelling of Brasil). Although Meireles’s response is unknown, as are any limits that might have been imposed upon her, Andrade’s assessment proved correct. Depictions of Blackness were almost completely absent from the Travel in Brazil publication, surfacing only in photographs of Indigenous and Black dolls, along with two artistic depictions of faceless brown figures by the modernist artist Castello Branco (see fig. 2.5).34 As a whole, then, tourism in Brazil brought to the fore tensions in how race would be depicted, both for national audiences and for outsiders. Despite national cultural ideals of a racial democracy in which all participated, such ideals fell by the wayside when it came to the visual realm. Even most modernists, besides Andrade, shied from tying popular culture to Black culture in any meaningful way. Although promoters in Bahian tourist texts had come to celebrate mestiço roots by the 1940s, their visual representations stressed whiteness through a focus on church architecture or resorted to limited tropes of Blackness—patterns familiar in Brazil more broadly. Jorge Amado broke with these trends dramatically in 1945, but his work also must be understood within the context of modernists before him. Indeed, placing Amado’s work as part of a modernist nationalist and regionalist project instead of a mere visitor’s guide allows us to answer to a curious puzzle: the work’s unexpected popularity. Written in

Figure 2.5. Castello Branco, folkloric depiction of Brazilian dancers with brown

skin for the cover of the national promotional travel publication Travel in Brazil 2, no. 3 (1942). Original in color. Courtesy of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

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Portuguese and published with the Brazilian publisher Editora Martins from São Paulo, the three-hundred-page guide proved a surprising hit despite its decidedly idiosyncratic format. Although the guide appears to have had limited national impact in its fi rst years, it garnered massive success over the course of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s it became a best seller, with three major revisions and fortytwo editions appearing over the next decades, in addition to a further reprinting as recently as 2012. Together, Jorge Amado and the artist Manuel Martins created a textual and visual celebration of Blackness that broke from the whitened ideals of other modernist guides and placed Blackness at the center of Salvador. But while Amado and Martins broke new ground, they also played upon deep tropes of the past, falling back in many ways on an older visual language of racial types. Both retrograde and avant-garde, Amado and Martins innovated even while they played upon older ideas of Blackness and the city. Together they played a central role in emphasizing a modernist vision of Salvador.

A Turn to a Black City Jorge Amado’s Modernist Vision Born in 1912 in southern Bahia, Amado moved to Salvador as a youth to continue his education in the capital, where he played an early role in interpreting the modernist movement outside the Southeast. São Paulo’s 1922 call for modernist renovation had passed unheeded in Bahia, in part due to distance and in part due to disinterest. Newspapers there failed to even report on the Modern Art Week of 1922 at the time, and the elite largely rejected the movement’s innovations for years to come.35 Modernism gained limited acceptance in Salvador only some six years later, and then only in literary, not artistic, circles.36 Amado participated in some of these first literary efforts, including one known as the Rebel Academy (Academia dos Rebeldes). These modernist circles provided Amado his earliest sense of intellectual belonging, although he also aligned himself with the Regionalist boom in novels of the 1930s and, as a communist, with the proletarian novel more broadly. Critics have deemed Amado’s 1935 novel, Jubiabá, as his most representative of this early stage. The national press acclaimed the novel for revealing “all of Black Bahia,” calling it “the work [that] estab-

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lished his reputation on the national scene.”37 Amado himself described the novel as an effort “to reflect the life of Bahia’s Black people, poets who live in the midst of the greatest misery, suffering all the prejudices of race, which still dominate Brazil, and resisting everything bravely without losing that light laughter, that power to laugh, to sing, to fight, that only Blacks possess.”38 Despite such sentimentalism and reliance on racial essentialism, Amado became respected at the time as an author who understood and documented the life of the lower class, and especially Black life in Bahia. The fact that the reallife Jubiabá (an Afro-Bahian religious leader in Salvador) objected to his depiction in the work would matter little to Amado’s claim of authenticity and allegiance to the povo. 39 Amado wrote his travel guide a decade after Jubiabá, at a moment in which he was one of the most important literary figures in Brazil. His impetus for writing a tourist guide is impossible to fully recover, because his correspondence and personal archive are closed to researchers, but it appears that his publisher at Editora Martins might have urged him to complete the work and organized the partnership with the artist Manuel Martins. The work, however, fit neatly within Amado’s own trajectory, including an earlier set of articles praising another northeastern city that used many of the same tropes enlisted for his guide to Salvador.40 Whatever its origins, Amado’s guide has rested uneasily with critics of his work more generally, who have neglected close analysis of it while nonetheless often quoting from it extensively as representative of his work.41 Amado’s Eclectic Innovations In the introduction to his guide to Salvador, Amado established a framework that was unexpected for a guidebook, promising to uncover a city that was unequal, dark, and mysterious. Speaking to a fictional young female visitor (moça), whom he portrayed as sheltered and presumably white and upper class, he wrote, “Young girl, I will show you the picturesque but I will also show you the pain. . . . Beauty lives in this mysterious city, young girl, but she has hunger as an inseparable companion.”42 The portrayal of beauty, misery, and mystery developed over the course of the book, focused especially on the mysterious. Amado titled his work Bahia de Todos os Santos: A Guide to the Streets and Mysteries of the City of Salvador and wrote evocatively of mystery that “dripped like oil” in the streets.43 The trope of mystery,

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tied to his emphasis on Blackness and darkness more broadly, served to exoticize the city as a racialized other, unknowable to the typical visitor without the inside connections of Amado. Although Blackness might have been exoticized in Amado’s work, it was certainly given much more treatment than any previous guide. As he described it, Salvador was “Brazil’s Black city par excellence, with a large population of color.” In linguistic terms, Blackness and darkness dominated the work to a much greater degree than some of his novels, where the descriptors “negro” and “mestiço” were often used interchangeably in descriptions of the city.44 In his guidebook he used the term “negra” or “negro” over forty times, or roughly every seven pages, and the terms “mestiço” or “mestiça” not at all. This connection between Blackness and Salvador had been developing elsewhere, as discussed earlier. But for the elite of the city, Blackness remained a controversial concept, and within the genre of domestic travel guides a focus on Blackness was still revolutionary in 1945. Although Amado treated the city as Black as a whole, he also developed special treatment of particular elements of Black culture, such as capoeira, Afro-Bahian cuisine, and especially Candomblé. Most remarkably, Amado showcased Candomblé as an attraction for tourists, going to considerable lengths to make it possible for travelers to visit a terreiro, or temple of Candomblé, and observe the religious rituals. In describing the religion, he highlighted his own role as an honorary member, helping to legitimize beliefs that many still viewed with suspicion. In addition, he gave much more than a mere description of what a tourist would see. Instead he provided a behind-the-scenes tour of religious buildings forbidden to visitors. Moreover, in one of the longest sections of the book, he not only engaged in thick description of religious rituals but also compiled the addresses of 117 terreiros and the names of the heads of each, a truly impressive undertaking (which I explore further in chapter 6). Amado’s encouragement for his readers to visit and experience a candomblé fit more generally into his central focus on Salvador’s lived popular culture as its central draw. Casting aside its attractions as a coastal beach city, or as a preserved colonial relic, he instead focused on a festive and mysterious city indelibly marked by the spirt of its povo.45 Thus, his introduction, entitled “An Invitation” (convite), billed travel to the city as an invitation to a party, with the call of drums that served to beckon a young girl to the never-ending street festivities of Salvador and to hint at the mysteries of Candomblé.46 In

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this vein too Amado dismissed restaurants as a whole and instead insisted that the best food was to be found in the street stalls of the markets. His treatment of politics described the local taxi stand as the best place for war updates. And for those seeking more detailed considerations of Bahia and its history, Amado gave instructions for how to reach a particularly loquacious blind Black man at the market, who would serve as good company over lunch. For Amado, the heart of the city was represented in the streets and within its Afro-Bahian underclass. All of these themes were central to Amado, although his organization, narrative, and tone were uneven. His organization was unorthodox, following neither the outlines of geography nor general divisions by theme. Instead, his guide began with an intellectual portrait of the city, moved on to a tour of neighborhoods by class, and then considered festivals, with short essays throughout that pondered diverse topics, such as the nature of particular streets, Candomblé, and Afro-Bahian food.47 Meanwhile, the narrative he established at the book’s opening, in which he addressed his fictional companion, was largely discarded in the whole of the volume, only to be taken up again for the last two paragraphs of the book.48 Overall, his tone was irreverent and casual; however, this dropped, for instance, in his discussion of the city’s churches, where instead he detailed with dull accuracy and a dry voice the dates of each church’s reforms. He intoned, for example, “In the plaza of Piedade stands the church and convent that gave name to the plaza. The nave is divided in three parts, in imitation of the St. Peter’s cathedral, in Rome. It was founded in 1679 and restored in 1809.”49 This tepid section in turn matched awkwardly with his emotional and moving description of disease and infant mortality in the “proletarian” neighborhoods of the city. The prose then changed abruptly once again as he quoted extensive technical tracts on tuberculosis to denounce the living conditions of the poor. All of these inconsistencies made for a highly eclectic text, but the accompanying illustrations by Manuel Martins helped to distill a more consistent vision of the city. Martins’s Dark City Though little known today, at the time Manuel Martins was an integral part of modernist art circles in São Paulo, where he had already developed a reputation for his critical depictions of urban scenes. He

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arrived in Salvador to accompany the work of Amado in 1944, intending to spend only one month. He stayed for seven months instead, captivated by the city but also shocked by its inequalities. As Amado reported, upon seeing one neighborhood, Martins remarked that he had seen no other city “where the difference between rich and poor was so shocking and brutal.”50 Amado of course provided a personalized tour through the city, and the two appear to have been exceptionally well suited for working together on the book. Amado gave Martins special thanks on the last page of the guide, claiming that “never have a person and a city understood and comprehended each other as well as the painter Manuel Martins and the city of Bahia.”51 Clearly Amado both appreciated Martins as an artist and believed Martins had succeeded in capturing the essence that Amado was trying to portray. As a whole, the accompanying art by Manuel Martins can be seen as a narrative faithful to Amado’s text in many ways. Just as Amado had downplayed the city’s architecture to focus on the city’s lived culture, so did Martins. Amado’s effort to showcase life in the streets was further echoed in Martins’s illustrations. The artist portrayed no indoor scenes, with the exception of his depiction of a Candomblé ceremony. Moreover, Amado’s focus on the povo, and the popular elements of the city, also gained echo in images that avoided elite life and focused instead more often on the poverty described by Amado. Martins’s choice of engravings or woodcut prints as his technique also played upon Amado’s popular focus: the method was used by modernists across Latin America to evoke popular printing methods. In the case of Brazil, this technique also evoked the aesthetic of the cordel, street poetry and stories printed cheaply on newsprint and sold on the streets for wide readership. This choice of medium led Martins to emphasize Blackness in ways that reinforced Amado’s imagery. Woodcut production dictated that images be carved in relief, then inked and printed, much as one does with a stamp. Martins used this relief to maximize black ink in the space: Amado’s dark, mysterious streets and his Black city gained literal representation, therefore, in the art of the book. When compared with the cover of the book, a sketch by the modernist Clóvis Graciano, the contrast only becomes clearer: Graciano’s depiction showed empty streets and colonial-style buildings, with a vast, light-colored expanse as the background (see fig. 2.6). Martins showed none of this colonial architecture, he populated the streets with people and types, and he substituted darkness for light.

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Figure 2.6. Clóvis Graciano, cover art showing empty city streets of Salvador. Original in color. Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945).

To be clear, Martins’s aesthetic was not a style adopted only for Bahia. Martins depicted São Paulo in this same period, using the same black-inked woodcuts for a much different city. But his depictions of the two cities could in no way be confused. In São Paulo he highlighted factory smokestacks, automobiles, and modern, circular buildings. The looming buildings dwarf even a car down below (see fig. 2.7). For Bahia, Martins altered his focus considerably and arrived at a portrait that revealed none of the bustle of a modern industrial city but rather an often rustic, chaotic city dominated by the lives and routines of the working class. Loaded donkeys, frequently in the background, signaled Salvador as a city driven by animal rather than mechanical power. As a whole, Martins’s drawings for the Bahia guide can be roughly divided into three categories: general cityscapes, depictions of individuals moving through the city, and an image of a Candomblé ceremony.

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This last image of Candomblé is unique in that it was the only image portraying religion in Salvador, a city that had long been known for the grandeur of its colonial Catholic churches, which even the communist Amado felt forced to pay tribute to in his text. Martins here, as elsewhere, distilled Amado’s vision into a tighter narrative and also

Figure 2.7. Manuel Martins, cityscape emphasizing the modernity of São Paulo,

woodcut, 1945. Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidad de São Paulo. Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

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took it further. Although Martins generally followed Amado’s emphasis on life lived in the streets, this image of a candomblé was his only indoor scene, with a wall and a roof looming in the background over participants in a religious ceremony (see fig. 2.8). The image was representative, however, in showcasing much of the same intensity as the rest of the work. Rapid lines filled much of the page, most prominently on the pattern of the atabaque, a type of large drum played by hand in Candomblé ceremonies. Female practitioners depicted in the scene remain faceless, crouched and bent over in the midst of ceremonial dance, and perhaps in possession by their gods. The edges of the image are primarily black, but white etchings and patterns dominate the center and illuminate the faces of the drummers, who appear as if in a spotlight. The impression is one of drumming, movement with bare feet, and a dark and mysterious ceremony in which a crowded circle of believers is lost in religious practice. In terms of cityscapes, Martins took several typical scenes of Salvador and subverted them in various ways, emphasizing poverty and disorder. An image of the Lacerda Elevator, most often used as a symbol of modern progress, is instead almost forgotten in the midst of haphazard housing clinging to the hills underneath it (see fig. 2.9). Rather than a peaceful ocean view, a port scene depicting the small sailboats of the bay portrayed the vessels as looming, keeling dangerously to the side. Most notable in another image was his depiction of lower-class housing, one of the few illustrations in which architecture played a central role (see fig. 2.10). The image shows either the outdoor porches of a multistory residence or, more likely, the inside patio of a tenement. A woman hangs laundry, while two children play nearby. The scene itself feels crowded, as if the viewer is immersed within the cramped quarters, where life is unfolding. While much of the detail of the image is unclear, Martins took pains to fill almost every available space with thin lines, retaining a sense of darkness and perhaps hinting also at chaos and filth. Indeed, in all of these scenes, the overwhelming impression is one of chaos. His use of lines in rough circular scribbles produces a sense of disorder in which the viewer’s eye is allowed few quiet spaces to rest. In fact, this focus fit well with Amado’s text. In contrast with the authors of other guides, Amado commented extensively on the poverty of the city, especially in the Pelourinho (the old colonial center and former site of the city’s colonial whipping post) and in the neighborhoods of the working class. Amado’s portrait of the historic district highlighted

Figure 2.8. Manuel Martins, image depicting drumming and Candomblé, woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

Figure 2.9. Manuel Martins, Lacerda Elevator, woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

Figure 2.10. Manuel Martins, tenement housing, woodcut. Jorge Amado and

Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

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Figure 2.11. Manuel Martins, image of mother and child at start of each chapter,

woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

the rats, the stench of overloaded toilets, and hunger, as did his tour of the “proletarian” zone of Liberdade (an Afro-Bahian neighborhood), which he termed “instructive.” He concluded the chapter, “Imagine these worker neighborhoods that the tourists, enchanted with the surprising and mysterious beauty of Bahia, almost never visit. . . . If you were to have courage to see the misery, you could go. . . . You would see, with certainty, at least three or four burials of children that died before they even realized what life was.”52 Putting the reader on edge with the specter of the death of innocents, Amado dared his readers not to look away from the difficulties of the city’s poor Black majority. Some sense of these difficulties came through in Martins’s depictions of individuals at work, which represent fully half of the ten fullpage drawings. Although the faces were etched in crude form, they included enough detail to indicate some sense of individuality. Yet Martins was by no means engaging in idle portraits: these were individuals at work on the streets of Salvador, and most of them were women. Their tasks linked them in marked ways to poverty and hard labor, whether as laundresses, street vendors, or prostitutes. Indeed, Martins made labor the central axis for the city, highlighting female labor and especially the theme of working mothers. In many scenes, women at work are depicted taking care of their children. The same image, for example, opened every chapter: it showed a somewhat rural scene next to the bay in which a woman carried laundry on her head as she shepherded a child and a dog back to a roughly sketched house (see fig. 2.11). In another image, a closer view, a woman carrying her

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child past a line of people outside a building appears to be attempting to procure food or is perhaps sheltering her child from the difficulties of life (see fig. 2.12). Other types of working women gained depiction as well. In one image, it appears that Martins has depicted prostitutes on a balcony of one of the buildings of the Maciel, a red-light district of the era (see fig. 2.13). This interpretation gains further support from Amado, who wrote in his memoirs, “Having come to Bahia to illustrate a guide of the streets and mysteries of the city, the Paulista painter Manuel Martins re-created the city in a series of magnificent woodcuts, hillsides, alleys, churches and whores.”53 Although it is possible that Martins

Figure 2.12. Manuel Martins, woman carrying child, woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

Figure 2.13. Manuel Martins, red-light district, woodcut. Jorge Amado and

Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

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Figure 2.14. Manuel Martins, image of Baiana printed at close of every chapter, woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

stumbled across such a scene himself, it seems more likely that Amado escorted him there, as in later interviews Amado made proud reference to the fact that he and his modernist friends had been frequent clients of the brothels of the city in the 1930s. 54 Yet in Martins’s depiction, the scene is more sympathetic than sordid or lascivious. While one woman, standing with her back turned, talks or perhaps fl irts with an avid-looking young man, her seated friend looks more directly at the viewer, bored and world-weary. Martins’s decision to show her with a shoe removed may be read as a way to signal the woman’s departure from upper- class morals or perhaps an effort to become more comfortable during a long day of waiting and work. Another working female, the Baiana food vendor, made several appearances in Martins’s work. A small image of her closed every chapter, thus bringing the framing of female labor full circle (see fig. 2.14),

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Figure 2.15. Manuel Martins, Baiana, woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel

Martins, Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

and a female vendor was the focus of an additional illustration (see fig. 2.15). All of these Baianas were far from the festive creations of the screen. They appeared to look at the viewer with a somewhat distant, unflappable stare and without much trace of a smile. Although the chapter-ending image portrayed a woman alone with her tray of food, the other women engaged with clients, clearly at work. In all the images, the lines depicted strength rather than sensuality and strong bodies more than sexualized ones. Like Candido Portinari’s workers depicted in his labor series, these were workers fi rst and foremost, and their physicality called attention to the effort demanded of them at their jobs.55 Martins called attention to the difficulty of

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Figure 2.16. Manuel Martins, laundresses, woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel

Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

the work he illustrated, and the expressions of the laborers were somber rather than gay. Laundresses, depicted with strong, sturdy bodies, washed clothes together alongside the banks of a lake, but each appears lost in her work (see fig. 2.16). One carries her heavy load on her head away from the water, another is bent over her clothes in quiet effort, and a third, the only one with her face more visible to the viewer, appears with empty or downcast eyes and a sad face. In another image (see fig. 2.17), a male porter, carrying a heavy load of fruit in a basket on his shoulders, remains with his face hidden from sight but with his muscular legs and arms straining at the effort, his unshod feet hinting at his poverty. In many respects the images fit Amado’s descrip-

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Figure 2.17. Manuel Martins, male porter, woodcut. Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins (illustrator), Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador (1945). Courtesy of Silvio Re Martins.

tions of a dark, somewhat exotic city with problems of poverty and overcrowding, but they also show an important Black culture within the city. There are no beaches and no churches in this mysterious and somewhat troubled city. I argue that the guide contains two narratives, one textual and one

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visual, and that the two did not always completely correspond. Overall, Martins’s art was more radical than Amado’s text in terms of labor, race, and gender. To begin with, Martins’s woodcut medium ensured that everyone in the city was Black. Although Amado called Salvador a Black city, he also used terms of mestiço and referred to the city’s white elite, none of which gained visibility in the illustrations. In this way, Martins went further than Amado, showing a city defi ned by its Black laborers who peopled the streets. Alternately, one might think of Martins’s art as color-blind in a basic way: because all of his images use black as the dominant color, one can question whether race emerged as significant in his vision. In fact, this choice of technique provides an important counterpoint to illustrations of the city in later guides, where a light background would be used to call attention to the Blackness of the individuals depicted. Although this is critical, it is also important to note that Martins dedicated considerable time to marking individuals as Black by their occupations, especially with the male porter and the Baianas, making a reading of Martins as color-blind less compelling. It is also worth considering that Martins’s focus on labor provided a more radical view of the city than Amado had intended. Amado, often critiqued for his limited portrayal of women as sexualized in his novels, had little of this same concern in his guide, yet neither did his text make female labor central. Even though Amado was grounded in the proletarian novel, and even though he was a communist, his guidebook did not fully turn to questions of labor per se. In fact, for a work by a communist, there is very little description of labor itself in the guidebook. Instead, Martins seems to have feminized the city in his portrayals of working women, as well as turned to a more critical depiction of the types of labor undertaken by its inhabitants. As a whole, Amado’s text incorporated a critique of society that would be absent from all later guidebooks. But it is important to note that Martins’s illustrations went further in a critique of society than Amado’s text. Though both Amado and Martins might agree on the portrayal of the city as dark, Martins’s artistic depictions rendered to the viewer a female landscape of labor. The women providing for their families showed the city as lonely rather than social and as a city dominated by everyday concerns rather than festive ones. This provides a striking contrast with the guides and illustrations that would come later, as I want to highlight. This chapter, therefore, both provides important precedents to the rise of modernism in the 1950s and is in-

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tended as a contrast to the tropes developed later. Labor, as a theme, would change dramatically in its depiction over time to become more romanticized or, alternately, to be written out of the scene altogether. Martins’s personalization of the city should also be foregrounded. It stands out, for example, that his illustrations of São Paulo had depersonalized the city, making people a background to the urban landscape but without any character of their own. In contrast, his illustrations of Salvador for Amado moved people into the foreground, making the city itself a landscape of urban types. While the focus and the ultimate argument underwriting these types were very different from their nineteenth-century precedents, nonetheless there is a similarity in the framing of urban scenes and figures and the way in which particular individuals became keyed as representative of the city. The questions, then, that remain for us as viewers are to what extent Martins pushed forward a new vision of an urban underclass and to what degree he relied upon earlier, older tropes of Black labor. Amado closed his preface to the guide in an unusual way. He cautioned his fictional companion, writing, “If you want to see everything, in anxious hopes of learning and improving . . . I will show you the streets and the mysteries of Salvador, and you will leave here certain that this world is wrong and that it is necessary to remake it as better. Because it is not just that so much misery is contained within so much beauty.”56 Amado perhaps hoped that the city would ultimately be changed and reformed by Brazilian visitors who, unlike locals, had not become accustomed to Salvador’s misery. 57 His plea, however, might well have been lost within the unfocused chaos of his own writing. The ideal of change and reform, however vague, would be set aside for later authors who fretted about the corruptions of modernity. Amado’s work is important for the paths he established for other guides, but also for the paths he traced that would be abandoned by later writers of the native guides. To begin with, Amado’s focus on the lived experience of the streets meant that the immediate surroundings took priority over Bahia’s past. Although Amado occasionally made historic references, his guide resisted the temptation to bury Bahia within a colonial context of grandeur. As he described it, treading on the stones of the colonial center near the Pelourinho, the former whipping post, the visitor would hear the echoes of the screams of the enslaved who had been whipped in earlier eras.58 No other guide would address slavery’s abuses in such vivid terms.

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Conclusion In the end, despite its grounding in the populist rhetoric current to the time, Amado’s guide proved ill-suited for the moment. To begin with, the guide appears to have made little immediate impact in the Brazilian press.59 National publicity for the fi rst edition seems to have gotten lost in the chaos of the end of World War II and Brazil’s return to democracy. Amado himself might have been little disposed to promote the work as he relocated to São Paulo and became elected as a federal deputy for the Communist Party at the start of 1945. In addition, there was a tepid initial response in the pacing of the book’s editions. Although the work would eventually gain forty-two editions, the book was slow to be issued in a second edition in 1951, while the pace of subsequent editions picked up only in the decade after 1955. The work’s apogee dates to the decades from 1965 to 1985, when a total of twenty-five editions were issued, and corresponds to a period in which Amado’s revisions had begun to stray from his earlier focus on poverty to portray a more festive city. While the guide itself would be incredibly influential, Martins’s social critique would eventually prove less palatable to Amado. In later rewrites, Amado’s own condemnations of inequality subsided into a more celebratory account of the city. In this framing Martins’s drawings seemed increasingly out of place, and in 1977 they were removed altogether. Significantly, Martins’s illustrations were replaced with drawings by the Bahian illustrator Carlos Bastos, allied with the celebratory modernist vision whose development I discuss in the coming chapters. Bastos embraced a celebratory and romantic view of Salvador. Notably, at this later point, book launches attracted considerably more press attention, with long lines for book signings.60 For WanDall Júnior, the 1977 revision marked a critical turning point in which the guidebook came to describe a festive city that seemed to have little in common with Amado’s early versions.61 Amado’s framing of the city resonated with readers, but it also evolved over time away from his socialist roots and denouncements of poverty and became increasingly tied to a Bahian modernism based around Blackness, an ideal that he himself had begun to forge in the fi rst edition of his guide. The translation record for the guide further reinforces that the book’s popularity only came some decades after its fi rst publication and clearly supports the notion that Amado wrote it for a domestic,

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rather than foreign, audience. Though Amado’s novels often went quickly to foreign translation, with only a short lag, his guide, curiously, did not. The guide gained publication abroad fi rst in Portugal, and there only in 1970, despite the fact that no language barrier prevented an earlier publication. The fi rst translation, to Spanish, came in 1980, with French and Italian translations lagging even further behind; remarkably, it has never been translated into English.62 As a whole, then, the true importance of Amado’s guide came in setting the dramatic stage for others. Although its popularity grew much later, it introduced a critical new focus on culture as Salvador’s draw and a groundbreaking treatment of the city’s Black culture as central. These themes would be important in the coming decades, as I show in the next chapters, and in some ways anticipated the counterculture appeal of Salvador in the 1970s.63 And the same themes would ultimately dominate the official promotions of Salvador by the state’s own tourist office, Bahiatursa, through the current day. In Salvador, Amado’s guidebook attracted some attention at its release, although less for its text than for a dramatic promotional event tied to the work in 1944: a modern art exhibition that marked only the second time modern art had been displayed to Salvador’s public. The city’s fi rst experience with modern art had not been auspicious. Local elites greeted an exhibition in 1932 by the Bahian artist José Guimarães with censure and disapproval, a climate that ultimately proved so hostile that he relocated to Rio without any further exhibitions in Salvador. Amado and Martins decided to force the point over a decade later with an exhibition held in 1944 in Bahia’s public library. Using their own private collections and that of the newly arrived art collector and journalist Odorico Tavares (discussed in the next chapter), the three men brought together a modern art show that became a landmark in the history of modern art in Bahia.64 This exhibition marked the fi rst time that many Paulista modern artists and the most important artists of Brazil would be seen in Bahia. Fittingly, it marked the beginning of an era in which modernist art and the promotion of tourism would be tied together in new ways in the city of Salvador. The fact that the city’s fi rst multiparty exhibition of modern art came in the service of the promotion of a tourist guide was no coincidence and represented a critical fi rst step in linking art and tourism.

CHAPTER 3

Pierre Verger and the Construction of a Black Folk, 1946–1951

When I arrived in Bahia, in 1946, I didn’t even notice that there were white people living there too. I only discovered the city had whites some time later, when I had to illustrate a book about the city’s elite of color for a professor of the Federal University of Bahia, published by UNESCO. Pi e r r e V e rge r , 1992 i n t e rv i e w

The postwar era brought dramatic changes to Brazil as Vargas was pushed out of power in 1945 and the nation moved to restore democracy. Mantras of progress from the turn of the century gave way to a doctrine of modernization, and Brazil rushed to industrialize and to prove that it belonged in a larger world. Yet for some, such as the French photographer Pierre Verger, who traveled to Bahia just one year after the return to democracy, the appeal of Brazil was less its modernization than its retention of an older way of life. Verger, a relentless traveler, would come to put down roots in Salvador and within the next few years became responsible for spreading some of Bahia’s most iconic images across Brazil and the world. In the process, he inaugurated a new era of photography in the city, one in which people rather than architecture took a starring role.1 Moreover, through his camera’s lens, Blackness became a central visual trope, with whiteness— as he claimed in his wry framing—an unnoticed sidenote to the city. In his fi rst five years in Salvador, Verger worked primarily as a photographer for the illustrated weekly magazine O Cruzeiro, a glossy venue targeted at elite audiences in the South and Southeast. With unheard-of numbers for circulation, reaching over three hundred thousand in 1951, the publication ensured a particularly wide audience for

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Verger’s work, much of which focused on promotions of Salvador itself. In a remarkably productive time from 1946 to 1951, Verger collaborated on twenty-five articles centered on Salvador alone, with a total of 373 black-and-white images dedicated to the city. 2 At a national level, such features provided the “local color” that a magazine depended on. But in broader terms, such articles provided a critical outlet for Bahian elites, who sought to include themselves in the new nationalism of the postwar era, aiming to reveal their region as both representative of the nation as well as more authentic than the modernizing nation’s center. Verger’s work was important not only for its national diffusion of a powerful new iconography of the city but also for its local repercussions. To begin with, his transatlantic interest in Black cultures in Salvador undoubtedly helped shift the visual culture toward a new celebration of Blackness. Influenced by the “negrophilia” of his native Paris, as well as his interest in colonial French Africa, Verger approached Bahia’s Black diaspora with particular interest. Yet he also brought with him an aesthetic shaped by the travel photography on which he had based his career, as well as an engagement in anthropology and folk studies and an interest in native cultures across the Americas. All of these influences combined to produce a work that emphasized Blackness, tradition, and folk culture in ways that found fertile ground in Salvador at the time. Local elites in Salvador formed not only a receptive audience for Verger’s work but also a new and important locus of influence. While Verger is often seen as a lone figure with an independent vision who arrived to Bahia fully formed as a professional, I propose that he must be understood as deeply immersed in the intellectual currents of Salvador itself. Local elites in this period were deeply committed to promoting Salvador to their peers in the South and engaged in new ways of understanding Black life in folkloric terms. And local religious leaders in Candomblé would come to see Verger’s sympathies as a valuable tool for their own legitimacy. The full breadth and power of these Bahian connections have not been fully examined, and I seek here to trace in new ways how Verger’s work interacted with and responded to powerful intellectual and social currents under way in Bahia. Verger’s framings of the city ultimately proved so influential that they not only shaped the work of later artists (as I discuss in the next chapter) but also attracted international attention as part of a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

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study of race initiated in Brazil in 1950. Here Verger’s work from Salvador gained new life, and his connections with top UNESCO figures ensured that his photographs came to be used as visual documents that revealed Brazil’s—and especially Bahia’s—remarkable racial harmony. The role of this visual evidence for the UNESCO project has remained unexamined.3 Yet the use of Verger for the project is particularly ironic, as I argue, because in a circularity little explored, Verger’s own photos had helped craft that ideal. And in a further irony undeveloped by scholars, his work, interested ultimately in urban types, both drew upon earlier nineteenth-century precedents and also came to reify the very racial differences that UNESCO sought to question. His work, then, both revealed powerful currents of race in Salvador at the time and helped consolidate these same ideas for audiences spanning the Atlantic and the international sphere. Understanding of Verger has often been colored by his later career. Departing for Africa in 1951 to research African connections to Bahian Candomblé, Verger developed a second career as an anthropologist and ethnologist until his death in Salvador in 1996. This later career has often come to defi ne Verger and to grant his earlier photography an air of veracity, with his depictions seen as a documentary record of Salvador during that time. Treating Verger as a photojournalist, or alternately as an ethnographer, implies that Verger merely recorded a reality that was visible to any observer and sells his considerable artistic talent short. Instead, Verger’s portrayals of Salvador reveal a careful framing of the city that deserves further critical attention and becomes increasingly important once he is regarded as a promoter of Bahia rather than a supposedly neutral documentarian.4 As a whole, Verger’s framing of Salvador moved away from the criticism of poverty offered by Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins, a poverty that could have been ably captured with Verger’s lens. Instead, his photographs presented a carefully curated portrait of festivity and a particularly premodern way of life located outdoors and especially in the streets. My interest in his antimodern celebratory focus, and especially in his interest in the streets of the city, corresponds with the fi ndings of other scholars, especially the important work done by Bruno Pinheiro.5 Yet Verger’s role as a promoter of tourism in this process has often been neglected, preventing a full understanding of the influences on his work. I uncover here both his international engagement with travel and the promotion of tourism in his early career and also ground him more fi rmly in Bahian currents of folk studies and tourism

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that similarly sought to promote the city. Both tourism and folklore showed an interest in uncovering the typical in contrast to the types of other regions, an interest that Verger also developed with depictions of urban types in the streets. These tropes expose deep resonances with previous generations of artists, connections that have gained little focused attention. And Verger’s interest in types is all the more fascinating when we consider that they were taken up and recycled in particularly surprising ways by UNESCO studies that attempted to demonstrate unions rather than divisions within Brazil and to propose a unified human race rather than one divided by racial types. I begin this chapter at the international and national levels, setting the scene of a growing interest in folklore and an accompanying rise in domestic tourism, often intended as a way for visitors to view these newly defi ned regional folk. I then briefly consider Verger’s own background, highlighting his previous experience as a travel photographer and his ties to the ethnographic photography of the era. After establishing these influences, I turn to analyze Verger’s depiction of Salvador as a Black folkloric city and how it was produced in concert with those he worked with in a variety of circles, ranging from local preservation societies to those interested in the folk and in popular culture. Finally, in the last section, I turn to Verger’s involvement as the visual interlocutor for UNESCO’s study of racial harmony in Brazil to continue to probe how much of Verger’s vision relied on familiar tropes of racial types.

Brazil’s Postwar Context Brazil’s postwar intent to modernize as rapidly as possible had its counterpart in Bahia. The fi rst democratically elected governor, Otávio Mangabeira, pledged to modernize Bahia and to attack its problems with new vigor. Indeed, Mangabeira could not help but bring a fresh eye to Bahian problems, as he had been forced into political exile from 1938 to 1945. According to popular lore, he was so shocked at the state of Bahia upon his return that he quipped that if the world ended, Bahia was so behind that it would only fi nd out five years later. Perhaps inspired by his own travels, he stressed the modernization of Salvador on a variety of fronts and oversaw the inauguration of a new petroleum refi nery in 1949. His minister of education and culture, Anísio

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Teixeira, similarly saw modernization as a priority, and both men enthusiastically supported the emergence of modern art in Bahia, as I discuss later. Meanwhile, the developmentalism of the era could have played some role in encouraging a folk movement that fretted over the price such modernization might exact from Brazil’s traditions. For example, the National Folklore Commission (Comissão Nacional de Folclore), formed in 1947, promoted the idea that the nation’s folklore was in danger of disappearing. And momentum built through these years to usher in the fi rst folklore congress in Brazil in 1952, which advocated the “study of popular life in all of its fullness, whether in material or spiritual terms.”6 Within this movement folklorists conceived of regional identities as making up critical reservoirs of the nation’s essence. Bahia gained its own regional folklore commission in August of 1948, and the regional head was particularly active in his correspondence with the leader of the national organization, Renato Almeida.7 Significantly, in Bahia, “folk” became a term used often, though not exclusively, for Black culture, a development that also took place across Brazil in more limited ways.8 In the late 1940s and early 1950s a new group of scholars and white elites of Bahia, influenced by the growing folklore movement, turned to the Black culture of Bahia with new interest. This process in Bahia had already begun, as shown by the career of Silva de Campos, a scholar of Afro-Bahian folklore who gained status through the 1930s.9 Yet although Campos enjoyed continued esteem after his death in 1940, it could not in any way equal the posthumous renaissance seen for the Afro-Bahian folklorist Manuel Querino (1851–1923) as the rush to publish Querino’s work in Salvador reached a fever pitch, with four of his works newly published in the 1950s and many others reissued within the decade.10 Another Afro-Bahian figure, the songwriter and singer Dorival Caymmi, enjoyed an even greater popularity at this time by turning to Black life in folkloric terms. The sambas of Caymmi had become a critical reference for the novelist Jorge Amado, who opened his guide to Salvador with Caymmi’s lyrics. Yet Caymmi also published in 1947 a curious work entitled Bahian Songbook (Cancionero da Bahia), which was reprinted three times within its fi rst year. Beyond the evocative strings of notations that opened each song, the volume contained lush watercolors and drawings by the Paulista artist Clóvis Graciano, who conveyed the traditional way of life depicted by Caymmi. Graciano,

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in an interesting artistic choice, stopped short of depicting individuals with dark skin and instead painted everyone a light brown or tan. While analysis of the work is beyond the scope of this book, the critical point remains that the work celebrated Bahian Black fishermen and sambistas in folkloric terms, both visually and lyrically, but shied away from Blackness itself in a way that would contrast with the portrayals introduced by Verger. The reasons that Bahian elite and intellectuals deemed Black culture a folk culture came from a variety of needs. Clearly, at some level, portraying Black people as the folk of Bahia was an acknowledgment of the demographic majority that they held within the population of Salvador. More broadly, this portrayal represented an effort to build up a regional sense of identity in which Bahia’s Black population became a wellspring of national culture, not a racial liability, as it had so often been imagined by racist thinkers. The idea of Salvador as fueled by its Black culture sometimes sat uneasily with an older elite that still sought to portray the city as a colonial white bastion of privilege and power; folklore allowed the possibility that both might coexist. Critically, it would be through the realm of folklore that many of Bahia’s Black cultural practices gained acceptance and wider visibility. In addition, the growing efforts to attract tourism would place importance on Black life as a folk culture, often portrayed in terms of difference and framed as being in danger of extinction from a more modern way of life. Meanwhile, domestic travel, influenced by folk studies as well as broader developments in transportation, began to take off in the nationalistic years after the war. Brazil’s new airline, Aerovias Brasil (founded in 1942), based its advertising around the idea that with air travel, the “wings of progress” would link the nation’s far-flung regions together.11 An ad in 1946 compared air travel to a “magic carpet” that could bring “closer commercial and human ties between the povos of the nation’s different regions” (see fig. 3.1).12 Illustrations echoed this idea of travel as a way to explore regional identities, with figures in folkloric garb intended to represent the gaucho of the South, the Baiana of the Northeast, and the rustic sertanejo of the North and Northeast. Using regional identities created along ideas of difference, promoters of domestic travel thus framed it as simultaneously nationalistic and exotic, themes that Bahian promoters would try to use to their advantage in coming years.

Figure 3.1. Airline advertisement, “Um tapete mágico sôbre o Brasil imenso . . .”

(A magic carpet over an immense Brazil . . .). Printed in the December 14, 1946, issue of O Cruzeiro. © Diários Associados.

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Verger’s French World I had a restless soul and a very sedentary life didn’t agree with me. Pi e r r e V e rge r , 50 a nos de fotogr a fi a

Verger came to photography in 1932, at the age of thirty, and began his relentless travels of the world at the same time, spurred by a desire to escape his “proper, bourgeois past” and perhaps to fi nd a more accepting environment for a homosexuality that seems to have been heavily repressed at different points in his life.13 His travels embraced two new interests, anthropology and travel photography, brought together in 1932 with his effort to publish photos from his journeys in the French colonies of the South Seas. Upon his return, he initiated contact with the ethnographic museum of Paris, one of the most important anthropological museums of the world (later to become the Musée de l’Homme), seeking photographs from their collection to bolster gaps in his record. These, he hoped, would form the base for publishing a photographic album of his travels, with captions to be provided by a French novelist. Verger’s career as a travel photographer took off during this time, and he devoted significant effort to photographic travel works collected in book form. Together with other photographers, he would contribute to travel books on Spain, Mexico, and Brazil, along with solo volumes on Italy, the South Sea Islands, and the festive world of the Andes.14 Lushly illustrated, many of these works were based on the premise he had fi rst imagined for his work on the South Seas: they combined travel photography with literary and poetic text, a formula that would also be embraced in O Cruzeiro. Meanwhile, Verger’s relationship with the ethnographic museum of Paris continued to bear fruit. He became friendly with many of the museum’s anthropologists and was eventually put in charge of the photo studio there in 1934, with the understanding that his unpaid position allowed him to use the photographic studios after hours.15 As the head of the photography lab for the museum, Verger gained exposure to the belief that it was the material of daily life that was most revelatory of a culture, a dictate Verger seemingly took to heart in his later work.16 Other cultural influences might have also been significant. As Alice Conklin reveals, while anthropologists there sought to challenge racism, they failed to challenge French imperial rule itself, a practice that in fact facilitated the collection of materials for the mu-

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seum.17 Verger, too, would profit from photographs of his travels in these years across the French African colonies, with no apparent critique of the larger colonial system. And this combination of engagement without critique would parallel in many ways the cultural environment in Bahia: there, too, intellectuals allied with the avant-garde engaged in fights against racism but also failed to fully question the dynamics of power in which they themselves participated and from which they benefited.18 Beyond the influences of anthropology and travel photography, the setting of Paris itself would also prove critical, exposing Verger to both the French fascination with negritude as well as the Surrealist movement among the French avant-garde. Although no evidence exists that Verger identified as a Surrealist, he shared the movement’s vision that the birth of artistic production could be attributed to the unconscious, insisting that he only truly saw and understood his photographic choices later.19 Meanwhile, an interest in l’art nègre spread much more widely across Paris by the 1920s, spurred in part by the turn to African aesthetics by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and others in the early years of the twentieth century. It was partly this context that explains Verger’s interest in Rue Blomet, a Parisian bar that hosted a large clientele from the Black Caribbean. One friend remembered weekly haunts there: “We were all passionate about Black art . . . and all of us loved to go to the Black dances.”20 Attracted by what he described as “those hot and exotic nights” of “joyful” dancing, 21 Verger later remarked that the bar was “probably where I caught the virus of the Black world.”22 Indeed, it was this same atmosphere that Verger later claimed he found replicated in Salvador. 23 Imbued with the norms of French anthropology and exposed to Surrealist searches for the exotic as well as to Parisian interest in diasporic Black culture, Verger entered Brazil. In his travel photography, his work for the Musée de l’Homme, and his free time in Black bars, Verger had been trained to look for the exotic and to seek out difference.

Verger’s Latin American World: “Types” and the Picturesque Verger arrived in Brazil in 1946 and quickly obtained his contract with the most important illustrated magazine of Brazil, O Cruzeiro. This was a significant professional coup, as there was no higher pinnacle in

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Brazilian journalism, nor perhaps in Latin American journalism more broadly. Already the periodical boasted the largest publishing house in Latin America as well as the single largest readership of any magazine in the region; it would come to occupy a place as the fi fth-largest magazine in circulation in the world. 24 Newly modeled on the US magazine Life, O Cruzeiro had a modern aesthetic and was glossy and image rich, the result of extensive reforms initiated by a new French artistic director. The magazine shaped elite and middle-class norms in a wide readership and paved new ground for the visions of professional photographers such as Verger. Verger proved particularly active in his fi rst five-year O Cruzeiro contract (1946–1951), with sixty articles for the magazine and two for its sister publication, A Cigarra. While this total production, 807 photographs, was monumental, his photographs dedicated to Salvador alone were stunning, with twenty-five articles based in Salvador and a total of 373 photos. Here his Brazilian partnerships proved formative, particularly in the early years, when his Portuguese remained fragmentary. Before I turn to his Bahian work and the themes he developed there, however, it is worth examining his very fi rst publication with O Cruzeiro, the photographs that earned him his employment and fi rst attracted the attention of the magazine. Verger’s fi rst contract with O Cruzeiro gives some idea of the interests of the magazine as well as the way in which Verger might have fashioned himself in these early years. His contract came out of his connections with French anthropology, stemming in part from a visit to his friend Roger Bastide as well as a critical introduction made by Alfred Métraux, both French anthropologists. Métraux had encouraged him to contact Vera Pacheco Jordão, a Brazilian writer and editor who, like Verger, had just visited the Indigenous highlands of Peru.25 In the midst of writing for O Cruzeiro about her journeys, she urged Verger to visit the magazine’s offices, where the directors agreed that Verger’s photos would work well with her article. The precise charge granted to Verger remains unclear. According to Angela Lühning, the criteria for submission to O Cruzeiro specified only that the topics treated should be of a “popular character,” a vague guideline that allowed for the editors’ rejection of over half of Verger’s proposed topics in the next five years. 26 Although the spotty archival record does not fully document the range of the portfolio of work that Verger presented to O Cruzeiro, or that the magazine later rejected, certainly the Peruvian work met with approval. Indeed, his

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Peruvian photographs were published almost immediately in a series of articles that spanned four issues, showing a remarkable degree of enthusiasm from the magazine. The photos focused on icons of the exotic, most often Andean felt bowler hats and occasionally the skirts of Indigenous women. The writer meanwhile emphasized the hardships of travel to a small village “lost in the vastness of the Andes” and the “strange scene” of “Indigenous customs that still live.”27 The photos were the result of Verger’s own extended stay in Peru, where he had been contracted by the National Museum of Lima to document the highland peoples of the Andes.28 The project resulted in a volume of photographs in 1945 entitled Celebrations and Dances of Cuzco and the Andes (Fiestas y danzas en el Cuzco y en los Andes).29 The text and its photographs emphasized cultural difference as well as Indigenous resistance to modern incursions, expressing well the Indigenist vogue under way in full force in the Andes. Verger’s photos for O Cruzeiro, most likely originally produced for Lima’s ethnological museum, would now gain new life in an extended travel narrative published by the magazine. This commission was not Verger’s fi rst experience with the interest in Indigeneity sweeping Latin America. An earlier trip to Mexico in 1936 and 1937 might have been even more formative for his career, as the scholarship of Heliana Angotti-Salgueiro explores. Verger’s travels there resulted in a volume of photographs of Mexico published in France in 1938 (reedited in 1955).30 Like his work in the Andes, this volume brought anthropological framings to tourism, both promoting the region as well as serving as a didactic guide to its authentic types. The resulting volume bore captions and text written by the French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle, who used the photographs to distinguish between different ethnic types and to emphasize that in Mexico, the past (represented by Indigenous ways of life) and the present came together. One photographer involved in the project, the French photographer Marcel Gautherot, came explicitly as an emissary from the Musée de l’Homme. Despite the silence in Verger’s own recollections, archival evidence indicates that Verger’s Mexican photos were also commissioned at least in part by the museum.31 Gautherot’s letter of introduction, written by Soustelle to the Mexican ethnologist Roberto J. Weitlaner in 1936, noted that his project would be to “photograph landscapes and monuments, Indigenous types and everything else that he may fi nd of interest in the country. I would be very grateful if you could introduce him to particularly picturesque peoples and

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regions so that he may benefit from your vast experience.”32 Indeed, in the archives of the French museum, where Verger had headed the photographic studio, the categories for fi ling images dictated divisions of “types and clothes,” “social life,” “sites or architecture,” and “landscape.”33 Given these categories, it seems likely that Verger had already gained an early education from the museum in how to frame his subjects, one that was reinforced with the Mexico project. 34 The trip would be influential in other ways as well. Beyond the ethnographic instruction that guided the work in Mexico, the trip granted both men contact and exposure with the work of the Mexican photographer Manuel Bravo, who was also interested in street scenes, daily life, and the Indigenous presence in Mexico. Bravo, along with others circulating in Mexico, embraced the New Vision movement in photography, an innovative and far-ranging aesthetic that focused on angled shots and urban scenes—a perspective also adopted by Verger and Gautherot. 35 What is also telling is that among the Latin American sites Verger visited, Mexico and Peru were both in the midst of building up a tourist economy shaped around an interest in folk and Indigenous culture. In the end, both the Mexico and the Peru experiences revealed the surprising variety of destinations for photos of Indigenous life. Strikingly, it was typical of the era that photographs commissioned by anthropological institutions could then likewise be used for books oriented toward armchair tourists as well as portioned out in the international press for more popular journalism on the region.36 These seemingly unlikely connections only highlight that journalism of the time bore the heavy imprint of anthropology and its divisions, as well as underline the fact that travel literature also blurred together with anthropological discussions and rankings of ethnic types. Immersed in an ethnographic realm that sought to highlight difference and in photojournalistic tropes of travel literature searching for the exotic, Verger sought to document the idea of difference from the modern world to a readership defi ned as outside the depicted culture.37 By the time he arrived in Brazil, Verger was thus well versed in both the othered narratives of travel photography as well as the ethnographic framing of difference: his central mode was documenting exotic practices in ways that combined travel accounts, ethnography, and a focus on ethnic difference and types. It is telling, then, that O Cruzeiro’s editors imagined that the travel and ethnographic photography

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of foreign lands would lend themselves well to the context of Bahia for the Brazilian reader.

Verger’s Bahian World Early Influences Verger’s arrival in Brazil was conditioned by a variety of influences, but he also had more specific interlocutors before his arrival in Salvador. To begin with, Verger often claimed Jorge Amado’s novel Jubiabá had fi rst awakened his interest in Brazil, shaping his understanding of Salvador so much so that he joked that he wandered the city searching for fictional sites described in the book, only to be disappointed.38 While Verger didn’t mention Amado’s guidebook, it is hard to imagine that the work, published the year before Verger arrived, was not also a critical reference. Meanwhile, the role of Roger Bastide in shaping Verger’s trajectory has gained less attention in popular lore but might have been even more formative. The French anthropologist had known Verger in Paris from their museum circles and had relocated to Brazil, meeting with Verger immediately upon Verger’s arrival in 1946. Verger remembers that in his encounter with Bastide in São Paulo in April of 1946, Bastide passed on contacts for the city of Salvador and stressed its African influence. As Verger moved on, he would rely upon Bastide’s “excellent” publication Images of a Mystical Northeast in Black and White (Imagens do nordeste místico em branco e prêto) “as a guide in the region.”39 Bastide’s work, published in 1945, was a curious study, part travel account and part sociological musings, accompanied by black-andwhite photographs.40 As Bastide framed it in his opening sentence, while others might speak of the Northeast’s modernity, his interest was in how to progress “without losing your soul, the very soul that the ancestors shaped.” In search of this answer, “I wandered, I dreamed in the old churches, I intruded into the candomblés, I lost myself in carnival. And from this enchanted trip I present here a bundle of images.”41 As Bastide himself worried in the preface, “perhaps the principal defect of this work is precisely its hovering between science and poetry.”42 A more accurate assessment might be that the principal defect was instead Bastide’s limited time in Bahia—only a month in early 1944—

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and his still rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese, which caused him to rely on Jorge Amado to lead him around the city and grant him access to the candomblés he sought to depict.43 Indeed, Amado wrote a series of articles in the press of that year celebrating Bastide’s visit to Salvador and narrating their explorations in the world of Candomblé.44 This may account for the surprising fact that Bastide included a list of candomblés with their leaders and addresses in his book, just as Amado’s guide of 1944 had done as well. In fact, the interests of French intellectuals of the era, looking for an alternative to the modern, intersected very nicely with the interests of Brazilian intellectuals in native cultures, the folk, and tradition. Bastide’s guidebook, and Amado’s guide of the same year, surely played a formative role in shaping Verger’s early understanding of Salvador before he even arrived. Bahia’s Heritage Service One of Verger’s earliest contacts in the city undoubtedly encouraged this interest in the past and in tradition: the modernist poet and local intellectual Godofredo Filho. In fact, the influence of Filho, and his position as regional head of the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional [SPHAN]), was more formative for Verger than has been previously acknowledged.45 Verger would publish an article in partnership with Filho for O Cruzeiro in 1947, Verger’s second to treat Salvador. Verger was also technically under Filho’s employment, for he was employed in Bahia not only by O Cruzeiro but also by the SPHAN. Indeed, while still in Rio, Verger had lined up a recommendation from the head of the organization, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, to serve as a photographer for the regional office in Bahia.46 Rodrigo saw an urgent need for photographers to document the heritage of Brazil, not only to preserve it but also to disseminate an understanding of it across the vastness of Brazil. As he wrote to Godofredo Filho in Bahia, all records and registers “should be accompanied by the most complete photographic documentation possible.”47 To this end, he energetically enlisted the work of multiple photographers, many of them European war refugees. The result was a photographic archive now containing over sixty thousand images.48 Although these photographs were viewed as critical to the organization, especially by Rodrigo, there were few fi rm guidelines in place, giving individually contracted photographers a wide interpretive berth.49

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In a twist of modernism particular to Brazil, it was modernists, including Mário de Andrade, who had played the chief role in creating Brazil’s heritage department. There was ultimately, however, some disagreement about what might represent Brazil’s patrimony. The organization identified four different categories related to the public good for registration and preservation: historical, fine arts, applied arts, and “archaeological, ethnographic, and landscape.” This last category, the most diffuse, was defi ned as including “archaeological, ethnographic, Amerindian, and popular categories,” as well as any sites or landscapes with “remarkable features endowed by nature or human industry.”50 Although the historical category gained the most attention from early bureaucrats, there remained an apparently wide range of possibilities of what might be deemed “popular,” a category that Mário de Andrade had urged to be included in the institution’s framing. Generally neglecting this potential, the early actions of the organization centered on more conservative views of the colonial and Baroque past. 51 While all of the SPHAN authorities were ostensibly working to promote national heritage, power struggles were under way to determine which regions of Brazil were most representative of the nation. As Ana de Mattos argues, Godofredo Filho found himself in a vulnerable position, for the dominant current within the organization, which mainly comprised officials hailing from the state of Minas Gerais, held that Brazil’s most original contributions to the world and its truest expressions of national culture came from the Baroque period—a period, not coincidently, of settlement and expansion in the gold regions of Minas Gerais. This regional jockeying for status placed Bahia, with its early colonial architecture, as less important, viewed by some as a mere copy of Lisbon rather than representing a development that revealed the character of Brazil in particular. 52 Godofredo Filho turned his attention to promoting Bahian primacy vigorously, interpreting his mission as hewing closely to a historical, colonial architectural focus, despite the possibility of other approaches. During the fi rst decade of the SPHAN (1937–1947), he succeeded in securing historical designations for 123 Bahian historic entities, more than any other state in Brazil. Rodrigo himself wrote to Filho in 1937 that thanks to his “zeal and competence,”53 Bahia had advanced further in the mission than any other state. 54 In the midst of this push to document Bahia’s colonial past, it is worth pondering that ideas of a modern art museum for Bahia and a petroleum museum, both conceived by Rodrigo, were dismissed as impossibilities by

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Filho, as was Rodrigo’s early interest in the Candomblé items still held by Bahia’s Geographic and Historic Institute in 1939. 55 Filho appears to have had a view of Bahian patrimony that focused more narrowly on the colonial era. Verger encountered the currents of the SPHAN at an early point. Filho had reported to Rodrigo that his assistant Motta e Silva would show Verger around “old Bahia.”56 Motta e Silva, an art critic and free-range intellectual, would be a founding member of Bahia’s modernist movement in the next two years, coauthoring his own guide to the city of Salvador, focused on popular culture, in 1958.57 Filho reported in September of 1946 that Verger had been a regular presence in the office and that he had helped Verger with the needed contacts “to collect photographic documentation about the characteristic elements of our traditional architecture, as well as about other aspects of the life of the city.”58 The officials of the SPHAN, then, played some role in shaping Verger’s understanding of the city, literally providing their own tours to orient him as he arrived. In addition to receiving lists of photographs to fulfi ll, Verger also frequently approached Filho with ideas and work of his own, which were enthusiastically received.59 It is worth considering how the focus on the folk and the popular that continued to percolate within the framing at SPHAN might have influenced Verger’s eye and his thinking in Bahia as he continued to produce work for the organization through the 1950s.60 One of the largest purchases came in 1947, when Filho commissioned 281 photographs by Verger, although for unstated reasons Verger was only able to complete 208.61 While the vast majority of the photos depicted churches, twenty were of “general scenes” and thirty-four were of “streets and buildings of architectural interest,” categories that granted Verger considerable latitude.62 Within the institution, Verger also had further influence from his old friend Marcel Gautherot, the French photographer from the Musée de l’Homme with whom he had collaborated in Mexico and roomed upon his arrival to Rio in 1946. Gautherot had already produced some photos of Bahia for SPHAN, and in the next years he would enter into partnership as photographer for the National Commission on Folklore (Comissão Nacional do Folclore), created in 1947, as well as the Defense Campaign for National Folklore (Campanha de Defesa do Folclore Nacional), created in 1958. His interest in popular culture had developed in Paris when the Popular Front came to power, from 1936 to 1938, which might have influenced Verger as well. Within Brazil, Lygia Segala has found that categories of ethnography and folklore

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made up the greatest quantity within Gautherot’s work, portraying almost exclusively Blacks and mestiços.63 It is worth considering that his engagement in folk cultures of Brazil—defi ned in particularly racial ways—might have sparked and encouraged Verger’s interests as well. The two found each other early in Verger’s stay in Bahia, at least by 1947, and together, perhaps with Odorico Tavares, they took a trip into the interior of Bahia, to Canudos, producing images that Verger would use for his UNESCO commission some years later, in 1950.64 As a whole, the photographs produced by Verger for the SPHAN would not gain a wide audience, with the exception of his one early article published in O Cruzeiro. But his connection with the organization reveals his position in particular circles of Bahian intellectuals, as well as the ways he might have experienced Bahia more broadly. Upon his arrival in Salvador, Verger supported himself with income that would be paid by photography from two contracts, O Cruzeiro and the SPHAN, not a set salary. Both jobs offered him considerable freedom with his subject matter, but both also represented a particular audience that Verger, if he were to be able to support himself from his art, would need to please. Even if Verger’s technical skills as a photographer were outstanding, he would have been unable to support himself with photographs that failed to appeal to the interests of Bahia, and Brazil. With these multiple influences established, I turn to the themes he developed in his work. Partnerships with Odorico Tavares Once Verger arrived in Salvador, the Bahian-based journalist Odorico Tavares was arguably his most important influence. Born in Pernambuco, Odorico (called here by his fi rst name to avoid confusion with his brother Cláudio) relocated to Bahia in 1941 in his midtwenties. He was an impressive figure who played a multitude of roles in Bahia’s vibrant intellectual scene of the 1950s. He served as a newspaper editor and columnist for two of the city’s most important dailies and was also an art collector and poet. As Scott Ickes has proposed, Odorico’s journalism, and later his tourist guide, pursued an aggressive campaign of inclusion for Black and popular culture among Bahia’s elite. In a more critical vein that I follow more closely, Bruno Pinheiro argues that his vision of these cultures was more limited.65 Although Verger collaborated with a number of authors, he worked by far most often with Odorico, who coordinated O Cruzeiro’s work in the Northeast.66 From their beginnings in 1946, the duo’s Salvador pieces all relied

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upon a similar formula: using the trope of Odorico speaking directly to a fictional visitor, the articles revealed folkways and practices in Bahia that a tourist should come and experience. Though the articles undertook a partial shift in 1950 to report on the art world of Bahia, this too was framed with the potential tourist in mind.67 According to Angela Lühning, Verger’s lack of language skills made it necessary for Verger to play a supporting role with his early photojournalism for the magazine, but given his history as a travel photographer accustomed to navigating unfamiliar worlds, it also seems likely that he would have been well familiar with trying to capture the essence of a location without speaking the language.68 In any case, lacking an archival trail, we can say with certainty only that the topics developed with Odorico would be largely the same as those in a book about Salvador envisioned by Verger himself, pointing to a deep correspondence of interests and focus between the two.69 Verger understood well O Cruzeiro’s interest in popular culture: his fi rst piece with Odorico—and Verger’s fi rst piece in Bahia— explored this interest by examining trovadores, or roaming street poets and musicians.70 As O Cruzeiro’s editors remarked approvingly, these practices ensured that “the old traditions do not disappear with progress and time.”71 The article focused on one famous troubadour, Rodolfo C. Cavalcante, and Verger partnered with the poet himself for an additional piece the next year, a poem entitled “ABC of Bahia.” In the poem, Cavalcante used the letters of the alphabet as a device to call out the distinctive markers of Salvador (in alphabetic order, of course), with a small stanza of poetry accompanying each one. For Cavalcante, these markers included staples of Afro-Bahian culture, such as acarajé (the street food made by Baianas), capoeira, the Dique (the town lake used by washerwomen and associated with AfroBrazilian deities), sambistas, xaréu (the fish of choice for local AfroBahian fisherman), and filhas de santo, or Candomblé practitioners. He ended with the letter z, dedicated to Zé Povo, or Ordinary Joe, concluding that such types were faithful to God, showed up in mass for religious processions, and were “happy in their hearts.” The accompanying photograph, printed full page in the magazine (see fig. 3.2), revealed a procession or parade viewed from above, with people of all skin colors gathered closely and two dark-skinned men foregrounded, shirts off and arms around each other. Bahian culture, one could well conclude, was grounded in an Afro-Bahian way of life, ready for any festival that presented itself, and always happy. In fact, the topics of

Figure 3.2. Pierre Verger, festive street scene. Rodolfo C. Cavalcante and Pierre Verger (photographer), “ABC da Bahia,” O Cruzeiro, May, 3, 1947. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

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the articles covered in the coming years by Verger and Odorico deviated little from the litany of traditional Bahian markers lauded by Cavalcante, who had offered with his verses a personalized tour for the newly acculturating Frenchman. Black Leisure in the Streets: The Masses at Worship and Play The early work of Odorico and Verger centered on Black practices, with special attention dedicated to festivals. Festivals during this time were seen to be the heart of folk and traditional national cultures, and they took on an added symbolic meaning as deeply resonant of Bahia’s and Brazil’s identity. Odorico clearly had long taken an interest in the topic: his only article in O Cruzeiro before his partnership with Verger appears to have been one documenting the festival of Bonfi m in 1943.72 Odorico advised O Cruzeiro’s readers in 1947 that Bahia was a city “full of mysteries and sensuality” that would not easily reveal itself to the visitor but that festivals offered a fi rst point of entry.73 These festivals were portrayed in earthy terms as profoundly popular understandings of religion and gaiety, combined with a sense of magic and mystery. Odorico would also return to the topic of the festival of Bonfi m in 1947 but documented two others that year as well: Conceição da Praia and those surrounding Yemanjá more generally. While the celebrations of Bonfi m and Conceição da Praia were centered on a Catholic church, with both Catholic and Candomblé components, the festival of Yemanjá was more exclusively African, based on the Yoruban mother of the gods who came to be known as goddess of the waters. Devotion to her, widespread across the city, created, in Odorico’s view, some of the “most beautiful popular festivals in all of Brazil.”74 This phrasing was taken up again for his treatment of Conceição da Praia. As he stated dramatically, anyone who wished to experience “the great popular festivals of Bahia—the most beautiful popular festivals of Brazil—should arrive in Salvador the last days of November without any pressure to leave. They will come to know a full cycle of festivals, in which tradition still has not died, where the popular soul expands to its full nature, and they will fi nd a world which is one of the richest in purity, in beauty, in poetry, in color.”75 For Odorico, these celebrations not only revealed the popular soul but also brought both Black and white together, building up a larger narrative of Bahia as a land of racial democracy. Odorico was em-

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phatic, for example, in asserting that both Blacks and whites believed in Yemanjá, seeking her protection with offerings. He wrote that it was impossible to describe “the beauty, the poetry of this povo—freed from prejudice, proud of their religiosity, of their mysticism, of their Black gods, of their queen of the waters.”76 Verger’s images supported this racially egalitarian message, with photos that included a range of skin colors among her devotees. This message of harmony around Yemanjá was disrupted, however, by the captions, which strove to impose racial hierarchy once again. Here it should be noted that Verger had little role in shaping the captions for the photos, which seemed particularly designed for provocation and exoticism, often with an attempt at sly humor. One caption for an image of a Black and a white woman standing next to each other noted, “not just for blacks: Pretty girls [moças bonitas] also participate.” And for a line of white and Black women, the caption called attention to the “beautiful and elegant girls, who democratically walk alongside the little dark-skinned ones [moreninhas queimadas].”77 Such statements about white standards of beauty are demeaning enough to be self-explanatory, but the larger point is that there were many levels of meaning in these articles, determined by the staff at O Cruzeiro, the author of the article, and Verger himself. Though the text and perhaps the photos already served to exoticize the practices depicted, the captions serve to make a critical reader question the portrayals of racial harmony put forth by Odorico. On the other hand, the mere inclusion of Black women as subjects in the magazine represented a new development and might well have come from the focus of Verger himself. A change can certainly be seen when comparing depictions of a festival in 1943 by Odorico, together with a staff photographer, to those of Odorico and Verger in 1947. The festival, Bonfi m, had often been a site of cultural conflict, with church authorities refusing to allow Black women to participate in their own ritual of washing the church, which paid tribute to both Catholic and Candomblé practice. As Scott Ickes demonstrates, elites like Odorico, along with the steady determination of the Black faithful, eventually succeeded in persuading Catholic authorities to permit the celebrations.78 The 1943 headline deemed the practices “curious,” and though Odorico extolled the beauty and elegance of the Black Baianas, only light-skinned Baianas were included in the photographs for the piece by the staff photographer.79 In contrast, the piece done only four years later highlighted the participation of Black women, giving their por-

114 Selling Black Brazil

traits the opening full-page photo for the article and highlighting their regal stance. The interests of Odorico and Verger were clearly more aligned, resulting in more emphasis on the popular aspects of the festival and on its Black participants. Odorico’s ultimate interest, however, was in developing a sense of Bahian pride and identity. For him, Blackness was used as an example of Brazil’s folk, or authentic, culture. Yet while he was willing to pull in Black participation, he generally resisted any notion of African origins and influence and instead focused on Bahia’s mestiço population. Here Odorico seems to have had some difference with his brother Cláudio. In the local realm of journalism, for example, the two found themselves on opposing sides, with Odorico generally associated with the establishment and Cláudio allied with a more radical left, with sympathies to the Communist Party.80 Odorico was at his most comfortable in the world of popular religious festivals and what might be classified as folk practices but fell short of championing Candomblé and practices that almost exclusively involved Black participants, a conclusion that makes sense given his insistence, in his articles, on the mestiço and racially mixed character of Bahia. Cláudio, in contrast, seems to have been more interested in secular celebrations that primarily involved Black participants.81 In an article in which he reported on Black carnival practices with Verger, he proclaimed emphatically that popular celebrations were the key to understanding Bahia and its “Black folklore.” Cláudio brought in Caymmi and his recently published Bahian Songbook as authority on popular practice but also developed a broader framework for carnival.82 He wrote, “Carnival, the great festival of the povo, in which the collective soul is made external, represents the best environment for the understanding of the historical and totemic survivals of the Black Africans, the excellent ballast and the most vigorous landscape of Brazilian folklore. Blacks fill the carnival of Bahia. They are the powerful force that propels Bahian carnival.”83 Despite his praise, however, with his language about totemic survivals that framed Black practice as primitive, Cláudio also revealed the limits of the elite of the era, even among those who saw themselves as defenders of the povo. In a similar vein, the article itself was titled “Afoché—Barbarous Rhythm of Bahia” (“Afoché—Ritmo bárbaro da Bahia”). Cláudio stood apart, however, in the centrality he gave to Black actors in his writing. His article on the African-based carnival parades of afoxé cited his informants by name and highlighted their leadership

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roles in the festivities. In addition, for his article on capoeira, for example, he opened with a quote from the renowned master Juvenal, from the Angola school of capoeira, and cited him as an authority in an extended quote later in the story as well. The captions took a didactic approach, naming capoeira techniques that O Cruzeiro editors would not have been familiar with, leading to the conclusion that Cláudio himself wrote the captions. Describing the practice as more of a dance than a fight, Cláudio took pains to humanize practitioners, describing the typical capoeirista as “not a malandro,” or criminal, but rather an artist and most of all “a worker, a dockworker who spends the hours of the day and even the night doing hard work.”84 Leftist modernists such as Cláudio in this way sought to reframe pernicious stereotypes linking capoeira and crime and to portray the practice instead as a respectable outlet for the working class. Premodern Labor: Working Types Beyond the focus on Black festivals and leisure, labor, particularly traditional forms of labor, formed one of the most prominent themes in the work of Verger and Odorico. One early article, for example, turned to street markets and fairs, where vendors sold items in “traditional” ways; another examined the practice of people carrying items on their heads through the streets; and yet another looked at the sailors of small-scale sailboats (as opposed to motorboats, or the large steamships dominating the port itself) that carried cargo back and forth across the bay surrounding the Recôncavo. As Bruno Pinheiro proposes, a focus on a premodern sense of timelessness pervaded the work of Verger and Odorico in the early partnerships in O Cruzeiro.85 This premodern way of labor and life was intended as a stark contrast to practices in Brazil’s Southeast and was marked in various ways through both text and image. The article on sailors is particularly illustrative. The feature opened with a broad view of the bay, but its focus was on the sailors and their craft. Of those figures who gained a close-up in the sailing essay, all of them were engaged in activity marked as premodern, such as lifting a small keg by hand onto one’s shoulder rather than by machine (see fig. 3.3) or physically straining to pull the boats to the dock. The premodern or timeless qualities of Bahia were further marked not only by the activity of the people depicted but also by their dress. Those figures featured in the largest images were all dressed in straw hats, for exam-

Verger, traditional labor by sailors of the bay. Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger (photographer), “Saveiros do Recôncavo,” O Cruzeiro, November 30, 1946. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

Figure 3.3. Pierre

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ple, items that were not the common accoutrement of the Bahian elite. The hats’ inclusion, therefore, in almost every picture selected, and the level of detail shown, was intended to mark ethnic, class, and racial difference. The clothes in the images reinforced this vision, as most of the men wore simple white pants, and many of them worked without shirts. Their hats, their partially unclothed bodies, and the labor depicted all marked them as different in terms of their race and class. In contrast, while the bodies of upper-class men might sometimes be shown in the magazine outside of suits and ties, it was most often in the context of leisure and the beach rather than their occupation. The Urban Type Revisited? Continuity and Change These portraits of Bahian life also played a didactic role in teaching the reader about regions of Brazil distant from the magazine’s southeastern audience, further consolidating the notion of regional and racial types. This was particularly evident in the captions of the articles. One caption described the sailors as “strong men, bronzed and happy, characteristic of the Bahian Recôncavo” (see fig. 3.4).86 Another label for an individual sailor further reinforced the focus on strength and muscularity while also emphasizing that the man depicted should be understood as representative of a type rather than an individual. The caption described him as one of a “characteristic type of Bahian men of the sea. They are strong—sturdy, like figures of Portinari— and have no other protection than their own work at sea.”87 Needless to say, even in images where a portrait was used for a full page, none of these figures were named, adding further to the sense that they were anonymous types rather than particular individuals. This didactic focus, aimed at teaching a white, southeastern audience about folkloric and racial types, emerged even more clearly in an article Verger did with the northeastern journalist José Leal. The article began with a chummy conversation between Leal and his pilot upon his arrival to Salvador. They began by discussing Brazil and what marked it as “original, typical, funny or traditional” compared to other nations. This then led to a discussion of “what Baianas have,” a reference to the title of the popular 1939 samba by Caymmi, while the pilot assured the journalist that his stay in Bahia would allow him ample opportunity to see these “interesting and different human types.”88 The conceit of the article, then, revolved around Baianas as a type, unique to Brazil and to Bahia, who then gained additional praise from Leal.

Verger, unknown man, bottom right, labeled “tipo característico” (characteristic type). Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger (photographer), “Saveiros do Recôncavo,” O Cruzeiro, November 30, 1946. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

Figure 3.4. Pierre

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On the one hand, the work being done by the author can be seen as an effort to redeem the figure of the Baiana, often historically repressed by modernizers in Salvador, who viewed her in racist terms as unhygienic and a threat to a civilized city. Yet any such focus in the text was destroyed by the photos and their captions. Verger apparently had some difficulty approaching Baianas, and none of his signature close shots or expressions of trust were in evidence here. In addition, despite Leal’s focus on insisting on the authenticity of the true Baianas, to which he contrasted in various ways the odiousness of “falsified” Baianas, the captions were used to suggest inspiration for carnival costumes—precisely the type of imitation that Leal had deplored. The opening page-length image of a Baiana (see fig. 3.5), labeled as a “Real Baiana: Suggestion for Carnival,” thus contradicted everything the author had written about but clarified who the reading audience was: white Brazilians in the Southeast who might dress as Baianas for costumed events. This intent was reinforced in the extended opening caption to the piece, which specified that Verger, “a photographer passionate about folklore and about everything concerning the Black race,” had captured “authentic” Baianas in their native setting precisely so that whites in the Southeast, especially in Rio’s carnival, could imitate them: “Here they appear as they do in reality, . . . without anything artificial. Authentic Baianas. And in these photographs, female readers will be able to be inspired for costumes for upcoming carnival.”89 The urban-type genre gained further life in such articles through close portraits, a format used often by Verger throughout his work at O Cruzeiro.90 Such a format was undoubtedly common in the photojournalism of Brazil, as well as the larger world, but it played a particular role in O Cruzeiro for its use in the illustration of types.91 While one cannot dismiss the humanistic framing of many of those whom Verger depicted, such close framing was also a technique relied on by other photographers of the era, particularly within the pages of O Cruzeiro, to indicate certain rankings of individuals in set categories. The close-up here, then, became both humanizing and at the same time objectifying, as a form of categorization. Equally important is the static social and racial order that such typologies revealed. Thus, a label of a sailor as a type indicated that the sailor would continue in his same profession for the rest of his life, without any chance of upward mobility or alternate paths.92 Likewise, this was spelled out explicitly in the portrait of an Afro-Bahian

Figure 3.5. Pierre Verger, unknown woman, left, labeled “uma baiana de fato” (a real Baiana). José Leal and Pierre Verger (photographer), “Baianas das saias rodadas,” O Cruzeiro, February 5, 1949. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

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Figure 3.6. Pierre Verger, unknown young girl with basket on head. Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger (photographer), “Atlas carrega o seu mundo,” O Cruzeiro, April 5, 1947. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

girl carrying a basket on her head (see fig. 3.6), where the caption indicated, “the young girl is already becoming accustomed to the weight. It will be this way for the rest of her life.”93 This damning sentence of hard labor not only placed her within the type of the carrier, already documented across the pages, but spelled out that there was little chance of change. Just as the portraits of Black urban laborers as types at the end of abolition might have been intended to subtly reassure white viewers that subservient Black labor would continue unaltered, such categorization of types in O Cruzeiro might well have pacified white readers who worried about social change and whether Black Brazilians would continue to know their “place.” In short, these images and the typology used to identify them assured the reader that Afro-Brazilians would continue serving in menial positions and performing hard physical labor, glossed here as “traditional.” Modern Art in Bahia The fi nal chapter in Verger’s work with O Cruzeiro in Salvador came with a series of articles on modern art written with Odorico Tavares: one at the end of 1950, with three more in 1951.94 The articles’ timing

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responded to a wellspring of energy around modern art in Bahia, as well as to Odorico’s own passion for the subject.95 The pieces for this series detailed the beach focus of the painter José Pancetti; the work of the “primitive” painter known as Rafael; Afro-Brazilian sculpture; and the artistic scene more broadly, identified as undergoing a veritable “revolution.” The series was intended to show Bahia off as a site of artistic innovation and to play up that such art represented a further attraction for the prospective visitor. With their focus on modern art, Odorico and Verger were in good company. The movement had just recently gained new steam in 1948 with a short-lived but influential modernist publication, Caderno da Bahia. This publication had a foundational role to play in the orientation of yet another foreigner to the city: Carybé. Yet for my purposes here, the focus of Bahian modernism, particularly in this early period, dovetailed well with the larger interests of Odorico and Verger more broadly; in a further connection, Odorico’s brother Cláudio, fittingly, had initiated the Caderno. In the words of one of its participants, the magazine sought to “valorize popular culture.”96 And as another remarked, the publication sought to combat “senseless prejudice, and sought to treat the subject of Black culture with respect.”97 I address the success and limits of these efforts later, but the intentions of this group, and their influence on the preferences of Verger and Odorico, were important. Indeed, a broader campaign to support modern art was under way in official circles. This energy was felt in politics, with new support given to modern art by the Mangabeira administration as well as through special efforts by Bahia’s secretary of education, Anísio Teixeira. In the midst of a local elite that viewed modernist art as frivolous, incomprehensible, and even offensive, both men undertook remarkable efforts to support modern art in Salvador. Teixeira stepped outside of the accepted elite norms when in 1948 he sponsored the arrival of a traveling show on modern art, accompanied by a series of public lectures by a specialist on the subject. And in 1949, as part of the four-hundredyear-anniversary celebration of the city, he inaugurated Bahia’s fi rst state-sponsored modern art salon, deemed a great success. The movement gained new coherence with the sculptor Mário Cravo Júnior’s return to Salvador from an extended stay in New York in 1949. His studio became a point of meeting for artists across the city, designated as a tourist stop itself by Odorico Tavares.98 In ways I explore in the next chapter, Bahian modernism, tourism, and Black culture would come together in powerful ways in the next decade.

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The focus on modern art in Odorico and Verger’s series, however, only served to further set off how the treatment of popular culture differed from that of elite culture. As a whole, popular culture was set in outdoor street scenes, while the artists, in contrast, were represented in their studios and indoors (see fig. 3.7).99 Likewise, Verger’s claim that he was not aware of whites was surely questionable, given that almost all of the artists were white, again in stark contrast to the “popular” Black subjects of their other articles. In all of these senses, then, the divergences established in the modern art series call attention to the carefully edited scenes that Verger and his Bahian partners had been accustomed to crafting. Verger’s images often walked a fi ne line between objectification and respect, and it is possible to read his images in both ways. Among the most stunning qualities of Verger’s work, whether in these articles or others, were his close-ups of faces, both beautiful and well framed. Close portraits would mark his style throughout his career, and critics have called attention to the apparent trust and openness often displayed by his subjects.100 On the one hand, many of his subjects in the sailing article, where he presented a number of striking close portraits, seem to have just engaged with him in some sort of joke, a technique he had tried to use in his previous work in the Andes (but to apparently more mixed results, in his own memory).101 In contrast to the difficulty he faced in the Andes, here the smiles appear open, happy, and natural. The close-up portrayals permit an individuality and a personality that the camera appears to have just captured. Thoughtful and engaging, this vision treats these men as humanized and in a respectful manner. Moreover, it bears emphasis that Verger captured the beauty of his subjects and especially the beauty of Black skin. By playing with light and shadow, his camera technique made the skin of the face glow. The centerpiece of the image, therefore, often became the skin itself as much as the personality of the individual underneath. While one might consider whether this was ultimately objectifying, it might also have been liberating for Black individuals in Brazil to be treated as beautiful within a magazine in which all of the standards of beauty remained indisputably white, whether in the advertisements, the fashion spreads, or the very covers themselves—almost exclusively dedicated to photos of glamorous white women. Verger’s portraits thus granted a visibility to Black men and women as beautiful individuals, beautiful because of their race and skin color, not despite it. Yet to argue the other side, many of the men in the sailing article,

Figure 3.7. Pierre Verger, artists indoors. Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger

(photographer), “Revolução na Bahia,” O Cruzeiro, July 7, 1951. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

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to take only the most prominent example, were also sexualized. This treatment was perhaps grounded in Verger’s own experience as a gay man; we might also wonder if this influenced his centering of halfclothed bodies and note the fact that a surprising number of frames made buttocks the center of the scene.102 Black male bodies gained their most striking portrayal, however, in the article depicting the practice of carrying items on one’s head, where the editors made the decision to include a foldout page as part of the feature. With this in place, the layout of three full pages of images culminated with two heavily muscled Black men—their skin glistening and wearing only small shorts— marching toward the viewer in perfect synchronicity.103 Verger’s sexuality and its role in his work has remained a taboo subject, never or rarely commented upon in his own interviews or by the researchers associated with the Verger Foundation, but even a casual look at the images he produced makes clear his interest in the male form.104 We might view the fact that Black men were treated as beautiful, sexual beings as a positive, given their often-negative portrayals or absence in Brazilian media: Verger’s portraits allowed them a sexuality like any other person. Yet the historical context of Brazil, in which the trope of the oversexualized Black male was all too common, whether under slavery or beyond, made such portrayals also potentially problematic. In addition, the portrayal of lower-class Black men as sexualized was certainly nothing new; it would have perhaps broken more boundaries to treat an upper-class Black man in this fashion. Moreover, whether we judge the sexualization of the men and their treatment by Verger as a positive or a negative, the fact remains that there was a corporality to Verger’s photojournalism that was central. Black bodies, in this article and in his others, made up the centerpiece of his work. It is also worth pointing out that Verger did not always gain the trust of his subjects. The article with Odorico entitled “Atlas Carries His World” (“Atlas carrega o seu mundo”), for instance, includes a photo of a young Afro-Bahian girl who stares back at the camera either frankly disgusted or terrified (see fig. 3.6), and many of his photographs of women especially seem to have been taken from a greater distance or from behind.105 Furthermore, in terms of judging the respect granted to these subjects, and the sense of difference established between readers and subject, it is also important to note again the way in which Verger’s work was used and labeled by the magazine in the photo captions, which appear to have been authored by editors rather than Verger or his partners.106 Capital letters were used to

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Figure 3.8. Pierre

Verger, unknown sailor about to leave. Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger (photographer), “Saveiros do Recôncavo,” O Cruzeiro, November 30, 1946. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

draw the reader in, often leading into a type of wry observation or comedic aside. In the case of the article on porters using their heads, one caption read, “carry flowers? Why use a cart when the head is there?”107 Or in the case of a close portrait of a thoughtful-looking sailor gazing into the distance (see fig. 3.8), an incongruous caption read, “the sailor is about to leave: what the devil did he forget on shore?”108 This genre of caption, intended to catch the reader’s attention, while perhaps drawing a chuckle, served a further purpose: to distance the reader from the person portrayed and to engage instead a sort of knowing camaraderie between editor and reader, one that cast both in the roles of bemused worldly readers gaining exposure to a very different way of life. In this way, regardless of Verger’s intent with his photographs, such captions served often to demean the people portrayed, emphasizing their curious, often bewilderingly different, choices and culture. In terms of the city itself, Verger’s photos established an evocative

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and rich portrait, granting Salvador a strong sense of place and a very distinct personality. The coast took a prominent role in this story, as did the city’s colonial and traditional character. Skyscrapers gained no space in these depictions, nor did modern intrusions, such as large roads, automobiles, or the architecture of the twentieth century. This contrasted with the treatment given to the city of Rio in the magazine, for example, where Rio gained a much more complex character, complete with stories about traffic jams as well as urban reform institutions for juveniles.109 In Verger’s hands, the portraits of Salvador were much more tightly focused, particularly in the years before he turned to pieces on modern art: Salvador was located outdoors and in the streets.110 In fact, among more than two hundred images that Verger took of the city from 1946 through 1949, I have found no depictions of automobiles or of any architecture produced in the twentieth century. Verger photographed food stalls on the street and in the market, but as a way to represent a popular construction rather than a particularly modern one. Furthermore, in his lens, no one is depicted inside: all two hundred photos show people and landscapes in a public setting; the home, the office, and the formal workplace were apparently not topics that gained Verger’s interest. As a result, there are no domestic servants or white-collar workers, and industrial workers were left aside for an article paired with another journalist in a very different vein that documented the oil refi nery growing outside Salvador. Verger’s focus on the life of the streets arose for a variety of reasons. To begin with, Lühning has pointed out that as a newcomer to the city, Verger likely spent little time in people’s homes, as he had few friends, thus forcing him into the street itself. Such a view may certainly be correct, but it sells Verger short to say that he was without contacts in the city, given his relationships with Odorico, Cláudio, and the staff of the SPHAN, nor would a lack of contacts have prevented him from taking his camera into restaurants or offices. Alternately, Verger’s focus on the streets can be taken as characteristic of the New Vision photography that had developed through the 1930s, where photographers tried to break with the rigidity of the older studio-based style and to capture reality more directly. In addition, the focus came from the content of the articles and the photos themselves, a portrayal of Salvador as a city freer and less bourgeois than the typical urban center. Moreover, Verger’s street scenes emphasized harmony, with festivals that brought people of all skin tones together. This fit well with the ideas of Brazilian racial democracy at the time, as well as with a growing understanding of Salvador as the center of such democracy’s development.

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Verger’s work promoting the city on his own, free from his Bahian partners, not only reveals that he remained independently active in encouraging tourism but also reveals an emphasis that differed little from his other efforts. Both influenced by and influential in Bahian intellectual circles, Verger’s work showed remarkable continuity beyond the pages of O Cruzeiro. To begin with the most telling example, only one year after his arrival in Salvador, Verger proposed a photo album entitled Bahia of All of the Saints and All of the Orixás (Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os orixás), outlining the plan of the book to Alfred Métraux in 1947.111 Divided into themes that closely followed the subjects he had already depicted with Odorico, it opened with a study of the coast and its sailors; then turned to markets; moved into a survey of the lower and higher parts of the city, capoeira, and religious festivals; and concluded with Candomblé and traditional fishing practices.112 This framing, chosen without the influence of any other partnership, reveals the deep sympathy of the folk culture interests among Odorico, Cláudio, and Verger and may indicate that Verger led as much of the journalistic agenda as his partners. In addition, as I discussed already, Verger’s commissions with the ethnographic museum in Paris had primed him to think about cultures other than his own. His work for Lima’s museum had focused his attention more closely on ethnic others; and there, and in Mexico, his work had centered on popular culture expressed through dance, rituals, and festivals. In addition, the book’s thematic outline reinforces that Verger was well versed in crafting a photo album for tourist eyes and had framed the attractions of the city in ways that were familiar from his earlier work in Mexico and Peru. With a focus on the festive, and on types, outsiders would be drawn to Verger’s photographs emphasizing difference and the exotic. Later works dedicated to tourism reveal once again not only Verger’s own interests, freed of Odorico’s partnership, but also Verger’s influence on Brazilians. Verger’s planned volume was never published, despite the apparent efforts of Métraux. But many of the images originally planned for the volume appeared in Brasil, published in France in 1950 and republished in Brazil two years later. The work collected more than two hundred photos, almost half by Verger, with Gautherot and Antoine Bon providing the bulk of the remaining photos. The Brazilian edition of this work, which included an introduction by the prominent Catholic literary critic Alceu Amoroso Lima, marked the work’s importance, as the publication of photography books was rare in Brazil.113 In this volume, too, Verger’s focus differed little from his work at

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O Cruzeiro. The introduction and text by Lima presented a Brazil of three regions, each with different levels of civilization: the stone age in the Amazon; the age of the motor and the skyscraper in the South; and the age of the mule, which included Bahia. According to Lima, “Nowhere else are the negroes [sic] so numerous as in Bahia, and to a large extent they have kept their own traditions and contributed to give Bahia its own specific character.  .  .  . [C]ertain popular festivals show these beliefs to be still full of vitality.”114 While Verger certainly cannot be credited with determining Lima’s restrictive hierarchy of civilizations, neither did his work challenge it, for his pictures also highlighted an older way of life in Salvador. This same type of nostalgia appeared in a curious work edited in 1955 by the anthropologist Arlette Frigout. Published independently from Bahian partnerships, the book provided translated poems by Brazilian authors that were juxtaposed with seventy-eight photos by Verger.115 These images focused primarily on rural and natural scenes of the city, with an emphasis on a traditional way of life, marked by donkeys and small fishing craft. Active in fashioning tourist literature for Salvador in both international and local circles, Verger’s focus on a traditional way of life and a Black folk resonated both within Salvador as well as abroad. Verger’s Bahian setting was not the only environment in which he found himself immersed in these years. Perhaps most centrally, his interest in Candomblé developed during this time, spurred by ceremonies he had witnessed in his travels to Recife in 1947. He also maintained an active international travel agenda, accompanying Alfred Métraux to Suriname and Haiti to focus on African-based cultures and together making a brief sojourn back to Paris, where they reunited in the Bal Nègre. And, in a turning point in his career, Verger traveled to Senegal, Benin, and Nigeria, where he undertook photographic work on African religions for a fellowship project. His departure once more for Africa in December of 1951, where he would travel for the next three years, marked a fi rm end to his fi rst years in Salvador and the development of a new intensity in his work on African-based religions.

Salvador’s Four-Hundred-Year Anniversary: The Centenary and Its Debates While Verger’s focus resonated with the local modernists, it was not so quick to be accepted by the traditional sugar elite. In 1949, for example, to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Salvador’s found-

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ing, municipal authorities attempted to attract visitors from across Brazil for parades and celebrations aimed at raising the city’s national profi le. Elite organizers considered Black participation only as an afterthought, limiting it to raw physical labor performed in the past and to an enslaved backdrop to white opulence.116 These same priorities can be seen in the tourist guides created to orient visitors during the celebration. One particularly audacious effort came from Edgard de Cerqueira Falcão, a lawyer in Salvador who had put together several earlier pictorial works on Bahia and now seized the moment to try to market these guides to city authorities as the ideal keepsake at exorbitant prices.117 Falcão’s version of Salvador—whether represented by his photographs of colonial architecture or his romantic watercolors—portrayed the city as absent of life and of any Black presence. The official guides for the city bore similar whitewashing. The short pamphlet produced by the mayor’s office in 1949 consisted primarily of lists of addresses, accompanied by black-and-white photographs with little regard for the text alongside them.118 Perhaps the most detailed textual descriptions were dedicated to festivals, but even there, the tone seemed uncertain. In the description of many of the festivals, AfroBahian elements were left out. For example, a festival for Yemanjá was blandly described as a festival of fishermen, neglecting the centrality of the African-based deity herself.119 A fi nal example of the limited vision of the city promoted by official authorities comes from a series of guides to the city’s colonial churches that began publication in 1949. Organized and produced by the mayor’s office, they were published as small paper pamphlets, each about twenty to thirty pages in length, illustrated lavishly with blackand-white photographs. Marieta Alves, who authored many of these fi rst guides, had been an employee of the SPHAN, and this preservationist background might have grounded her static approach as well as the overall tone of the series. While in one guide she spoke broadly of how the church still inspired “praises of the past,” the present received little to no mention in the guides.120 Odorico and Verger’s focus on popular religious festivals held no relevance: even the most obvious opportunities to mention such celebrations were passed over.121 These guides presented a strictly conservative, elite view of Bahia’s religious community that excluded significant treatment of Bahia’s Indigenous populations as well as sugar or slavery, despite the realities that both had made the construction of the churches possible.122

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The Afro-Bahian ethnologist Edison Carneiro provided a much different account of Bahia’s past in one of Bahia’s newspapers on the day of the centenary’s celebration, March 29. In an extended and powerful statement, Carneiro argued that remembering Black contributions to Bahia was “an obligation of justice, justice that Bahia still owes.”123 An article by Cláudio Tuiuti Tavares, published in the newspaper edited by his brother Odorico, took issue with the elite nature of the celebrations, calling attention to the lack of “popular contributions” representing “Bahian folklore.” Marshaling support with photographs by Verger, he wrote that capoeira and samba circles should have been included in the festivities and that tourists had complained about the absence. A parade of “Baianas dressed in character” and exhibitions of popular art would have helped to remedy what he described as “the great gap” in the celebrations. Though visitors apparently did gain access to such demonstrations, as well as to religious celebrations of Candomblé, such activities took place outside of the official circuit.124

Brazil’s Racial Harmony: An Example for the World While the Bahian sugar elite might have been slow to appreciate Bahia’s popular culture and its African roots, outsiders were not. In fact, Bahia gained international acclaim the next year in a world survey of racial harmony undertaken by UNESCO. Intent on preventing a recurrence of the horrific racism of the Nazis, UNESCO set itself the task of deconstructing the role of science in ideas of racial difference in the aftermath of the war. By 1950 it had decided to examine a handful of case studies where race relations had proceeded harmoniously: Brazil was held up as one of the principal examples. The history of this effort has been treated in detail elsewhere, but my focus here is the involvement of Verger, the photographer charged with visually representing Brazil’s mingling of races for UNESCO.125 In fact, the visual component of the UNESCO studies has been neglected by scholars. Photojournalism was already an essential element of the UNESCO bulletin, the Courier, but it surely gained increased importance in the Brazilian project due to the fact that Alfred Métraux, Verger’s good friend and travel companion, had become head of the social science division of UNESCO and oversaw the Brazilian fieldwork. Thus, he commissioned Verger to document the Brazilian fi ndings.126 As the studies developed, it would be Verger’s images that

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provided the visual evidence for Salvador as perhaps the most striking example of Brazil’s racial tolerance and fusion. Ironically, although Verger was called in to document racial harmony for UNESCO, in his framing, it was only during this experience that he became aware that there was more than one race in Bahia. As Verger states in the epigraph with which I opened this chapter, he did not realize that whites existed in the city until he was forced to notice them, a formulation he would repeat numerous times. As he remembered on another occasion, in 1982: I was seduced in Bahia by the presence of numerous African descendants and for its influence on the daily life of this place. My attention was so monopolized by them and by the mulatos that for a long time I did not even dream of pointing my Rolleiflex in the direction of people of more anemic colors. I didn’t fully perceive the presence of them [white people] except, under the initiative of UNESCO, I was charged with illustrating a book by Thales de Azevedo about “the elite of color in a Brazilian city” and the good interracial relations that then existed.127

In 1996 Verger emphasized again that he fi rst “discovered” whites only in working with Thales de Azevedo. Azevedo, as Verger reported, “had a negative opinion of the Candomblé, of African customs, and his text was extremely unsympathetic toward people of the Candomblé,” writing about them as “being a disgrace for Bahia.”128 Azevedo’s book was only one of the results of the UNESCO studies, however. Verger’s photographs accompanied the UNESCO studies in three settings: an array of articles written in the UNESCO Courier, Azevedo’s study of Salvador, and an edited collection on race in Bahia by the anthropologist Charles Wagley. In the Courier, UNESCO’s official organ, Verger’s photos, especially his large-scale photo gracing its cover, emphasized harmony, with people of all skin tones standing closely together (see fig. 3.9). Indeed, this was the overall conclusion drawn by Métraux in his overview of the project. He wrote, “As UNESCO’s inquiry has clearly shown—Brazil remains an exemplary nation, destined because of this to play an important role in the building of a world in which mutual respect between races will become an established and universal fact.”129 As would become evident, Métraux had his own preconceived notions of Bahia’s remarkable position as a site of harmony, notions he proved reluctant to reconsider.130 It seems

Figure 3.9. Pierre Verger, festive streets, cover of UNESCO series on race.

UNESCO Courier, 1952. © UNESCO. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

134 Selling Black Brazil

likely that Verger proved influential in sparking such understandings of Bahia and Brazil, given his own belief in Bahia’s exceptional race relations. In addition, his deep friendship and extended literary correspondence with Métraux ensured that he served as tour guide for Métraux in Salvador on previous occasions, in addition to his visit for the UNESCO project. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which Verger participated in this meaning making in relation to the other authors he collaborated with for Bahia. Curiously, for example, the leader of the studies in Bahia, Charles Wagley, made no mention of Verger in his introduction to the edited collection. Thales de Azevedo thanked Verger for his competent “technical help” but not as a collaborator or participant in the study, nor (oddly) specifically as the photographer.131 Although Angela Lühning notes Verger’s correspondence with Métraux and his participation in many of the group’s expeditions, there is little evidence of Verger being central to the studies’ orientation or development.132 A further indication of Verger’s lack of contemporary engagement with the project is that he apparently submitted older photographs (originally taken for other purposes) for the UNESCO project. Recent research by Ednei Santos and Jaci Menezes has revealed that at least one of Verger’s photos in the Courier had been taken several years earlier, in 1946, and that its setting was Salvador, rather than Bahia’s backlands, as the article implied.133 Yet this was only one of many errors. My own research has revealed that many of Verger’s photographs from Salvador were reattributed to other geographical areas: two of the three photos that accompanied an article on São Paulo, for example, had in fact been taken in Salvador (see fig. 3.10), and the photos were later republished as representative of Salvador in Azevedo’s study. Beyond this, the photographs of Salvador were also used without geographical reference to represent Brazil as a whole, both on the Courier’s cover as well as inside its pages.134 In sum, it seems that many of Verger’s pictures in the UNESCO Courier, if not the majority, were in fact taken in Salvador in the late 1940s, even as they were used to illustrate racial harmony in places like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro some five years later. Beyond this ahistorical and careless conflation of time and place by Verger or his editors, another, more significant issue is at stake. Scholars have failed to call attention to how Verger’s photos in this project became documents of different racial types. In a striking reversal that

Figure 3.10. Pierre Verger, photographs of Afro-Brazilians, originally taken in

Bahia but used here to depict Black life in São Paulo. Roger Bastide, “Race Relations in Brazil: São Paulo,” UNESCO Courier, 1952. © UNESCO. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

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Figure 3.11. Pierre Verger, unknown

Figure 3.12. Pierre Verger, unknown

woman, labeled “Cabocla of the interior of Bahia.” Photograph originally taken in 1946. Charles Wagley, ed., Race and Class in Rural Brazil (1952). © UNESCO. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

man, labeled “A black cowboy of the Sertão.” Photograph most likely originally taken in 1946. Charles Wagley, ed., Race and Class in Rural Brazil (1952). © UNESCO. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

has not been acknowledged, the UNESCO project to debunk the scientific foundations of race became involved in an older racial classificatory project conducted in visual terms.135 This is particularly striking in the compiled chapters on Bahia edited by Charles Wagley, for instance. There, Verger’s full-page, close-up photo of an older man’s face bore the caption “caboclo of the interior of Bahia,” while another close-up portrait of a woman gazing out a window read “cabocla of the interior of Bahia” (see fig. 3.11). These images were joined by a close-up of a thoughtful-looking man labeled as “a black cowboy of the Sertão” (see fig. 3.12) and another man labeled as “mulatto cowboy of the interior of Bahia.”136 Verger’s images of types became even more fi rmly racialized in the process, and as a result, Bahia became, in the lens of the project, yet another site of typical and authentic racial types.

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Finally, the portrayal of Verger as a documentary photographer for this series, by both UNESCO as well as later readers, neglects to recognize that Verger himself had helped to construct this idea of Bahia as a harmonious place of Black traditions; ironically, his earlier efforts to that effect were now being used to document the truth that he had helped to fashion. In a circularity that has not been noticed, then, Verger both constructed a particular reality with his creative eye and then was called upon as offering the best documentary proof of that same reality years later. Confusions between his role as a chronicler of ethnic folk cultures for a southeastern Brazilian audience and his later use by UNESCO as a documenter of a unique Brazilian reality thus helped fashion and reinforce the myth of Brazilian racial democracy.

Conclusion By 1951 Verger had played an instrumental role in portraying Salvador as a festive Black city, with a series of tropes that positioned festive masses on colonial streets, gayly participating in religious festivals, and urban types performing premodern forms of labor. Yet it is provocative that, in the end, his work circled back to the same ethnographic and anthropological moorings with which it had begun: as a way to document racial types in settings marked as distinctively other. Even as his close portraits granted personality and humanity to those he photographed, the cumulative result of his immensely productive period in Salvador retains the sense of cataloging that comes from seeing multiple types depicted in their typical settings and as authentic representations of a different way of life. His anthropological roots, and his immersion in the celebration of the folk, thus carried with them powerful racial implications. Verger, despite all of his ambulatory wanderings, had left a deep mark on Bahia’s visual culture, one that would be indelible in many ways moving forward.

CHAPTER 4

Festive Streets: Carybé and Bahian Modernism

For the Brazilians of my generation and older, even those who knew Salvador, it is difficult to imagine the city before him. . . . [As the Bahian artist Mirabeau Sampaio once said,] in Bahia, Blacks didn’t exist until the arrival of Carybé. José Cl áu dio da Silva , “A s a rt e s de C a ry bé”

In 1950, after a prolonged campaign to return to the city, the Argentinean artist known as Carybé arrived in Salvador. Charged by the modernizing governorship of Otávio Mangabeira with the ambiguous task to “draw the city,” Carybé began the most prolific period of his career, with numerous print publications that showcased his portraits of Salvador. The wide circulation and critical acclaim for these portraits ensured that Carybé’s vision came to be iconic in short time. Roger Sansi observes that Carybé’s art became the city’s trademark, while the artists José Silva and Mirabeau Sampaio credit Carybé with changing understandings of the city itself.1 As the epigraph suggests, even for many elite who had grown up immersed in the reality of Salvador, the image of the city remained white until the arrival of Carybé. Such tributes no doubt place too much priority on Carybé at the expense of others. Pierre Verger, as I have already discussed, also engaged in depicting Salvador as a Black city, and Jorge Amado had done so before him; their work would be foundational for Carybé’s vision, as I reveal here. As I explore in the next chapter, such visions would become dominant across tourist guides of all ilk by the late 1950s. But even with this in mind, the influential role of Carybé is important to stress. Within two years of his arrival, his illustrations were paired with texts of the city’s most prominent modernists for a ten-volume series on Sal-

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vador, as well as two tourist guides written in concert with the most important art critics in the city, Odorico Tavares and José Valladares. Carybé’s work, along with Verger’s, would become deeply imprinted in the visual register of Salvador. Carybé brought with him important influences from a peripatetic life across South America but also quickly absorbed influences from Bahia’s budding modernist movement that sought to promote the city to Brazilian visitors. Modernist writers used a particularly didactic focus to educate their audiences about the importance of cultural celebrations that those in modernist circles deemed popular, folkloric, and of the povo. Carybé illustrated the works of these modernist writers and, in the process, translated the often-oblique language of these writers into something much more concrete: a visual iconography of the city as Black. In these depictions of Black life, Carybé is treated far too often, by critics and in his own analysis, as a mere recorder for an authentic Bahian reality. Matilde Matos, for example, a Bahian art critic with a long career of writing for the local press, praises Carybé for his depiction of the customs of the “povo baiano,” and for celebrating “the beauty and dignity of the Black race.”2 Such conceptions, and others similar, fail to recognize that understandings of the city as dominated by popular practices, and as Black in very particular forms, are in many ways a result of Carybé, alongside the larger efforts of the modernist movement, and not a refl ection of reality itself.3 My effort to credit Carybé’s active role in framing the city relies on a new historical grounding of his work that stresses his immersion in modernist circles in the early 1950s. While some critics have dismissed his work as simply folkloric, others remain unstintingly celebratory. Neither approach captures the foundational early context of his work and its larger impact. Far from being a mere chronicler of the city’s reality or a single figure acting alone, Carybé, together with his cohort, marked the city in creative visual terms that need to be unraveled and viewed with fresh eyes.4 I begin this chapter by linking Carybé’s depictions of the city with his previous career, a career influenced by the Pan-Americanism and Indigenism of South America, before moving on to show the deep connections he developed with the modernist movement under way in Salvador. I pay special attention to Carybé’s links with the work already undertaken by Pierre Verger. While many have observed close visual parallels between the work of the two artists, the connections between

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the two have never been fully explained. I break new ground here by showing how deeply Carybé was indebted to Verger and how Carybé relied in very direct ways on Verger’s work from O Cruzeiro of the 1940s. I also step back to examine how Carybé translated Verger’s work into a new visual language of his own. Moving on, I consider the larger themes of Carybé’s work across his tourist publications of the era. Here I show how local interest in folk culture influenced Carybé’s themes and aesthetic of this time, creating a particular emphasis on festivals and types. The result was a crafting of Salvador as a Black, festive site, a vision also indebted to understandings of Bahia as a preserve of racial harmony consolidating during this time. As a whole, this chapter reveals that while Carybé arrived primed for a particular experience, the Bahia of the early 1950s made Carybé as much as he made Bahia. Further, although Carybé’s work ostensibly promoted racial inclusion, it did so in ways that reflected the limits of Bahia itself in the 1950s.

Turbulence of the 1950s Carybé’s arrival in Salvador in 1950 marked a particularly turbulent moment. The former dictator Getúlio Vargas returned to power in the election of 1950, awakening anxiety among local elites that their regional interests would be shunted from national politics in ways they had denounced under his dictatorship. Change was also afoot in state politics: Otávio Mangabeira’s term ended in 1951, and the next governor, Régis Pacheco, came from a rival party that supported Vargas (the Social Democratic Party). Perhaps even more significant than these political shifts, however, were the great transformations in the petroleum industry of Bahia, still Brazil’s only known oil preserve. Although oil was fi rst struck in 1941, some fi fty kilometers north of Salvador, in 1950 Brazil inaugurated its fi rst oil refi nery (later known as the Landulfo Alves Refi nery) a short distance away, in Mataripe. 5 Though Bahians felt great pride in their ownership of this “black gold” and harbored hopes for the development and wealth it might bring, tensions heightened as Bahian oil came under federal control with the creation of Petrobras in 1953. This nationalization had important ramifications for Bahia, for it meant that the petroleum production of the state counted toward the federal register, not as a Bahian state success. Further, it meant to many critics that Bahia’s potential for wealth and development was being siphoned off by national companies who cared

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little about Bahian welfare. The traditional Bahian elite, already worried about Vargas, now felt further anxiety about federally imposed politics opposed to Bahian interests. This beleaguered sense of Bahian interests being ignored or exploited by others helped build a growing sense of regional identity. The early 1950s also brought a host of urban reforms to the city that made some feel that “progress” had arrived too quickly and at too great a cost. An urban plan, fi rst conceived in the early 1940s and fi nally initiated in 1948, would transform the city over the next decade, with new thruways that demolished much existing housing and changed the layout of the city with a new, grand, sweeping boulevard, Avenida Centenário.6 In addition, modernist architecture became increasingly visible. From 1951 to 1952 several striking modernist constructions were completed, many of them designed by the most important modernist architect for the city, Diógenes Rebouças, who had also participated in the new urban planning. Many other modernists, ironically, remained less convinced that Salvador’s new direction was a positive one and harkened back instead to ideas of an older time and to themes of folk and popular culture, then seen in decidedly antimodern terms. These connections were clear, for example, in the description of the most prominent modern art space of the era, the Galeria Oxumarê, named for one of the deities of Candomblé and owned by the modernist Carlos Rocha. The gallery hosted its fi rst show in 1948, addressing a long-standing need for exhibition space and rapidly becoming a meeting point for modernists in the city. The gallery was also seen as a site for the development of folk culture, as well as a market for folk and folk-inspired art. As one tourist guide suggested in 1958, “If a visitor wishes to buy sculptures or paintings they should go there, where they will also fi nd amulets of Guinea [used in Candomblé], ceramic cows, and books on folklore, without any markup in price.”7 Modern art, Black religion, and folklore would become intimately intertwined in Bahia. Returning to these connections later in the chapter, I fi rst turn to the early career of Carybé.

A Search for American Roots: 1930–1950 Carybé was born Héctor Bernabó in 1911 in Argentina, but he spent little time there until early adulthood. His family moved almost immediately after his birth to Italy (his father’s homeland) and then to Bra-

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zil in 1919 (his mother’s homeland), where he was raised from eight to nineteen in Rio de Janeiro, adopting his new name there. He entered art school in Rio in 1927, abandoning art studies two years later. In 1930 he returned to Buenos Aires, working in newspapers while beginning his career as an illustrator. Before his arrival in Salvador, Carybé spent the 1930s and 1940s in restless travel, spurred by the growing interest in Indigenous roots and Pan-Americanism that dominated the Americas during this era. He stopped twice in Salvador (in 1938 and 1941) for a period of months, claiming, like Verger, to have been attracted by Amado’s depiction of the Black city in the novel Jubiabá. But Carybé also gained exposure to a dynamic art scene in Buenos Aires and then spent extended time in Argentina’s Northwest, close to the Andes. There, immersing himself in a regional movement under way with local folklorists, musicians, artists, and poets, Carybé joined others searching for an authentic America with inspiration in Indigenous ways and themes.8 This modernist interest in national and Indigenous themes dominated the books Carybé illustrated during this time, beginning with his fi rst contract in 1939 to illustrate the work of the modernist novelist Bernardo Kordon (Macumba). Such interests were also central in his illustrations in the early 1940s for an edition of Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma (1928), a work that had so captivated Carybé that he began his illustrations before even having the permission of Andrade himself. Carybé’s depictions of Indigenous life in the Amazon foregrounded a vegetal excess and made human figures almost indistinguishable from the nature surrounding them (see fig. 4.1). And such ideas reached culmination in one of Carybé’s most ambitious efforts of the era, a surreal 1948 novel that he wrote and illustrated himself with seventy-five pen-and-ink drawings of Indigenous life grounded in folkloric themes.9 In a seemingly prosaic work done at the end of this period, a tourist guide for Argentina in 1949, Carybé played with ideas of native and racial types in particularly reductionist ways, depicting Argentines as being typically gauchos, Americans as blond and freckled, and Black people as racialized caricatures with exaggerated lips and ink-black skin. His hand-drawn map at the end of the volume located various folk types across Argentina, reinforcing ideas of difference that might be discovered through travel (see fig. 4.2). Carybé’s early focus on folklore gained attention and praise. A Brazilian reviewer of his fi rst independent show in 1945 framed his work,

Figure 4.1. Carybé, Indigenous life in the Amazon, illustration for the novel

Macunaíma (1928), by Mário de Andrade. Drawing completed ca. 1944, edition of novel with Carybé’s illustrations published in 1979. Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

Figure 4.2. Carybé, map showing folkloric types for Argentina tourist guidebook. Emilio Sarmiento and Benjamin J. Holt, An American’s Guide to Buenos Aires (1949). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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including many of his drawings for Macunaíma, as primarily concerned with “Indigenous themes,” observing approvingly that “almost all his pieces have a folkloric aspect, inspired in the legends of Indigenous ‘folklore’ from the continent.”10 Another critic noted that his “knowledge of folklore was impressive.”11 This search for identity in folk modes found echoes in Carybé’s own views of the time. In a 1947 interview for an early exhibition in Salta, Argentina, he expounded, “What I’m concerned with is finding an American mode of expression. I think what has most disturbed [perturbado] our art is its almost obsessive preoccupation with Europe.”12 In sum, the 1940s found Carybé strongly influenced by the native modernism that had spread across Latin America, and he applied his efforts to depicting regional and racial types in a variety of venues, whether in travel narratives, the ultimate modernist novel, or even a folktale of his own crafting. These early efforts before 1950 also showed engagement in social critique that would be largely absent in his later work, particularly in his subsequent depictions of Salvador. Carybé had at least two opportunities during this period to depict Salvador in books he illustrated. One set of illustrations was for a work by the Argentinean novelist Bernardo Kordon, who had traveled to Brazil. Inspired by Brazil’s racial dynamic, Kordon composed a series of short stories entitled Macumba (Black religion, 1939). The other illustration opportunity came with a work by the Brazilian exile Newton Freitas, who dedicated himself to detailing Black life and Brazilian folklore in Spanish for his new peers in Argentina (Maracatú, 1943). On both of these occasions, Carybé’s city portraits stood in stark contrast to his later work in Salvador. One point of contrast was that although this early work did engage in the depiction of types, and especially Baianas, Carybé provided distinguishing details and facial features that set them apart as individuals. For Kordon’s work, Carybé sympathetically depicted a Baiana as peaceful and beautiful, asleep on a colonial street corner while selling her wares (see fig. 4.3). Here, although the portrait of a vendor alone on the street with an accompanying label certainly tended toward the genre of a type, Carybé took care to portray his subject’s humanity in terms of both her exhaustion and the features of her face, drawn with some care. In his 1943 drawings for Freitas, the individual features of the Baianas are largely obscured, but he took care to portray clothing with some detail to show individuality and difference. These women,

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however, are also sexualized, with the breasts of the central Bahian street vendor highlighted despite her flowing blouse. In another image of women in Bahia who seem to be prostitutes, one woman appears completely nude beneath the outline of her dress.13 Carybé assumes that the visitor to the city will wish to see (and indeed, his drawings direct them to see) not only the city and its social types but sexualized bodies underneath Black women’s clothes. In addition, however, Carybé granted attention to the difficulty of these women’s labor or the poverty of their conditions. His critical eye was certainly visible in his 1943 illustrations for Freitas’s Maracatú. A seated Baiana vendor anchors a scene in which all of the women portrayed appear to be engaged in commerce or errands of some sort, rather than fun or leisure (see fig. 4.4). His treatment of prostitutes portrayed a dismal scene of poverty, with poorly dressed women clustered in a room devoid of any furniture or softness. In terms of his depictions of the city itself, Carybé’s portrayals in this period revealed two important differences from his later work: he showed the city as largely empty of human life and showed the poverty of the streets themselves. In Carybé’s 1939 portrait of Salvador, for example (see fig. 4.3), the town appears tranquil, rather than vibrant, and more deserted than alive: it is not a folkloric city but a historic one, with its grandeur in its architecture instead of its people. In Carybé’s 1943 illustration for Freitas (see fig. 4.4), he presents a more populated city and undertakes some effort to hint at its culture, as both Christian and Candomblé religious figures hover in the sky, foregrounding the Black church of Rosario dos Pretos.14 Yet the city’s poverty also stands in stark relief. This is not an orderly city but an old one, with uneven cobblestones and stray animals and fl ies. Neither portrayal of Salvador fit particularly well with the tone of the authors, reflecting Carybé’s own style more than anything else. All of these apparently mundane decisions are significant in comparison to the dramatic reinvention visible in Carybé’s work beginning with his arrival to the city in 1950. In contrast, his work of the 1950s turned to a particularly folkloric view of the city. The focus of the picturesque changed from its architecture to its people, and from Portuguese colonial splendor to Black popular festivals. These shifts paralleled the transformation taking place within Salvador itself, giving a fi rst indication that Carybé’s depiction of Salvador in the early 1950s reflected a larger cultural shift within the city.

Figure 4.3. Carybé, sleeping Baiana, illustration for the short story collection

Macumba (1939), by Bernardo Kordon. Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

Figure 4.4. Carybé, outdoor scene showing poverty of Salvador’s streets,

illustration for the essay collection Maracatu (1943), by Newton Freitas. Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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The Bahian Scene To Draw Bahia Carybé’s history of portraying racial types and themes native to Latin America reached a particularly receptive audience in Salvador. After his arrival in the city in 1950, he became astonishingly prolific and successful within the year. Carybé was one of a series of artists invited by the state of Bahia during this time as part of a general mission under Governor Mangabeira to encourage the development of modern art and to promote the city. Although Carybé’s contract cannot be located, other contemporary parallels show governmental initiatives intent on bringing artists to Salvador with explicit directives to focus on the city in their art. Two governmental grants offered to modernist artists from São Paulo in 1949 and 1950 included identical language inviting artists to “paint Bahia.”15 As Bahia’s museum director José Valladares emphasized to Djanira da Motta e Silva, a southeastern artist known for her distinctive “naive” style of painting, “We continue with the same interest in having you visit and paint Bahia.”16 Such a charge helps frame Carybé’s own memories of the commission, which he described later as a state-sponsored contract “to draw [desenhar] Bahia.”17 His wife remembered his task as more directly linked with folk culture and centered on “documenting in drawings the festivals and customs of Bahia. Work that he completed with much pleasure, frequenting popular festivals, candomblés, capoeira circles and open markets.”18 Regardless of his exact charge from the government, there seemed a clear expectation among Bahian officials that artists should be encouraged to come and use the city as a base of inspiration for their works. Although it appears that Bahian authorities were on the hunt for modernist artists, Carybé also conducted his own campaign to return to Bahia, one that framed him as particularly suited for developing folkloric themes. Rubem Braga, a friend and journalist in Rio, played a part in the movement with a newspaper column in 1949 that appealed to state authorities to take pity on Carybé and invite him to Bahia. Braga described Carybé as a bohemian who had proved himself an ideal translator of the Brazilian soul with his drawings for Macunaíma but who also boasted connections to Black culture and folklore. Carybé, he wrote, might not have political connections, but he “knows a lot of Blacks from candomblés and capoeiras [negros de candomblés e capoeiras], he has close friendships with scoundrels [malan-

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dros] and guitar players,” and some “thought he could be contracted by the Bahian government to do studies of folklore.” Although Braga reported that the Bahian government had already commissioned a North American folklore scholar, Braga advocated that “Carybé could be a fabulous assistant to this professor” without much expense.19 In Carybé’s view, Braga’s additional glowing letter of recommendation, surely written in a similar vein, helped convince state authorities to grant him the commission. 20 Another account further frames Carybé as given an official charge to document folklife. As the modernist writer and art critic Carlos Rocha remembered it, Carybé chafed upon his arrival at suggestions by José Valladares (director of the state museum) that he might teach in the public schools and appealed to Odorico Tavares, who suggested that Carybé be permitted “to simply carry out his craft, drawing Bahia, its popular festivals, types, and places, and to supply the drawings produced to the State Museum.”21 Odorico’s own account cited misgivings by some about the “gringo” Carybé and his cushy government assignment but reported that the result was a successful interpretation of the city, described in particularly folkloric terms. As he wrote in 1951, many skeptics had asked “what specific charge had Secretary Anísio Teixeira given him, to enable an artist, from the ‘outside,’ to be enjoying some thousands of cruzeiros from some dumb [burras] officials?” The result, Odorico argued, had proved naysayers wrong, and he reported that one year after Carybé’s arrival, Carybé had produced “an artistic work the like of which has never been seen here, drawing, its types, its landscapes, its festivals, its terreiros, its capoeiras like no other artist inside or outside of Brazil has done.”22 Using the language of types, and highlighting Carybé’s dedication to Black culture, Bahia’s leading cultural arbiters declared themselves well satisfied with Carybé’s arrival and his portraits of the city. Integrating into Bahian Modernism Carybé’s trajectory in Salvador was marked not only by widespread critical approval but more broadly by a remarkably rapid integration into modernist circles. As already seen, he arrived in the city with the endorsement of officials, such as the governor and the secretary of education and culture, and enjoyed early relationships with perhaps the two most important art critics in the city, José Valladares and Odorico Tavares. Carybé also integrated quickly with folklore scholars as well

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Figure 4.5. Carybé,

illustrated cover for study of Bahian folklife, Cachaça, moça branca (1951), by José Calasans. Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

as some of the most important modernist thinkers and writers in Salvador. Paired with some of Salvador’s most powerful and influential cultural brokers in a variety of projects, these connections placed Carybé fi rmly within the influence of the cultural renaissance under way in Bahia. To begin with, local folklorists certainly called upon Carybé at an early point to illustrate their work. Already in 1951, his work graced the cover of a Bahian study of the folk beliefs surrounding cachaça, an unrefi ned sugarcane liquor consumed most often in non-elite sectors (see fig. 4.5).23 But his closest and most productive connections came with his increasing links to the Bahian modernist movement, a group also engaged in promoting their own concepts of the folk, defi ned as Afro-Bahian ways of life. A ten-volume series in 1951, the Recôncavo collection, best reveals these connections: each volume consisted of

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short texts about the city written by prominent local figures, accompanied by Carybé’s drawings on the given theme (the term “Recôncavo” referred to the area surrounding Salvador’s bay, extending into the former sugar zones). Although the texts of the Recôncavo collection never claimed to be guides to the city per se, many texts referred to potential travelers and the sights they should see. Despite variations in tone, ranging from poetic to didactic, the prospects of tourism were never far from the surface. The Recôncavo series represented a strange genre, with two to three pages of impressionistic texts accompanying roughly thirty drawings in each volume: the illustrations, therefore, were the starring attraction, with the texts adding further endorsement by Bahia’s most prominent figures in the arts. Described in 1951 as a “collection of drawings about folkloric themes and principal popular festivals of Bahia,” the art was displayed in an exhibition organized by the secretary of education in January of that year. 24 Among the collaborators were Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger. Four of the remaining volumes were authored by writers from the modernist journal Caderno da Bahia. 25 All of these writers shared the goal of promoting the city, with a special interest in celebrating popular and Black culture. Along with Carybé, they saw the potential not only to celebrate the emergence of a newly popularized Salvador but also to shape it in the process. A lack of documentation makes it unclear whether the themes of the volumes were initially chosen by the authors and then illustrated by Carybé or whether Carybé set his own course. Certainly, there was deep overlap in their interests, most obviously in the attention given to popular culture and especially the treatment of folk practices of the povo, interests Carybé had already been cultivating in his PanAmerican vision of the folk. In addition, however, the choices undeniably bore the imprint of Bahian priorities. As the poet and Caderno da Bahia contributor Wilson Rocha remembered, the modernist project in Bahia sought to combat the disrespect and persecution faced by Black culture—a goal Pierre Verger and Odorico also shared. 26 Furthermore, many of the themes in the Recôncavo series had already been developed in the Caderno da Bahia, showing undoubtedly that these authors exerted some power to shape the chosen subjects. Bahian priorities were also evident in the continued thematic focus on festivals and markets to defi ne the city, themes that had occupied Odorico’s work with Pierre Verger in O Cruzeiro and that now came to occupy five volumes (or half) of the Recôncavo collection.

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Figure 4.6. Pierre

Verger, close-up of woman dancing. Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger (photographer), “O ciclo do Bonfim,” O Cruzeiro, March 22, 1947. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

Retracing the Path of Verger Direct overlap between the Recôncavo collection and the previous partnerships of Odorico and Verger in O Cruzeiro show how deeply Carybé and the series drew upon earlier local precedents. In two particularly striking cases, the Recôncavo volumes directly echoed earlier O Cruzeiro articles by Odorico and Verger, not only in their same choice of themes but also in their textual and visual treatment. In a volume on the Bonfi m festival, for example, Carybé seems to have reproduced Verger’s thematic focus almost exactly. Like Verger’s photographs, his drawings showcased large straw hats and the dress of Baianas, in parallels that appear too close to be coincidental. 27 In one case, although the pose has shifted, Carybé appears to have depicted a woman in a dress and hat almost identical to a woman photographed by Verger in 1947 (see figs. 4.6 and 4.7). 28

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Figure 4.7. Carybé,

woman dancing. Carybé (illustrator) and Odorico Tavares, Festa do Bonfim: 27 desenhos de Carybé, Recôncavo series, vol. 5 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

These overlaps with Verger’s earlier work emerged even more dramatically in a volume depicting one of Salvador’s markets, where Carybé’s drawings directly copied the central conceits of Verger’s work, leaving aside any doubts about accidental similarity. Carybé hardly modified Verger’s scene depicting female market vendors in large hats: his only real addition to the scene was to insert an additional female at the front, perhaps for symmetry (see figs. 4.8 and 4.9). Another image from this market volume makes the comparisons even more obvious. In this particular example, Carybé has drawn a male porter carrying a heavy load of bricks on his head, with attention to his muscular form. Just as Verger had done before him, Carybé depicted the man moving elegantly through space at an angle (see figs. 4.10 and 4.11). Not all of Carybé’s drawings in this volume or others were taken directly from Verger’s earlier photojournalism, but there are enough similarities to conclude defi nitively that Carybé arrived in Bahia with the vision of Verger shaping his own views. One should also consider the elements that changed as Verger’s photojournalistic vision became channeled through the pen of Carybé. To begin with, Carybé’s vision removed the background and context of the labor being performed. The goods that the female vendors are selling have been taken out of the scene, as have the boats from which the man has unloaded his bricks. Likewise, a sense of the physicality of the labor in Verger’s version of the male porter is lost with Carybé’s.

Figure 4.8. Pierre Verger, women vendors sitting at market. Odorico Tavares,

“Itinerário das feiras da Bahia,” O Cruzeiro, February 15, 1947. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

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Figure 4.9. Carybé,

women vendors sitting at market. Carybé (illustrator) and Vasconcelos Maia, Feira de água de meninos: 27 desenhos de Carybé, Recôncavo series, vol. 4 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

In Verger’s version, with the sun beating down, one can imagine the heat and the sweat that carrying such a heavy load would entail. In Carybé’s version, it is not particularly clear why the man has removed his shirt, and he is so far away, with his face now completely obscured, that any sense of the labor’s difficulty is now absent. In addition, although the figures in Verger’s photos have their faces somewhat obscured, faces have been almost completely obliterated in the record of Carybé, erasing any sense of individuality. In Verger’s photo of the vendors, for example, the central female figure looks disgruntled, turning her head to the side: whether she is merely worn out or avoiding the camera is unclear. In Carybé’s version, she looks forward perkily, her face assigned a curious scrawl of a smile and eyes: any hint of dissatisfaction has been removed. Perhaps one of the most striking parallels in both text and image is found in another Recôncavo volume, which took up a theme already treated by Odorico and Verger four years earlier: the traditions of rural Black fishermen on Salvador’s coast. The text of Wilson Rocha, a

Figure 4.10. Pierre Verger, men (right) carrying bricks on their heads. Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger (photographer), “Atlas carrega o seu mundo,” O Cruzeiro, April 5, 1947. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

Figure 4.11. Carybé,

man carrying bricks on his head. Carybé (illustrator) and Vasconcelos Maia, Feira de água de meninos: 27 desenhos de Carybé, Recôncavo series, vol. 4 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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leading modernist poet and one of the founders of Caderno da Bahia, opened the work. Together, Rocha and Carybé retraced many of the tropes used by Odorico and Verger. 29 Rocha used at least one sentence, for example, directly from Odorico’s text with almost no alteration, and his larger description of the practice also shows extensive similarities with Odorico’s earlier work. 30 Rocha’s paraphrase exhibited some differences in framing. Most importantly, Rocha took more pains to frame the practice in folk terms than had Odorico. Odorico’s longer text emphasized the difficulty of the labor, while Rocha’s portrayed the fishermen’s efforts as a “festival of poetry,” divorcing their work from its physical effort and its monetary function. To be clear, the differences between the two were of nuance. Both authors ultimately made clear the difference between themselves and their subjects. Nonetheless, as a whole Odorico romanticized the labor but still treated it as labor, while Rocha neglected the practical aims of the fishermen altogether, treating their work primarily as a time of song and dance that should be valued as folkloric display. “Folklore in Bahia remains alive and sometimes mysterious, demanding study, research and artistic interest,” Rocha wrote, and the case of the fishermen “reveals the life of its povo with clearest and purest beauty, in perhaps one of its richest and most exciting instances. A maritime and essentially mystical povo. . . . [The] communal and traditional action of Bahia’s Black fishermen [displays] a revival of African rites, with expressions of dance, mimicry, poetry and song.”31 The modernist affi nity for folklore led Rocha to value the practice of Black fishermen, but he divorced their actions from the difficult circumstances of poverty, instead celebrating their lives as picturesque. The treatment of the fishermen by both Verger and Carybé would become iconic: visually, the event was arresting, with men moving together in carefully orchestrated lines against the vast shoreline of the ocean. But there is evident contrast between the two visions. Verger’s images in O Cruzeiro set up a narrative based around labor and the many intricate and demanding tasks undertaken by the fishermen. Verger emphasized the physicality of the labor, particularly with one of the fi rst shots of the series, showing a long line of masculine, muscled Black legs straining together to pull in the heavy fishing nets (see fig. 4.12). The next photographs in the series showed hands repairing the nets and fish itself, further grounding the material reality of the scene. Carybé’s drawings, in turn, focused more on the social networks of wives who arrived to provide food and encouragement, as

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well as on a communal story in which people worked together. Labor was not nearly so central in Carybé’s drawings. Instead, Carybé treated the social scene from a more romantic perspective that largely erased the physicality of the efforts (see fig. 4.13). Even as his line drawing drew attention to the lean movements of the bodies and the force used to brace the fishermen’s legs and rears, Carybé’s images did not emphasize the labor itself as central. In Carybé’s vision, the men drawing in the net might be interpreted as dancing as easily as working. Similar to the links between Odorico Tavares and Wilson Rocha, then, the imprint of Verger continued forcefully within the work of Carybé, but Verger’s images had been transformed into a more festive and folkloric framing. Beyond the parallels between Verger’s early work and Carybé’s Recôncavo collection drawings, another effort the same year shows even further the retracing of Verger’s steps by Carybé and may also reveal some of the impetus behind it. Sometime soon after Carybé’s arrival, Odorico Tavares chose to republish his O Cruzeiro articles as an independent tourist guide described as “impressions and sensations” motivated by “love for the land of Bahia.”32 He selected Carybé as illustrator for the work. Based upon Odorico’s previous writing for O Cruzeiro, with minimal if any edits, the text was dedicated almost exclusively to popular festivals and celebrations of the Bahian popular practices. Roughly organized by themes of festivals, water, the Canudos rebellion, and “other images,” eclectic topics were united by an earthy emphasis on the authenticity of a folkloric povo.33 The resulting book, Bahia: Images of the Land and Its Povo (Bahia: Imagens da terra e do povo), came out in 1951, the same year as the Recôncavo collection and one year after Carybé’s arrival in Salvador. Odorico’s texts had already attracted a national audience, and together with Carybé’s drawings they proved a resounding success. The volume sold out within a month, went to a second edition immediately, and also won fi rst prize in a national book exposition.34 Odorico claimed modestly that the book’s success was not due to his own insights but rather to a public that continued, more and more, to be fascinated “by everything related to aspects of the Bahian land and povo.” This swelling interest undoubtedly helped to account for the rapid second edition, as well as for the later third edition in 1961 that expanded the work with chapters on capoeira and the Pelourinho. 35 Carybé occupied a peculiar position with this work, as Odorico’s writings had already been issued with the photographs of Verger: in

Figure 4.12. Pierre Verger, fishing net extended across the sand and fishermen

hauling heavy nets out of the water. Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger (photographer), “A pesca do xaréu,” O Cruzeiro, October 18, 1947. © Diários Associados. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

Figure 4.13. Carybé, women waiting for fishermen’s haul. Carybé (illustrator)

and Wilson Rocha, A pesca do xaréu: 21 desenhos de Carybé, Recôncavo series, vol. 1 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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other words, Odorico’s texts had already been illustrated once, and now Carybé came in to illustrate them yet again. The most likely cause of this shift from one artist to another, and from photographs to drawings, seems to be a question of copyright, as O Cruzeiro owned the rights to all work published in the magazine. It might also have been significantly costlier to produce a book with high-quality photographs, whereas Carybé’s black-and-white drawings were much easier to duplicate. The result, in any case, was that Carybé was called upon to produce drawings to fit the folkloric topics that Odorico had been developing in his work and that had already gained one interpretation and narrative under the lens of Verger. Carybé surely looked back at the original articles in doing the work, and this may be part of the reason why his work was influenced so deeply by Verger. Overall, in many ways Carybé’s drawings fit well with the romantic texts of Odorico. Carybé’s focus on festivals meshed seamlessly with the text, and his folkloric tone matched the celebration of the povo that formed the center of Odorico’s worldview. But the Blackness of Carybé’s illustrations contradicted Odorico’s focus on mixing. And the drawings also showed some significant differences from the original photos by Verger. The primary difference was that although Carybé occasionally used the briefest of outlines to sketch figures, he often used a dark black ink to fi ll in the bodies and faces of the figures completely. Verger’s photography had often focused on the expressiveness of the face itself; Carybé’s drawings obliterated the faces of those involved, portrayed only as black ovals from a distance. Detail came instead in exaggerated buttocks for males, perhaps intended to signal Black masculinity, as well as the exaggerated hips and breasts of the Black women depicted, indicating a highly sexualized Black femininity. Furthermore, by emptying the landscape of detail, except in the briefest of terms, Carybé made Black figures a stark contrast to a background that was almost completely white. These dark-inked bodies and sexualized figures became iconic for his work in Salvador. Researchers have noted, in general terms, striking similarities in the artistic work of Pierre Verger and Carybé over their careers, but the causality and the timing of the influence has never been clearly elucidated. One recent book from the Pierre Verger Foundation, for example, has gone so far as to pair undated images by Carybé and Verger side by side, to eerie effect. Although such similarities beg for commentary, the volume offers none, except as a way to further emphasize that the two worked together to reveal what is deemed a deeper

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truth of Bahia.36 As the introduction ambiguously frames it, “both [Carybé and Verger] turned their gaze in the same direction, looking at the same angles, with the same framings, capturing the same movements and recording a time that will never return.”37 Likewise, a documentary that poses the question about mutual influence to Carybé’s daughter rests content with the explanation that Carybé and Verger frequently attended the same festivals together. The documentary ignores the ahistorical nature of this possibility, which conflates later friendships with unusual parallels in Carybé’s early Bahian work and depictions made by Verger long before Carybé’s arrival to the city.38 In either interpretation, the symphony of depictions among the two is treated not as the artistic influence of one artist marking deep treads in the work of another, but rather as proof of the documentary nature of the way both artists depicted Bahia’s reality at the same time. In fact, 1951 crystalizes this question of influence and grants a defi nitive answer: Carybé arrived in Bahia, largely retracing the steps of Verger, and the influence of Verger is so evident that in many ways we might wonder whether Carybé’s work is altogether derivative. The two had met each other in Rio in 1946, staying at the same guesthouse, and it is probable that Carybé, in Rio for the next several years until his relocation to Salvador, followed Verger’s career in O Cruzeiro with interest. Regardless of whether Carybé knew of Verger’s work upon its fi rst publication in O Cruzeiro, Verger’s imagery was certainly present and available to both Carybé and the authors of the Recôncavo collection as they composed their texts in 1950 and 1951. I now turn to a deeper analysis of the themes developed in Carybé’s work. A Bahian Folk Both Verger and Carybé had been influenced by the larger interest in native cultures spreading across the Americas and the growing folklore movement of the Andean areas in which they had been immersed. Carybé reflected these Latin American currents especially powerfully, although, like Verger, always in combination with Bahian currents as well. Following a larger Pan-American movement, Carybé’s art communicated a folk aesthetic in his style, in his focus on religion and festivals, and, ultimately, in his interest in types. Where Verger brought an interest in Black culture with him from Paris and from his travels in French colonial Africa, in Bahia, Carybé moved to abandon his earlier Indigenous focus and to substitute instead the culture most readily

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at hand: Afro-Bahian culture. In doing this, he adapted to the Bahian scene by marking folk culture and popular culture as Black. In terms of his aesthetic choices in the early 1950s, Carybé modified the romantic style he had often used in his earlier work, as well as the heavily lined drawings he had made of the Indigenous folk cultures in Macunaíma. Instead, he drew upon a modern art language familiar across the Americas. For example, several of his covers for the Recôncavo collection used woodblock prints that communicated immersion in a medium popular across the Americas in the early twentieth century. Here the aesthetics of the title further evoked a folkloric view, with hand-blocked letters intended to replicate the printing of the cordel literature, or street poetry booklets, published at the time.39 Carybé’s cover also introduced one of the new characteristics of his Bahian work: figures who were marked as Black both by their practices as well as by Carybé’s choice to completely black out their faces, removing any distinguishing facial features. In his cover for the volume treating the historic colonial neighborhoods of the Pelourinho (see fig. 4.14), he made certain not only to include particular markers of a traditional way of life—namely, a donkey, as well as the practice of carrying items on the head—but also to indicate that those participating in this way of life were Black. The overlaps between the folklore movement and the modernist movement stand out clearly when we consider that none of the authors chosen to depict folkloric themes in the Recôncavo series had any background in folklore studies. In other words, modernists adopted the themes and the interests of the folklore movement, seeing the need to celebrate popular traditions, but they had no particular training as scholars of the topic nor as folklorists in particular. This stands out clearly, for example, in the choice of the author José de Souza Pedreira for a volume in the Recôncavo collection treating an Afro-Bahian religious festival. Pedreira was part of modernist circles in Salvador, an art critic and writer in his own right and later a museum director. Yet he was not, in any source I have found, an authority on Afro-Bahian religions or festivals, nor was he a traditional academic. Instead, he made a point of saying in his text that all of his information about the festival had come from “Old Pedro,” an elderly Black fisherman. Pedreira thus took a stance as an intellectual, interested and in touch with the povo, but not a participant in these practices himself. As was often the case within folklore studies, intellectuals such as Pedreira celebrated the folk wisdom of such informants but believed themselves

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Figure 4.14. Carybé,

cover design for Carybé and Odorico Tavares, Pelourinho: 27 desenhos de Carybé, Recôncavo series, vol. 2 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

to be the more appropriate interlocutors for wider audiences. The goal, thus, was not an explanation of the festival by a practitioner but an explanation of a festival by an intellectual who took pains to showcase his alliances and connections with the popular class. This distancing and fi ltering of the views of the popular class also allowed the writer Pedreira and others like him to frame the episodes they discussed in ways of their choosing. Pedreira, for example, took great pains to depict the religious festival of Yemanjá as Bahian, despite the fact that the deity celebrated came from an African pantheon. This was done too by Carybé himself, in his narrative that accompanied the volume on Candomblé, where he stressed the distinctively Bahian na-

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ture of the religion, leaving its African connections largely aside. While the relative contribution of Africa in either practice might easily be defi ned in different ways, the consistency of the priority placed on Bahian practices makes clear the choice being made: these volumes were intended to celebrate particularly Bahian contributions to the nation and a particularly Bahian culture. Even while practitioners of Candomblé, and perhaps also those who gave tribute to Yemanjá, might have seen their beliefs in terms of deep connections to Africa, such connections were often whitewashed to prioritize a particularly Bahian identity in these works. The volume on capoeira written by Carybé and the volume on Orixás by Verger were partial exceptions to this trend but stand out all the more for their focus.40 In the text of his Candomblé volume, Carybé spent very little time on the origins of the rituals themselves and the religion’s history, instead taking pains to ground the religion within the everyday life and landscapes of middle- and lower-class folk. Yet these landscapes were nowhere to be seen in the drawings, and the Candomblé he depicted was not grounded in an urban setting. One of the advantages offered by Carybé’s medium of illustrations rather than photography was that he had greater freedom in staging his subjects, with unlimited liberty of themes as well as the potential to venture indoors, freed from any restrictions of lighting or flash. These qualities offered a new potential range of interpretation for portrayals of Candomblé, which had long had a complicated relationship with photography. Carybé utilized few of these advantages, however, revealing little of the interior setting of Candomblé temples. Over three-fourths of the images in the volume had no backdrop at all, creating the illusion that the religion floated outside of any real physical or geographical context (see fig. 4.15). This portrayal made the faith timeless, in some sense, and linked it to the festive world of folklife. Carybé gave priority to the dance, the costume, and the communal aspect of Candomblé, portrayed as exclusively female. Another volume on Candomblé, this time with text by Verger, had a distinctly pedagogic focus and a strong anthropological bent. Verger’s introductory text was followed by a type of visual dictionary by Carybé in which drawings of the dress and symbols of each deity were accompanied by explanatory text. The last section of the volume showcased fi fteen carefully documented deities. The capoeira volume also bore this didactic focus, with illustrations showing various types of instruments, each with scholarly descriptions (see fig. 4.16). These at-

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Figure 4.15. Carybé, Candomblé ceremony. Carybé, Temas de Candomblé,

Recôncavo series, vol. 9 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

tempts to make legible practices unknown to the white elite placed Carybé and Verger fi rmly within the realm of a political project that aimed to bring legitimacy to Black culture more broadly. Candomblé, a religion long denigrated as sorcery, and capoeira, long associated with street violence, both suffered the stigma of being associated with the Black underclass. Yet while the labels served to emphasize the objective reality of such practices, they also emphasized their ex-

Figure 4.16. Carybé, explanation of instruments used to play music for capoeira. Carybé, Jogo de capoeira, Recôncavo series, vol. 3 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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otic nature with a type of scientific drawing most often used to document foreign and primitive cultures. The Black folk, explained here for outsiders, gained new status but also stood as an object of study and display. In his treatment of festivals, Carybé developed a trope that would be central to his work: the idea of Salvador as engaged in a constant stream of celebrations in the street, where convivial scenes brought people together. This festive emphasis had occupied Odorico in his work with Pierre Verger in O Cruzeiro, and now it played a prominent role in the Recôncavo collection. Authors repeatedly emphasized the harmony of Bahian society, epitomized by a carefree and friendly cycle of festivals in which all celebrated as one. This romantic idea of both equality and racial harmony fit well with the mantra of racial democracy that had become increasingly important on the national scale. This argument ultimately reinforced the ideals of Salvador as a racial democracy and avoided depictions of the tenements and poverty shown in the Jorge Amado guide of 1945, with the woodcuts of Manuel Martins. Ostensibly free to depict people in any manner of activity, whether in worship, in churches, or in family celebrations at home, Carybé focused instead on the public dimensions of festivals (see fig. 4.17). He neglected scenes of devotion to focus instead on the street processions and the popular elements of the celebration. Urban Types Beyond the idea of a festive city, the texts of the modernists, as well as Carybé’s illustrations, returned repeatedly to the idea of types particular to the city of Salvador. One of these was obviously the Baiana. Carlos Vasconcelos Maia, a modernist poet and founding member of Caderno da Bahia, urged that the market was the ideal place to encounter the real thing: “At every corner you come across an authentic ‘Baiana’ [baiana de gema], always in everyday clothes, at times in party dress, never ‘a la Hollywood’; these, thank God, still don’t exist at the market.”41 In the volume treating the city’s dockside markets, Carlos Eduardo da Rocha, an art critic and later director of Bahia’s state museum (like Pedreira), rhapsodized about the “picturesque” nature of the location, adding that Baianas completed the “local color.”42 He concluded, “This is the true Bahia, the Bahia that we are all accustomed to seeing in postcard photographs or the shorts taken from the cinema, and to hearing in the lyrics of samba and evoked in the novels.

Figure 4.17. Carybé, festive streets in colonial downtown. Carybé and Odorico

Tavares, Pelourinho: 27 desenhos de Carybé, Recôncavo series, vol. 2 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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This Bahia of enviable happiness, with its typical life, its atmosphere illuminated, its eternal poetry.”43 In an interesting twist, Rocha’s description tied together the types found in postcards, perhaps evoking depictions of Baianas that continued to circulate, with the reality of the markets, where one might fi nally come in contact with the living version of the postcard type. The idea of types was often used as a shorthand for races as well as a nod to the authentic nature of those described. Odorico Tavares, imbued with a belief in racial harmony, portrayed a city in which all races and types came together: its streets harbored all that was the “most authentic and the most characteristic within the word povo.”44 Carlos Vasconcelos Maia wrote poetically in another volume, urging that any visitor to Bahia must see the “most typical” “markets of the povo,” which displayed “a countless variety of human types.”45 All Brazilians, in his vision, mingled together: “Whites, Blacks, amarelos, mulatos, sararás, caboclos, gazos and cabo-verdes [terms for racial mixture now rarely used], of all sexes and ages, middle class and proletariat, meet up, talk, argue.”46 Maia moved beyond a vision of Black, brown, and white to a much more varied racial landscape, one that fit the ideal of racial mixing even while revealing the intricate racial classifications that hinted at efforts to divide those of African descent into a range of levels of color and mixture. In an interesting departure from the dynamic scene of exchange painted by authors who described the market, Carybé instead depicted many vendors on their own, silhouetted with the tools of their trade. This decision calls attention to the larger trajectory that surely influenced his aesthetic choice: the nineteenth-century urban type. In general, Carybé used festivals to show Black masses, while his focus on vendors showed Black individuals, largely apart from each other and apart from their ostensible customers. In this sense, the tone of the vendor portraits was considerably more somber, and while many of them were folkloric, they were not particularly festive. In many of these vendor portraits, Carybé took an approach in which he illustrated figures from behind or with empty ovals for faces and no facial features. He drew few people with distinctive faces or personalities. In addition, many of his figures were outlines rather than being inked black (see fig. 4.18). This was an interesting contrast to the figures he portrayed from a distance on the street, and I argue that these contrasts emerged out of certain assumptions. When the Brazilian reader would have expected to see a Black person (for exam-

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Figure 4.18.

Carybé, urban vendor. Carybé and Odorico Tavares, Pelourinho: 27 desenhos de Carybé, Recôncavo series, vol. 2 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

ple, in the case of street vendors), Carybé felt little need to mark the figure as Black. Another example of this was his treatment of capoeira. Perhaps because capoeira was already marked as Black, in this volume Carybé chose not to use any color for the people in his drawings, occasionally using black shadows on faces to indicate Black skin but focusing instead on movement itself (see fig. 4.19). Skin color, however,

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was only one of the markers that Carybé used for denoting Blackness. He drew exaggerated breasts and hips for women, especially for Black women, but he also took care to mark race with turbans, hairstyles, bare feet, and often exaggerated noses and lips. This arsenal of depictions of Blackness came together in remarkable ways in a tourist guide published in 1952 entitled The Baiana’s Turban (O torço da bahiana), one of the most unusual guides of the period. The work’s ostensible goal was framed as an explanation and a recording of folk culture: it sought to bring a historical understanding to the turban or headscarf often worn by Baiana street vendors as well as by

Figure 4.19.

Carybé, capoeira match. Carybé, Jogo de capoeira, Recôncavo series, vol. 3 (1951). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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Selling Black Brazil

priestesses of Candomblé. A more direct goal was to promote the concept of regional types to encourage tourism to Bahia. For example, the text was printed in English and German in addition to Portuguese. After a short introductory text by the director of the state museum, José Valladares, the rest of the book was dedicated to drawings of step-bystep instructions on tying turbans in different ways. Valladares opened his text by asserting that Brazil had three regional costumes, and the Baiana was one of them. He then immediately linked these regional traditions to tourism, explaining that a tourist naturally sought keepsakes that represented these folk cultures. Perhaps with this in mind, the text and the captions for each illustration were translated into both English and German. As Valladares explained: There are three typical regional costumes in Brazil: the gaucho, the Nordeste cowboy, and the Baiana. All three have received the merited attention of our folklorists, as well as those in the industry of regional keepsakes. . . . [For tourists seeking Bahian souvenirs] it is the doll dressed as a Baiana—a doll of black cloth, various sizes, with sandals, a round skirt, lacy blouse, scarf, turban, and many necklaces and bracelets. The torço, or turban, is therefore one of the essential parts of the Bahian costume. A Baiana without the twist, be it doll or even people, is an incomplete Baiana, missing one of its fi nishing touches.47

Valladares insisted that the turban stemmed from Brazilian traditions and thus formed a valuable part of Brazilian folk culture. In fact, he was so intent on stressing this folk element that he neglected an obvious comparison to another reference that would have jumped immediately to mind: Carmen Miranda. Miranda had appeared in her fi rst Hollywood film in 1940, after a short spell as a Brazilian fi lm star and singer. Her adaptation of the turban of the Baiana into fruit-laced headwear was already legendary and surely would have brought further interest to the subject. Significantly, however, she was not mentioned in the work, perhaps because of express disapproval of her distortions of tradition.48 On the one hand, Carybé’s drawings for the volume communicated a sense of individuality, in that different facial features and fabrics were paired with each variety of turban depicted. Despite such customization, the portraits that centered the page were minimal

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sketches, intended to evoke, rather than demonstrate, the style of the turban: they used spare black lines on white space, with no shading, color, or texture except occasionally for a deep black used to depict hair peeking through the turban.49 The women did not have enough detail to be fully realized, and their expressions remained flat. Few details portrayed an exaggerated sense of racial difference or Blackness. Carybé instead emphasized this context elsewhere, either in kinky hair or in the stylized drawings that appeared on the margin of the page. These margin drawings represent the most curious aspect of the volume, with step-by-step illustrations showing the reader how to produce the same turban at home (see fig. 4.20). Labeled for instructional clarity, the drawings include letters to denote different sections of the fabric and numbers to indicate the order of the actions. Thus, technical detail communicated a didactic purpose. In contrast to the head views, the illustrations at the margin portrayed the models from the waist up, and Carybé fi lled in their bodies and heads with a dark, black ink. Such models, left faceless, gained individuality through other elements, most centrally in the variety introduced in the drawings of their breasts. Carybé took care to portray each woman’s breasts even in frontal views, by jutting them out assertively to the side, and side perspectives gave equal attention to the breasts’ form. Portrayed sometimes round and sometimes triangular, they often ended in a point, perhaps in an effort to represent the nipple. In the diversity of forms, Carybé probably intended to evoke breasts unobscured by either bras or clothing. This is worth calling attention to, for Baiana dress in fact called for a free-flowing and loose shirt, overhung by a scarf, causing the torso to be well covered. Such dress, in short, would have made breasts fairly indistinguishable beneath the flow of the ample layers of fabric. In contrast, there was no clothing depicted in any of these drawings, suggesting that although these women were dressing themselves in turbans, they were otherwise nude. Such nudity brought an air of the voyeur into the narrative, as readers watched the women wrap their turbans, even as the women remained in a state of undress. In sum, in illustrating a topic that had everything to do with the head and with clothing, Carybé turned the images into something that objectified Black women’s bodies within a context of undress. The result was a sexualization of what was an ostensibly didactic effort to bring attention to folk costume. In the end, it is unclear whether the artist is depicting different types of turbans or different types of

Figure 4.20. Carybé, diagram depicting how to tie a turban. José Valladares and

Carybé (illustrator), O torço da bahiana (1952). Courtesy of Solange Bernabó.

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Black women and their bodies. Carybé’s drawings raise the question of whether the turban itself or these Black women and their sexualized forms were intended as the true focus of tourist interest. A Festive City Beyond these types portrayed by Carybé, his drawings also created a very particular vision of Salvador itself. To begin with, the drawings of Carybé followed the framing of Verger, depicting Salvador’s life as lived in the streets, not indoors. For Verger, such a focus might well have been in part dictated by the demands of camera flashes and the inability of a French-speaking single man to penetrate the inner realms of Brazilian family life. Carybé, in contrast, faced no limits from his pen and circulated easily within Brazilian society as a family man speaking fluent Portuguese. Despite Carybé’s free range within the city, however, his work retained a framing similar to Verger’s, focused outdoors and in the streets. Like Verger, Carybé depicted a highly selective type of streets. All of the buildings he sketched were colonial; there was no treatment of the nineteenth-century architecture of Salvador’s upper city or the skyscrapers sprouting up across the city in the 1950s. Symbols of the modern world were absent in other respects as well. There was no bustle of modern forms of transport, for example: Carybé portrayed Salvador largely without cars, trolleys, or buses. In a similar vein, there were few streetlights or power lines and little evidence of electricity. Carybé’s Salvador evoked a different era, one immune to the intrusions of modernity. In terms of the people depicted, Carybé focused especially on either masses in the streets or urban types. This meant that in Carybé’s city, there were few children and few family units. Furthermore, Carybé’s depictions focused almost exclusively on the povo, or the lower classes. The suits and hats that served as symbols of the upper-class male, ubiquitous in photos of men like Odorico Tavares or José Valladares, were nowhere to be found in Carybé’s drawings. Given his extensive marking of much of the population as Black, it is not clear how often he included whites at all. Indeed, the middle and upper classes, those arenas most dominated by whites, were missing almost altogether in these portraits. While such a focus undoubtedly reflected Salvador’s demographic reality, in that the white middle class and upper class remained small, their exclusion is so complete that it calls atten-

178 Selling Black Brazil

tion to the very tight editing chosen by Carybé. The portrait is consistent, despite the variety and sheer number of images Carybé depicted. Finally, Carybé’s aesthetic, echoed in the work of other Bahian modernists of the era (as I explore in the next chapter), left the background of the page largely white, a choice that allowed for a hypercontrast of Black skin in the foreground. The focus was no longer a dark city, as in the vision of Jorge Amado and Manuel Martins, but dark people moving through the city. Carybé developed this aesthetic especially for his work in Salvador, and it contrasted sharply with his earlier art elsewhere (especially in Macunaíma, for example) as well as his depictions of Salvador done a decade earlier. As I showed earlier, these early depictions of Salvador revealed a somewhat critical look at the poverty of the city. This critical eye can perhaps still be seen in the Pelourinho volume of the Recôncavo collection, in which Carybé depicted bleak women breastfeeding their children in impoverished surroundings. But these images were ambiguous enough, and rare enough, to mean that they did not dominate the visual portrait of the city that Carybé crafted as a whole. Moreover, Carybé’s focus on festivity meant that the ultimate message of his art was that of unlimited leisure by carefree Black citizens. This view not only played into stereotypes of Black people as happy but also gave further fuel to the myth of racial democracy. As all of the texts reveal, the promotions by modernists at this time worked to consolidate an ideal of Bahia as a land of exceptional racial harmony, built especially around the participation of all in a festive way of life. Carybé encapsulated this vision in visual terms, making it both appealing and immediately comprehensible. He ultimately disrupted the idea of a mestiço city, as I discuss in detail later. In some ways, it is unclear whether this was intentional or not, as Carybé in his own texts would continue to insist on mixture. In any case, the result was a visual distillation of Salvador as a Black city, representative of Brazil’s racial harmony, and the ultimate site of an older, more harmonious, and simpler way of life. In sum, Carybé’s illustrations served to ground the Black population in Blackness rather than mixture, in the streets rather than in domestic or commercial structures, and in an urban yet particularly colonial setting that played with a viewer’s sense of time and space. His images helped to consolidate the archetype of the Baiana, and they helped construct a festive world of Black urban life that framed the world of Salvador in very particular, and very enduring, ways.

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Becoming Iconic Carybé’s images made a particularly deep impact on Salvador’s visual culture. Their continued power was due in large part to their exceptionally wide and long-lasting circulation. The Recôncavo collection shows this most dramatically. It was surely unexpected that a series of black-and-white drawings accompanied by impressionistic text would reach a large audience, but the volumes’ popularity quickly exceeded expectations. Municipal authorities distributed the work widely, including to the press in Rio de Janeiro. Press coverage there listed all of the volumes by name, praising the initiative for its educational as well as artistic value and for its new insights into the “traditions of Bahia.”50 Meanwhile, José Valladares, director of Bahia’s state museum, found himself responding to a variety of requests for the work from across the country. Edison Carneiro, the prominent ethnologist, requested permission to use Carybé’s illustrations in his work on Candomblé, while the artist Percy Lau of Rio’s National Council of Geography wrote to ask for two complete sets of the Recôncavo series, noting that he and his colleagues were very interested in “the types and aspects of Bahia.”51 The Recôncavo volumes also gained new life for readers abroad. Within a year of publication, the Brazilian embassy in Argentina requested copies to help in their job of “making our country more known,” along with guides written by Tavares and Valladares himself.52 And the volumes were further distributed in 1953 to Brazil’s promotional office in New York by recommendation of Rômulo Almeida, a Bahian economist and the future head of a central development agency for the state.53 In sum, Carybé’s work resonated immediately upon its issue in 1951, both domestically and abroad. The series sold out rapidly, and only a few years later, in 1955, all ten volumes were reprinted, with a press run indicating considerable popularity, despite the limited book market at the time in Brazil. 54 What has not been fully accounted for in assessments of Carybé’s work is how widely the illustrations from these volumes continued to circulate in a variety of forms outside of the Recôncavo collection itself. Many of the images were also used by Odorico Tavares in his guidebook of 1951, and a newspaper reprinted a selection of the illustrations in celebration of the third edition of the guide in 1961.55 These same images were then further reused in Carybé’s own guide of 1962.56 Other tourist guides sometimes reproduced illustrations from

180 Selling Black Brazil

the series, unattributed. 57 Even decades later, the illustrations were recycled as representative of Bahia’s essence. In 1994 they accompanied a guidebook by Carlos Eduardo da Rocha, who had originally written one of the Recôncavo volumes.58 A decade later, in 2014, Salvador’s newspaper O Correio reprinted all of the volumes once again.59 Most significant of all, Carybé’s drawings were also widely reproduced at the time in both the local and the national press, where the black-and-white drawings proved easy to print. Graphically arresting, the images were sometimes printed in combination with a relevant article, but they were occasionally printed alone. This level of reproduction became so extensive in Bahia that even articles unrelated to Carybé often showcased one of his drawings, usually unattributed. A Rio newspaper, for instance, ran one of Carybé’s Recôncavo drawings on the front cover of the literary supplement with no relation whatsoever to the texts.60 In a 1954 reply to a letter from Carneiro asking yet again for use of Carybé’s images, Valladares reported that while the state museum had no control of the material, he was not sure how the request would be received. He wrote, “Lately Carybé has been bored with the unlicensed advantage taken of his drawings, used even as decoration for fabrics.”61 The idea that even fabric might be printed with Carybé’s designs only three years after their issue shows how deeply his imagery saturated Salvador’s visual scene and gives some indication of how rapidly the work from his fi rst years in Bahia gained broad approval. Furthermore, in addition to national acclaim, Carybé’s work gained the critical endorsement of key Bahian figures. Such support was already clear in the many partnerships Carybé entered into with Bahian writers. But the glowing terms of praise used for his work at this time also consolidated his local endorsement and acceptance. Odorico used the preface of one of the volumes of the Recôncavo series to give the artist a ringing endorsement, focusing on his ability to capture the life of the povo. In Odorico’s words, Carybé’s drawings brought to life the povo’s “most authentic and pure” essence and “most characteristic aspects . . . like no other artist in no other Brazilian city.”62 Odorico’s framing established Carybé as an urban artist intimately connected to the lower classes that modernists and the populism of the era considered to be the wellspring of national and Bahian identity. Valladares too joined the chorus praising Carybé’s work. He wrote, “It is proven he feels more affection toward Bahia than many born here, a tenderness that only experts in the origins of affections could explain. He

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likes it here, a lot, he is capable of sacrificing himself, and in design, without doubt he is at the moment its best interpreter.”63 Carybé had arrived in 1950 as a middle-aged Argentinian “gringo” with a Spanish accent, but he rapidly transformed himself into one of the most celebrated chroniclers and interpreters of Salvador.

Conclusion The deeper reasons for Carybé’s influence lay in part with his remarkable aesthetics, which remain striking today: the graceful lines that captured movement and his often-beautiful framings of stories. But the popularity of his images also owed much to the fact that his past interest in authentic American cultures fit precisely with the priorities of a modernist movement already underway in Bahia; and he further paralleled and rehearsed the work of Pierre Verger, who had already gained substantial renown. The ability of Carybé to fi nd a visual language that translated so well to locals in Salvador came in part from its coherence with a larger modernist movement and in part from the very local priorities of actors within Bahia itself. Bahians in the early 1950s, gripped by rapid industrialization, a changing cityscape, and a new national focus on racial democracy, worked to translate anxieties about progress into a celebratory narrative of the city. In doing so, modernist circles in Salvador turned most often to notions of the folk and the povo, defi ned in often imprecise ways but generally in reference to the city’s underclass as they sought to gain relevance in the national scene. Such language was particularly powerful in the midst of a broader populist moment in politics, as well as a movement by modernists to portray themselves as a particular new kind of intellectual, one at home with the people and aligned with the voice of democracy. Some years later, by the time of the Artists of Bahia exhibition at São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art, Carybé had certainly absorbed these priorities. He asserted in a press release for the exhibition, “We are here to show to the Paulistas our art, which looks to tradition and the povo.”64 Bahian modernists, defining themselves for other regions, turned to popular traditions as the core of Bahia’s regional essence. Such concepts of popular traditions, however, often came with their own host of assumptions. To begin with, modernists in Bahia generally deplored the path of progress. Vasconcelos Maia expressed this

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well when he despaired that the local market and its stalls had once been more attractive, at a time when “the hell [diacho] of progress hadn’t dipped its feet into the depths of the market, hadn’t erected those heinous oil deposits of Standard Oil in the sand that used to be the bed of the lovers under the open sky, and the hiding place of runaway boys. The market in the old days was prettier. What will it be in the future?”65 For Maia as for others, Salvador’s best years remained in a past saturated by nostalgia, a vision wary of the intrusion of the modern world. In the end, the work of Carybé raises provocative questions: Do his illustrations complement the texts of the modernists he teamed with, saying what they could not say? Or is he a betrayer of the texts, emphasizing Blackness when they don’t? As with any complicated issue, the answer is no doubt a bit of both. Carybé fit into a scene in which modernists took a new interest in Black and popular culture. Yet his background in depicting Indigenous types and his study of Pierre Verger had also primed him to think of the city in terms of difference and Blackness in a way that broke with the racial silence of the Bahian art world and broke also with the modernist focus on mixture. In the end, Carybé both challenged and reinforced trends within Bahian modernism in complicated ways. Carybé played a primary role in shaping the modernist movement of Bahia and in taking Black culture as his principal subject, but he often veered dangerously close to objectification of Black subjects and to an essentialization of Black life in Bahia. He was part of a modernist movement that saw new space for inclusion of Black life, but he also, like many modernist artists across Latin America, played a role in portrayals of a racial other in stereotypical ways. To claim that Carybé peddled in stereotypes, however, is to forget that he played a large role in creating those stereotypes and that he did so in concert with a much broader cultural scene. I trace this broader scene further in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 5

“Human and Picturesque”: Consolidation in the Bahian Tourist Guides of the 1950s

Accustomed as we are to a representation of Bahian life animated by capoeira, by samba, and by Candomblé, one imagines that the quiet Bahia, serene and tranquil, in [the drawings of] Menocal perhaps depicts another city. Pure deception: it treats only the other side of the same city, the side that would awaken more attention in a son of Boston. José Va ll a da r e s, i n N e e se r a n d M e noc a l , Ba h i a e nc a n ta da

As José Valladares, the director of Bahia’s state museum, observed in 1957, in his introduction to a collection of drawings by the US artist Richard de Menocal, Bahians had by then grown accustomed to a very tightly defi ned representation of Bahian life. Depictions of the city with sedate colonial architecture in tranquil streets now seemed an unexpected surprise, possible perhaps from a visiting artist from Boston but not from a native son of Salvador. Indeed, across visual depictions of the city, a set of archetypes had come to reign supreme in local circles, with images dominated by capoeira, Baianas, Candomblé, and festive life. For Bahian interpreters, it was no longer Salvador’s architecture but the living culture of some of its poorest inhabitants that would create the draw for visitors. Jorge Amado’s focus on Blackness, Pierre Verger’s depictions of a Black folkloric authenticity, and the rise of a regional modernism with Carybé’s arrival had all paved the way for a new identity for Salvador. Yet these figures, though central, were far from alone in their efforts. Rather, their work crystalized a growing consensus in how the city should be depicted, one that gained shape in a variety of guidebooks that emerged at an ever-increasing pace.

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In this chapter, I reveal the growth of this consensus in a stream of guidebooks over the 1950s and show that the trends in the work of Amado, Verger, and Carybé found fi rm roots in a much broader visual culture over the course of the decade. I examine how these trends percolated across other tourist promotions of the 1950s, showing some indecision and diversity at the start of the decade before a consolidation of the trends by its end. I begin by setting the scene with increasing social tensions in Salvador, which might have encouraged the rise of a tourism particularly tied to defending an older way of life and linked to folk traditions. I then turn to a selection of guidebooks from the early 1950s to show how the visual depictions of the artist Carlos Thiré rose to prominence, in many ways paralleling the themes traced by his contemporary, Carybé. As the decade progressed, modernist illustrated guides continued to gain prestige and influence, culminating in two works in 1958 that brought all of the trends of the decade together. I take a closer look at the two guides: one by the Bahians Darwin Brandão and José Motta e Silva and the other by a Spanish journalist, with both illustrated by leading modernists in Bahia, Carlos Bastos and Lenio Braga. I bring these works together with the works of Thiré to consider the tropes and patterns developed during this time as well as the larger importance that guides gained during this era. I conclude the chapter with a few key examples of outliers: authors who relied upon artists outside of Salvador to produce alternate visions of the city that failed to take hold. An examination of their different perspectives shows in new relief what was distinctive about the modernist guides that gained popularity in the 1950s.

The Bahian Enigma The uptick in numbers for modernist guides came partly from the growing importance of tourism in Brazil and within Salvador. International visitors doubled in the 1950s and then again in the next five years as the airways cleared after the war. More significant, however, was a boom in domestic tourism, enabled by the expansion of Brazilian airlines and the growth of highways and automobile culture. In 1951 Salvador created a tourism tax, a tourism council, and a larger, more autonomous municipal tourist office with eleven officials. In 1954, the state would become the fi rst in Brazil to fashion a tourism development plan, and state authorities declared 1956 the year of tour-

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ism.1 By the end of the decade, Bahia attracted roughly thirty thousand visitors a year, with domestic travelers making up the vast majority. Hotels struggled to keep up with the number of guests, with hotel revenue growth in Salvador exceeding even that of Rio de Janeiro. 2 By 1959, an official publication proudly declared that tourism was the new smokestack of Bahia: in short, that tourism had now become an industry and an answer, in part, to the enigma of stalled industrial development. As the 1950s progressed, hopes that petroleum would spur wider economic development had soured. 3 Bahia established a new Commission for Economic Planning (Comissão de Planejamento Econômico [CPE]) in 1955, charged with uncovering how the state had fallen behind the dynamism of the Brazilian Southeast—a process that gained its own shorthand during this time as the “Bahian enigma.” Milton Santos, a young Afro-Bahian geographer, was one of many intellectuals who turned their focus to the enigma and to broader studies of the city of Salvador during this time. Commissioned by the CPE, Santos’s research revealed that the value of industrial production in Salvador was only 3 percent that of the city of São Paulo in 1954.4 In a similar vein, the port, though still active, continued to function in its colonial role as an exporter of primarily agricultural goods. 5 Population increase in the city intensified the social costs of this anemic economic performance. The city’s languorous population expansion over the previous centuries finally jump-started to reveal high rates of growth in the 1940s, primarily resulting from migration to the city by rural people who lacked land and resources.6 These migrations intensified already existing problems of poverty in the city. The 1950 census showed more than 50 percent of Salvador’s working-age population as underemployed or in the informal sector.7 Not surprisingly, a survey of the era further found average income in Salvador to be significantly below average monthly expenses.8 To make matters worse, migration, poverty, and a lack of available housing resulted in a housing crisis, newly visible in the rising numbers of land “invasions” that began in the 1940s.9 Meanwhile, the politics of the 1950s and early 1960s were tense in Bahia. The election for governor in 1954 pitted Antônio Balbino, trained in political science at the Sorbonne and a proponent of industrialization, against Pedro Calmon, the historian who fretted that Afro-Brazilian culture, such as samba, would come to be mistaken for the culture of Brazil as a whole.10 Though Calmon lost the election, he

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received only slightly fewer votes than his opponent (56,000, or 8 percent, fewer), showing that many Bahians might have shared his conservative fears of Blackness playing a central role in Bahia’s image. Politics shifted again at the end of the decade with victories for governors from the opposing party, Juracy Magalhães (1959–1963) and Lomanto Júnior (1963–1967). Both oversaw significant modernizing victories: Magalhães created a major new road linking the upper and lower city; Lomanto Júnior inaugurated the highway from Rio de Janeiro to Bahia in 1963 and created a new industrial complex, which would become the largest in South America.11 All of these projects brought visible symbols of a changing and modernizing city. In fact, the modernization and urban and social upheavals that Salvador experienced in the 1950s set the stage for those who would privilege an older way of life, set explicitly in contrast to the impositions of the modern world. In a twist, those involved in tourism largely turned their backs on promoting modern developments and instead tied the character of the city to its popular or folk culture. Valladares was instrumental in publishing some key volumes on folklore as editor of a museum journal series. Bahian officials commissioned the folklorist Carlos Torres to write a guidebook in 1957, which gained six editions by 1973.12 The municipal director of tourism in this era, Albano Frederico Marinho de Oliveira, was also active in the study of folklore and later served as president of the state’s folklore society. Perhaps the most important collision of folklore, modernism, and tourism came with the next director of tourism, Carlos Vasconcelos Maia (1959– 1964), who accepted his post shortly after publishing a 1958 novel centered around Candomblé. An early leader in the modernist movement and a founder of the Caderno da Bahia, he too would write a tourist guide during his term, and he also published extensively in the local press. The guides of the 1950s, then, must be understood against this backdrop. José Valladares, in his own tourist guide, fretted that tourism might erode “the character of our city, almost by a miracle still conserved in a Brazil whose large cities are turning excessively similar to the big cities of any other part of the world at a great pace.”13 Oliveira, the director of municipal tourism, also worried that traditions might soon be threatened by the imposition of the outside world and by tourism itself. As Oliveira saw it, his biggest task would be “to maintain the call of tradition in Bahia alive and well [bem viva] and not allow it to be extinguished in the face of the nefarious influence of internation-

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alism.”14 Like Valladares, he feared that “traditional” behaviors would be threatened by “modern” intrusions from the outside world.

Carlos Thiré and José Valladares Define Salvador, 1951 As I traced in the previous chapter, the fi rst years of the 1950s brought a bumper crop of illustrated tourist guides by top intellectuals and artists. Already, between 1951 and 1952, Carybé had illustrated three major tourist guides: the ten-volume Recôncavo collection, the guidebook of Odorico Tavares, and José Valladares’s guide to the turban of the Baiana. In this section, I address three additional works published around this same time to trace why another work by Jose Valladares emerged triumphant. José Valladares published a guide in 1951, Bêabá da Bahia, with the illustrator Carlos Thiré, that would come to dominate visions of the city. Its competition included a second guide by municipal authorities in Salvador, written the next year by the folklorist and director of tourism Albano Frederico Marinho de Oliveira, with illustrations by the modernist artist Lygia Sampaio.15 Then, in 1953, another Bahian member of the elite, Weldon Americano da Costa, published a lush, heavy coffee-table guide to Salvador accompanied by his own black-and-white photographs. Only one of these volumes proved significant for the visual register of the city: the work with illustrations by Thiré. Thiré’s work would go on to be endorsed by a massive commemorative volume on the city in 1954, but his drawings, like Carybé’s, continued to circulate more widely. Thiré, along with Carlos Bastos, who illustrated another guide, in 1958, encapsulated the new visual look for the city as Black, festive, and organized in the streets. Before I get to this later consolidation of the city’s visual culture, however, I turn to the more diverse array of portrayals of the city in the early 1950s to examine the tensions of the time and, ultimately, what was edited out. All three texts of the early 1950s revealed significant hesitation in claiming Salvador as a Black city, instead referring to it in terms of racial mixing or, more generally, to its povo. The tensions of the time can be seen clearly in the 1952 volume by Oliveira, which boasted three different prefaces by high-ranking elites who diverged dramatically in how they viewed questions of race.16 The mayor of Salvador, Osvaldo Veloso Gordilho, began by calling Salvador a “theater of intense and lasting fusion of civilizations, races, and religions” with “a

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brilliant and colorful appearance,” phrasing that showed a focus on race mixture but not on Blackness per se. The second introduction, by Luiz Menezes Monteiro da Costa, a history teacher, mentioned race only in the context of Bahia’s colonial past, while neglecting its contemporary social makeup altogether.17 The third introduction, however, by Oliveira, highlighted distinctively Black practices within the framework of folk culture. Oliveira’s introduction undeniably reflected a deeper engagement with Afro-Bahian culture. He made the history of slavery central to his introduction, and Afro-Brazilian cuisine and popular festivals gained chapters of their own alongside others on more traditional topics of monuments, colonial mansions, and churches. This engagement had its limits, however, as Oliveira in general avoided mention of race or African roots, instead attributing Bahian traditions to the culture of the povo as a whole. The tensions of how to depict race continued to plague Oliveira, who in a work promoting tourism a few years later, in 1954, emphasized Salvador’s “manifestations of Black folklore” and boasted of the best popular festivals and the “best terreiros” but concluded by urging tourists “to admire its monuments and its bizarre customs [costumes bizarros].”18 The balance of inclusion with full respect had yet to be achieved. Valladares revealed much of the same ambiguity in his 1951 guide, Bêabá da Bahia, a title that invoked the idea of the ABCs of Bahia. He claimed the city was mestiço, “with a white appearance,” in what might have served as a fitting description for the city’s ruling class but certainly not its poor majority. Lauding racial mixing as the secret to Bahia’s particularly harmonious race relations, he wrote, “Rio, São Paulo, New York, Chicago, are fi lling up with big Blacks [pretalhões] of pure blood, thanks to racial discrimination. Now they have to resolve their ‘big’ problem, one that we have already figured out how to resolve. And with what satisfaction!”19 This lascivious allusion to interracial sex as the way to a whiter future bore much similarity to the focus of Gilberto Freyre. Yet Valladares also gained complexity when he spoke out against racism and took the highly unpopular stance that color prejudice existed, thus tempering considerably the rosy view of inclusion put forth by other Bahians of the era. 20 These contradictions came together in a chapter of Bêabá entitled “Picturesque Bahia.” The chapter contained sections on Candomblé, Bahian cuisine, markets and fairs, traditional fishermen, capoeira, and popular festivals, themes that had been central to the work of Amado, Verger, and Odorico Tavares as well. Yet Valladares made explicit an understand-

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ing that these other authors had also relied upon: he grouped all of these practices as “picturesque,” effectively segregating them from his chapters on the city’s history and arts. In sum, Valladares represented a still contradictory and unresolved middle ground held by many local intellectuals. He incorporated Black and popular culture into his survey of the city, but he demoted it into the somewhat demeaning category of “picturesque” while embracing a white or “mestiço” ideal. The 1953 guide by Costa, City of Salvador: Land of My Heart (Cidade do Salvador: Terra do meu coração), revealed the most conservative of all of these perspectives. Weldon Americano da Costa had direct ties to the Bahian elite, boasting a grandfather who had been a former mayor of the city, and he now made his living as a poet, surely indicating family support of some means. This book had large glossy photographs, with short verses dedicated to the city on each page. While the racial makeup of Salvador’s population as a whole was never mentioned, Costa sexualized the “beautiful and sensual” dark-skinned mestiças (morenas) of its beaches, pledging never to forget their afternoons together.21 Costa’s appreciation apparently only extended to the carnal, however, for when it came to religion, he described Candomblé as a barbaric practice (as I discuss further in chapter 6). All three of these texts stopped well short of declaring Salvador a Black city, of celebrating the city’s Blackness on its own terms, or of allowing a role for African-based practices in the city’s culture. While the guides of this era had come to emphasize Salvador’s cultural life as the center of its charm, all proved tentative in acknowledging the Black roots of such culture. The illustrations for the three works differed dramatically. As mentioned, the work of Thiré would come to be dominant, so I turn fi rst to the two visions that lost out in the process: Oliveira’s 1952 municipal guide and Costa’s text of 1953. At the start of each chapter, Oliveira’s guide featured the artwork of one of Bahia’s few female modernists, Lygia Sampaio, although there was less art included than in many guides of the time. Her drawings overall were notable for stepping away from the colonial portrayal of the city. She was one of the few modernists of the era, for example, to include an automobile in her depiction of the city, a seemingly trivial detail but one that spoke much about the folkloric focus of other artists, who were anxious to prevent intrusions of the modern world (see fig. 5.1). In this realm, Lygia (as she was known) was also distinctive for her decision to stay away from backdrops in her scenes that represented the city in quaint forms.

190 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 5.1.

Lygia Sampaio, chapter opening for municipal tourist guide. Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador and Lygia Sampaio (illustrator), Roteiro turístico da cidade do Salvador (1952). Courtesy of Lygia Sampaio.

Perhaps most unique of all, her portrayal of Blackness, even when engaged in a portrayal of a “typical” Baiana, granted distinctive character to those depicted (see fig. 5.2). Moreover, her use of spare lines was not accompanied by the heavily inked bodies and faces seen elsewhere in the illustrations of both Carybé and Thiré. As a result, she displayed a modernist style less influenced by folk art and, with it, a different sense of race and place. Costa, as mentioned, included his own photographs, along with an illustrated cover of a scene that by now had become iconic: a Baiana standing in front of the Lacerda Elevator. Costa’s photographs primarily depicted views of the city from the sea, along with a few beaches and several scenes with young, white-skinned women as models. The illustrations serving as the chapter divisions, done by Álvaro Zózimo, hewed closely to Costa’s beach focus, with a priority given to tropical scenes and palm trees. While the beach focus and the icon of the

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Baiana in front of the elevator would continue to resonate through later eras, Costa’s view of Salvador as a beach city with young white women never gained traction. 22 Among this trio of works, the illustrations that would become iconic were those of the artist Carlos Thiré, paired with the text of Valladares. Thiré was originally from Rio, but he had exhibited and won a prize at Bahia’s fi rst art salon in 1949, which might have been where Valladares fi rst encountered his work. By this point, Thiré had lived in Salvador for some time and had recently completed a stay in Paris. Just as the “picturesque” and popular culture ultimately played a limited

Figure 5.2.

Lygia Sampaio, chapter opening for municipal tourist guide. Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador and Lygia Sampaio (illustrator), Roteiro turístico da cidade do Salvador (1952). Courtesy of Lygia Sampaio.

192 Selling Black Brazil

role in Valladares’s Bêabá, they also played a less central role in the illustrations. Within the guide, there were no images depicting Candomblé, and Baianas appeared only as part of a scene’s background. Thiré, like Valladares, instead put considerable emphasis on colonial architecture: colonial churches represented almost half of the forty-six illustrations for the book. Also dominant were a variety of cityscapes, with a focus on other colonial buildings and on traditional boats. Capoeira was nowhere to be found, and there were no images of popular religious festivals or processions. For many of the drawings, the presence of humans seemed incidental, the backdrop to an architectural scene: less than half of the images depicted people within them. Those drawings with people, however, introduced a fascinating disparity between author and artist. Valladares’s mestiço focus was betrayed by Thiré’s decision to portray most of the people in these drawings as decidedly Black, a decision brought into even greater contrast by the large white space in the background of the images. The opening to the picturesque chapter, an image depicting a market, shows this contrast at work (see fig 5.3). Faceless Black bodies inhabit a scene full of market stalls where vendors and passersby come together. Black men adorned with straw hats stand at an angle with their shirts open, implying a casual and leisurely stance. A curvaceous woman carries goods on her head through the center, while two Black women, one perhaps a Baiana, converse at the edge of the scene. In all the figures, save perhaps the vendor on the right, Thiré has taken care to ink in arms, legs, and heads with a clear emphasis on Blackness. Thiré’s vision of a Black city gained further endorsement by city officials in the next years. Such approval stood out in a glossy volume published to commemorate São Paulo’s four-hundred-year anniversary in 1954. 23 The rising dominance of Thiré, along with Carybé, emerged clearly across various articles in the promotional volume but especially in the article dedicated to tourism, penned by the municipal director of tourism, Albano Frederico Marinho de Oliveira. Oliveira’s text was accompanied by two drawings of Salvador by Thiré and another from Carybé, alongside a variety of photographs calling attention to capoeira, popular festivals, and modern architecture. In another article in the volume, the visual hierarchies that privileged Thiré and Carybé became even more clear. This article, “Bahia: Berth of Intellectuality,” began by celebrating the city’s municipal guide of 1952 with a photograph of the book, labeled as “one of the most interesting publications of its genre in the country.”24 But another

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Figure 5.3. Carlos Thiré, “Bahia pitoresca” (picturesque Bahia). José Valladares

and Carlos Thiré (illustrator), Bêabá da Bahia (1951). Courtesy of Carlos Artur Thiré.

photo in the article depicting the book’s display in a local bookstore window revealed a paradox. The illustrations used to promote the municipal guidebook were by Thiré and Carybé instead of the book’s own illustrator, Lygia Sampaio. Lygia’s departure from the folkloric emphasis on types placed her work on the margins of Salvador’s new self-fashioned image of festive Black streets. The visions of Thiré and Carybé had come to dominate instead.

Consolidation of the Late 1950s Two works provide a window into the transformations over the decade and the consolidation by the end of the decade of visual portrayals of Salvador as a Black city. In 1958 two important Bahian tourist guidebooks were published, both with prominent modernists as illustrators. The fi rst, Bahia of All the Saints and of All the Demons (Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os demônios), I shall treat only briefly, for its author, Ernesto Caballero, was an outsider to the city. Caballero, a Spanish journalist, spent only a limited time in Salvador. While Caballero’s text cannot be said to represent the intellectual currents in place at the time, the context of its publication was revealing. The Uni-

194 Selling Black Brazil

versity of Bahia chose to translate Caballero’s guide and to publish it in their still-limited line of publications. Perhaps more significant was the inclusion of illustrations by the modernist Lenio Braga (known as Lenio). Given the short stay of Caballero in Salvador, it seems likely that Lenio and the author might never have been in contact with one another directly. Such a scenario indicates not only that local intellectuals took an activist bent in fi nding texts that promoted the city but also that they believed such a work needed modernist art to be complete. Although ultimately Caballero treated Candomblé in exotic and derogatory terms, Lenio translated his depictions into something much more festive and appealing, as I explain in the next chapter. Moreover, the artistic aesthetics of Lenio made Blackness central through the white space used for the background and the dark black ink used for people’s bodies. This same aesthetic emerged as equally important to the other work published that year, City of Salvador: Path of Enchantment (Cidade do Salvador: Caminho do encantamento), written by Darwin Brandão and José Shaw da Motta e Silva. In Path of Enchantment, the journalist Brandão and the free-ranging intellectual Motta e Silva came together with the Bahian modernist Carlos Bastos. The rising significance of the modernist tourism guide can be seen in the work’s exceptional level of promotion. For the book’s launch, the press in Rio reported that three planes full of Rio’s literati, as well as the most iconic figure in Brazilian samba, Pixinguinha (an Afro-Brazilian musician known as the father of samba), disembarked in Salvador. Some were friends of the authors, but all had received a special invitation from Mayor Helio Machado to attend an extended celebration that lasted days. Jorge Amado led the crew around the city on a private tour. The theater director Martin Gonçalves put on a play for the attendees, and local modernists, such as Vasconcelos Maia, Mário Cravo Júnior, and Glauber Rocha, attended the events. 25 Also typical of the era were efforts to emphasize the connections of Brandão and Motta e Silva (as well as those of Salvador more broadly) to folk troubadours, Black music, and Afro-Bahian food throughout the hosted events. Popular city poets who composed verses on the streets led the itinerary of speeches at the launch of the book at a bookstore, accompanied by the cooking of Vitorina, one of the most celebrated Black street vendors of Bahian sweets, who cooked up treats fried in dendê oil. Rio’s visiting entourage visited the church of Bonfi m, famous for its popular ex-votos as well as its connections to Candomblé. Moving on, they made an extended stop at the Model Mar-

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Figure 5.4. Tacun Lecy, contemporary portrait of Arquimedes Gonzaga Nasci-

mento (known as Dezinho), religious authority and Ogã for the candomblé Ilê Axé Icimimó Aganju Didê in Cachoeira, Bahia. Dezinho was credited as the central informant for the 1958 guide by Brandão and Motta e Silva, Path of Enchantment (Cidade do Salvador: Caminho do encantamento). Photograph dated 2013. Courtesy of Seu Dezinho and Tacun Lecy.

ket, admiring Candomblé religious items and commenting upon the exotic nature of the site. And at night the retinue ventured out to “penetrate the nocturnal mystery of the hilly streets,” led by Amado. As might be expected, Rio’s invitees wrote glowing reports of the book and Salvador upon their return.26 Path of Enchantment shows well the multiple influences that came together by this time to form a new sense of Bahian identity. The book opened with three epigraphs: quotes from Carybé and Stefan Zweig (the Austrian writer who had led the way in praising Salvador for foreign audiences in 1941) and a lyric from the Afro-Brazilian sambista Pixinguinha.27 This formula established the authors as tied to the local scene, to larger international currents, and to popular Black culture. Brandão made this last focus even more central to the work by dedicating the book to “Arquimedes Gonzaga Nascimento, the Black [negro] Dezinho, who taught me almost everything about Bahia.”28 Dezinho (see fig. 5.4), a local religious authority, was closely associated

196 Selling Black Brazil

with Aganju Didê–Ici Mimó, a candomblé located in the neighboring town of Cachoeira and generally held up as a beacon of Yoruba traditions. 29 The authors’ acknowledgment of Dezinho as a central informant was intended to offer thanks, of course, but also to add a badge of legitimacy to the work. The introduction to the guide further showcased an element that had become a central badge of authenticity by the late 1950s: an over-the-top endorsement of the book written by Jorge Amado. Although Amado had not lived in the city since 1945 and would not return to live there until well over a decade later, he continued to be an arbiter for depictions of Salvador. The biographies of Brandão and Motta e Silva show some of the deeper influences of the Bahian scene at work. It is worth noting that both had extensive and early contact with Pierre Verger. Brandão had published a book with Verger in 1948 on Bahian cuisine and had written an article with him in 1949 for O Cruzeiro.30 Motta e Silva had worked with Verger at the national heritage society (SPHAN), with close ties to Godofredo Filho, who had directed Motta to give Verger an early tour of the city (Motta also earned special thanks in Amado’s guide for his knowledge of the city). Most importantly, both Brandão and Motta were in early circulation within the Bahian modernist scene. Although there is little biographical information about Motta, it is clear that he had served as a local art critic in Salvador as well as a regular contributor to the Caderno da Bahia, where he wrote a review of an art exhibition for its fi rst issue. He would later marry Djanira, a prominent modernist artist from Rio (whom he met, perhaps, when she came to Bahia in 1947 and painted a Candomblé mural in the home of Jorge Amado), and he appears to have relocated to Rio sometime in the 1950s. Brandão was also part of the Caderno da Bahia cohort and active in the birthing of the modern arts in Bahia, penning an early favorable review of one of Carlos Bastos’s earliest modern art shows.31 In addition, Brandão had a longer history of interaction with Afro-Bahian culture in Salvador. He had made it a point to review a work on AfroBrazilian religion by one of Salvador’s leading scholars, Edison Carneiro (now relocated to Rio), in the first edition of Caderno da Bahia. In personal correspondence with Carneiro at this time, Brandão played an instrumental role in connecting others in Bahia with Carneiro as a resource for “Black themes.”32 Furthermore, he became the distributor and point person in Salvador for the radical Black publication Quilombo, authored by Abdias do Nascimento and Guerreiro Ra-

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mos, leading figures in Rio’s Black intellectual movement. 33 Brandão, then, as a member of the elite, dedicated significant effort to bringing intellectuals in Bahia together around Black topics.34 In many respects, the book by Brandão and Motta would have read as familiar to anyone who had been reading the previous decade’s guides. Like the guidebook of Amado, the guide by Brandão and Motta relied on tropes of mystery. And like Amado’s guide, the volume exposed the poverty of the city, citing the still-shocking tuberculosis rates linked to malnutrition and including, again, the “proletarian” neighborhoods in the city tours. Brandão and Motta departed from Amado, however, in their sexualization of the city’s women. While this conceit had important precedent, Brandão and Motta carried it further than most, portraying the city as a woman who would seduce her visitors and, likewise, as a conquest that every man needed to undertake.35 Although Brandão and Motta highlighted the city’s racial harmony as exceptional, they shied away from characterizing the city as Black. The book’s illustrations, however, went further in this respect. The illustrator, Carlos Bastos, was a Bahian-born artist who had spent time in Paris and was an early fi xture in Bahian modernism. His art for the Brandão and Motta guide reinforced all of the now familiar themes: it showed the city as dominated by anonymous Black bodies, it focused on festive scenes, and it called attention to popular rather than elite ways of life (see fig. 5.5). Bastos relied upon this Bahian modernist style, now well developed, with a few personal touches. His sketches of ornate, rococo carvings, in forms reminiscent of a Catholic altar or church, framed the title of each chapter in a nod to older traditions of book engravings. In another whimsical touch, Bastos played with a traditional practice of having large, ornate letters at the start of the text by placing Baianas leaning upon them. Bastos also put more emphasis on showing clothes as white in his drawings, leading to a curious sense sometimes not only of Black bodies but of disembodied Black body parts, with Black faceless heads floating above white shirts and Black stick arms floating out from white sleeves.

A Celebratory Visual Culture When the artworks of Thiré and Bastos are placed together with the earlier trajectories of Verger and Carybé, it is evident that despite a variety of artistic approaches and some distinct differences, a host

Figure 5.5. Carlos Bastos, festive street scene. Darwin Brandão, José Shaw da

Motta e Silva, and Carlos Bastos (illustrator), Cidade do Salvador: Caminho do encantamento (1958). Courtesy of Mirella Bastos.

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of broader similarities emerge. By this point, it was clear that popular culture and Black culture would have to figure into any intellectual’s guide to the city. Although authors used certain cultural practices, such as Candomblé and capoeira, to stand in for language about race or African culture, most of the authors shied away from conceptions of Salvador as a Black city, or even from discussing African roots. Their oblique language showcases how Brazilians could reference race in a wide variety of ways without necessarily referring to race directly in written form. All of the artists illustrating these guides took depictions of Blackness further than the writers they were paired with had intended. This, then, was why the artistic movement in Salvador was so critical: it made Blackness central in a way that the obliqueness of language of the time could not. While mestiço Bahia gained sway in texts, Black Bahia emerged through the art. These images thus spoke a truth that few texts could directly acknowledge: Salvador was Black. The images also worked to further transform that reality into something romantic, folkloric, and nonthreatening—something that would attract white visitors to experience Black culture. Three elements in the iconography of these guides were central: the changing treatment of Blackness, a focus on Bahia’s urban colonial streets as the chief arena for this Blackness, and the creation of a festive air to the city that played up ideas of an antimodern escape. The artists portrayed Blackness in these depictions in a different way than had been chronicled earlier by the photographer Pierre Verger. Instead, this new modernist generation substituted the humanistic, individualist approach often favored by Verger for an approach that often focused on the masses in largely anonymous terms, intended, in some basic way, to represent the povo, or the popular heart of Bahia. As a whole, the figures had indistinct facial features, and they were often depicted in groups rather than as individuals, except in portrayals of types, such as the Baianas. Thiré’s art made this technique particularly clear. In over fi fty images, there was only one effort by Thiré to portray individual features in his figures. Set in a cabaret, this particular scene also represents the only inside space depicted by Thiré (see fig. 5.6). The drunken slump of the man in his chair and the woman leaning into him seem intended to depict moral depravity, or perhaps a prostitute looking for work. What also made the image unusual was that Thiré intended the illustration to portray a white individual, the only white person in all of his illustrations. As this decision highlighted, while whites were depicted as individuals indoors (even

200 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 5.6. Carlos Thiré, cabaret scene. José Valladares and Carlos Thiré (illustrator), Bêabá da Bahia (1951). Courtesy of Carlos Artur Thiré.

if morally suspect), Black people remained anonymous masses on the streets, as shown in the cityscapes (see figs. 5.7 and 5.8). In a technique later used by Bastos, Thiré used the white background of the page as a contrast to Black figures—figures who remained faceless and were completely inked in to become totally Black. Another feature defi ned the work of these artists for Salvador: an insistence on a traditional, premodern way of life lived outdoors. One of the ironies of the new modernist style used by these artists was that it shied away from portrayals of modern sectors of the city, modern architecture, or symbols of modernity more broadly. The cover art of Bastos for Path of Enchantment by Brandão and Motta e Silva expressed these trends well (see fig. 5.9). The sketch shows pottery piled up as if at a market, with a faceless Baiana in its midst, carrying a large pottery urn on her head. Pigs and stray dogs dominate the bottom of the page, giving the impression of a decidedly traditional way of life, even as utility poles and wires run through the outdoor area to

Figure 5.7. Carlos Thiré, street scene in colonial downtown. José Valladares and

Carlos Thiré (illustrator), Bêabá da Bahia (1951). Courtesy of Carlos Artur Thiré.

202 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 5.8. Carlos Thiré, street scene in colonial downtown. José Valladares and

Carlos Thiré (illustrator), Bêabá da Bahia (1951). Courtesy of Carlos Artur Thiré.

connect to the city above. Outdoor market scenes, with roaming animals, people transporting loads on their heads, Baianas, and lowerclass dress, were visual symbols that communicated clearly the vision that Salvador was not a modern metropolis but rather a city still dominated by rustic wares, traditional forms of labor, and anonymous Black inhabitants.

Figure 5.9. Carlos Bastos, cover for Darwin Brandão, José Shaw da Motta

e Silva, and Carlos Bastos (illustrator), Cidade do Salvador: Caminho do encantamento (1958). Courtesy of Mirella Bastos.

204 Selling Black Brazil

In part because of this antimodern aesthetic, the geographic focus of the guides moved almost exclusively to the colonial sector of the city and especially to its cobblestoned streets. The urban scene depicted in these images became tightly edited in terms of geography. Artists limited themselves primarily to the colonial streets of the old city center and left out more modern street scenes, as well as other markers of modernity, such as cars or other modern transport. The heart of the city, then, existed in the colonial streets and in an era intended to be as free from modern intrusions as possible. It is worth considering the possibility that this focus was simply the inevitable result of having colonial architecture in the city’s historic center. Modern buildings and buildings from the nineteenth century, however, also in Salvador’s downtown, appeared hardly at all. As noted, beaches too received comparatively short shrift. The end result, depictions of anonymous Afro-Bahians placed in a colonial cityscape, meant an inevitable association with an earlier time. These depictions did not show labor or the difficulties of daily life in the way that Amado’s illustrator, Manuel Martins, had depicted in his street scenes. Instead, they focused on popular culture, and especially Black culture, portrayed in folkloric terms. Indeed, for illustrators of the 1950s, the central focus of the city became its festivals, with an overall focus on recreation and leisure. Practical city business transactions, daily life waiting for buses, and indoor scenes did not exist. There was no real family focus here, and no hint of domestic life. A few exceptions came with Carybé’s depictions of Baianas cooking indoors, but such scenes failed to bring any new complexity to the lives of Black women. Finally, the city of Salvador emerged in this era as eminently light and festive. As I discussed in chapter 2, Amado and Martins had portrayed the city as dark and somewhat derelict, certainly a viable strategy for those who sought to call attention to the city’s mystery and poverty. As should now be clear, no other artist followed this path. Instead, the city became open, light, and charming, transforming from a troubled city to a romanticized vision. The importance of such choices is brought home by a look at the cover of Brandão and Motta e Silva’s guide, which reversed the color scheme of a drawing from Bastos within the book. This resulted in an entirely black cover, with a white sketch in relief (see fig. 5.9).36 Such an aesthetic choice, similar to the woodcut illustrations of Martins, made the city appear dark and foreboding. The lightness within the pages of the book brings into greater contrast how important these light backgrounds were. As the city became more

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festive, represented by quick lines and white space, the color of people’s skin gained greater contrast. A colonial cityscape populated largely by Black figures, Salvador became in these works, defi nitively, a Black city.

Outliers: The Road Not Taken A few examples of guides and artists that might be considered outliers bring the artistic currents of Salvador into greater relief. SPHAN produced a guide to Salvador in 1960, This Is Bahia! (Isto é a Bahia!), as part of a nationwide series. This type of serial publication demanded some uniformity, and the photos used for the volume revealed a fairly standard perspective on colonial architecture in photos taken by the European-born immigrant photographers Erich Hess and Alice Brill, the former with a long record of work with SPHAN.37 The vast majority (three-fourths) of over one hundred images appearing in this volume showed either the exteriors of churches or artistic details from their interiors. This perspective, so dominant in earlier framings of the city, was accompanied by text by the Bahian Edgard de Cerqueira Falcão that sounded similarly dated, framing the city in terms of tradition and progress.38 Human depictions within This Is Bahia! often relied on portrayals of particular types in familiar ways. Many of the captions identified individuals as typical figures in the city, such as the image labeled “authentic Black women of Bahia” (or in the translation used in the text, “typical colored women of Bahia”). 39 Yet in their interest in capturing the reality of such types, SPHAN photographers also included images that strayed far from the focus of the modernists: a few images showed Black individuals stretched to their limit in hard physical labor, such as tobacco processing.40 While outsider interest in documenting the city led to a continued reliance on a classification of types, the photographers’ illustrations also incorporated a somewhat wider range of activity than the modernists had depicted. A second guidebook, Souvenir of Bahia (Lembrança da Bahia), published in 1962, included an overview of the city by the modernist novelist Carlos Vasconcelos Maia, who had recently become the new municipal director of tourism. Maia took many expected paths, highlighting race mixture and the city’s “racial and social fraternity” that made cordiality its guiding principle.41 As in other narratives of this time, Salvador’s character, in Maia’s view, came from its street life and folk practices; he made Candomblé a centerpiece in his depiction of

206 Selling Black Brazil

the city. But such practices were often depicted in patronizing ways. He described the Model Market, for example, as “one of the most curious and exotic sites of this exotic and curious city.”42 He also echoed the sexualization of the city depicted by Brandão and Motta e Silva, describing the city as a mulata to be possessed.43 While Maia’s text fit within contemporary currents in Bahia, it fit poorly with the black-and-white photographs that accompanied the text, pointing to the different aesthetics and priorities of his publisher in Rio. The focus of the text was betrayed in large part by the images, and the text lost a considerable amount of its interpretative force without Bahian modernist illustrations alongside. The photographs did not convey the sexualization of the city in the way that modernist drawings might have (imagine Carybé’s illustrations, for example), nor was Maia’s focus on folk culture well reflected in the black-and-white photographs of the modern buildings of the city. The volume’s photo of the outside of a candomblé did not match the folkloric textual description (see fig. 6.11 in chapter 6). In contrast to the modernist illustrations of the era, the photography revealed the site’s poverty and its isolation while conveying none of the festive religious force portrayed elsewhere (as I explore in the next chapter). A fi nal outlier, a guide produced by the National Council of Geography in 1956, calls attention to all of the conventions so dominant in this larger generation of guides. With the prosaic title of Bahia: Excursion Guide No. 6 (Bahia: Guia da excursão no. 6), the volume was one of several book-length editions prepared for the eighteenth International Congress of Geography, the fi rst to be held in Latin America and in the tropics. Written by geographers rather than novelists, and perhaps also by Brazil’s southeasterners rather than Bahians, the guide to Salvador took a much less rosy view of the city than Bahian authors and illustrators typically displayed. Published outside of the tourist genre, to some degree, as it was not explicitly aimed at promoting the city, the geography council’s guide showed the more critical views of the city that might come from different genres, perspectives, and influences. Some of the framing of Salvador was familiar. An anonymous author praised the city as Brazil’s best representation of the “fusion of the races,” although the author neglected to mention any Indigenous role in this mixture. In a well-worn vein, the text remarked upon the “conservative and nostalgic spirit in which tradition conserves the customs, habits, and popular festivals that make the city of Salvador the most Brazilian of Brazilian cities.”44 Yet the idea of nostalgia as under-

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pinning tradition also hinted at a more critical view of Bahia’s embrace of the past. This critical view was unleashed with some force as the guide moved to discuss the living conditions of the city itself. In terms of urban planning, Excursion Guide No. 6 portrayed Salvador in pessimistic terms. The recurrent phrase used in the guide to describe the city’s growth and development was “disorderly,” a decidedly negative take on what tourism promoters called the charm of colonial streets. Most of all, the authors highlighted poverty and popular housing as pressing problems that were still unresolved. According to their mapping and calculations, the population living in poverty represented not only the most numerous sector of the city but also the most rapidly growing.45 In the Afro-Bahian neighborhood of Liberdade, they reported, “there are no roads, no pavement, no water service or drainage.” In the colonial center, old mansions had been converted into tenements with the “most precarious conditions of comfort and hygiene.”46 Perhaps most telling was the citation that median life expectancy in the city was thirty-five years, a shocking statistic that placed Salvador at the bottom in a ranking of Brazil’s cities.47 With no folkloric illustrations, the guide instead provided maps of the rising density of poverty across the city. It is possible to read a racialized dismay in the description of the “disorderly” ways of Salvador and to see the authors’ concern with hygiene as guided as much by middle-class norms as real problems of public health. Yet these statistics certainly had never been mentioned by the modernists, who tended instead to romanticize the lives of the poor. This different focus was a result of the guide being written by outsiders who were not members of or travelers in Bahia’s modernist movement and who were not committed to promoting the city. Although Excursion Guide No. 6 paid lip service to the idea of Bahia as representative of racial harmony, it stressed, with much greater urgency, the city’s poverty and problems.

Conclusion The city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia and former capital of Brazil, is being changed by the construction of modern houses and buildings and going through great progress, owing to the oil wells recently discovered and the oil refinery already going at great capacity. “Ba h i a ,” Br a sil Mode r no 1 (Sep t e m be r 1951)

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The fi rst volume of the national magazine Brasil Moderno had heralded Salvador in 1951 as a busy modern industrial depot, with oil— the great modern wonder—driving the new economy. In fact, this was not altogether wrong. Petroleum did fundamentally change the city and its environs, bringing new employment, new investment, and new infrastructure. But the contrast remains that few in Salvador chose to promote the city in this way through the 1950s. Part of this reluctance, of course, comes from the fact that the sources I have been examining are tourist guides, and petroleum held little interest for the visitor. Nonetheless, the focus on Salvador as modern was exceptional, unusual, and contrary to the trends I’ve been tracing in these chapters. This focus on the modern came instead from magazine writers in Rio, and it showcased what was distinct about Bahian efforts.48 While modernity and progress continued to be the markers of success by promoters of Brazil in other regions, such conceptualizations proved a contrast to efforts promoted by modernists in Bahia. In fact, not only were modernists in Bahia out of step with contemporaneous promotions of Salvador as a rising industrial power, they were also out of step with art trends more generally across Brazil and the rest of Latin America during this time. Modernist movements in São Paulo had largely dissipated by the mid-1950s. With its origins in the early 1920s, modernism had by this point lost its currency. This was also true across much of Latin America, which in the 1950s and 1960s began instead to prioritize abstractionism and geometric forms. Concretism, a trend in which artists sought to break with symbolism and representations of reality, had hit Brazil’s Southeast in a dynamic way in the fi rst years of the 1950s, with artists from Rio de Janeiro such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica gaining international acclaim. By the end of the decade, Concretism was undergoing its own forms of renovation, already moving into a second stage. Just as the rest of the art world turned away from modernism, away from the figurative representations of reality, and away from symbolism, Bahian artists, and their supporters in Salvador, found new meaning in these trends. Bahian modernism reflected an explicit program of preservation, seeing the core of Bahian identity as under threat from modernization. This program of preservation portrayed Black culture as folklore, linking the culture with a preindustrial way of life in opposition to the modern world. Modernists used modern forms and modern styles in an attempt to rescue what they worried was a disappearing era. Just as the modernists in the Vargas era had been some of the leaders in the

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preservation movement that created the National Heritage and Patrimony Foundation, so the modernists in Bahia looked to the past as a symbol of a true Brazilian identity that was threatened by the industrial and international world. The Bahian modernists engaged in work that was often frankly nostalgic and idyllic, and such works often glossed the tensions of this way of life. Black bodies, the central component in this vision, were limited to existence as types or as anonymous festive masses, floating in time and space on colonial, premodern streets. These artists also went further in recognizing Blackness in the city than did the authors they collaborated with, many of whom insisted on mixture or mestiço roots for the city. It is also possible, of course, to interpret the street scenes in positive terms as portrayals of daily life, grounding the city in Black lived reality. This interpretation dominated at the time and has lingered in Bahian framings of the artists discussed here. While this is also in some ways true, it is important to think back to the earlier precedents I traced in chapter 1. Turn-of-thecentury authors who wanted to emphasize modern progress used photos of grand buildings and modern cityscapes. The focus on the folk in the 1950s made the people and culture of Salvador picturesque, relocating the city’s epicenter to its colonial streets. While this stage was in some ways inclusionary, it portrayed Afro-Bahians as part of a festive city or colonial traditions but not necessarily as part of the modern future of the city. Salvador remained a very unequal city, where poverty and the picturesque often became confused and where modern innovations such as running water, literacy, and political rights were often perceived to be at odds with Bahia’s traditions. Images of Black figures immersed in a happier, simpler way of life relied upon racial stereotypes to tie Black individuals to a way of life unsuited and generally at odds with modernity and, perhaps more troubling, placed them outside of political life. Returning in some ways to nineteenth-century urban types, the modernists proved limited in their sense of how Blackness might be represented in the city.

CHAPTER 6

All Roads Lead to Black Rome: How the Religion of “Secrets” Became a Tourist Attraction

One should never pass up the opportunity if a negra de acarajé offers you a tour of the Orixás. Da rw i n Br a n dão a n d José Sh aw da Mot ta e Silva , Cida de do Sa lva dor: C a m i n ho do e nc a n ta m e n to (1958)

Xangô is very satisfied with the visit. M ã e Se n hor a , l e a de r of t h e c a n dom bl é Opô A fonjá , i n r e sponse to Je a n-Paul Sa rt r e a n d Si mon e de Be au voi r’s 1960 v isi t to h e r t e r r ei ro

By the 1950s, various promoters of Salvador had come to frame the city in terms of its Blackness for an audience across Brazil. These intellectuals and artists came from varying regional backgrounds, but they shared among them European heritage and a white appearance, with only a few exceptions. This meant that the depictions of Salvador as a Black city, with all of the limitations and tropes I have already examined, came primarily from white pens and white imaginations. What, then, was the Black majority’s response to such transformations? Although the lack of a Black press in the city and the high levels of illiteracy across the city have complicated matters for historians intent on understanding Black perspectives in Bahia, the guides themselves offer tantalizing evidence. Two Afro-Bahian cultural groups became integrated into the tourist narratives of the 1950s, indicating significant levels of engagement and gaining new visibility and status in the process. The two groups were the local practitioners of the martial art of capoeira and the religious community of Candomblé, a faith established under slavery with roots in both Africa and Brazil.1

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The route to visibility for these two groups took very different paths. Although capoeira gained status over the 1950s, it failed to enter the realm of the tourist texts in significant ways. Authors of tourist guides often mentioned capoeira in passing, and artists played some role in popularizing it, particularly Pierre Verger and Carybé. Yet capoeira never entered these texts as a central topic. Powerful divisions among capoeiristas themselves might have had some role in this, preventing a united front of promotion for the practice, as traced by Ana Paula Höfling. In addition, although capoeira would eventually gain its own spot in the regular offerings of the tourist office, it had a difficult time shedding associations of the practice with violence, gaining mainstream acceptability only in the mid-1950s and 1960s. 2 As a whole, the Black physical masculinity of capoeira might have presented more difficulties in representing a city than the vision of Candomblé as festive female religiosity. In some sense it is tempting to tie the rise of Salvador as a tourist destination with the rise of public recognition for Candomblé. In this scenario, tourism for the city became possible only as Candomblé, and assumedly Black culture more broadly, gained new respect. While this is in part true, the paths of tourism and Candomblé have been not merely parallel but intertwined. As I argue, the rise of tourism in the 1940s and 1950s did not merely follow larger trends in the acceptance of the religion, it helped create them. Furthermore, Candomblé practitioners themselves actively participated in forging this new frontier. Religious leaders played a critical role in allowing tourists access to their terreiros, or temples, and in the process often further consolidated power and esteem both within the Candomblé community and beyond. The rise of tourism, and the texts central to it, provided a critical element in the ascension of Candomblé in the public sphere, just as the religion itself became a central axis for the rise of Salvador’s cultural tourism.3 The success of Candomblé in entering the mainstream is striking, particularly given the important historical and religious rationales for secrecy within the faith. In a remarkable transformation, a faith that began the twentieth century deemed witchcraft and censored by the police ended the century as the ultimate symbol of Bahia itself.4 This transformation can be traced in the tourist guides over the course of the 1950s and into the 1960s. As Darwin Brandão and José Motta e Silva’s guide emphasized, the tourist should be sure to accept an invitation to a candomblé, particularly if offered by a “negra de acarajé.”

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Here the authors coyly made reference to one of the most powerful religious leaders in the city, Mãe Senhora, who also maintained her own side business as a food vendor.5 Such open invitations to a religion long forced to dissemble for authorities, and deeply protective of ritual practice, at fi rst seem surprising. Much knowledge of the religious practice was only accessible to those at the very top of the religious hierarchy. The open invitations fit, however, within larger patterns of change under way in the mid-twentieth century, changes helped, in no small part, by the endorsements given to the religion by the modernist tourist guides. The illustrations for these guides were instrumental in fostering the rise of a public profile for Candomblé. Long-standing resistance to photography within the religion meant that modernist illustrators came to play a particularly important role as mediators for a new wider audience. Artists boasted a freedom of expression that worked in their favor, allowing them to depict ceremonial festivities, trances, and the larger sense of community that were otherwise difficult to capture due to religious restrictions on photography. The ideals of secrecy and the demands that the nighttime practices of the religion put upon the stilllimited photographic technology of the time gave artists an advantage in portraying Candomblé. The images that emerged under modernist pens portrayed the religion as festive, and the artists’ folkloric focus removed the edge from the “savagery” insults levied by racist observers in the early twentieth century. Animal sacrifice, still often controversial among outside, white audiences, now slipped from the visual narrative in favor of dance, ritual, and drums. Indeed, the openness to tourism during this time helped build back respectability after a series of sensationalized photographic depictions of Candomblé in the international and national press in 1951 scandalized religious faithful (I treat this representation later in the chapter). As a whole, artists edited out reference to sacrifice, blood, and practices that still held the potential to offend middle-class readers or to cast doubts upon the religion’s legitimacy. In the hands of the modernists, then, the religion became both more folkloric and festive as well as more sanitized. Cleansed of any notion of the poverty that surrounded the terreiros, the artists’ illustrations instead portrayed dancers lost in the white space of the page. In taking out any depiction of audience and any depiction of the tourists, the artists also reinforced ideas of purity. Such a vision affi rmed ideas of a practice untarnished by outside eyes and untarnished by tourism and modernity itself. Can-

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domblé leaders gathered modernists close to them, and in the process, whether by intention or not, they assisted in a public relations campaign that by the end of the decade had achieved substantial success. Although it is common to see the rise of public Candomblé as a product of the 1960s or 1970s, scholars have begun to question such timing.6 As Lisa Castillo argues, the 1930s and 1940s brought a new recognition by religious leaders of the power of the press as well as the power of ethnographic studies to bring new respect to the religion.7 For Paul Johnson, the period after 1940 marked the birth of a public Candomblé, although Roger Sansi proposes that the decade of the 1950s initiated a commodification of Candomblé in which the religion increasingly became a public good.8 This chapter thus follows these scholars in situating the rise of public acceptance of Candomblé earlier than often acknowledged. I also argue that the linking of Candomblé and tourism in the late 1960s and 1970s (as traced eloquently by Jocélio Teles de Santos) had its origins much earlier.9 Mattijs van de Port has observed that indications of Candomblé’s rising public acceptance can be seen in early tourist guides, beginning with the guide of Jorge Amado.10 This chapter takes a closer look at the religion’s changing status within the guides over time. I begin by establishing the legal precepts of repression used against Candomblé. I then use the tourist texts to point to transformations in the religion in the 1950s that have gone unnoticed by scholars, in terms of both Candomblé’s numerical expansion of temples and its religious practice. In the process, I argue that links were developed between the religion and tourism much earlier than scholars have generally considered and that the two expanded in tandem. I then turn to the active roles taken by religious leaders to bring artists and intellectuals, many of them authors or illustrators of tourist guides, in closer contact with the religion during this time. I argue that the tourist guides were used strategically by the religious community as part of a new concern with reforming their long-denigrated public standing—a strategy that proved remarkably successful. Finally, I turn to the guides themselves as a way to trace the changing attitudes toward Candomblé in the city, culminating in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the religion had become deeply identified with Salvador itself. A casual visitor in these later years found a city in which malls, beauty salons, and even gas stations boasted the names and often the iconography of the deities of Candomblé.11 I propose not only that the tourist guides show evidence of a growing public role for the religion in the

214 Selling Black Brazil

city but, more centrally, that the guides helped forge this public recognition. And equally important in the process, the guides’ illustrations served to distill the idea of inclusion of Candomblé in Bahia’s visual repertoire and consolidated the idea, yet again, of Salvador as a Black, festive city. All of these ideas came to resonate powerfully in the national imagination as the city became the embodiment of Brazil’s racial democracy and an exoticized location for African-based culture.

Repression, Growth, and Competition The generally accepted history of Afro-Brazilian religion posits that the fi rst candomblé in Brazil, Engenho Velho (also known as Ilê Iyá Nassô, or Casa Branca), was founded in Bahia by Yoruba speakers in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. From this house two other branches developed, Gantois in the mid-nineteenth century (also known as Ilê Iyá Omin Axé Iyamassé) and later, in 1910, Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, both of which would continue to emphasize their African, and especially their Yoruban, roots.12 Historical research has complicated this narrative, showing earlier foundations by Africans outside of the Yoruban tradition, as well as critical practices developed in the context of slavery and Brazil, even as African belief systems continued to be important.13 All would agree that in the midst of slave society, the world of Candomblé provided an alternate space of meaning for peoples heavily repressed and often denigrated in their everyday lives.14 This alternate space grew to be much larger, incorporating a diverse array of religious practices within the umbrella of Candomblé, despite the continued primacy of these three early terreiros, or temples. A broad religious terrain, though richly varied, was united by a belief in interventionist gods who actively entered the world, commemorating them in ways that shared broad similarities if not the same pantheon or rituals. Authorities recognized the power that this alternate worldview offered and accordingly viewed the religion as a threat to the established order, often deeming it witchcraft and restricting its practice in a variety of ways. While the 1890 constitution and all constitutions to follow technically guaranteed freedom of religion, the elite found other ways to repress Candomblé through a strategic use of the penal codes. They wielded bans on witchcraft, magic, and quackery with a heavy hand that cared little for distinctions between such ideas and the legitimate practice of the religion. And authorities continued to regu-

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late and repress even the most basic elements of the religion. A 1934 law, for instance, set up oversight by the federal police as well as Bahian authorities, which required participants to appeal to the police for permits for any celebrations of festivals and drumming.15 Because Candomblé did not break free from such permitting restrictions until 1976, these regulations opened up a world of potential abuses as well as a tenuous legal existence. Officials could deny permit requests arbitrarily, and temples often suffered frequent police raids, depending on the police supervisor in charge. Although the religion had considerable emphasis on secrecy within its doctrine, police repression and unrestricted violence also played an early role in making practitioners guarded in the information they shared with a broader public. Public recognition and acceptance began to shift slowly but surely in the Vargas years (1930–1945), in part due to the new emphasis on Brazil as a mestiço nation with African roots. One of the most formative battlefields for this acceptance was the second Afro-Brazilian Congress, held in 1937 in Salvador and organized by the Afro-Bahian ethnologist and modernist Edison Carneiro.16 With Carneiro leading the way, the congress established a critical endorsement of Candomblé as a legitimate religion deserving of respect by scholars and the broader public. Moreover, Candomblé practitioners themselves took a leading role in the congress as experts in the religion, contributed to the proceedings, and allowed the public to access a series of ceremonies across the city. The congress ended with the formation of a new organization, the Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects, to be led by Carneiro, intended to gather practitioners together and to help protect them from abuses by the police. The congress marked the beginning of increased attention from intellectuals and academics, who alternately framed Candomblé as a religion and as a representation of folklife. In earlier decades, scholars such as Nina Rodrigues, Manuel Querino, Edison Carneiro, and to a limited degree Arthur Ramos had all circulated within the world of Candomblé, asking questions, conducting interviews, and writing up assessments that varied in their degree of support and condescension. Mário de Andrade sent a collector of folklore to Salvador’s AfroBrazilian Congress in 1937 who returned to São Paulo with a collection composed exclusively of Candomblé religious objects. Musicologists recorded Candomblé music during the same visit as well. At roughly this same juncture, academics from the United States arrived wielding recording equipment, interviewing informants, and photographing par-

216 Selling Black Brazil

ticipants. Donald Pierson was perhaps one of the fi rst Americans to engage seriously with Candomblé leaders, and Melville Herskovits, Ruth Landes, Franklin Frazier, and Lorenzo Turner delved further into the religious terrain in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Although scholars debate the ultimate impact of academics on the religion itself, my interest here is not to enter into that debate but rather to emphasize that Candomblé was far from isolated. Instead, the religion had a longer history of relying upon, and often benefiting from, allegiances and cooperation with outsiders of various sorts.17 A more complicated picture of Candomblé’s path over the twentieth century emerges if we reassess the critical decades of the 1940s and 1950s using statistics, unknown to historians thus far, from the tourist guides of the era (see fig. 6.1). Such numbers should, of course, be regarded as mere estimates, for they indicate official counts for temples registered with the police—surely an undercount of actual numbers. These same official counts, however, are what scholars have been forced to rely on across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until the religion was legalized in 1976. They provide, despite their imperfect nature, a fairly consistent way to track change over time. Without the statistics provided by the guides, the lack of data for the thirty-year period from 1937 to 1969 meant that historians were forced to conclude that the period demonstrated a slow increase in the number of temples over time. When we add in the new numbers provided by tourist guides, however, it is possible to see that there was perhaps an unusual peak in the number of temples in the 1940s and 1950s, one that then took a sharp decline with the start of the military dictatorship in 1964. In fact, these new figures completely change our understanding of the growth rate of the religion over time. Before this new data, the period from 1969 to 1981 appeared to demonstrate the highest annual expansion of registered temples. With more complete data, it is clear instead that the highest annual rates of expansion for all of the twentieth century occurred during the period from 1944 to 1956, with the period of 1969 to 1981 a close second in rates of expansion. Whether in terms of the numbers of temples or the rate of annual growth, the transformation during the 1940s and 1950s was impressive. The period before the military’s 1964 coup represented a dramatic time of expansion for the religion, one that unfortunately suffered initial setbacks with the onset of dictatorship. This representation fits more generally with what we know or might imagine about these periods. It is known, for example, that tourist

Percent annul growth rate in number of candomblés

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20 15 10 5 0 1888

1937

1944

1956

1957

1969

1981

-5 -10

Year With Tourist Guide Data

Without Tourist Guide Data

The dark line of this graph shows new patterns of expansion and decline in the number of candomblés once tourist guide data is included. The light line does not include tourist guide data and thus assumes a steady annual growth rate of 4.8 percent for the years 1937 to 1969, based on trends from the previous period. This annual rate of growth, applied steadily, would have reached the same point but with a very different trajectory, as the graph displays. See appendix for data and sources. Figure 6.1. Differences in annual rate of growth for number of registered candomblés, with and without tourist guide data, 1888–1981.

guides and other cultural indicators seem to show a growing public acceptance of Candomblé over the 1940s and 1950s, as I trace here. And we might well imagine that in the aftermath of dramatic political upheaval, particularly the escalated dictatorial repression brought about by 1969 (known as the Fifth Institutional Act), candomblés without high-profi le protectors might have either been forced into greater hiding or destabilized altogether. Thus, the history of Candomblé during the critical middle years of the twentieth century has in fact been much more turbulent than historians have understood. Most central for my purposes here is the indication of the tremendous boom and expansion of the religion in the postwar decades before 1964. While scholars have traced how Candomblé won critical victories of acceptance in the world of academia, this striking period of victory in the wider world has been little examined. The rapid period of growth of Candomblé in the postwar era suggests two critical conclusions. First, that there was a rising acceptance of Candomblé. This

218 Selling Black Brazil

was due in part, as I discuss in this chapter, to the ongoing efforts of Mãe Senhora and her leadership in the prestigious terreiro of Opô Afonjá (one of the Yoruba temples held to be the original three). In addition, however, this rapid expansion of the religion raises the possibility of a growing sense of competition among candomblés as the religious field became much more crowded. Leading candomblés took more proactive measures to win prestige and acceptance for their particular terreiros, intensifying rivalries with a decades-long history.18 Modernist figures and their tourist guides played a critical role in both of these areas, making Candomblé a central part of the city narratives as well as reinforcing a developing hierarchy of status in this increasingly crowded religious terrain. Beyond these new numbers, other textual sources, also largely unexamined by historians, reinforce these conclusions and highlight the changes that were under way by the late 1940s. These sources are the statutes of the 1946 organization of Candomblé that eclipsed the earlier Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects, formed in 1937. This new organization, known as the Bahian Federation of Afro-Brazilian Religion, established governing statutes that are particularly revealing of the concerns of the era to consolidate power and prestige. While the original 1937 union had been established in part to police the religion from within, it had generally acknowledged a plurality of faiths and, within its very name, had envisioned itself as a union of “sects.” The understanding of plurality was further elaborated in its statutes, which defi ned Candomblé as “various African sects subdivided from the religious forms brought from Africa. This intellectual heritage, although fractionated and subdivided, has rights to exist.”19 Not only did the name of the new federation of 1946, in contrast, replace the plural concept of “sects” with the singular term “religion,” a terminology more fitting to the time, but the language of its statutes further reinforced this vision of one unified faith and eschewed any notion of plurality. The federation would maintain, it declared, one single religion, not a subdivided one. Along these lines, the federation also claimed, as had its predecessor, the right to police its members, this time framed as “a permanent and rigorous supervision and disciplinary control.”20 By the mid-1940s, a concept of Candomblé as a unitary religion, intent on creating adherence to singular norms, not only signaled an attempt to make the faith more accepted by outsiders but also communicated insider efforts to enforce the dominance of the most powerful Yoruba-based terreiros, giving them the mandate to restrict and police rival members of the faith.

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Equally significant were indications of a broader public relations campaign, which came through in the 1946 regulatory code. The fi rst statutes set out a forceful policy of controlling information in the public sphere, while a later group of statutes developed a full agenda of proactive publicity. In the fi rst set of statutes, the federation declared its responsibility to protest, in front of public authorities, “actions and practices clearly prejudicial to the interests and dignity of the religion which could compromise its esteem and its traditions” or cause a loss of “public credibility.” This same concern echoed in another statute, which called for the federation to launch proceedings against any publications “that came to distort the rites and beliefs of the religion.” Likewise, the group sought to restrict representations of the religion in carnival and also sought to prohibit “under any pretext, artistic spectacles and folkloric exhibitions of whatever nature, no matter who creates them, whether a member of the federation or not.”21 In short, the federation took an active stance on controlling the portrayal of Candomblé and limiting distortions of it in the outside world. A more proactive stance on the matter of controlling misunderstandings of the religion was also outlined in other statutes, which mandated the federation to “control and disseminate [divulgar] publications which divulge the Afro-Brazilian religion with exactitude and fidelity, respecting, however, the fundamentals of its rituals which cannot and should not be profaned.” In other words, although religious secrets should be maintained, the group imagined a series of broadly promoted publications for the public that would help to guard against misuse and misunderstandings of the religion in society. This agenda for a broader public relations strategy was taken further by the dictate that the group should “collaborate with public powers” for the “well-being of the community.”22 In sum, what stands out from the foundation of the 1946 group is how deeply they were concerned with both policing internal infractions in a religion they defi ned as unitary and uniform as well as restricting misinformation and misuse of their symbology. The group planned to counteract such misinformation efforts with a more controlled broadcast of their true aims and objectives. Modernists, sympathetic to these broader concerns, would seek to help the leaders in these efforts. And religious leaders, at least in some cases, seemed particularly predisposed in this era to undertake a broader campaign of understanding. While the alliance worked in many senses, the concern about the mistaken conflation of Candomblé with folkloric spectacles unfortunately would get lost in translation, as I will show by the end of the chapter.

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The federation’s interest in broader alliances reflected an agenda that had been building for some time. The 1930s kicked off two decades of intense efforts by some of the most powerful candomblés to build larger social networks, focused increasingly on connections with the white elite. These were established especially through honorific titles granted to outsiders, known as Ogãs and, in the case of Opô Afonjá, Obás. While early social networks had focused on incorporating academic sponsors into the religion, this next wave of action took aim at a broader public sphere. This broader sphere came increasingly to encompass Bahian modernists engaged in the promotion of tourism. These modernists became sponsors and allies of the religion in striking and very public ways. While the modernists were eager to link themselves to popular culture as a mark of their own authenticity, the candomblés themselves took a leading role in the alliances. One of the most critical actions taken by leaders in this respect was the naming of Ogãs, members of a terreiro who might become incorporated into the religion and hold a formal position but without undergoing initiation rites. The title granted added status to the individual selected, as well as both honorific and practical advantages to the candomblé itself. 23 Ogãs were expected to help in fi nancing ceremonies and, more broadly, to serve as representatives in the secular world, a practice that appears to have dated back to the nineteenth century, when such sponsorship was especially valuable in a hostile climate. 24 While the position of Ogã was common across the many different types of candomblé in Bahia, one terreiro undertook a new innovation in the 1930s that built upon the position but took it much further, establishing significantly more alliances in the process. This was Opô Afonjá, led by Mãe Aninha from its founding in 1910 until her death in 1938. Under Aninha, and with the help of the formidable figure of Martiniano de Bonfi m (an Afro-Bahian religious expert who spent considerable time in Nigeria), by the mid-1930s the terreiro had introduced a practice of having twelve ministers attached to Xangô, one of the gods. 25 As Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, Mãe Senhora’s son (known as Mestre Didi), described it in his history of the candomblé, the practice marked the “reestablishment of the old tradition” from Africa and “came to give even greater prestige to the Opô Afonjá and to demonstrate the qualities and knowledge” of Aninha. 26 The ministers, known as Obás, came primarily from within the ranks of the candomblé; all were Ogãs, including many religious elders.27

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Part I of the diagram shows that Mãe Aninha created twelve new ministers known as the Obás of Xangô. Each numbered box represents an Obá. Part II demonstrates the expansion of Obás under Mãe Senhora’s leadership. Each of the twelve original ministers gained two additional posts affiliated with the position. Each numbered box represents an Obá, showing that the total number of Obás rose to thirty-six. Figure 6.2. Religious innovations: Expansion of affiliates of the candomblé Opô Afonjá under the leadership of Mãe Aninha and Mãe Senhora.

Aninha’s successor, Mãe Senhora, who presided over the terreiro from 1942 to 1967, expanded this practice considerably. As shown in the diagram (see fig. 6.2), each minister was now followed by two additional posts. These ministers might come either from within the religious community or from outside, allowing for new alliances between the religious and the secular worlds, alliances that soon became a marker of prestige both for the terreiro and for those named as Obás. For Mestre Didi, this brought “new impulse” (impulso) to Opô Afonjá. 28 In more practical terms, this might have also served as a way for Senhora to gather supporters closer to her. The terreiro had struggled for four years to fi nd a suitable heir to Aninha, and Senhora faced some internal resistance from others within the terreiro, some of whom had also been considered for the position as heir. 29 Senhora’s innovation meant that the terreiro might now have thirty-six ministers at a time, expanding considerably the network of patronage that linked the candomblé and the larger community in Salvador. One of the most prominent Obás, the sister of the anthropologist Vivaldo da

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Figure 6.3. Pierre Verger, iconic portrait of Mãe Senhora, revealing her

confidence and leadership, 1948-1953. Courtesy of Fundação Pierre Verger.

Costa Lima, noted that many of these ministers might well have been called Obás of Senhora instead of Xangô, as “they were there because of her.”30 Or as Senhora’s successor remembered, Senhora named a lot of Ogã.31 The process gave Senhora the role of selecting new allies of her choosing, particularly important given that the twelve original ministers were intended as hereditary positions, to be replaced only upon death or extended absence.32 Senhora, therefore, in many ways faced what might be considered a crisis of leadership, one she overcame admirably.33 Pierre Verger’s iconic portrait of her in the mid-1950s captured this confidence and power in visual form (see fig. 6.3). Senhora oversaw a selection process that differed considerably from

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the initial naming of the fi rst twelve ministers, or Obás, by Aninha. As Senhora set herself to the task of naming people to these added twenty-four positions, now on her own terms, her selections, rather than coming from inside the Candomblé community, came almost exclusively from outside. As Vivaldo da Costa Lima observed in 1966, these outsiders were primarily whites of considerable social prestige, and, with only two exceptions (one being a wealthy Black Obá), they came from the “highest stratum of society.”34 In a telling shift, although many of the early Ogãs of Candomblé were scholars, such as Nina Rodrigues or Manuel Querino, many of the Obás in the 1950s included cultural figures and artistic modernists. The anthropologist Lima was himself an Obá chosen by Senhora. She also selected the novelist Jorge Amado, as well as Pierre Verger, Carybé, and the tourism director Carlos Maia Vasconcelos.35 While Aninha, the founder of a new candomblé, had sought to consolidate her religious authority with the creation of the Obás, Senhora now faced a different challenge, as heir to a position of leadership that had been hotly contested. She chose to consolidate a cultural authority, one perhaps particularly important in the rising tide of candomblé expansion across the city.36 In the process, these Obás and other modernists served an especially active role in promoting themselves as the ultimate authorities on Candomblé for a broad audience. This was undertaken in public, rather than academic, forums and increasingly in print publications oriented at the future visitor. Although these allegiances between intellectuals and Candomblé, especially the connections of Amado, Verger, and Carybé to Candomblé, have gained frequent mention and now represent popular knowledge, they have rarely been linked to tourism. Yet all of these Obás, and many of their modernist peers, took a newly active role in encouraging tourists to encounter the Candomblé religion. Furthermore, as Obás, their responsibilities also included the fi nancing of public ceremonies, which became increasingly grander and larger during this time.37 In the words of one scholar writing in 1970, “the unique post of Obá has virtually assured the fi nancial, administrative, and legal stability of Opô Afonjá.”38 The flourishing of the temple of Opô Afonjá under the leadership of Mãe Senhora was a success due in no small part to the strategic alliances forged with the Obás and other allies. Despite these new allegiances, Mãe Senhora offered her full trust only selectively in this process of expanding the public role of Candomblé, carefully safeguarding access to her terreiro and knowledge of

224 Selling Black Brazil

its religious practices. Sacred rituals remained closed to the public, and tourists saw only the festivities that celebrated the successful end to rites conducted in a private world carefully guarded by ritual levels of belonging and knowledge. As Carybé’s wife, Nancy Bernabó, recalled, Mãe Senhora guarded information closely and “was very mistrustful. [S]he didn’t respond to what people wanted to know, until they gained her confidence.”39 Indeed, as others also remember, Senhora was fi rm in setting limits, whether for the modernists who came to surround her or for Afro-Bahian locals. Luiz Domingos, son of the famed cook and restaurant stall owner Maria de São Pedro, remembered Senhora’s insistence on setting the terms of her interactions. As he recalled, “she had a habit of saying this: ‘I don’t want to know if you are white, if you have expensive shoes, none of this interests me, here I’m the one who rules and here you have to respect the order of Xangô that I pass on to you.’” 40 Her successor, Maria Stella de Azevedo Santos, recalled that “she didn’t make pacts with situations which were not in agreement with her religious beliefs.”41 An incident from the late 1950s reveals many of these developments at once, showing both the rise of Candomblé as an encounter increasingly sought out by tourists and, in the midst of this, how practitioners retained critical elements of control over the experience. The Danish travel author Karl Eskelund, along with his Chinese-born wife, ventured into Brazil after a decade of writing globe-trotting stories. Eskelund’s travel account of Bahia in 1958 aptly reveals the connections between Candomblé and tourism during this time. As drums began to “throb somewhere in the night,” their host Herman Neeser, a local printer and Protestant preacher with deep roots in Salvador, offered to take the visitors to a celebration of Senhora’s fiftieth anniversary of her initiation into the religion. As Eskelund reported, Neeser had described Senhora as a “fat old negro woman who is probably the most important spiritual leader in Bahia.”42 Despite the disparagement within his assessment, Neeser counted himself as a close friend and associate of Senhora and agreed to take Eskelund to the celebratory event. Senhora’s celebration brought together a couple of hundred people in attendance, and Eskelund remembered that he had hoped to take pictures. Neeser cautioned him, however, saying, “I’m not sure. Sometimes they like to be photographed. At other times the mere sight of a camera infuriates them.” Neeser used as an example the trajectory of Pierre Verger, whose camera was apparently smashed during an early

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effort to photograph the candomblé, even as he eventually gained their confidence, brokered religious news from Africa, and was “appointed a priest.” Neeser thought it wise to ask one of Senhora’s secretaries, whom he knew, who seemingly nodded his assent. When Eskelund approached Senhora with his camera, however, though she smiled kindly, she shook her head and sent an attendant to tell him that flash could not be used “on such a solemn occasion.” Despite blushingly retreating, Eskelund found himself called out and humiliated when one of the speakers addressing the crowds noted that “a representative of evil forces is present here tonight—a sensation seeker who is only interested in superficial matters like taking pictures of this occasion to enrich himself.” As he recalled, as everyone turned to stare, “my ears burned and I wished I was somewhere else.”43 The celebration in honor of Senhora reveals that while tourists might be welcome enough at public ceremonies, Candomblé believers worked hard to police representations of themselves and to set firm boundaries on what they deemed exploitative behavior. Visitors who failed to follow these norms might be shamed publicly or ostensibly thrown out. These norms appear to have been well understood as a whole, as the speaker who shamed the author was actually described as a white vice admiral in the navy and thus not a religious leader himself (although it is possible he was an Ogã). Far from being passive, the candomblé made clear the terms by which they were willing to accept visitors. Notably, in the later history written by Mestre Didi, Senhora’s son and a candomblé member, Senhora’s commemoration was heralded precisely because it revealed the power she wielded to attract the allegiance of a wide circle of supporters. The journalist and playwright Zora Seljan commemorated her celebration with a play, “Festa de Bonfi m,” and also detailed in the press the “caravan” of more than seventeen “artists and writers” who arrived from the South on a special airplane from the airline Panair to pay homage.44 “Many other intellectuals and artists from Bahia” attended the commemoration, along with representatives from other terreiros, foreigners, emissaries from the Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek, and representatives from his Ministry of Education and Culture.45 Yet while such accolades by intellectuals were by this time becoming common, it is worth noting that such recognition also became an increasing indication of prestige within the terreiros themselves. In this case, Seljan’s account of the celebration in the press was seen as significant enough that it was quoted in its entirety by Mestre Didi in his history of the terreiro in the early

226 Selling Black Brazil

1960s.46 Artists and modernists came to recognize the legitimacy of Candomblé throughout the 1950s, and the Candomblé community valued such supporters, who were held up as endorsing their religion’s strength and reach. Finally, it is worth noting an unusual conflict mentioned by an observer in 1968 concerning the openness of a terreiro to outside visitors. Apparently doctors from a visiting medical conference had requested a special religious celebration, one outside of the usual religious calendar, so that conference members might attend. While a Black member of the Candomblé was amenable to the request, the decision to deviate from religious calendar norms was “much to the consternation of the artists and intellectuals, who showed their disapproval by staging a boycott of the ceremony.”47 This account reveals, ironically, that while Candomblé practitioners might well have been open and flexible to visitors, they were sometimes held back by confl icting efforts of the outsiders whom they had incorporated into their faith.

The Rise of Candomblé as a Tourist Attraction: Tentative Incorporation in the Early 1950s The transformation of elite understandings of Candomblé as a primitive practice best left ignored to one central to the city of Salvador can be clearly seen in tourist guides over time. As I showed in chapter 2, the modernizing Brazilian republic and its focus on whiteness in the early years of the twentieth century had refused to admit the Candomblé practice into descriptions of the city. This began to alter with the arrival of Jorge Amado’s guide in 1945, but the 1950s brought a particularly dynamic period of change. Foreign guides had taken an earlier role in trying to defi ne Salvador in terms of its culture, often calling attention to its difference. Such guides had early on described Salvador as a Black city. Indeed, foreign guides emphasized the city’s Afro-Brazilian population much earlier, it should be noted, than did Brazilian guides as a whole and certainly earlier than Amado’s guide. Candomblé, however, remained a taboo topic for many foreign tourist guide authors in the 1930s and 1940s. A guide written in English by the prolific American travel writer Vera Kelsey noted Salvador’s “celebrated and grandiose Negresses” and praised the city’s festive culture but made no mention of AfroBrazilian religion.48 Change was underway by 1952, when a guide for

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US readers by the Pan-American Union described Salvador in distorted folkloric terms as “unspoiled, genuine, and forever festive. . . . Bahia’s tradition is flavored with the primitive folklore of Africa—preserved in the music, dances and Candomblé (voodoo) rituals of present-day descendants of Sudanese slaves.”49 Before this, however, the Austrian novelist and Jewish refugee Stefan Zweig had already broken this taboo in an English-language guide in 1941. Writing in the midst of Nazi aggressions and a forced exile, Zweig claimed that he had written the book precisely because Brazil posed a compelling example of tolerance. While Zweig might have been inclined to be sympathetic, he did not escape his own racially determinist views. All his prejudices came together in his synopsis of Black religion. Salvador, he wrote, was the city of Candomblé, “in which old bloodthirsty African rites combine so strangely with fanatic Catholicism.”50 Zweig also made clear that these “bloodthirsty” practices were an essential stop for the tourist and described how he had submitted to a nighttime hike through tropical overgrowth to arrive at a ceremony himself. He wrote in 1941, “Every foreigner boasts of having seen a ‘genuine’ one with the help of a special friend.” He complained, however, that visits had “long ago led to such pseudospectacles,” akin to those arranged by tourist companies. He also noted that the one he attended “was doubtless also faked.”51 It was into this fuzzy realm between fakery and authenticity that modernists stepped, granting their endorsements—and their white authority—in a field in which tourists sought the most representative candomblés. This religious fragmentation created an even greater pressure for candomblés to set themselves apart from one another. For the well-connected visitor, such a circuit had been in place for some time. Edison Carneiro in particular seems to have played some role in brokering the arrival of foreign observers to candomblés in Bahia. He was given special thanks in 1939 by Bernardo Kordon, the Argentinean novelist whose book Macumba had been illustrated by Carybé. And Carneiro was an indispensable interlocutor for the American anthropologist Ruth Landes, helping her to negotiate access for scholarly study and introducing her to the field. It was also most likely through Carneiro that Jorge Amado himself gained access to the world of Candomblé.52 These efforts of outsiders to learn more about the religion could often serve the interests of both observers and practitioners, particularly those religious leaders with less established prestige. In answer to Carneiro’s request to bring Landes to her terreiro,

228 Selling Black Brazil

one leader on the outskirts of the Candomblé community responded shrewdly, “I hope we can get an announcement in the paper.”53 Outside observers and access helped grant, she hoped, a wider publicity and legitimacy for her faith. Certainly, by the time Jorge Amado composed his meticulous database of candomblés in his 1945 tourist guide, we can see not only Amado’s own determination to bring visitors into closer contact with Candomblé but also that a visitors’ circuit on that route already existed. Zweig had complained in his 1941 travel narrative about the supposedly staged religious ceremonies brought out to satisfy tourists. Along similar lines, Amado claimed that he heard the “constant complaints” of visitors seeking out a Candomblé ceremony who were left disappointed when taxi drivers instead took them to spiritist centers.54 Amado’s guide intended to remedy the problem by providing concrete addresses and names that a visitor could wield with authority. As I noted in chapter 2, one chapter of his guide documented the names, addresses, and leaders for over one hundred Candomblé temples—no small feat. With this guide, then, Amado played an important role in placing a trip to a candomblé fully within the path of the casual visitor and establishing Afro-Bahian religion as both a tourist attraction and a commodity. The year 1951 brought increased production of guides, as well as the establishment of new benchmarks for the treatment of Candomblé. José Valladares would dedicate a section of his tourist guide that year to Candomblé, describing the various gods and claiming that the religion “grants to the city one of its best adornments: the Baiana with round skirts, blouse and turban and multicolored necklaces and bracelets.”55 And Carybé, with his works in the Recôncavo series published the same year, had a volume of drawings dedicated to the gods of Candomblé, accompanied by texts by Pierre Verger (Orixás), as well as another Recôncavo volume on Candomblé that he wrote himself (Themes of Candomblé [Temas de Candomblé]). But a different event attracted considerable attention and controversy this same year. A storm erupted over the printing of a sensationalist article on Candomblé by the French cinematographer Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1951 and a similar article that appeared in O Cruzeiro later that year. Clouzot had toured Salvador, visited candomblés, and returned to Paris to write an account of his visit for the popular French illustrated magazine Paris Match. The article, described as “ethnographic,” at fi rst had limited repercussions in Brazil. But the Bahian newspaper A

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Tarde published the article in translation in its entirety two months later (appearing July 10, 11, and 12, 1951), causing an uproar among Bahians, who now had full access to Clouzot’s depiction of their city and his focus on Candomblé.56 Most shocking were the photographs accompanying the article, which broke with the accepted general practices of portraying Candomblé. Clouzot’s photographs included depiction of trance and of the animal sacrifice that made up a more private aspect of religious ritual. Religious figures bathed in blood, accompanied by the editors’ provocative headlines, violated all of the religion’s dictates on secrecy and threatened to erode its growing respectability. Many intellectuals in Rio and São Paulo, such as Edison Carneiro and Roger Bastide, wrote to the press to document their displeasure with a treatment they deemed sensationalist and exoticizing. In Bahia itself, the furor was perhaps even greater, with the public outraged that their city had been depicted in such a way. Among the group angered by Clouzot’s depictions were Odorico Tavares and Pierre Verger, who also wrote a letter of protest to the press, although it was apparently never published. Odorico and Verger attempted to defend the religion and argued that the photographs in Paris Match were sensationalistic rather than realistic in their depictions of animal sacrifice, which was used purely as a matter of ritual. Despite this defense, the letter expressed particular concern that Candomblé might be understood to represent the city as a whole. Given Verger’s enthusiasm for Black practices, it is likely that this drafted letter, which remained undated in Verger’s archive, represented more accurately the perspective of Odorico. Odorico was clearly savvy enough to be aware that such an attempt to disassociate the city from Candomblé might well be read as racist. The letter insisted defensively that the charges that the city had been misrepresented had nothing to do with prejudices: Bahia has as much pride in its churches, its artistic richness, its colonial houses, its old architecture, as it does of its markets, popular festivals, of its whites and of its Blacks. We are the most democratic city in Brazil: there are no prejudices here, nor limitations. What was irritating in Clouzot’s reporting was his European prejudice in transforming Candomblé into a novelty despite the fact that it is centuries old, as Mr. Edison Carneiro highlighted very well. . . . In addition to this, the author of the article does not say in his work, as he should have, that Bahia is a civilized and progressive city, with countless schools and hospitals, full of traditions. Saying,

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on the other hand, that a third of the local population is fetishist, with which I don’t agree, gave the impression to those who don’t know this land that people live here in complete primitivism. 57

Reverting to hierarchical and prejudiced notions of civilization and progress versus primitivism, Odorico and Verger resented any idea that Bahia should be seen as dominated by primitivism. The statement reveals how even modernists supposedly sympathetic with Black culture and the povo found themselves pushed past their comfort levels by narratives that privileged Black culture exclusively and especially by narratives that privileged Candomblé. The editor of O Cruzeiro, Accioly Neto, was also furious about the Paris Match article, but for different reasons. In confidential correspondence, the editor charged the photographer José Medeiros with making sure that Brazilians would “not be defeated in our own land by two gringos” and ordered Medeiros to get similar pictures as well.58 The result of this effort was an article entitled “The Brides of the Bloodthirsty Gods” (“As noivas dos deuses sanguinários”), published in O Cruzeiro in September 1951 (see fig. 6.4). Notably, both the reporter and the photographer came from outside of Bahian circles. As Lisa Castillo pointed out, although the article was “touted as ‘ethnographic,’ the piece contained dozens of images of novices bathed in blood, while its text cleverly shifted the stigma of fetishism away from Brazil as a whole, identifying it instead as a backward practice of Black Bahia.”59 The controversies of 1951 thus serve as a useful barometer of the still-limited acceptance of the religion at this juncture and how readily both modernists and mainstream accounts resorted to tropes of difference and primitivism. Within Bahia these tensions over Candomblé’s acceptance were felt more broadly. In 1954, the municipal director of tourism ultimately revealed the same concerns in an article where he boasted that Salvador had the best terreiros yet labeled Candomblé practices “bizarre.”60 Likewise, a guide from a year earlier reveals the way that such prejudices continued to function. Weldon Americano da Costa, like other authors of guides during this time, was a member of the Bahian elite. His grandfather had been mayor of the city, and he himself was a published poet, but currents of the time apparently also dictated the need to draw on popular references. Costa dedicated his book to the songwriter Caymmi, as had by now become almost obligatory, and, like others of the era, he praised the popular festivals of the city in

Figure 6.4. José Medeiros, sensationalist depiction of Candomblé. Arlindo Silva, “As noivas dos deuses saguinários,” O Cruzeiro, September 15, 1951. © Diários Associados.

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expansive terms. He set himself apart, as I discussed in chapter 5, with an extensive focus on the beaches of the city and with his sexualization of the city’s women, stressing their “well-formed brown-skinned [moreninha]” charms.61 When Costa turned to Candomblé, however, he did so in terms that marked the religion, too, as sexualized, but far from charming. As he wrote in rhyme: A lugubrious torpor envelops all Well before the ritual acts begin Here, in this quite terrifying place [assustador] With semi-naked Blacks, sensual women!62

Costa emphasized none of the religion’s beauty, the complexity, or the respect that many authors would attempt to communicate in coming years, instead turning to a sexualized, terrifying, primitive vision of Candomblé. More broadly, the debate about how to represent Bahia for outsiders continued in the local press at this time, as Tiago Santos Groba has uncovered. A 1951 survey of Salvador residents that asked what tourists should see received a variety of answers. A chemist stressed “beaches, colonial architecture and ancient paintings and objects of art, which are seen everywhere, and especially the popular festivals.” Another response drew attention to “snobbish” Bahians who didn’t think tourists should visit the outdoor markets. A third respondent, an alderman, responded that “Candomblé, with its mournful rhythm, beaten in the terreiros of the ‘fathers of saints,’ to the sound of atabaques [drums], is always something new that dazzles and enchants our visitors.”63 This positive view was far from the consensus, however, as other incidents in the press reveal. Only a year later, another reader wrote to protest precisely such a focus, likely referring to the recent scandal over the photographs in Paris Match, although he might have been referring to press coverage and tourist promotion more generally. In this reader’s view, “the attractions and charms of our land—it becomes necessary to say—cannot be summed up by the candomblés, to which all visitors are taken, nor are they encapsulated by the practices of black magic, of which the magazines have recently frequently published gruesome reports.”64 This reluctance to acknowledge Black culture as central to Salvador played out in other parallels across the city. Municipal efforts in 1953 to restrict Baiana vendors from selling their wares in the

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streets, for instance, also show how the city continued to attempt to repress Afro-Bahians in their daily life. While the restrictions met with an outcry in the press, such protests could not mediate the fact that the plan had been touted in language echoing that of some forty years earlier, as elite reformers interested in promoting “progress” attempted to clear the streets of Black vendors and Black bodies.65 Finally, the continued debate on how to represent the city can be seen in official preparations for Brazil’s third national tourism congress, held for the first time in Salvador in 1955. This event was an apt example of how continued official reluctance to depict Candomblé as part of the city received energetic opposition from modernist intellectuals in concert with believers themselves. Carlos Vasconcelos Maia wrote a letter in 1955 to Pierre Verger offering news of Opô Afonjá, as both men were now Obás. But Verger had apparently inquired about the tourism congress in a previous letter, and Maia replied that the “infamous” event had indeed occurred, with a very restricted view of what visitors should see, shaped around what he termed absurd events, such as concerts by police and fi refighters, with visitors prohibited from entering the old streets of the city as well as the newly emerging slums.66 He wryly detailed that Jorge Amado had set himself to remedy the situation and had decided to organize a trip for the tourists to a candomblé, with a celebration hosted by Mãe Senhora. This endeavor to organize the celebration was done most certainly with the approval of, and perhaps even at the request of, Mãe Senhora, who exerted considerable control to make sure visitors did not come unannounced. Carybé’s wife recalled that Mãe Senhora insisted she be notified of any visitor ahead of time: “What you couldn’t do was take someone without letting her know, she didn’t like that.”67 This rule applied not only to white foreigners but also to Afro-Bahian locals. Luiz Domingos remembered attempting to visit the terreiro and being caught out at the front door by his own lie that Jorge Amado had sent him. Giving him the third degree, Mãe Senhora responded sharply, “And he [Amado] was here yesterday and he didn’t tell me that anyone was coming here,” before relenting and letting him in out of the rain.68 In the end, the event during the tourism congress gained her support not only through her admission of busloads of tourists to her terreiro but also through her organization of a festival that continued despite setbacks due to overcrowding. In addition, she sponsored a grand feast for the visitors.69 Together she and Amado ensured that the carefully edited vision of the city imagined by elite organizers—

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whitewashed to eliminate both poverty and Black presence—had been challenged by a visit that brought wider recognition to Senhora’s candomblé in particular.

Consolidation in the Late 1950s: Candomblé as a Symbol of the City By the late 1950s, all of these debates and actions had coalesced into a considerably more inclusive vision of Candomblé within the tourist guides. An assortment of guides published in this era marked this new trend. As a sign of the changing times, two of the publications directly referred to Candomblé informants or assistance from practitioners, and three guides referred to Candomblé, or slyly hinted at it, in their titles. Carlos Torres titled his 1957 guide Bahia, City of Enchantment (Bahia, cidade feitiço), playing upon a dual meaning of feitiço as both enchantment and fetishism, an older term for Afro-Brazilian religion. In 1958, Ernesto Caballero drew upon the city’s full name of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (Saint Salvador of All Saints Bay) in more questionable terms with his evocative title Bahia of All the Saints and All the Demons (Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os demônios). And Darwin Brandão and José Motta e Silva published their guide the next year, titled City of Salvador: Path of Enchantment (Cidade do Salvador: Caminho do encantamento). Torres’s 1957 guide revealed a still ambiguous position for Candomblé. Torres used his preface to bill the city as the “Brazilian Rome” without any reference to the alternate formulation, then common, of Salvador as a “Black Rome,” a reference to the city’s centrality for Afro-Brazilian religions. Such a choice might have been intended to endorse Salvador as a center of Catholicism, a traditional formulation that privileged the city’s numerous colonial churches.70 In a similar vein, Torres rarely referred to Candomblé in the introductory overview of the city and billed the religion as a folkloric practice. But the guide did not neglect references to Black culture and to Candomblé altogether. Even the fi rst edition included a separate chapter that surveyed the general beliefs of the religion and included a photograph of practitioners among its illustrations.71 Torres credited the president of the Afro-Brazilian Federation (Federação Afro-Brasileira), Jorge Manuel da Rocha (an Ogã for Opô Afonjá), with “providing information” for the chapter.72 The focus on Candomblé gained added attention in

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later editions of the work. Already, by Torres’s second edition of 1961, Candomblé had gained significant symbolic ground, advancing to the front of the guide to become central to the city’s introduction. Caballero’s slim volume of 1958 is a telling example of how art and Bahia’s Candomblé became ever more fundamental in the crafting of the city’s image. The Spaniard Ernesto Caballero’s musings—he had visited the city for only a few days and then wrote of his experiences in the Spanish press—were paired in the book with the illustrations of the modernist Lenio Braga, a recent transplant to Bahia from Brazil’s South.73 As Caballero explained in his opening page, the city’s intrigue and mystery (he cited Amado directly) came from its tenuous balance between heaven and purgatory. In Caballero’s vision, the city’s churches and their saints existed alongside its candomblés, whose saints he deemed demons, an ambiguity that made Candomblé central to the city even while damning it in Christian terms.74 In the illustrations, however, the balance between Catholicism and Candomblé tilted much more heavily toward Candomblé. Lenio depicted individuals exclusively as Black, marked either by their activity or by the dark ink he used to color their skin.75 Moreover, he portrayed no Catholic celebrations at all and instead included multiple depictions of Candomblé (see figs. 6.5–6.7). Here, in a bit of a departure from other artists, such as Thiré, Carybé, or Bastos, Caballero often separated Black bodies out from the city and portrayed them in separate frames. Individuals floated on an empty white background that brought the Blackness of their skin color into high relief. The 1958 Path of Enchantment guide by Brandão and Motta e Silva (already discussed in chapter 5) removed all of the tentativeness of these guides and pushed their vision of Candomblé further. The text and framing of the guide showed especially well how modernists of the time made Candomblé a central element of the city. The illustrations of the modernist Carlos Bastos followed this tone by depicting Candomblé in festive terms (see fig. 6.8). In their opening sentence, the authors claimed that “every Brazilian, from the South or from the North, feels the urge to know Bahia, its ‘three hundred and sixty-five churches,’ and its candomblés.”76 Of nine various walks or itineraries for the visitor, the tour dedicated to Candomblé followed fi rst after the general survey of the city. The writers attempted to normalize Candomblé as a nonthreatening practice that was not just Afro-Bahian but one in which all, even the tourist, might participate. Though the section dedicated to the tour

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Figure 6.5. Lenio

Braga, Candomblé drummers. Ernesto Giménez Caballero and Lenio Braga (illustrator), Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os demônios (1958). Courtesy of Marcelo Brazil; image editing by Walter Mariano.

was relatively short, it emphasized that “one of the best emotions that any visitor arriving to Salvador could feel is to be invited to enjoy [apreciar]” a Candomblé ceremony. The authors stressed, “One should never pass up the opportunity if a negra de acarajé offers you a tour [roteiro] of the Orixás.”77 Since a visitor might easily tire from visiting colonial mansions and convents, they advised, “It is wise now to rest so as to be able to visit a candomblé, at night, in the company of the negra who sells acarajé in the Model Market or Sete Portas.”78 A visit to Bahia, they implied, would be incomplete without a trip to a candomblé, ideally with a local guide. The recommendation that Baianas or acarajé vendors might serve as such guides and play an active role in bringing in tourists to view Candomblé was not merely an idle suggestion. Although the links between

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Figure 6.6. Lenio Braga, pen-and-ink drawing of women of Candomblé. Ernesto Giménez Caballero and Lenio Braga (illustrator), Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os demônios (1958). Courtesy of Marcelo Brazil; image editing by Walter Mariano.

Figure 6.7. Lenio Braga, pen-and-ink drawing of women of Candomblé. Ernesto Giménez Caballero and Lenio Braga (illustrator), Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os demônios (1958). Courtesy of Marcelo Brazil; image editing by Walter Mariano.

238 Selling Black Brazil

Figure 6.8. Carlos Bastos, Candomblé ceremony. Darwin Brandão, José Shaw da

Motta e Silva, and Carlos Bastos (illustrator), Cidade do Salvador: Caminho do encantamento (1958). This image also replaced Manuel Martins’s woodcuts for later editions of Jorge Amado’s guidebook, Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da cidade do Salvador, beginning in 1971.

the religion and vendors were not necessarily always direct, they did have historical connections. It had been the practice for initiates in Candomblé to be granted permission to sell acarajé as a way to raise money for their initiation and rites.79 In this case, however, the suggestion was likely a direct reference to Mãe Senhora, a regular vendor at the Model Market, where she maintained a stall named A Vencedora. Again, the connections between modernists and Candomblé practitioners proved important: both worked not only to promote the city but to make the religion central to any understanding of it.

Must-See Events: A New Starring Role for Candomblé in the Early 1960s By the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Candomblé had gained a new starring role for visitors. Three moments bring these

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changes into high relief. A 1959 congress, the Fourth International Colloquium of Luso-Brazilian Studies, engendered two new guides to orient visitors; one of these was dedicated exclusively to the terreiro of Opô Afonjá. In 1960, the arrival of the internationally recognized French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir gained extensive publicity in O Cruzeiro, and the two made Bahian Candomblé a central stop in their Brazilian itinerary. In the next years, the authors Odorico Tavares (1961), Jorge Amado (1961 and 1962), and Carybé (1962) would issue revised editions of their guides to the city, and the revisions reveal the now-central role of Candomblé and its tensions.80 The illustrated volume for visitors of the Luso-Brazilian studies colloquium made clear that the living culture of Bahia and especially the culture of its Black population were now key to any visitor’s experience. The guide promised to provide visitors with the essentials for understanding the “landscape and man [homen] of Bahia.”81 Likewise, the authors titled their now-obligatory chapter on Afro-Bahian culture “Human and Picturesque Bahia.” It had come to be well understood that a visitor should view, experience, and come to understand the human landscape of Bahia rather than merely the built environment of the city itself. In this cultural vein, Candomblé iconography occupied a central space on the front and back cover of the colloquium volume, printed in vibrant primary colors (see fig. 6.9). Although Catholicism too gained a space in this art, with a representation of a carved Virgin Mary, the framing highlighted Candomblé as central. What was most remarkable, however, was the production of a second guide for the colloquium dedicated exclusively to the subject of Candomblé. Entitled A Xangô Celebration at Opô Afonjá (Uma festa de Xangô no Opô Afonjá), this guide included a cover illustrated with stark woodcuts, text written by the Bahian anthropologist Vivaldo da Costa Lima, and chapters separated by illustrations from an unknown artist.82 As a letter from Carybé to Pierre Verger reported, Lima had also helped to organize a “monstrous festival” for colloquium visitors at the terreiro of Opô Afonjá. More than five busloads of people and many cars brought “elite” and “intellectuals” to the celebration. A special speech at the event by Jorge Amado was republished in Bahia’s newspaper Diario de Notícias.83 And the event gained particular mention in the account by Senhora’s son, Mestre Didi, who cited Amado’s speech in its entirety.84 The text in the colloquium volume by Lima began by establishing

Figure 6.9. Unknown

artist, cover art for Bahia de Todos os Santos: Editado pela Universidade da Bahia por ocasião do IV Colóquio Internacional de Estudos LusoBrasileiros (1959), published by the University of Bahia.

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the terreiro’s exceptional pedigree. Lima cited Edison Carneiro’s recent appraisal of Opô Afonjá as one of the five most important candomblés in Bahia, also stressing that the Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos had deemed this terreiro’s traditions the “most rigorous” and the “most advanced.”85 Lima’s discourse emphasized in particular the “constant correspondence” between the candomblé and Africa, noting on numerous occasions its fidelity to African practice: the ultimate badge of legitimacy for this time.86 Within this framing, Lima gave special praise to Senhora (and Aninha before her) as an exceptional leader tied to African, authentic practice but also open to outsiders. Lima’s portrayal of Opô Afonjá reveals how integrated the cultural and religious world in Bahia had become under the leadership of Mãe Senhora: Senhora is—like Aninha was—a great friend of writers, artists and ethnographic scholars, whom she permits a more secure knowledge of the Afro-Bahian religious world, while naturally guarding the principles and barriers imposed by her belief. There has been a great deal of intellectual and artistic activity around this House of Xangô. Painters like Carybé, [Richard] Menocal, Mário Cravo, Silvia Chalréo, Genaro de Carvalho, Lênio Braga, and Hamilton de Sousa; writers like Vasconcelos Maia, Zora Seljan, José Pedreira, Jorge Amado; ethnologists like Edison Carneiro, José Lima and Pierre Verger—have been inspired or have documented their works under the benevolent and understanding [compreensiva] authority of Senhora.87

Amado’s introduction too stressed Senhora’s many connections in Bahian society as well as his own role in the terreiro as Obá. Clearly, by this point both religious authenticity and social connections with the local avant-garde had become badges of legitimacy for the religion. What is worth calling attention to is not that intellectuals gained in their interactions with Candomblé, or even that candomblés gained in return, a topic that has already garnered significant attention. Instead, it is worth noting that in the telling of the candomblé members themselves, these social connections and even the public display for the colloquium were deemed important, earning detailed attention in historical overviews by religious figures such as Mestre Didi.88 In addition, controversies surrounding the colloquium showed once more the cultural tug-of-war continuously going on among the elite. The progressive rector of the university, Edgar Santos, had helped to organize the

242 Selling Black Brazil

religious festivities to take place in the candomblé, and the university in fact published Lima’s guide to the candomblé’s festivities. Meanwhile, newspaper coverage in Rio instead chose to emphasize an exhibition on Rembrandt organized by a federal director of extracurricular education.89 Once again, modernists and Candomblé leaders had taken what threatened to be an elite vision of the city and transformed it through the medium of the tourist guide and through visits to experience the Candomblé religion itself. And once again, a familiar cast of figures, of artists, modernists, university officials, and Mãe Senhora, came together to pay tribute in both written and artistic form to the religion in a newly public manner. The same dynamic linking tourism and Candomblé can be seen at work in the next year, when two of the most important international visitors to Brazil came through Salvador: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre was arguably the world’s most prominent intellectual at the time, while Beauvoir was a formidable feminist intellectual in her own right. Their arrival in Brazil in 1960 naturally garnered reporters’ interest across the country as they made their way through São Paulo, Rio, Recife, the Amazon, and Bahia. It was their stop in Bahia, however, that earned a central story in O Cruzeiro. This article was written and photographed by two staff members who had no connection to Bahia, but by this time the tropes to be covered were well established. The magazine framed the title of the article in terms of the famous Caymmi song—“Sartre Saw What Bahia Has”—and the text detailed the French couple’s tour, led by the married pair Jorge Amado and Zélia Gattai, of the highlights of popular and Black culture in the city. They traveled to see one of the oldest Black female sisterhoods, the Boa Morte; they viewed the popular ex-votos in the Church of Bonfi m; they ate Afro-Bahian specialties prepared in the market stalls of Maria São Pedro; and they wandered the streets and viewed the popular ceramics of Maragogipinho at an outdoor market. One caption in large font proclaimed, “The oddities of Bahia enchant Sartre and Simone,” a framing that called attention to the exoticness and difference of Bahia.90 Candomblé formed a central part of the visit and gained significant mention in the article and its photographs. Jorge Amado took them to a ceremony on one of their fi rst nights and then brought them the next day to Axé Opô Afonjá to introduce them personally. As the article marveled: “The person who received the visitors was Senhora herself. Ah, who has been to Bahia and not heard of Senhora. To hear about

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her is very easy, but to meet her, talk with her, it is its own thing. . . . Senhora is an institution. Her terreiro is a force. For this reason, Vivaldo [da] Costa Lima . . . led the group, as a diplomat to introduce them. Senhora received [them] saying, ‘There’s Jorge Amado, I already know . . . Xangô told me.’”91 Senhora’s fame and her connections to local figures stood out in this description of the interaction, as did the spiritual connections that had warned her of the visit. Senhora proceeded to charm everyone, bestowing personal gifts upon the visitors as well as consulting the Orixás to declare that Sartre’s Orixá was Oxalá and Beauvoir’s was Oxum. She concluded, “Xangô is very satisfied with the visit.”92 The text boasted that Senhora had allowed her portrait to be taken only once before, by Pierre Verger, but she now permitted the photographer for O Cruzeiro to photograph her flanked by Sartre and Beauvoir (see fig. 6.10). Indeed, her terreiro was the only location that garnered two photographs for the magazine, accounting for one-fifth of the images. Although our understanding of this encounter is inevitably fi ltered through the reporting of the magazine, we can see, nonetheless, that Senhora made considerable effort to welcome the visitors and embrace them within her faith. Moreover, assuming the reporting is correct, it is interesting to see the way in which Senhora framed the visit as endorsed and approved by the gods themselves. In this way, far from violating any code of secrecy, Senhora represented her religion as one that welcomed outsiders and was pleased by the interest and visits of others. Although the visit of such luminaries might be different from that of the average tourist, the general principle of being open to those who expressed interest and showed respect for Candomblé remains clear. The following years brought continued efforts by the now- central figures of Amado and Carybé. In 1961, Jorge Amado published his fi rst substantive revision of his tour guide to Salvador.93 Although the revisions as a whole were limited in scope, among the few chapters that received substantial change was one of his chapters on Candomblé. Amado had included two chapters on Candomblé in his first 1945 edition: one entitled “Macumba” that described in thick detail a ritual he had observed (notably, at a rival of Opô Afonjá), and another that compiled his listing of all of the terreiros he had been able to fi nd. While his revised edition left the fi rst intact, he completely reworked the framing of the latter. Now, instead of a numerical listing of candomblés in no particular order, his chapter consisted of a longer analytical synthesis

Figure 6.10. Geraldo Viola, photographs of Mãe Senhora and her reception of

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Mário Camarinha and Geraldo Viola (photographer), “Sartre viu o que a Bahia tem,” O Cruzeiro, September 10, 1960. © Diários Associados.

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of the religion, one in which he attempted to ascribe a particular ranking and a new emphasis on hierarchy.94 In this newly revised 1961 edition, his eighth, Amado took care to insist that Candomblé as a whole could be divided into four main groups, which he ranked from most pure to least pure. Within this framework, as he described it, the “gêge-nagô [broadly, Yoruba] are the purest . . . and the most powerful and respected. This is the most important group.” Although he believed another branch of the religion (the caboclo) to be larger in number, he described these competitors as “far from having the force, and the respect held by the gêge-nagô.” Amado went on to further distinguish rankings within this most powerful Yoruba group, placing three terreiros at the top that “command the mysterious complex of Black religion not only in Bahia but in all of Brazil.” Among these, of course, was Opô Afonjá, described in parenthesis as “my house, which I invite you to visit,” and labeled the “most famous and important terreiro de santo in Bahia.” He confessed proudly that his rankings might well have been biased, given his close relations to the house. As he explained, “I am a confi rmed Obá, I have my chair there at the side of the mãe de santo [religious leader, in this case Mãe Senhora] and at times I’m her spokesman.”95 Amado went on to list almost three pages of Yoruba-based houses (described as gêge-nagô), while dedicating only a paragraph to two other groups (those of Congo and Angola) and only a page to the caboclo candomblés (often dismissed by academics as less prestigious). Whether by his descriptions, his personal endorsements, his rankings, or the sheer quantity of words he dedicated to the subject, Amado made clear that one branch of Candomblé was higher in status than the others, and he reinforced that status further in his overview of the religion. Around the same time, in 1962, Carybé decided to write his own tourist guide, and he illustrated it with art he reused from his 1951 Recôncavo collection illustrations.96 His narrative recycled texts that he had written for the collection, but he made an interesting editorial choice. He moved much of his text on Candomblé to his introduction, and the writings he had previously used to explain Candomblé were now used to explain the city itself. In essence, Carybé used his new guide as much to explain Candomblé as to explain the city: one had become the other. In his fi rst two pages alone, he referred to twelve African gods by name, and beyond these mentions of gods themselves, he made frequent reference to the practices of the Candomblé religion. By this point Candomblé had become a badge of authenticity, and relations between the religion and the elite were called upon by many

246 Selling Black Brazil

to symbolize Bahia’s ultimate populist roots. Carybé’s editor stressed, for example, that the highest politicians of the city mingled with practitioners of Candomblé, a point Carybé himself also made.97 Equally important were the links carefully established between Carybé and Candomblé. All three of the introductions to the book—Carybé’s own, that of his editor, and that of his friend Jorge Amado—stressed that Carybé was an Obá. Obviously, by the time this guide was written, an affiliation with a candomblé had become an important badge of prestige for intellectuals who wanted to claim allegiance with the povo. An affi liation with a candomblé had become a critical element of guides of the era. By the 1960s, Amado, Verger, and Carybé had become Obás for Opô Afonjá, a fact they flouted as central to their own authenticity and to that of their guides. Carybé’s guide was revealing not just for the role it granted to Candomblé but for its more general insistence on the city as dominated by a popular Black culture that Carybé both understood and participated in. First, the cover of Carybé’s guide, printed in vibrant color, evoked folk art and block-printing techniques. Second, the guide began with an introduction from the editor that stressed that Carybé was one of the most “authentic Bahians.”98 Finally, a foreword written by Jorge Amado crafted a cantiga in Carybé’s honor. Used in performances of capoeira, a cantiga was a type of rhythmic, rhyming chant that often relied on Afro-Brazilian slang and phrasing. In today’s popular terms, this was the rough equivalent of a white grandfather composing a rap to commemorate his aging white friend. As Amado’s cantiga emphasized, Carybé had links to Candomblé, was engaged in capoeira, and was the “master of the atabaque,” or African drums.99 Running through a checklist of popular affi liations with Afro-Bahian culture, Carybé checked them all. Carybé, the song insisted metaphorically, was as Black as a white man could be. A fi nal example that encapsulates the intimate ties developed over the 1950s among modernists, tourism, and Black culture, especially Candomblé, is the trajectory of Carlos Vasconcelos Maia, the early leader in Bahian literary modernism. As might be suspected for a modernist of his stature, Maia had been selected as an Obá for Opô Afonjá. In an interesting twist, Maia became the municipal director of tourism the same year that he published his novel centered on Candomblé. These roles all came together in the public realm in a weekly series of newspaper columns that Maia authored from 1958 to early 1964. Using the genre of the crônica, a chatty format that engaged directly with

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the reader, Maia wrote on a variety of topics that touched on daily life in the city and its streets. Maia included Candomblé among these topics, going so far as to publish a series of columns in 1960 intended to guide visitors in how to behave at a Candomblé ceremony. As might be anticipated, Opô Afonjá received a place of privilege in his accounts. In Maia’s own later framing, it was his role as Obá that allowed him to disseminate the religious calendar of Opô Afonjá in his columns; he abstained from doing the same for the other terreiros.100 A small but glossy tourist guide in 1963 showcased the writings of Maia, and his stature was such that the guide was translated into an English edition the same year. Perhaps because it was produced by a commercial Rio publisher, however, the guide broke with the use of modernist illustrations and instead accompanied the text with a glossy compilation of black-and-white photos. Maia’s narrative approached the city as if on a walking tour. I briefly criticized the narrative in chapter 5 for its lascivious treatment of Bahian women as the city’s true treasures. More relevant here is that the guide also mentioned Candomblé, naming in turn the four female leaders of the most prominent Yoruba terreiros and granting them official endorsement in the process.101 Tellingly, the description for a photo taken outside of the terreiro of Gantois credits the municipal tourism office that Maia directed.102 Unintentionally revealing of the poverty surrounding the terreiro, the photo showed by contrast how important the romantic and tightly edited modernist canon had become (see fig. 6.11). Deprived of its central illustrated interpreters, Candomblé’s portrayal in Maia’s guide highlighted the limits of black-and-white photography for the idealized portrayals fashioned by modernist writers. The trends of tourist guides with modernist illustrations would be reversed by the mid-1960s, when guides as a whole again turned to photographic depictions of Candomblé. These guides departed from both the aesthetic and the thematic focus of earlier eras in significant ways. To begin with, they did not portray the dress of the gods, nor Candomblé ceremonies. Instead, they limited illustrations to outside scenes of the terreiros themselves. Because of this, the photographs failed to capture any festive element of the religion and instead captured the material surroundings of the candomblé itself. The terreiro of Gantois, recognized as among the oldest in Brazil, tended to be more represented, in part due to active allegiances forged by its leader, Mãe Menininha, who also maintained religious ties with Pierre Verger and Carybé.103 But viewers of the photograph of the terreiro in Maia’s guide, for ex-

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Figure 6.11. Unnamed municipal photographer for tourism office, terreiro of

Gantois. Carlos Vasconcelos Maia, Lembrança da Bahia (1963).

ample, saw little historical context; such photographs instead exposed the relative disrepair of the buildings, the poverty of the neighborhoods in which these candomblés were located, and the tropical landscape around them that had been largely absent from the illustrations. In the transfer from artists’ illustrations to photographs, something of the power and majesty of the religion was lost. In addition, although Candomblé practitioners had allied in various ways with state officials and modernists, it does not appear that leaders of the most prestigious terreiros granted permission for portraits of themselves. Thus, the medium of photography resulted in a lessened ability to humanize the rituals compared with the previous genre of illustrations. The particular coming together of modernist art with tourism and Candomblé fulfilled a particularly critical role, as modernists’ depictions of the religion were permitted without the same restrictions that applied to photography. Such an artistic decision seems to have been made with some influence from Candomblé leaders; for example, Carybé’s continued friendship with and designation as Obá in Opô Afonjá seem to indicate at least a basic agreement, on the part of Candomblé leaders, with his artistic project. Illustrations were not necessarily any less real than photographs, but critically, the illustrated depictions of Candomblé fulfi lled an important mission of making

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the religion more familiar to the broader public without breaking the traditional ban on photography within the terreiro. In fact, Carybé would attempt in many respects to portray his role as that of ethnographer, claiming to capture detail in dress and ritual with accuracy rather than pushing the limits of artistic license. This effort highlights a point that deserves more attention. While scholarship has debated the degree to which scholars have influenced the practices of Candomblé, not enough attention has been given to the fact that some of the most formative promoters and interlocutors of Bahian Candomblé were modernist artists who were active in the 1940s and 1950s as promoters of tourism for the city in some shape or form. What is fascinating is that although most of these figures were artists fi rst and foremost, many of them came increasingly to represent themselves as broader authorities on Candomblé. To be sure, there was not always complete synergy between the visions of these modernist interlocutors and Candomblé practitioners. We can certainly question to what degree many of these modernists fully understood the religion. Perhaps more significant was that many of these modernist figures deliberately portrayed Candomblé as a religion of mixture with both Brazilian and African elements, even while the most powerful Candomblé leaders, and especially those of Opô Afonjá, stressed African continuities and practices. The fact that both Amado and Carybé stressed mixture so insistently in their texts surely distorted and disfigured the vision of the religion held by their friend and ally Mãe Senhora. Verger, in contrast, with an interest in African connections himself, better fit with the priorities of Opô Afonjá. Nonetheless, despite these divergences, it seems that all three men continued to have close relations with Opô Afonjá into their old age, with Carybé actually breathing his last breath at the candomblé itself. Although the priorities of all the parties did not always match directly, they all agreed that Candomblé deserved more public respect and more authority within Bahian life and that Candomblé should play a central role in any understanding of the city.

Conclusion It appears that the alliances made between religious leaders and modernist promoters enabled Candomblé’s much more prestigious role in the tourist industry in comparison to that of capoeira, whose leaders

250 Selling Black Brazil

perhaps did not engage so directly. It may further indicate the relative power wielded by Candomblé practitioners, who several decades earlier, in 1938, had been described by Edison Carneiro as largely hostile to capoeira.104 By the late 1960s, Candomblé was now deeply ingrained in the cultural life of Bahia. Even mainstream promotors of tourism, such as the publication Industrial and Commercial Shopping News of Bahia, now declared Black culture to be integral to Salvador, with Candomblé at its core.105 In 1962, a Nigerian visitor to the city observed that the religion had come to take a much more vibrant role in life there than in Africa itself.106 In this respect, it is important to note that Bahiatursa, the state tourism agency, asserted in 1974 that tourism had played the most important role in legitimizing Candomblé.107 While such a view grants too much agency to the tourist, and it neglects the activism of Candomblé’s leaders that I have discussed as well as the actions of Afro-Bahian scholars such as Manuel Querino and Edison Carneiro, it does point to an important connection whose early roots have been neglected for too long. I would like to complicate this public relations victory, however, by highlighting that the focus on Candomblé celebrated the reality of some of the Black community, but only a portion of it. Most particularly, while recognition of Candomblé brought attention to the world of faith and festivity, it ignored the mundane realities of police repression, poverty, and political exclusion, even while the faith was grounded, historically, in providing an alternate space to those very realities. We must remember that the promotion of a Salvador centered around Candomblé focuses largely on the victories of the city, not its failings. While Candomblé gained in public acceptance, these victories did not correlate to increased public assistance for the poor sectors from which the religion drew. Although it is possible to point to the alliances made between local politicians and Candomblé leaders as an advance for the religion’s public acceptance, it is sometimes difficult to see how such alliances translated into any material relief from the abysmal poverty of the city and its high mortality rates due to malnutrition and poor health. Some of the top leaders in the most respected terreiros surely improved their own situations, and perhaps even their immediate neighborhoods, but these shifts failed to signal any new public recognition of the city’s deeper problems. There is another failure that the alliance of the modernists with Candomblé did not address, one that historians and scholars have often overlooked. This is the profound irony that for all of the public

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victories of Candomblé, and despite the much-heralded connections of Candomblé leaders with artists, literati, and government officials, the state of Bahia was the last to abandon its restrictions and policing of the candomblés. It was not until 1976 that the governor of Bahia agreed to the petition launched by the Bahian Federation of AfroBrazilian Religion to discontinue the policy of requiring paid permits to host Candomblé religious celebrations. This policy had always been unevenly applied and policed. As Julio Braga notes, this breakthrough was much celebrated by the less prestigious terreiros of the city, but the most famous, such as Opô Afonjá, had long boasted of their ability to ignore such restrictions due to their extensive connections and prestige.108 It is possible to consider, then, that leaders of these wellconnected terreiros never prioritized attacks on the legal provisions because the restrictions had little impact on their own practice. Yet it is also worth asking, given such extensive connections and patronage, why the restrictions lasted longer in Bahia than anywhere else. As Antonio Monteiro, the federation’s president, denounced in the 1976 petition, Afro-Brazilian religions came under different regulations in various states, but nowhere else was a police permit required in the same repressive way as in Bahia. Restrictions on Candomblé in Bahia had recently taken on new form, as government officials moved away from the rhetoric of policing a religion and instead claimed that they were supervising the practice of folkloric acts. As the petition detailed, in 1972 a state law had been passed to regulate the collection of taxes and fi nes by the police for folkloric acts; Candomblé, alone without the company of any other religions, was placed within this category. As Monteiro pointedly questioned, it was curious that public displays of Protestant guitar playing were not also deemed folklore. Monteiro began with a broad consideration of the term “folkloric,” emphasizing that the scholars he had consulted had granted their full support in questioning the designation of Candomblé practices as “folkloric acts.” As he incisively pointed out, no other country defi ned religion in terms of folklore, and no other state in Brazil defi ned it in such terms. Why then, he questioned, “is it only in Bahia that there is a mechanism that includes Afro-Brazilian religion as a folkloric pastime, a folkloric act?”109 As Monteiro explained with devastating logic, the designation of Candomblé as folklore in Bahia had no frame of reference in the scholarly realm or the real world. It is worth marveling at the adeptness with which the Bahian state

252 Selling Black Brazil

pivoted to repress Candomblé so effectively once again. Outsiders had defi ned Candomblé in shifting terms over the twentieth century, relegating it to the realms of superstition, psychic disturbance, folklore, and finally religion, depending on the levels of prejudice in place. While the larger framing of the faith in Brazilian society is too much to take on here, the modernists in Bahia played a particular role in this intermediate stage of billing Candomblé as folklore—and in failing to see that the designation of a religion as anything but a religion was ultimately harmful to its legitimacy and acceptance. Certainly, not every thing can be traced back to the generation of modernists in the 1950s and 1960s. But it is worth considering the very real implications that the festive portrayals of the religion, celebrated in tourist guides by both their authors and their illustrators, helped to bring about. It is also worth wondering why so many of the modernists, allied and integrated into the highest cultural institutions of the state, though successful in wielding their status to help make Candomblé a symbol of Bahia, were so ineffective at protecting the religion from the repression of the state. In a fi nal twist, the new constitution of Bahia in 1989, enacted after the fall of the dictatorship, not only charged the state with the protection of Afro-Brazilian religion but also sought to regulate the appropriation of Candomblé for tourism. As article 275 proclaimed, the state would “prohibit the organs charged with state touristic promotion from the exhibition, commercial exploitation,” or prejudicial use of any symbols, dress, or elements associated with Afro-Brazilian religion.110 Shaped by the active involvement of the Black movement, the constitution of this era reflected a significant backlash against the appropriation of Black religious practice for state profit. This battle would not by any means be over in the coming years, but it revealed new tensions in the position established for Candomblé over the course of the 1950s.

Epilogue: Reflection and Refraction

Salvador’s modernism fit neatly in many ways within the modernist art movements across the Americas. It provided a vibrant example of how native and ethnic traditions became reinterpreted by a local elite interested in throwing off the inferiority complex created by an idealization of European white culture. Further, modernism in Salvador shows how such art might serve important political and official purposes, even long after its revolutionary edge is no longer sharp. A striking parallel can be found in the modernist movement in Mexico, where the murals of Diego Rivera, chosen to adorn the Ministry of Education in 1928, were channeled by the postrevolutionary authoritarian government for its own purposes.1 The consolidation of Mexican modernism within an authoritarian state bears important parallels to Brazil, as Bahia’s modernist depictions were embraced with new enthusiasm under the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964. The story of Salvador’s modernism also helps explain the still lingering power of Latin American racial ideologies forged in the early twentieth century. Though many have questioned how Brazil’s modern ideal of racial democracy became so deeply entrenched, few have looked closely at the role of iconography and art in consolidating this ideal. Just as Rivera’s noble Indians and peasants helped consolidate a wider acceptance of a glorified (if depoliticized) Indigenous past, so did Bahian modernists create a world in which racial democracy was a given and Bahia’s “happy” and “festive” nature (read Black) might be celebrated without the hindrance of actual Afro-Bahians in real positions of power. Racialized images became absolutely central to Bahian identity, to the tourism industry, and to Brazilian nationalism more broadly. They therefore became increasingly useful to Brazil’s own authoritarian efforts.

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Indeed, the arrival of the military dictatorship in 1964 only reinforced much of Bahian modernism. In part this happened because federal authorities sought to cultivate closer foreign relations with the newly independent nations of Africa. Rhetoric of Brazil’s vaunted racial democracy, epitomized in Salvador, served as a linchpin for appealing to African representatives. With these imperatives in mind, symbolic representations of Africa gained new incentive, as did the ideals of Brazil as a racial democracy. In this sense Candomblé and capoeira only gained in prestige within the state-sponsored tourist circuits of this period and within state-sponsored culture more broadly. 2

Symbolic Victories One of the most striking symbolic demonstrations of the military’s embrace of Bahian modernism could be found in the urban structure of the Administrative Center of Bahia (Centro Administrativo da Bahia), a new architectural complex that relocated governmental offices to the outskirts of Salvador in 1972. This relocation came from dictatorial concerns: military authorities hoped to avoid public demonstrations and protests that might prove more visible and problematic in the city proper. Such authoritarian ideals in no way obstructed, however, the governmental decision to marshal a perfect pantheon of Bahian modernist artists of the 1950s, almost all of whom had been involved in promoting the city through tourism. The selection of these artists owed significant debt to Jorge Amado, who, despite leftist leanings, nonetheless formed a tight and very public alliance with the Bahian governor Antônio Carlos Magalhães (known as ACM). ACM was a populist right-wing politician who dominated Bahian politics for most of the military dictatorship as both mayor and governor, and it was under his rule that the administrative center was inaugurated in 1972.3 As the construction of the administrative center came to completion, ACM charged Amado with recommending artists for the public art of the project. Amado agreed, and he endorsed the resulting artworks in his ever-evolving guide, where he wrote that while he did not appreciate the center’s cold modernist architecture, it was certainly worth a visit for its art, where the murals of Bastos accompanied the work of Carybé.4 With Amado as broker, ACM was able to draw upon a spectrum of artists to fashion artworks across the complex. Although some of the

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artists diverged politically from the dictatorship, they were united with Amado in their celebratory take on the city.5 Meanwhile, ACM’s position ensured a starring role for the politician himself in the resulting work. Carlos Bastos, for example, recommended by Amado, created a mural for the complex depicting a boat full of Salvador’s top intellectual figures. ACM, of course, figured among the boat’s passengers, an inclusion that Amado endorsed as natural.6 Moreover, although the boat was intended at fi rst to have some forty luminaries spanning all of history, Amado reported that a constant stream of petitioners claiming the governor’s approval eventually wore Bastos down so that the fi nal count of depicted intellectuals totaled over 140, with a decidedly heavy representation for those allied with the dictatorship.7 In the end, the ultimate built symbol of dictatorial power in Bahia succeeded thanks in part to Amado and his ability to marshal the iconic power of the modernists of the 1950s. Some years later, ACM and Amado took a critical role together in another questionable venture that combined authoritarian and popular pretensions: the renovation of the historic colonial center of the Pelourinho. Over the twentieth century the plaza had undergone a gradual transformation so that its original function as a site of violent repression was almost completely forgotten. Instead, the location was now seen as the center of a festive colonial cityscape that preserved Brazil’s history and offered access to Afro-Brazilian culture through its streets. After its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, the neighborhood was cleared, often violently, of the area’s longstanding Black inhabitants. This tragic irony, of removing Black citizens to promote a more sanitized version of Blackness, has been commented upon by many. Such tensions continue today. The area is heavily policed, and Black women dressed as Baianas are paid by the tourist board to assist tourists in the streets, even as Baiana food vendors have struggled to maintain their practice. None of this critique was present, however, in the glossy celebratory volume in which Amado and ACM collaborated together to praise the renovation of the Pelourinho and its astounding “success.”8 The Pelourinho and its surroundings are the same streets and the same urban landscape granted a starring role by the modernists I have traced over the course of this book. Modernists working in the service of tourism consistently identified a visual aesthetic of the city in one particular geographical space, and as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in a fi nal coup, the same space gained a fi nal consolidation as the

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essence of the city. Although such a result might have in many ways been predictable, or even inevitable, given the historic importance of the area, we must also consider the ways in which the modernist framing of Salvador in the 1950s played a formative role in informing and shaping the city’s development and portrayal.9

Amado’s Long Tour of the City Amado and his guide of Bahia perhaps provide the clearest example of the continued legacy of the trajectories I have traced in this book. Born out of a new modernist interest in Blackness, and influenced by his communist leanings, Amado’s guide of 1945 and its artwork showed the city as impoverished, dominated by hard labor and lonely people. As Amado softened his political leanings, and as Bahian modernism gained a more particular iconographic language, this impoverished working city depicted by Manuel Martins grew increasingly out of sync with the novelist Jorge Amado and his guide. Martins’s work was gradually phased out: photographs were introduced alongside his woodcuts in 1960 in an intermediate stage of substitution, and by the late 1970s, all of Martins’s art had been replaced by the romantic work of Carlos Bastos, who became the new illustrator for the guide (Carybé held a brief stint as cover illustrator in the 1970s). Bastos’s portrayal removed all social critique, brought in a new Catholic focus, and emphasized the idea of the festive city of leisure and happiness that had been developed in tourist guides over the course of the years. It is worth emphasizing how little Bastos’s work of the 1970s differed from his drawings some two decades earlier for Darwin Brandão and Motta e Silva’s guide of 1958, including many illustrations that were reproduced and used again. This pairing of Bastos and Amado continued to circulate widely, and the book signings for this edition and others in the future attracted considerable crowds, further indication of the continued popularity of their celebratory vision more broadly and of this work in particular.10 Amado’s guide was most recently printed in 2012, indicating how far and deep these images have traveled, and how the work established in the 1950s set up an iconography that would be replicated again and again. The central figures I have discussed in this book escalated their pace of work during the Brazilian dictatorship. Amado produced a flurry of illustrated and promotional works for the city in the 1960s, along

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Figure 7.1. Municipal sign promoting tourism in Salvador, 2015. Photograph by Taynara Matos.

with novels that increasingly celebrated racial mixing and Bahia’s festive nature.11 Carybé continued his prolific career, with high-profile commissions across public sites in the city, including twenty-seven engraved wood panels depicting Candomblé deities for the Bank of Bahia in 1968, as well as works in the early 1980s that depicted the dress of Candomblé Orixás.12 Pierre Verger undertook a second, very public career as an ethnographer of Candomblé, stressing the role of African connections with Bahian practice and becoming a central figure in the religion himself, serving as a go-between for Yoruba-based practices in Africa and Salvador. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the ties between Verger, Carybé, and Amado tightened, enabling them to reinforce each other in constant circular references to one another’s work and inspiration. The continued legacy of these efforts can be seen in a promotional sign erected in 2015 by Salvador’s municipal tourist office (see fig. 7.1). The sign’s illustrations, Black faceless bodies in a festive portrayal of the city, demonstrate the continued and long-lasting legacy of these figures and their modernist cohort of artists and writers. To be sure, many Afro-Bahians in Salvador surely welcomed the racial integration of the visual register, as well as the particular style of these artists. It is known, for example, that the capoeira instructor Mestre Bimba worked directly from Verger’s photographs to produce his own manual for his practice.13 And Candomblé practition-

258

Epilogue

ers far beyond the city, in Rio de Janeiro, later found Carybé’s work useful in remembering the proper dress and accoutrements of the Yoruba Orixás as they struggled to build their own sense of authenticity.14 More broadly, many Black Brazilians certainly gained status from these tourist works, either in the world of Candomblé or in roles as the performers for folkloric displays and shows that came to be a new source of livelihood in the 1960s and 1970s. We might even interpret this art as creating space for the new Black presence of Carnival groups such as Ilê Ayê, founded in 1974 by leaders who sought to promote African themes and who limited membership to Black participants, although other influences, such as the Black Power movement, also bear credit for such developments. But another possible reading of all of these works is to read them as documents of segregation, as documents that continued to see government, schools, and inside spaces as the domains of whites, with festive Black bodies on the streets representing a visible rejection of Black individuals from the inside domains of authority or intellectual pursuits. In this reading, then, these modernist works show the continued resistance to thinking about Black individuals as inhabiting a full range of spaces and domains, from the streets to political power. In the end, the answer surely lies between these two extremes, but one cannot deny the force of the modernist movement itself.

Black Abstraction Segregation of space stands out all the more when we consider that Black artists who stayed away from the tropes of Black bodies in the streets found little traction in Bahia’s modernist movement or within a broader Bahian public. The most telling example of this is the case of the Afro-Bahian artist Rubem Valentim, who struggled in his fi rst years as an artist in Salvador, achieved remarkable success after an early move to São Paulo, and has continued to garner international attention and respect since his death in 1991.15 Valentim’s trajectory expresses well the tensions in place for artists who deviated from the tropes I have traced here, for he produced colorful geometric and abstract art instead of figurative drawings in black and white (see fig. 7.2). Valentim began as a self-taught artist connected with the early circles of modernism in Bahia in the late 1940s. But his focus on abstract geometric forms made his work less useful to

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Figure 7.2.

Rubem Valentim, Composição 12, oil on canvas, 40 × 28 in., 1962. Original in color. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, gift of Ana Dale Antonio Almeida and Carlos Dale Júnior in 2017. Courtesy of Roberto Bicca de Alencastro.

the promotional nature of Bahian modernism. Valentim entered highprofi le events, such as the Bahian modern art salons, with judge José Valladares granting him an early award in the category of abstract art. Despite such support, he had limited success in Salvador more broadly. His fi rst and last solo show in Salvador took place in 1954, and he left for Brazil’s Southeast three years later. As he explained, “In Bahia, I never gained much acceptance, and this was the reason I left. . . . So I went to Rio instead, and since I arrived in the midst of the geometric and constructivist trend underway, critic Mario Pedrosa gave my work a lot of support and recognition.”16 His isolation from Bahian trends more broadly was noted by many. Pedrosa wrote in 1967 that Valentim had initiated his career as a rebel against the outdated aesthetics dominant in Bahia, and he had “recused himself from the regionalist facade [in Bahia], from trite ideas, from anecdotes for tour-

260 Epilogue

ists, from the picturesque and from folkloric enchantments.” As one of the fi rst abstract artists in Salvador, Valentim had been forced “to suffer and fight.”17 While Valentim’s isolation from the Bahian trends was significant, he did, however, agree on the centrality of Candomblé, and he turned increasingly to motifs from Afro-Brazilian religion as he developed his geometric focus. In the end, Valentim’s geometric work plays with Candomblé-inspired forms, especially in his later work, which gained him significant renown in Brazil and abroad but no traction in Bahia. As Bruno Pinheiro has emphasized, there was little space for modernist Black artists in Salvador, who often came instead to be billed as “primitive” painters or representative of a folk worldview.18 Valentim, who set aside the motifs of Black bodies on the streets, might have been particularly censured. While abstract Black modernism had little place in Bahia, it flourished elsewhere.

Market Demands Throughout this book, the role of the market, and of capitalism, has been lurking. Both drove tourism, and both ultimately shaped the promotion of Blackness in Salvador. As modern artists allied with tourism created new meanings for the city, should that production be understood as separate from a desire for profit, both for themselves and for the larger tourism cause they were promoting? Or could any artist be divorced from questions of viewership or consumption? These abstract considerations notwithstanding, the market was certainly a critical player in the story of modernism, for the fact that Bahian tourist guides and their art were produced to sell the city to outsiders undeniably shaped their meaning and content. The art that became tied to the promotion of the city did not turn a critical eye on the city and its problems, nor was that its purpose. Its purpose was to celebrate Salvador so that others would recognize its importance, so that the city would gain status nationally and beyond, and so that the city’s economy might benefit from increased tourism. The difficulty for Salvador has been, however, that this promotional view has long been confused with reality. The origins of these images as forms of promotion have been forgotten, and the visual culture of the 1950s lives on, often now understood as a documentary truth of a different, more idyllic way of life in earlier times. These image makers

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remade the city in forms that are still being drawn upon today by state agencies of tourism such as Bahiatursa, by political authorities, and by meaning makers more broadly. The narratives described here have become so hegemonic that they are taken as the truth itself, and ideas to the contrary have little space to breathe. More importantly, as I have traced throughout the book, the images that have become hegemonic for the city present a profoundly limited view of Blackness. Guided by a sense of the exotic, by travel literature itself, by nineteenth-century types, and by anxieties about modernity, the images that emerged from tourist promotions distilled a distinctly apolitical form of Blackness. The celebrated festive streets and the folk practices held up as authentically Bahian were certainly part of Bahia’s reality, but they came to take the place of a much wider array of realities. In the end, any assessment of the city today is forced to acknowledge that while Afro-Bahians have succeeded as culture makers, the city still bears the hard lines of inequality. If we ask the difficult question of who profited from the modernists’ vision, it is only partly true that Black citizens themselves have won out in this process. While Blackness has been embraced as the visual icon of the city, whites remain in many cases the ones writing or illustrating Blackness. In a city that has remained largely segregated, the tourist economy has brought the most benefit to either wealthy neighborhoods or neighborhoods cleared violently of their Afro-Bahian residents, such as the Pelourinho. Likewise, tourism has undeniably been used as an excuse for an increased police presence in the city’s colonial center, a presence that has acted more widely as an agent of violence against the city’s Black population rather than protection, with terrifying and deathly effects. If there is any change, it is visible in a recent renaissance by AfroBahian artists, such as Tiago Sant’Ana, Thais Muniz, and Àlex Ìgbó.19 White culture makers in Bahian museums and galleries, however, have often remained uninterested in or hostile toward those straying beyond the themes of festive Black life or religiosity. Often critical of or embarrassed by the earlier representations of Afro-Bahian life, these artists fi nd themselves in difficult territory as they seek, once again, to redefi ne Blackness in the city.

Acknowledgments

This book has been my constant companion for longer than I would have imagined, but I’m grateful to have had other companionship and support throughout. In terms of funding for the support of this project, I feel particularly lucky. The National Endowment for the Humanities granted me a fellowship that was critical in giving me time to write and think. Reviewer comments were particularly helpful in framing the work, as was the encouragement of Geoff Burrows. At Texas State, a REP grant and History Department research funds supported research trips, and department funds assisted in defraying the costs of the images used here. Colleagues in a variety of settings and conferences provided encouragement and pushed me to pursue the project further. Scott Ickes, Hendrik Kraay, and Mary Ann Mahoney at the AHA gave comments that helped the early stages of the project, and I thank Scott especially for his generous and thoughtful feedback throughout. Reviewers at the Journal of Latin American Studies also provided valuable feedback, and I thank the journal for permission to publish some of those fi ndings here in chapter 2. Jane Mangan’s invitation to give a talk at Davidson College was critical for my fi rst thinking about the role of images in the tourist guides. And a panel at LASA inspired fruitful conversations, especially with Vanessa Castañeda, Ana Paula Höfl ing, and Patricia Pinho. Two other moments of collaboration have been especially helpful in my thinking. The fi rst was through my involvement in an art exhibition centered on Salvador, organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Conversations there with curators Patrick Polk, Sabrina Gledhill, Randal Johnson, and Roberto Conduru gave me a thought-provoking in-

Acknowledgments 263

troduction to the world of art history and many insights into art in Salvador. The opportunity also introduced me to scholars and artists who raised provocative questions about my project; I thank especially the scholars Kimberly Cleveland, Heather Shirey, J.  Lorand Matory, and Elena Shtromberg and the artists Tiago Sant’Ana, Thaís Muniz, and Àlex Ìgbó. My participation in a multiyear colloquium on Brazilian regional identity in an international context has also offered fruitful connections for my work. I am especially grateful for feedback from organizers Courtney Campbell and Glen Goodman, as well as from participants Durval Muniz de Albuquerque, Jerry Dávila, Ericka Edwards, Antonio Sergio Guimarães, Marc Hertzman, Francisco Firmino Sales Neto, Ruben Oliven, and Barbara Weinstein. Kerri Brown, Gillian McGillivray, and Michele Nascimento provided feedback as well as excellent company for exploring London. Archivists and librarians assisted me in my research across Brazil and the United States. Although I have only recorded fi rst names for some, I’d like to register my deep appreciation for their work. I am grateful for the assistance given to me by Edwalter Santos Lima in the Seção Memória at the Biblioteca do Estado da Bahia; Edivaldo at the Biblioteca Manuel Querino at IPAC; and Maria Conceição Barbosa da Costa e Silva at the archive of the Museu de Arte da Bahia. Angela Lühning at the Fundação Pierre Verger graciously shared some of her insights, and Paula Santos helped orient me in the world of Candomblé. I especially enjoyed learning from the expertise of Ana Teresa Góis Soares de Mattos in the IPHAN archive of Bahia and Sandra Regina Jesus in the archive of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia; conversations with both Ana and Sandra helped enrich the project. Bruno Fraga at the Fundação Casa Jorge Amado has been especially helpful over the years. I thank Demian Reis for patiently driving in circles to help me understand the Centro Industrial de Aratu. Colleagues in Salvador have been particularly helpful and generous with this project. João José Reis has been a constant source of wisdom and support. I have also very much appreciated Negro Gino’s sense of humor and his thoughtful research leads, as well as his gift of an early edition of Jorge Amado’s guide. A further high point of my time in Salvador has been time spent with Laura de Oliveira and Ricardo Sangiovanni. Suely Ceravolo, Alan Passos, and Livio Sansone were generous with their time in Salvador and with their ideas for references. For help with research, I thank especially Ricardo Sangiovanni and Neuracy Moreira.

264 Acknowledgments

In the United States I have drawn from many libraries for help in accessing the materials for my research. I would not have been able to complete this project without the help of Michelle Williams and the Interlibrary Loan services at Texas State. The librarians at Trinity University and the University of Texas at Austin have also been exceptionally generous in extending their benefits to me. I thank especially Linda Gill and Melissa Guy at UT and Jason Hardin and Maria McWilliams at Trinity. Tim Noakes in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University helped in scanning a rare copy of Gilberto Freyre’s early guide. Henry Widener rushed me scans of postcards from the Oliveira Lima collection. Colleague Joel Wolfe generously granted me an extended loan of his microform for Brazil’s Touring Club. As a historian new to working with images, the effort involved in seeking permissions for images was often overwhelming. Sarah Chenault’s assistance and expertise was essential in this process. Colleagues Sven Schuster and Abigail Lapin Dardashti generously helped with leads on permissions. I owe a special thanks to the families of the artists for their willingness to support the academic effort, even for a scholar very far away. My deep appreciation goes to Silvio Ré Martins (son of Manuel Martins), Solange Bernabó (daughter of Carybé) and her assistant Adriana Vendramini of Copyrights Consultoria, Carlos Artur Thiré (grandson of Carlos Thiré), Marcelo Brazil (son of Lenio Braga), Mirella Bastos (great-niece of Carlos Bastos), and Roberto Bicca de Alencastro (nephew of Rubem Valentim). Alex Baradel at the Fundação Pierre Verger and the very efficient staff at the Instituto Moreira Salles and Diários Associados also helped with permissions. I thank Lygia Sampaio, who, as the last living artist depicted here, was able to give me permission herself, and Marcus Sampaio, her nephew, for their help. At the University of Texas Press I have been lucky to work with Kerry Webb, whose interest in the topic helped sustain this project. Andrew Hnatow and Abby Webber helped usher it to completion. Two anonymous readers provided particularly thoughtful feedback that helped strengthen the work. The careful work of the press throughout has made these images look their best. A trio of colleagues nurtured the writing of this project in intensive ways. It is safe to say that this book would have lingered with me much longer, and in far less developed form, without the advice and encouragement of Kathryn O’Rourke, Curtis Swope, and Julia Rodriguez. Kathryn and Curtis offered weekly reality checks, accompanied

Acknowledgments 265

by a cheery sense of the absurd, and helped me stay my course even in the midst of setbacks and busy semesters. Julia has been critical to the conceptualization and writing of the project from its early days, and her generous and insightful feedback on my unruly drafts has improved the quality of the book immeasurably. I consider myself very grateful and lucky for our conversations and exchanges throughout. Other colleagues and friends have also been important for this project. I thank Jane Mangan for her steady friendship and all of her advice on the publishing process. At Texas State, many members of my department read drafts and offered encouragement that has been much appreciated; I thank especially José Carlos de la Puente, Lynn Denton, Ken Margerison, Jessica Pliley, and Peter Siegenthaler for close readings of drafts and members of the Swinney Seminar for their helpful comments. Special thanks go to Angie Murphy, who generously read the manuscript in its entirety. Other friends contributed solely through their ability to distract me from my work and, occasionally, to listen to me ramble on about the book when they were probably tired of hearing about it. I am grateful always for the company of Justine Heilner, Jessica McCannon, Susan McDonough, and Stephanie Saulmon, who have all stuck with me for the long haul, making me laugh along the way. In San Antonio, the families of Lisa Jasinski, Kelly Lyons, Habiba Noor, Corinne Pache, Julie Post, Jill Thurber, Kerri Saulmon, and Melissa Zellers have all helped me stay sane and entertained. My family has also been a steady source of support as I worked on this book. My parents, Harriett and Ricardo Romo, played a role in sparking my interest in art, immersing me in art in my childhood home and fi lling my current home with treasures. They have also been unfailingly generous with their time and especially toward my children. I owe a special debt to my mother for cooking delicious meals during tough semesters and for her thoughtful edits in the last push for revisions. The support of the rest of my family has also been key. A big thanks goes to the Romo-Knape family; to Rose and Mike O’Sullivan; and to my sisters-in-law, Courtney, Jennifer, Michelle, Pam, and their families. I feel extremely lucky to be a part of a fun and supportive extended clan. Finally, it is traditional that acknowledgments end with those who have lived with the project, a practice that has surely irritated my children, Lily and Emmett, if they have been reading this far. I think they know how much their excitement, their conversations, and their love have helped me get through a long slog of work. I’m sure they are as

266 Acknowledgments

glad to be done with this project as I am, and I appreciate all the patience that they’ve been able to muster over the course of the book. My husband, Tim O’Sullivan, cannot truly be thanked, but I will continue to try. I could not have completed this project without his support, his patience, and his juggling of our lives as I sank under work at various moments. I’m always grateful for his ability to make me laugh. I am looking forward to celebrating this book with him, with Emmett, and with Lily.

Appendix

The following table is the basis for the graph depicted in figure 6.1. Table A.1. Number of registered candomblés in Salvador, 1800–2006

Year 1800–1888 1937 1944* 1956* 1957* 1969 1981 1992 1998 2006

Number of Number of Annual candomblés years percent from increase from registered previous previous with period police period 56 67 117 600 639 306 1,349 938 500 1,163

n/a 49 7 12 13 12 12 11 6 8

n/a 0.4% 8.3% 14.6% 0.5% −6.0% 13.2% −3.2% −10.0% 11.1%

Source Harding Parés Amado and Martins Amado and Damm Torres Parés Parés Parés Parés J. Santos

Sources: Amado and Martins, Bahia; Amado and Damm, Bahia, 174; Harding, Refuge in Thunder, 75; J. Santos, “Mapeamento dos terreiros de Salvador”; Parés, Formation of Candomblé, 206; Torres, Bahia (1957), 189. Data for the nineteenth century are gathered from irregular archival police records examined by Rachel Harding; while the collection method for this early period thus differs from the other sources, it provides the best data available for this early period. Note: All these numbers should be regarded as approximations, but it seems likely that the 1969 figures found by Parés may be an undercount. In 1970, Russell Hamilton (“Present State”) noted that while no accurate count existed, he believed the city held over a thousand terreiros, although he gave no base for his estimate. *Indicates a new tourist guide source for data.

Notes

Introduction 1. Earle, Return of the Native; Schwarcz, “Mestizo and Tropical Country.” 2. The literature on race and national identity in Latin America is vast; see, especially, for the countries mentioned here, López, Crafting Mexico; Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos; Moore, Nationalizing Blackness; Eakin, Becoming Brazilians; Vianna, Mystery of Samba; Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, Race and Nation; Skidmore, Black into White. Argentina is also an important field of study; see Rodriguez, Civilizing Argentina; Alberto and Elena, Rethinking Race in Argentina. The region as a whole is surveyed in Wade, Race and Ethnicity; Graham, Idea of Race. 3. Brazilian racial ideology is surveyed in Skidmore, Black into White; Schwarcz, Spectacle of the Races. Telles, Race in Another America, brings the analysis up to more contemporary times. The idea of Brazil’s racial democracy has been treated by many; critical historical works include E. Costa, Brazilian Empire; Guimarães, “Racial Democracy”; Alberto, Terms of Inclusion. 4. See Weinstein, Color of Modernity; Garfield, In Search of the Amazon; Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum; P. Pinho, Mama Africa; Ickes, AfricanBrazilian Culture. 5. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 10. 6. Comparisons might be made especially with the cases of Cuba, Colombia, and even Mexico. 7. For a fuller trajectory, see, especially, Andrews, Afro-Latin America; as well as the survey of the field in Fuente and Andrews, Afro-Latin American Studies. 8. Important precedents are established in Fuente, “Afro-Latin American Art.” Tamara J. Walker’s forthcoming study of Afro–Latin American representation in art will be critical: see Walker, Color and Undertones. 9. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics. For New Orleans, see Gotham, Authentic New Orleans. 10. Records from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database show that Bahia received 1,550,355 enslaved Africans over the course of the Atlantic slave trade from 1501 to 1866, roughly one third of the 4,722,143 enslaved Afri-

Notes to Pages 5–10

269

cans brought to Brazil during this time. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Estimates,” SlaveVoyages, accessed January 6, 2020, https://www.slavevoyages .org/assessment/estimates. 11. Quoted in P. Pinho, Mama Africa, 191. I use Pinho’s translation here. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 12. Bahian history is surveyed in L. Tavares, História da Bahia. Salvador gets dedicated treatment in Risério, História da Bahia. The importance of slavery to the region is aptly demonstrated by the 1835 uprising of slaves analyzed in Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil; while its end days are traced in Fraga Filho, Crossroads of Freedom. 13. Trends for the region are treated well in Graham, Idea of Race. 14. This is a broad literature, but see, especially, W. Albuquerque, Algazarra nas ruas; J. Braga, Gamela do feitiço. 15. This followed the trends of Latin America more broadly; see Andrews, Afro-Latin America; Wade, Race and Ethnicity. For Brazil, see Borges, “Recognition of Symbols”; Skidmore, Black into White; Vianna, Mystery of Samba; Eakin, Becoming Brazilians. 16. See, for example, Butler, “Masquerading Africa”; Reis, “Candomblé in Bahia”; Harding, Refuge in Thunder. African connections in Candomblé are treated in Dantas, Nagô Grandma; Matory, Black Atlantic Religion; Capone, Searching for Africa. For Querino, see M.  Leal, Manuel Querino; Gledhill, Travessias no Atlântico negro. 17. I treat these anthropologists together in Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum, 113–132. 18. For cultural politics and regional identity in Bahia during this era, see Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture, 223–225; Ickes, “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural”; O.  Pinho, “Bahia no fundamental”; Risério, História da Bahia; Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum; Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments. For changing ideas of race in Salvador over the twentieth century, see the preceding, as well as Bacelar, Hierarquia das raças; Alberto, Terms of Inclusion; P. Pinho, Mama Africa; Butler, Freedoms Given; Dunn, Contracultura, chap. 3. 19. Collins, Revolt of the Saints. 20. Based on total state population of 15.2 million for 2015. 21. Statistics cited in Mitchell-Walthour, “Politics of Blackness,” 237. Christen Smith stresses exceptionally high levels of police violence in Salvador in Afro-Paradise. Human rights organizations have warned that levels across Brazil have escalated considerably since President Jair Bolsonaro came to office in 2019. See Ahmed, “Police Wear Masks.” 22. Sheriff, Dreaming Equality. For demographic studies, see N.  Silva, “Morenidade”; Hasenbalg and Silva, “Racial and Political Inequality.” S. Santos, “Black in Brazil,” provides police statistics as well as a useful overview of debate about racial identification. 23. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics; she builds on this notion from the sociologist Rob Shield. 24. A useful brief survey of such concepts is provided in Withers, “Place and ‘Spatial Turn.’” For Brazil, Courtney Campbell’s work is particularly insightful: see “Space, Place and Scale”; “Brazilian Northeast.” 25. Albuquerque Júnior, Brazilian Northeast, 7.

270

Notes to Pages 10–16

26. Oliven, Tradition Matters; Weinstein, Color of Modernity; Albuquerque Júnior, Brazilian Northeast; Blake, Vigorous Core of Nationality. Bahian regional identity is treated in Risério, “Bahia com ‘H’”; P. Pinho, Mama Africa; Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum; Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture. Formal geographic divisions defi ned Bahia as part of the Northeast only after the close of this study’s scope, in 1970, so I leave aside the question of Bahia within a northeastern identity here. 27. Weinstein, Color of Modernity, 2. 28. Among the many studies of modernism in Latin America, perhaps the most insightful for Brazil are Schelling, Through the Kaleidoscope; Martins, Modernist Idea; and Cardoso, Modernity in Black and White. For a still elegant overview of the movement in Latin America as a whole, see Ades, Art in Latin America, 126–149. The movement’s hemispheric connections are emphasized in Montgomery, Mobility of Modernism. Bahian modernism is still understudied, but critical works include O. Oliveira, “Notas sobre páginas”; Scaldaferri, Arte Moderna; Ludwig, “Mudanças na vida cultural”; Risério, Avant-garde na Bahia; Ickes, “‘Behold Our City.’” 29. Quoted in Ludwig, “Mudanças na vida cultural,” 39. 30. For the nineteenth-century links between costumbrismo and the casta imagery, see Moriuchi, Mexican Costumbrismo. For the casta system as precedent for twentieth-century mestizaje, see Vinson, Before Mestizaje. Poole’s pathbreaking work reveals visual continuities in Peru; see Vision, Race, and Modernity. 31. Morán, “Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” 131, notes a similar pattern in Cuba, where depictions of Black figures and types by nineteenth-century costumbrismo artists were taken up again by a group of artists known as the Vanguard in the 1920s and 1930s and used as national symbols. Costumbrismo is treated more broadly in Ades, Art in Latin America, 68–74. 32. Osmundo Pinho insightfully labels these works “guides to baianidade”; see “Bahia no fundamental.” Riggs’s rich study examines debates over the Pelourinho and concentrates especially on the 1970s; see “‘Room for Everyone.’” See also Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture, 223–225; “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural.” The work of Jocélio Santos grants close attention to state promotional material for tourism, but for the later decades of the 1960s and 1970s; see Poder da cultura. 33. Scott Ickes has begun this conversation with his framing of a Black aesthetic that developed in the partnership of the local journalist Odorico Tavares with the artist Carybé; see Ickes, “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural.” I push further in insisting on the centrality of the visual for these works as a whole and by reconsidering the role of Carybé more broadly. 34. Histories of tourism are still sparse for Latin America; for a recent sampling focusing on the twentieth century, see Berger and Wood, Holiday in Mexico; Merrill, Negotiating Paradise; Ward, Packaged Vacations; A. Wood, Business of Leisure. The most relevant for this study are Mendoza, “Emergence of Identities”; Rice, Making Machu Picchu. The complexities of outsiders’ travel narratives in the nineteenth century are treated in Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

Notes to Pages 16–30

271

35. Roberto Conduru perceptively frames Verger and Carybé as producing “macumba by tourists,” a play on the term “macumba for tourists,” which references the practice of staging nonauthentic displays of Afro-Brazilian culture for visitors seeking the exotic. “Macumba” is a generalized term for Afro-Brazilian religion, used more for practices in Brazil’s Southeast. See Conduru, “Bridging the Atlantic,” 67–69. While Conduru rightfully calls attention to their status as outsiders, I emphasize their connections to Bahian currents and society. 36. For these trends as they relate to Salvador, see Romo, “Writing Bahian Identity.” A fuller history of tourism in Salvador is best traced in Queiroz, Turismo na Bahia. Leftists and hippies under the military dictatorship (1964–1985) found in Salvador a countercultural appeal, as traced in Dunn, Contracultura. 37. Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments, 131. 38. Sebastian Modak, “When in Brazil, Just Follow the Music,” New York Times, July 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/travel/52 -places z-salvador-brazil.html. 39. Sansi’s insightful study goes the furthest in laying out this framework, but his focus on the rising commodification of Candomblé leaves little room for representations of the city more broadly, an analysis of the racial content of this production, or a deeper consideration of how promotion of tourism helped fashion these new visions of the city. See Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments.

Chapter 1: Precedents and Backdrops 1. Kirkpatrick, “Ideology of Costumbrismo.” 2. Larger trends across Latin America echo what I trace here. 3. Diegues, “Mass Tourism in Brazil”; Romo, “Writing Bahian Identity.” 4. Araujo, Brazil through French Eyes. 5. Callcott is also known as Maria Graham, her married name at the time of her stay in Brazil. The full history of the circulation of such images is still unknown. Callcott’s watercolors, and the images shown here, appear to have been released in 1848 in Vistas e costumes de Pernambuco, together with works from an artist known only as H. Lewis; a copy of the album is held at Brazil’s national library. 6. Trevisan, “Jean-Baptiste Debret.” Graham’s travel narrative was translated and published in Brazil only in 1956. 7. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity. 8. Quoted in Turazzi, “Representação de tipos e cenas.” 9. Many of these images were used wholesale, without credit, in the 1857 travel narrative of the Reverends D. P. Kidder and James C. Fletcher, American visitors to Brazil. The ethics of such plagiarism aside, the fact remains that images such as these circulated widely. 10. For the British and French parallels, see, respectively, Turazzi, “Representação de tipos e cenas”; M. Wood, Black Milk. There is also an intriguing

272 Notes to Pages 30–39

parallel with types of Salvador depicted by the Luso-Italian artist Carlos Julião in the late 1700s, although the circulation of these images in Brazil is unclear. See Lara, “Customs and Costumes.” 11. Turazzi, “Representação de tipos e cenas.” 12. Moriuchi, Mexican Costumbrismo; “Nineteenth-Century Mexican Costumbrismo.” 13. Majluf, Reproducing Nations. 14. Casta paintings visually charted possible combinations resulting from racial mixture and can be seen as part of the Enlightenment efforts to create hierarchies that placed Europeans at the top. Katzew, Casta Painting. 15. See, especially, Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity. 16. G. Ferrez, Photography in Brazil. 17. In the United States, formerly enslaved people and abolitionists also used cartes de visite as publicity for their cause. It does not appear that these purposes were ever adopted in Brazil. Important work has begun to contextualize and question the use of photographs of the enslaved organized by the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz within the United States; see Barbash, Rogers, and Willis, To Make Their Own Way. Agassiz conducted a similarly controversial project within Brazil; see Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, chap. 3; Machado and Huber, Rastros e raças de Agassiz. 18. Ades, Art in Latin America, 97, 99. 19. M. Wood, Black Milk, 198. 20. See, for example, Shirey, “Baiana and Afro-Brazilian Identity”; M. Wood, Black Milk, 306–310. 21. Kossoy and Carneiro, Olhar europeu. 22. Quoted in Kossoy and Carneiro, 194. 23. Levine, “Faces of Brazilian Slavery”; Azevedo and Lissovsky, Escravos brasileiros. 24. Alinder, “Picturing Themselves,” 31. Black paid models in nineteenthcentury Brazilian painting may provide some parallel; see Williams, “Artists and Models.” 25. Majluf, Reproducing Nations, 24, 45. 26. Koutsoukos, Negros no estúdio, chap. 2. 27. The studio was Photography Diamantina, of which little is known. M.  Sampaio, “Da photographia à fotografia,” 63. See images 24 and 25 in Olszewski Filha, Fotografi a e o negro. Though these pictures were undated, they were published in Manuel Querino’s 1917 Raça africana e seus costumes na Bahia and thus certainly predate 1917. For their use there, see Vasconcellos, “Uso de fotografias.” 28. Traditionally, women from Africa in Bahia often wore a woven cloth draped over the shoulder. This was typically pano-da-costa, a fabric imported to Brazil from the African coast, often of striped cotton, but it might also be made of silk. H. Torres, “Alguns aspectos,” 419. 29. Vasconcellos, “Circuito social,” chap. 1. 30. Vasconcellos, “Uso de fotografias,” 101. 31. He joined the photographic studio of the Swiss-born Wilhelm Gaensly in 1882, established fi rst in 1868. Lindemann perhaps maintained an indepen-

Notes to Pages 39–47

273

dent studio of his own, established in 1881, and split off from him in 1900, but the changing partnership of the two need not detain us here. See the useful index in Sampaio et al., Fotografi a na Bahia. 32. Kossoy and Carneiro, Olhar europeu. For Lindemann’s contribution to the Paris exhibition of a portrait of a banana vendor discussed later, see Schuster, “Envisioning a ‘Whitened’ Brazil,” 35–36. 33. In Portuguese, they are labeled as follows: A. Ama—Bahia; B. Uma Creada—Bahia; C. Caixinheiras—Bahia; E. Lavandeira—Bahia; H. Vendedora de fructas—Bahia; J. Creoula—Bahia; and R. Ganhadores Africanos— Bahia. I have translated “caixinheiras” as street vendors, although a literal translation would be “box women,” a label that referred to the boxes carried by urban vendors. I have translated “creada” as domestic servant, although it might have had a broader usage as well. None of these terms necessarily indicated actual enslavement. 34. Labels appear to be less common as a whole for the genre of cartes de visite. 35. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature. 36. Salvador had lakes important for the Candomblé community and for Black washerwomen, but the idyllic nature of this particular backdrop seems to indicate a more generic (perhaps European) setting. 37. I. Santos, “Crioulas e outras baianas,” 29, 70. 38. I. Santos, 75–76. 39. Another possibility raised is that Lindemann found the Ferrez photos in his archive and used them. This seems less likely, especially in light of the second case that I present here of the 1885 Ferrez print. 40. According to the defi nitive study of Ferrez, the photograph was produced in Salvador in 1884; M. Ferrez, Brasil de Marc Ferrez, 237. 41. Occasionally Black women might be depicted with their children, most often carried on their backs in the street rather than in domestic scenes. Olszewski Filhas’s research on Black subjects in early Bahian photography uncovered only one portrait of a Black couple; Olszewski Filhas, Fotografi a e o negro. 42. The idea of clothes as studio props seems unlikely, in part due to problems of fit. It is also brought into question by the research of Vasconcellos, who discovered no such jewelry or clothing described in the inventories or wills of local photographers in Salvador, despite such objects’ use in photographs of the era. Vasconcellos, “Circuito social.” 43. For further defi nitions and a consideration of the changing role of Baianas, see I. Santos, “Crioulas e outras baianas.” 44. Alberto Henschel, a German immigrant, arrived in Recife in 1866 and immediately established a studio there, with outposts in Salvador and Rio in the next four years. 45. Scholars have noted that racial classification was also a concern in the illustrations of Debret and Rugendas; however, that remains too far afield of Bahian notions of Blackness to be developed here. 46. Within the larger history of photography they are perhaps particularly out of sync: Poole highlights a decline of racial categorizations within photog-

274 Notes to Pages 48–58

raphy beginning after 1890, although museums and the field of anthropology continued to rely on them. Poole, “Excess of Description,” 164. 47. The latest postmark I have seen is 1909. 48. Kossoy and Carneiro, Olhar europeu, 195. 49. Fraga Filho, Crossroads of Freedom; Albuquerque, Jogo de dissimulação. 50. These ideas have been traced by many; see, especially, Skidmore, Black into White; Graham, Idea of Race. 51. Graham, Idea of Race. See also López-Durán, Eugenics in the Garden. 52. The literature on Brazil’s roles in international and national expositions is extensive and growing. For classic works, see Pesavento, Exposições universais; Neves, Vitrines do progresso. For focus on visual culture especially, see Turazzi, Poses e trejeitos; Schuster, “Envisioning a ‘Whitened’ Brazil.” Few have yet focused on Bahia’s role in such events, but a useful start is found in Cunha and Cerávolo, “Para bem representar o Brasil.” Although photographs early entered these expositions as indicators of modernity in specialized competitions, they appear to have been primarily landscapes. I draw this assumption from the list of photography submissions collected by Turazzi for nineteenth-century expositions. 53. Cunha and Cerávolo, “Para bem representar o Brasil,” 33. 54. Elkin argues that Black Brazilians were largely absent altogether until 1922, and their symbolic presence there also seems to have been minimal (“Promoting a New Brazil,” chap. 5). Schuster agrees that topics of race and slavery were generally avoided but also fi nds Brazilians seeking to portray a more humane form of slavery (“Envisioning a ‘Whitened’ Brazil”). 55. O estado da Bahia: Noticias para o emigrante, 4. 56. Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, Memoir of Bahia, n.p. 57. Sampaio and Diretoria de Estatistica da Bahia, Estado da Bahia, 13. Sampaio’s 1925 phrasing was repeated in the updated 1932 edition of the work (Sampaio and Directorio de Estatistica da Bahia, Noticia historica, 12); a 1934 tourist guide; and a 1939 tourist guide, to name only those I have confi rmed. 58. O estado da Bahia: Noticias para o emigrante, 27, 29, 31. 59. Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, Memoir of Bahia, 6. 60. Sampaio and Diretoria de Estatistica da Bahia, Estado da Bahia, 14. 61. The statistical overview of the state in 1932 reused the historical essay but dropped all of the images. T. Sampaio, Noticia historica. 62. L. Sampaio, Indicador, 9. 63. The Anjos guide had more far-ranging advertisements and seemed to reach further to a middle-class consumer. Anjos, Guia da Bahia. 64. L. Sampaio, Indicador, 221.

Chapter 2: Colonial Churches and the Rise of the Quintessential Black City 1. Jorge Amado’s novels have been translated into thirty-nine languages; he further dominated, by far, the domestic Brazilian literary market in the

Notes to Pages 58–63

275

twentieth century until the rise of Paulo Coelho in the 1980s. Criticism of his work is abundant; for an introduction, see Chamberlain, Jorge Amado. 2. The son of Portuguese immigrants, he grew up trained as an artisan and self-taught as an artist. Together with others of similar backgrounds, he formed part of the Santa Elena Group of São Paulo in the mid-1930s. Later, he integrated into a short-lived but influential artist collective, Família Artística Paulista (1937–1940); the catalog of the fi rst show by the group stressed that they rejected modernism as a limiting label that had been misunderstood. 3. McCann, Hello Brazil. Samba portrayals of Bahia were central in Bahian identity; see Mariano, Invenção da baianidade. 4. The original Portuguese lyrics used the term “nêga” and, later, “minha nêga,” which were slang terms for “negra,” or Black woman. With no full equivalent in English, I have taken the racially charged “endearment” and used “girl” instead. Translation of the title is usually “Have You Been to Bahia,” which omits the “yet” and thus fails to capture the assumption that one will at some point go to Bahia. 5. Wolfe, Autos and Progress. 6. This was the reading of Peixoto, Breviário da Bahia, 340–341. 7. Zweig, Brazil, 258. 8. Press column published October 15, 1943; quoted in Passos, “Cidade de Salvador,” 33. 9. Darién Davis proposes that although the roots of Brazilian popular music had extensive participation by both whites and Afro-Brazilians, the latter lost out as the genre entered new forms of mass media like radio and fi lm, with Carmen Miranda typical of this process. Davis, White Face, Black Mask, chap. 5. 10. Das, Katherine Dunham, 67–68. 11. Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil. 12. Correspondence from Mário de Andrade to Carlos Drummond de Andrade; quoted in Oliven, “Brazil,” 58. 13. Freyre had taken an early role in promoting Salvador along these lines, controversially, with a lascivious poem of 1926 praising the city’s tropical nature and “sensuous” “mulatas.” Predictably, such characterizations created outrage among the Bahian elite. On the poem, see P.  Pinho, “Gilberto Freyre,” 227–254. The best intellectual biography for Freyre is Burke and Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre. 14. Albuquerque Júnior, Invention of the Northeast, 45–46. 15. Albuquerque Júnior, 58–60. Movements from the Southeast are often assumed to be national in ways that movements from other regions are not. Although Freyre himself emphasized the regional and traditional, this in fact fit well within other modernist movements. Ultimately, I’m not interested in parsing the various modernist credentials of the different figures I trace here, but I consider an individual modernist when they sought to break from the oligarchical approach of a more traditional elite. The literature on modernism in Latin America is vast. For an introduction, see Schelling, Through the Kaleidoscope; Rowe and Schelling, Memory and Modernity. 16. While Hermano Vianna decenters the role of a well-known 1924 ex-

276

Notes to Pages 63–66

pedition organized by the modernists Mário de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral into the interior of Brazil, placing priority instead on a much broader nativist interest in Brazilian roots, it remains a pivotal case of domestic tourism by artists seeking native inspiration. Vianna, Mystery of Samba. These efforts had international parallels. The Works Progress Administration in the United States, for example, marshaled modernists to collect local lore and to produce local visitor guides from 1937 to 1941. Nationals in Mexico turned to Tepantapec or Oaxaca, while Peruvians turned to Cuzco. For those writing in Latin America especially, they wrote with an awareness of adding a national perspective to a genre long dominated by foreigners. 17. Lira, “Estranho patrimonial,” 367. A sometimes ethnologist, Andrade had himself gathered folk stories in the Amazon and used these in part as a basis for his surreal and unsettling novel Macunaíma, written in 1928, framed as a folktale itself. The work became one of the foundational texts of Brazilian modernism. Schelling, “Mario de Andrade.” 18. Freyre and Bandeira, Olinda; Freyre and Jardim, Guia prático do Recife. The Olinda guide was illustrated by the Recife artist Manoel Bandeira, which can create some confusion with the poet Manuel Bandeira discussed here. Printed in a small batch, the guide used color plates for at least some of the editions, although it appears that only five hundred books in total were printed. The fi rst edition of Freyre’s Recife guide was exceptionally small: only 105 books were printed, and all were colored by hand by Jardim. Although Freyre’s Recife guide is sometimes referred to as the fi rst tourist guide for a Brazilian city, it appears to have been predated by one year by a guide produced for Rio from the Touring Club of Brazil in 1933. Freyre’s second edition of his Recife guide was published with a larger run of one thousand copies. This was still much smaller than Amado’s guide, which was published not only as a special run of 105 signed copies but with an additional 3,000 published for the general public (noted in Amado’s fi rst edition). 19. Strikingly, Manuel Bandeira had a very different reaction to Salvador. There, in 1927, he had written to his colleague Mário de Andrade that the people of the city itself seemed to be a living example of the patrimony. Collins, Revolt of Saints, 9, 124–133. Bandeira’s guide was also republished various times, the fi rst being a French translation in 1948. For an analysis of the guide within the career of Bandeira, see Lopes, Baleiro, and Quinteiro, “Guias de viagens.” 20. Although the volume was produced by the Bahian section of the Touring Club of Brazil, it seems likely that its neutral tone came from authors at the national office; a native Bahian would not have missed the many opportunities to emphasize Bahia’s primacy in the nation. The work was republished in 1937 in French, showing the interest by the touring club in attracting international as well as domestic visitors. As far as I have been able to determine, this was the second touring club guide (the fi rst was for Rio in 1933). The next, a guide to “historic cities” of Minas Gerais, came only in the 1940s. This organization has not attracted much historical attention but is noted in Wolfe, Autos and Progress. Despite its bland tone, the touring club guide was later repackaged with minimal changes in 1949 for Salvador’s four-hundredyear anniversary, as I discuss in chapter 3.

Notes to Pages 66–72

277

21. Touring Club do Brasil, Guia turistico da Bahia, 19. 22. Touring Club do Brasil, 64. 23. Mayor Durval Neves da Rocha (1938–1942) took an interest in developing tourism during this time, alongside the governor of the era, Landulfo Alves. Most political positions during this time were appointed not elected. 24. Bahia’s sugar elite had early called for historical preservation, with their own colonial legacy in mind. The former sugar baron Wanderley de Pinho made the fi rst proposal for a preservation policy in 1917 and again in 1935. Mattos, “Nem português, nem mineiro,” 19. 25. Mattos, 33. His broader efforts are traced in Mattos, chap. 2. 26. Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum, 90–92. 27. I have located the fi rst two issues, both published in 1939, but have been unable to locate references to any later editions. As an ambitious and expensive publication, it might have simply run out of financial support. 28. Poems in Diretoria de Cultura e Divulgação do Estado da Bahia, Bahia: Tradicional e moderna 1, no. 1 (1939): 22–24. The theme of happiness is developed in José N. Allioni, “A Bahia vos Convida: Notícia sobre a cidade do Salvador,” Bahia: Tradicional e moderna 1, no. 2 (1939): 45–47. 29. “A nossa capa,” Bahia: Tradicional e moderna 1, no. 1 (1939): 16; Pedro Calmon, “Bahia, a cidade mais brasileira do Brasil,” Bahia: Tradicional e moderna 1, no. 2 (1939): 1–2. 30. Pedro Calmon, “Bahia, minha Bahia!,” in Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador, Cidade do Salvador: Tradição, progresso, n.p. 31. Pedro Calmon, “O Sr. José Lins é a favor do samba,” O Estado da Bahia, July 15, 1939; quoted in Cruz, “Samba na roda,” 49. 32. The DIP was charged with censoring depictions of Brazil at home and abroad. Promoting tourist propaganda was one of six priorities in its founding policy. Revista Cultura Política 2, no. 21 (November 1942): 173. Distribution of Travel in Brazil was at least twenty-five thousand copies in the United States. See http://www.fgv.br/cpdoc/acervo/dicionarios/verbete-tematico/depar tamento -de-imprensa-e-propaganda-dip. 33. Mário de Andrade to Cecília Meireles, March 21, 1941; quoted in Vieira, “Política editorial,” 4–5. 34. Travel in Brazil 2, nos. 1–3 (1942). 35. O. Oliveira, “Notas sobre algumas páginas,” 12. 36. Amado, Jorge Amado, 10. Interview granted in 1981. 37. “Livros novos,” O Cruzeiro, October 26, 1935, 8. Amado’s career spanned a half century, and his work’s reception has generally been split between those who see it as hopelessly marred by simplistic plotlines and stereotypes and others who see it as groundbreaking for its treatment of Black protagonists and the daily life of the working class. A good survey is Chamberlain, Jorge Amado. For his early period, see Rossi, Cores da revolução. Ilana Goldstein shows that mestiçagem would become central to Amado’s work; however, Amado’s emphasis varied historically, shifts that she does not address (Goldstein, Brasil best seller). 38. Quoted in Tati, Jorge Amado, 77. 39. See Castillo, Oralidade e a escrita, chap. 3; and especially J.  Braga, Gamela do feitiço, chap. 4.

278 Notes to Pages 72–91

40. Newspaper articles Amado wrote in 1939 during his stay in Estância, Sergipe, praised Estância’s resistance to modern intrusions, cited the mystery of the city, and were directed to a fictional young girl—tropes recycled in his guide to Bahia. The articles are collected in Nascimento, Jorge Amado, 250. 41. For an insightful urban studies perspective, see Wan-Dall Júnior, “Narrativas literárias.” 42. Amado and Martins, Bahia, 16–17. 43. Amado and Martins, 26. 44. Amado and Martins, 26. Amado elsewhere in the guide used the terms “Black Rome” (Amado and Martins, 31) as well as “mixed” (misturado) (39). Jubiabá, ostensibly the early novel where he most celebrated Afro-Bahian life in Salvador, referred often to the “Black city” (Amado, Jubiabá, 52, 62, 84) but also alternated other formulations. 45. Collins too notes the trope of mystery in Salvador (Revolt of the Saints, 222–234). 46. The invitation to a young girl (moça) to mysterious dark streets certainly reads as sexualized, yet overall the ribald sexuality of his later oeuvre was surprisingly absent. 47. Bahian food became a symbol for Brazil’s African connections in the 1920s and 1930s. P. Pinho, Mama Africa, 187–190. 48. Amado does speak directly to his reader elsewhere; however, it is not clear whether it is the same young girl. 49. Amado and Martins, Bahia, 177. 50. Amado and Martins, 71. 51. Amado and Martins, 303. 52. Amado and Martins, 84–85. For the racialized policies aimed at infant mortality, see Otovo, Progressive Mothers. 53. Amado and Ivo, Navegação de cabotagem, 463. 54. Amado, Jorge Amado, 10. 55. Portinari was one of the most important painters of Brazil’s modernist movement, especially active in the 1930s. 56. Amado and Martins, Bahia, 17. 57. Courtney J. Campbell emphasizes that racial discourse in Brazil depended on audience; see Campbell, “Four Fishermen,” 173–212. 58. Amado and Martins, Bahia, 98. 59. I was not able to conduct a full search of Bahian newspapers for this era. The Recife press, however, made scant mention of the work. The city’s leading paper announced briefly that Manuel Martins arrived in Salvador to illustrate Amado’s guide in June of 1944 but generally left the topic untouched, even during the guide’s publication in 1945. Gilberto Freyre, a regular contributor to the newspaper there, apparently also saw little reason to promote it, whether due to territorial jealousies or other reasons. Available issues of the national illustrated magazine O Cruzeiro out of Rio also show no mention of the work. “O guia das ruas e dos misterios da cidade do Salvador,” Diario de Pernambuco (Recife), June 11, 1944, 3. 60. The clipping collection at the Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado attests to this; see, for example, folder J/R b.or [19—]–1994.

Notes to Pages 91–100 279

61. 62. 63. 64.

Wan-Dall Júnior, “Narrativas literárias.” The French edition is from 1989, the Italian from 1992. See Dunn, Contracultura, 34, 108, chap. 3. Scaldaferri, Arte moderna, 32, 67–71.

Chapter 3: Pierre Verger and the Construction of a Black Folk, 1946–1951 1. For Gustavo Falcón, the arrival of Verger in Bahia marks a major turning point. Falcón, “Fotografia baiana,” 83. 2. This useful enumeration comes from table 1 of Barbosa, “Bahia de Jubiabá,” 164. Circulation information was provided in each issue. 3. Certainly Verger’s role has not been completely forgotten, but it has not been assessed critically within the project’s ideals. For a basic outline of his involvement, see Lühning, “Projeto UNESCO.” 4. Selected essays in Verger et  al., Brasil de Pierre Verger, show how his work has been regarded by Bahians in nostalgic terms as documents of an era. Verger has attracted increasing attention in recent years, although some of it remains unpublished. For a useful overview, see Lühning, “Pierre Fatumbi Verger.” For consideration of his early career in Bahia, see Aguiar, “Corpo das ruas”; A. Araujo, “Pierre Fatumbi Verger”; Barbosa, “Bahia de Jubiabá”; L. Bonfi m, “Espelhos da Bahia”; Lühning, “Tempos de O Cruzeiro”; Malysse, “Olho na mão”; Pinheiro, “Bahia em construção”; Rolim, “Olho do rei.” 5. Aguiar (“Corpo das ruas”) also emphasizes Verger’s focus on the streets and Blackness but connects it early to a particularly Yoruban vision, a trend I think better characterizes his later work. Pinheiro (“Bahia em construção”) provides the best critical assessment of Verger’s work of this time, grounding it, as I do, in rising interest in folk culture and tradition. I depart from Pinheiro with my focus on tourism, my grounding of Verger in a larger trajectory of “types,” and my analysis of the UNESCO studies. 6. Quoted in Azevedo, “Folclore e ciências sociais,” 26. 7. Vilhena, Projeto e missão. 8. I cannot develop the idea here at the national level for reasons of space, but the transition to thinking about Black culture as folklore is an important one and central to this project. 9. See Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum. 10. The next republishing of his work in Brazil came in 1988, with the centennial for the abolition of slavery. 11. Ironically, routes to Salvador and several other cities were not yet in place. For an earlier effort to “know your country,” in Argentina and more broadly, see Chamosa, “People as Landscape”; Löfgren, “Know Your Country.” 12. Ad for Aerovias Brasil, “Um tapete mágico sôbre o Brasil imenso . . . ,” printed in the December 14, 1946, issue of O Cruzeiro, and again through early 1947. 13. Nóbrega and Echevarria, Verger, 54. Perhaps following the wishes of Verger himself, those biographers and researchers with personal ties to him have generally skirted the issue.

280 Notes to Pages 100–104

14. Both the Cuzco volume and the Mexico volume proved particularly popular, with further editions in 1951 and 1952. The Brazil album was reissued twice and reprinted in translation in Brazil in 1952. 15. Nóbrega and Echevarria, Verger, 62; Verger, 50 anos de fotografi a, 67. 16. In this focus, Verger joined a larger global circle of photographers. An interesting comparison can be made with the American photographer Genevieve Naylor, who arrived in Brazil in 1940 after a stint with the Works Progress Administration. Naylor also focused on daily life and the streets. Mauad, “Genevieve Naylor”; Levine, Brazilian Photographs. 17. Conklin, “Civil Society.” Verger’s most critical words about colonial rule in Africa, and the only criticism I have seen, were directed at the colonial abuses of the Belgian Congo of the 1950s, and this denouncement was made in 1982, a charged era in which apartheid in South Africa had gained particular attention. Verger, 50 anos de fotografi a, 256. 18. It is curious, for example, that Verger never mentions decolonization in Africa in his many memoirs, despite the upheaval it must have caused during his own travels. 19. Malysse, “Olho na mão.” 20. Gil, “Maurice Baquet e Pierre Boucher”; my translation from the Portuguese transcription of the French interview. 21. Quoted in Nóbrega and Echevarria, Verger, 75; my translation from the Portuguese translation. 22. Mortaigne, “Entretien avec Véronique Mortaigne.” 23. Gil, “Conversation with Pierre Verger.” 24. The year is not given for this latter statistic, but it would likely be the mid-1950s or 1960s, when the magazine reached its apex. Hohlfeldt and Valles, Jornalismo brasileiro, 53. 25. She was married to José Olympio, owner of the most important Brazilian publishing company of the time, where she managed much of the work on translations. 26. Lühning, Tempos de O Cruzeiro,” 26. 27. O Cruzeiro, January 4, 1947, and September 7, 1946. 28. Verger, 50 anos de fotografi a, 177. In this source Verger also credits Ernesto Moré, brother of Gonzalo Moré, with facilitating his connection with the museum, which may further indicate his interest in Indigenous Latin American culture while in Paris (177–179). The Peruvian-born Gonzalo had fallen in love with a famous performer of Indigenous dances (though not Indigenous herself), Helba Huara, and moved with her to Paris in 1931, where she became a popular performer known as the Dancing Inca. 29. Verger, Fiestas y danzas, 196–197. 30. With Hartmann as publisher, Verger also contributed to En Espagne (1935), Italie, des Alpes à Sienne (1936), Brésil (1950), Congo Belga (1952), and Cuba (1958). 31. Gautherot et al., Olho fotográfico, 370n11. 32. Letter dated April 1936; quoted in Gautherot et  al., 368 (emphasis added). I have used their English translation here. Jacques Soustelle later became involved in establishing the Mexican anthropological society.

Notes to Pages 104–107

281

33. In the original, “‘types et vêtements’ dans le cas des portraits, ‘vie sociale’ (scènes diverses, commerce), ‘sites’ ou ‘architecture’ et ‘paysage.’” Angotti- Salgueiro, “Portraits,” para. 15. 34. These categories are also stunningly similar to categories used in his own archive, where nothing was arranged by date. 35. For these connections, see especially Angotti-Salgueiro, “Portraits.” 36. Angotti-Salgueiro (“Portraits”) draws attention to the often incongruous captions that the photos gained in such works. 37. This marks a contrast with Verger’s later work, interested most centrally in fi nding connections, rather than differences, between Africa and Brazil. 38. Verger, 1986 interview; quoted in Nóbrega and Echevarria, Verger, 150. Claims of the influence of Jubiabá represent a frequent refrain in Verger’s interviews, and Amado has also insistently sought to claim Verger’s arrival as partly his own victory. See, for example, Raillard, Conversando com Jorge Amado, 90. 39. Verger, 50 anos de fotografi a, 239. Verger quoted in Bastide, Verger, and Lühning, Verger-Bastide, 39. 40. A local photographer, Voltaire Fraga, is credited as the photographer for several images. Fraga has not gained his own detailed study but played an important role as photographer for the mayor’s office for several decades beginning in the 1940s, composing often stunning portraits, many of which were framed as urban types of Bahia. His relationship with Verger in Salvador is unknown but merits study. 41. Bastide, Imagens, preface, n.p. 42. Bastide, n.p. 43. Capone, “Transatlantic Dialogue,” 341. Curiously, Bastide does not note this reliance on Amado in his book, although he does thank him. 44. Bastide, Verger, and Lühning, Verger-Bastide, 3. 45. The organization is now known as the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional [IPHAN]), but to remain historically accurate I use the fi rst iteration of the name, or SPHAN. 46. I use “Rodrigo” to avoid confusion with Mário de Andrade. Verger’s own memories never stress this assignment. This meeting might well have been brokered by Verger’s old friend Gautherot, who had by this time relocated to Brazil, abandoning his work for the French Musée de l’Homme. It was at this juncture in Rio that Verger also fi rst met the artist Carybé, where they attended a macumba ceremony. Interview by Nancy Bernabó; quoted in Nóbrega and Echevarria, Verger, 149. 47. Rodrigo de Andrade to Godofredo Filho, May 15, 1937; quoted in Fonseca and Cerqueira, “Mapeamento preliminar,” 14. 48. Fonseca and Cerqueira, 30. 49. Lima, Melhem, and Cunha, Fotografi a, 31. 50. “Decreto-Lei no. 25, de 30 de novembro de 1937,” articles 1 and 4, accessed July 23, 2019, http://portal.iphan.gov.br/uploads/legislacao/Decreto _Lei_n_25_de_30_de_novembro_de_1937_pdf.pdf.

282

Notes to Pages 107–110

51. The history of the SPHAN is treated in Fonseca, Patrimônio em processo. 52. Mattos, “Nem português, nem mineiro.” 53. Quoted in Mattos, 53. 54. Fonseca and Cerqueira, “Mapeamento preliminar,” 16. Figures for 1938 alone are given in Dócio, “Sob o signo,” 80–81. 55. Quoted in Mattos, “Nem português, nem mineiro,” 59–60. 56. Date not given. Quoted in Lima, Melhem, and Cunha, Fotografi a, 57–58. 57. Brandão, Silva, and Bastos, Cidade do Salvador. 58. Godofredo Filho to Rodrigo de Andrade, September 24, 1946, Arquivo da Superintendência do IPHAN na Bahia (hereafter cited as IPHAN/ BA). 59. Filho was more interested in colonial architecture, but the outlines of the SPHAN nonetheless encouraged Verger to stay attuned to both this built legacy as well as popular culture, in danger of extinction and in need of being preserved by the organization’s photographers. Filho wrote enthusiastically to Rodrigo over the next two years to acquire various works by Verger, “due to the excellence of the documentation” (Godofredo Filho to Rodrigo de Andrade, October 15, 1946, IPHAN/BA). 60. The last record of correspondence I have found is from 1956. He does not appear in Fonseca and Cerqueira’s survey of photographers in the SPHAN after 1958 (“Mapeamento preliminar”). 61. Oficio no. 76, Godofredo Filho to Rodrigo de Andrade, May 21, 1947, IPHAN/BA. 62. Godofredo Filho to Rodrigo de Andrade, May 22, 1947, IPHAN/BA. 63. Gautherot et al., Olho fotográfico, 173. 64. Image dated 1950, in Gautherot et  al., 169. Odorico Tavares and Verger produced a series of articles together about Canudos, published in O Cruzeiro in 1947. It is unclear who initiated the theme. Another photographer of the time, Genevieve Naylor, from the United States, offers an interesting parallel to the work of Gautherot and Verger: her focus in Brazil in 1940 also emphasized everyday life on the street, as well as racial harmony. Mauad, “Genevieve Naylor.” 65. Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture. Ickes (“Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural”) examines Odorico Tavares’s larger role in a budding regional modernism. Although we agree on Odorico’s importance, I fi nd the inclusionary nature of Odorico to be more restricted than does Ickes. Bruno Pinheiro (“Bahia em construção”) likewise questions Odorico’s nature of inclusion. 66. Indeed, of Verger’s twenty-five articles based in Salvador in O Cruzeiro and A Cigarra, eighteen (more than two-thirds) were authored with Odorico Tavares. Altogether, Verger collaborated on a total of twenty-seven articles with Odorico. Although indications exist in some cases for a total of eighty articles, only sixty were located by Cida Nóbrega. Nóbrega and Echevarria, Verger, 159. Apart from an early article on Bonfi m in 1943, Odorico’s fi rst regular articles for O Cruzeiro came with the arrival of Verger in 1946. 67. Eight of the ten could be classified as folk themed. The ninth was ded-

Notes to Pages 110–121

283

icated to a lake tourist destination, and the tenth was dedicated to Caymmi, the songwriter whose work only reinforced a folk focus. 68. Lühning stresses, however, that Verger led the way in determining content in a series with Gilberto Freyre on Brazilian returnees to Africa. Lühning, “Tempos de O Cruzeiro.” 69. Archival gaps obscure any knowledge of which topics O Cruzeiro rejected. 70. O. Tavares and Verger, “Trovadores da Bahia.” 71. O. Tavares and Verger, “Trovadores da Bahia”; Cavalcante and Verger, “ABC da Bahia.” 72. Odorico was more active in the Bahian press itself during this time; see Ickes, “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural.” 73. O. Tavares and Verger, “Conceição da Praia,” 29. 74. O. Tavares and Verger, “Reino de Yemanjá,” 54. 75. O. Tavares and Verger, “Conceição da Praia,” 29. 76. O. Tavares and Verger, “Reino de Yemanjá,” 64. 77. O. Tavares and Verger, “Reino de Yemanjá,” 60. 78. Ickes, “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural”; African-Brazilian Culture. 79. There is no credit given for the photos, a practice the magazine altered in future years, with the contracting of more prominent photographers. O. Tavares, “Festa do Bonfi m.” 80. Intriguingly, in the elections for the Brazilian writers’ association in 1948, the brothers found themselves on opposing sides. Cláudio was together with Darwin Brandão, Vasconcelos Maia, and other figures traced later in this book. F. Oliveira, “Clóvis Moura” 44–45. 81. Lühning notes the difference between the two but portrays Cláudio as interested in more “popular” themes (“Tempos de O Cruzeiro,” 19–20). 82. C. Tavares and Verger, “Afoché,” 60. 83. C. Tavares and Verger, “Afoché,” 60. 84. C. Tavares and Verger, “Capoeira mata,” 10. 85. Pinheiro, “Bahia em construção.” 86. O. Tavares and Verger, “Saveiros do Recôncavo,” 8. 87. O. Tavares and Verger, “Saveiros do Recôncavo,” 12. 88. Leal and Verger, “Baianas das saias rodadas,” 87. 89. In original: “apaixonado pelo folclore e por tudo o que diz respeito a raça negra, apanhou.” Leal and Verger, 86–87. 90. Juciara Barbosa’s research has revealed that O Cruzeiro often tightly cropped Verger’s images to highlight this format (“Bahia de Jubiabá”). 91. See, for example, the close-up of the light-skinned man with protruding teeth labeled, “A type very common in Paracatu: the buyer of gold dust. Price: 28 to 30 cruzeiros per gram,” in a 1949 article on Gerais. Arlindo Silva and Peter Scheir (photographer), “A cidade de ouro,” O Cruzeiro, November 12, 1949, 47–49, 52. 92. O.  Tavares and Verger, “Saveiros do Recôncavo.” This point is also emphasized in Pinheiro, “Bahia em construção,” 68. 93. O. Tavares and Verger, “Atlas carrega o seu mundo,” 57. 94. His influential series on formerly enslaved Brazilians (primarily from

284

Notes to Pages 122–127

Bahia) who relocated to Africa at the turn of the twentieth century was also published in 1951, but I do not treat it here due to its predominantly African, rather than Bahian, emphasis and because it has already gained attention from scholars. 95. In some accounts, Pancetti claims he came at the invitation of Odorico Tavares himself. See “O mar da Bahia na obra do marinheiro José Pancetti 16 de abril de 1984,” Artes Visuais, November 27, 2012, http://reynivaldobrito artesvisuais.blogspot.com/2012/11/o-mar-da-bahia-na-obra-do-marinheiro .html. 96. Interview with Pedro Maocir Maia in 1998; quoted in Groba, “Caderno da Bahia,” 176. 97. Interview with Wilson Rocha in 1998; quoted in Groba. 98. O. Tavares and Verger, “Revolução na Bahia.” 99. This is not true of the treatment of Pancetti and Rafael, but the goal of these articles was precisely to align these artists with nature and with Black culture, respectively. 100. The idea of Verger as someone who gained the trust of his subjects is common. See, for example, Gautherot et al., Olho fotográfico. 101. Verger, 50 anos de fotografi a, 177–178. 102. See, for example, the images on pages 9, 10, and 14 of the article. The full-length image on page 10 includes a central phallic structure in the form of the ship’s mast, with a view from below of a sailor’s buttocks as he shimmies up the mast. O. Tavares and Verger, “Saveiros do Recôncavo.” 103. O. Tavares and Verger, “Atlas carrega o seu mundo,” 59. 104. Patricia Pinho pointed me to the controversy around an exhibition that called attention to his homoeroticism. For this show, see Silas Martí, “Mostra em SP joga luz sobre visão homoerótica de Pierre Verger,” Folha de S.Paulo, February 23, 2015, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/2015 /02/1593341-mostra-em-sp-joga-luz-sobre-visao-homoerotica-de-pierre-ver ger.shtml. Most scholars seem to simply ignore the question, but some have explicitly argued that his photos of this era do not have a homoerotic context. See Barbosa, “Bahia de Jubiabá,” 69; Malysse, “Olho na mão.” 105. O. Tavares and Verger, “Atlas carrega o seu mundo,” 57. 106. This is indicated by inconsistencies of tone among text, image, and caption, as well as remarks by O Cruzeiro editor Jean Manzon, who remembered with a sense of outrage that when he arrived in 1943, there were not even any caption writers; assumedly, this was a reform he put in place soon after (Carvalho, Cobras criadas, 63). Added proof for this theory is that text of the captions is absent in Odorico’s republishing of his articles in book form. See Tavares and Carybé, Bahia. 107. O. Tavares and Verger, “Atlas carrega o seu mundo,” 57. 108. O. Tavares and Verger, “Saveiros do Recôncavo,” 10. 109. A fuller contrast of the cities’ urban portraits remains to be done, but it is certainly clear that a much wider array of stories was published about Rio. 110. Notably, in the 1980s, Verger’s own selection of his work from these years reveals a similar focus, indicating it was not merely Odorico’s personality that created this street-based focus. But I argue that it is not correct to use

Notes to Pages 128–131

285

Verger’s selection in the 1980s as representative of his work during the 1940s, because it is marked by a later aesthetic as well as nostalgia. For the collection, see Verger, Centro histórico. 111. It is interesting to note that his title anticipated later tourist guides of the city, such as the 1958 Caballero guide, Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os demônios. 112. Le Bouler (Pierre Fatumbi Verger, 160) reprints this proposed outline from Verger’s letter to Métraux, July 20, 1947. 113. Of the fi rst eight photography books published within Brazil, Bahia occupied a central place in three and a critical role in a fourth (Brésil). Only one of them, on Candomblé, was not exclusively devoted to promoting tourism. See the list in Coelho, Imagens da nação, 27. 114. Bon, Brasil, n.p.; English translation in original. 115. Verger, Bahia de tous les poètes. 116. Passos, “Cidade de Salvador,” 113. 117. Edgard de Cerqueira Falcão to Mayor José Wanderley de Araújo Pinho, March 7, 1949, Municipal Archive of Salvador, Bahia. 118. Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador, Breves informações turísticas. The mayor’s office published another guide in 1949 (Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador, Pequeno guia turístico), but this one too bore the mark of hasty preparation, as it was essentially a republication of the 1934 text produced and published by the Touring Club of Brazil. 119. O. Tavares, Bahia. 120. Alves, Santo Domingos. 121. See, for example, Alves, Igreja do Bonfi m. Here the lavagem, or washing of Bonfi m, a syncretic celebration that attracted larger crowds, somehow passed unmentioned. I should note that I have only been able to access the 1968 edition of the guide, but my analysis assumes increasing acceptance of popular festivals would make it unlikely for a later guide to edit out their mention. 122. Another apt example is Alves, São Francisco, 18. This vision was modified somewhat by 1966, with a volume on Salvador’s historic Black church (Freitas, Igreja do Rosário dos Pretos). 123. Carneiro, “Lembranças do negro da Bahia,” A Tarde, March 29, 1949. 124. Quoted in Passos, “Cidade de Salvador,” 111. Governor Mangabeira, perhaps with the limitations of the event in mind, personally invited the members of the Black religious sisterhood of Cachoeira, the Sisters of the Good Death, who represented an impressive contingent in the historical parade. Odorico’s description of the group made them the highlight of the celebrations described in O Cruzeiro (reprinted in O. Tavares, Bahia, 221). 125. For UNESCO studies in Brazil, see especially Maio, “Projeto UNESCO.” For Bahia, see also Guimarães, “Projeto UNESCO na Bahia”; Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum, 143–150. 126. Nóbrega and Echevarria, Verger, 187. For a fuller timeline of Verger’s involvement, which nonetheless remains incomplete due to gaps in the record, see Lühning, “Projeto UNESCO.”

286

Notes to Pages 132–139

127. Verger, 50 anos de fotografi a, 240. 128. Goethe-Institut and Fundação Pierre Verger, “Conversation with Pierre Verger”; I use their English translation here. 129. Métraux, “Inquiry into Race,” 6. 130. Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum, 143–150; Sangiovanni, “Cor das elites.” 131. Azevedo, Elites de côr, 20. Verger’s photos were published in the original 1953 French version of Thales de Azevedo’s book but not in the 1955 Portuguese edition. Most likely this was due to cost, but it also appears that Azevedo would not have fought to include them, as he does not acknowledge them as important to the work. 132. Lühning, “Projeto UNESCO.” 133. To be fair, there was no caption identifying the photo as from the backlands, but it was used as documentation within Wagley’s article on the backlands. See the photo of the two women in Wagley, “Attitudes in the ‘Backlands.’” These fi ndings are not widely known and seem to have been fi rst uncovered in the work of Santos and Menezes (“Projeto colúmbia”). 134. Two of the images in Bastide, “Race Relations,” were published as images 4 and 7 in Azevedo, Élites de couleur. 135. Gil-Riaño shows how salient the category of race remained for the scholars framing the UNESCO project more broadly (“Relocating AntiRacist Science”). 136. Wagley, Race and Class in Brazil, facing pp. 18, 42, 19, 43, and 18, respectively.

Chapter 4: Festive Streets 1. While it would be a truism to say that the art of Carybé has defi ned portrayals of modern Bahia, this truism has not been adequately examined. For Roger Sansi, Carybé was part of a modernist cadre whose style later became appropriated in turn by popular artists themselves who produced for tourist buyers in Salvador’s historic Pelourinho. Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments. 2. Matos, “Bahia vista por Carybé,” 392. 3. Carybé has largely escaped critical notice outside of Bahia, but I am not the fi rst to call attention to his romantic and folkloric vision of Bahia, which has been noted in Conduru, “Bridging the Atlantic,” 67; and Albuquerque Júnior, Brazilian Northeast, 180; and scathingly summarized in M.  Wood, Black Milk, 405n18. As these brief citations indicate, however, his work has not gained much sustained critical scholarship. Valuable, though largely laudatory, documents have accompanied major exhibitions of his work: see Carybé and Araújo, Carybé; Carybé and Lody, Carybé. 4. It is true that Carybé’s works from across his career have served today as a visual record of practices for practitioners of capoeira and Candomblé; this is most true of his 1980 work Iconografi a dos deuses africanos no candomblé da Bahia. But one must also ground his work in his larger political project and the context of the time.

Notes to Pages 140–152

287

5. Technically, oil was fi rst found in 1939, in a suburb of Salvador, but this discovery proved unviable. 6. The EPUCS (Escritório do Plano de Urbanismo da Cidade de Salvador, 1943–1946) began the process of urban planning. The CPUCS (Comissão do Plano de Urbanismo da Cidade do Salvador, 1948–1958) put the plan into action. 7. Brandão, Motta e Silva, and Bastos, Cidade do Salvador, 44. 8. He was joined by the artists Raúl Brié, Luis Preti, and Gertrudis Chale, who had shared a studio with him in Buenos Aires. 9. Carybé, Ajtuss. 10. “A exposição de Carybé,” Diario Carioca, September 26, 1945, 11. 11. Antonio Bento, “Carybé,” Diario Carioca, September 22, 1945, 6. 12. Interview with newspaper La Razon; quoted in Besouchet, “Até 1949,” 63. 13. We cannot be completely certain that these women were intended to represent prostitutes, but their grouping together in a common room and their licentious depiction seems to invite this conclusion. 14. This church was constructed by one of the Black Catholic brotherhoods in the eighteenth century. 15. The Paulista artist Carlos de Aguiar Magano was one of the artists who, alongside Carybé, painted a mural for the Carneiro Ribeiro school, which may indicate that he accepted the grant of BR$5,000 offered. Valladares to Mogano, February 7, 1949, José Valladares, Cartas Expedidas 1948– 58, Museu de Arte da Bahia (Hereafter MAB). 16. Valladares to Djanira, March 21, 1950, José Valladares, Cartas Expedidas 1948–58, MAB. She accepted two weeks later. While in Salvador, she also painted a mural for Jorge Amado’s house and met her future husband, José Motta. Motta was an employee of the national heritage organization and the author, some years later, of his own tourist guide to the city: Brandão, Motta e Silva, and Bastos, Cidade do Salvador. 17. Quoted in Chaves, “Carybé,” 100. 18. Bernabó, “Carybé por Nancy,” 14. 19. Reprinted in R. Braga, “Que venha Carybé,” 138. 20. Carybé, “Biografia.” 21. This is Rocha’s much later framing. Rocha, “Anísio Teixeira.” 22. Carybé and Tavares, Festa do Bonfi m, n.p. 23. The study was organized as part of the state museum series and published by Livraria Progresso, which published the fi rst edition of the Recôncavo collection the same year. 24. Carybé and Rocha, Pesca do xaréu. 25. Its origins remain murky; K.  Paulo Hebeisen put the series together, but research has so far turned up no information about him. The collection has gained frequent mention but little sustained attention; Hebeisen was also involved in Valladares and Carybé, Torço da bahiana (discussed later in this chapter). The Caderno ended in 1951 after a short run that belied its influence. In a further connection, Carybé would illustrate in 1953 one of the few books published by the Caderno, the novel Rosa da noite by José Pedreira, a

288

Notes to Pages 152–169

contributor to the Caderno and founder of Bar Azul, which hosted early exhibitions of modern art. 26. Interview from October 31, 1998; quoted in Groba, “Caderno da Bahia,” 176–177. 27. For juxtaposition of undated images by Carybé and Verger for the festival of Bonfi m, see Barreto, Carybé and Verger, 99. I have also located another Verger photograph in Odorico Tavares and Verger’s 1947 “Ciclo do Bonfi m” that corresponds with Tavares and Carybé’s 1951 Festa do Bonfi m, making clear that Carybé owes a significant debt to Verger’s earlier framing. 28. This raises an interesting question of whether Carybé consulted another photograph of the woman, one not published in O Cruzeiro but held in Verger’s private collection. Carybé and Tavares, Festa do Bonfi m; O. Tavares and Verger, “Ciclo do Bonfi m.” In Barreto’s linking of their work, he connects Carybé’s drawings to another photo by Verger of a woman dancing, although her dress in that photo does not show the same features. Barreto, Carybé and Verger, 105. 29. O.  Tavares and Verger, “Pesca do xaréu”; Carybé and Rocha, Pesca do xaréu. 30. The similarities are too close to be coincidence. See, for example, the minimal alterations Rocha made to Odorico’s sentence in the following comparison. Tavares: “From October to April the xaréu head north in large schools for spawning, seeking warmer climates to fulfi ll their procreative mission, and it is at this time that the fishermen on the beaches of Salvador’s suburbs begin their task.” Rocha: “From October to April the fish travel for the spawning, seeking warmer climates to fulfi ll their eternal procreative mission. When the great schools depart to the north, the fishermen begin their arduous task.” O. Tavares and Verger, “Pesca do xaréu,” 54; Carybé and Rocha, Pesca do xaréu. 31. Carybé and Rocha, Pesca do xaréu, n.p. 32. Tavares, Bahia, 11. 33. Ickes highlights his interest in authenticity and the povo in “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural,” 440, 451–454, 458. The Canudos rebellion pitted an impoverished religious community in backlands Bahia against a federal army. 34. Ickes, “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural,” 459. 35. Tavares, Bahia, 12. Odorico frequently drew upon texts written previously (Ickes, “Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural,” 454). 36. Barreto, Carybé and Verger. 37. Introduction written by Gilberto Sá, chairman of the Pierre Verger Foundation; Barreto, Carybé and Verger, 156. I use here the English translation provided in the work. 38. Holanda, Pierre Fatumbi Verger. 39. Carybé and Tavares, Pelourinho. 40. For a fuller treatment of capoeira in light of this source, see Höfl ing, “Staging Capoeira”; Staging Brazil. 41. Carybé and Maia, Feira de água de meninos, n.p. 42. Carybé and Maia; Carybé and Rocha, Rampa do mercado.

Notes to Pages 171–182

289

43. Carybé and Rocha, n.p. 44. Carybé and Tavares, Pelourinho, n.p. 45. Carybé and Maia, Feira de água de meninos, n.p. 46. Carybé and Maia, n.p. 47. Valladares and Carybé, Torço da bahiana. 48. This focus on folklore would perhaps go against his work in the Bahian museum, where he had constructed an exhibition in the early 1940s that drew upon recognition of Carmen Miranda to celebrate Baiana dress. Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum, chap. 3. 49. Although there is a clear reason for the side and frontal views, there is an interesting parallel to police photos in this choice, as ultimately one is intended to be able to pick out the variations of the turban from a lineup of similar versions. 50. “Publicações sobre Bahia: Uma iniciativa da Prefeitura do Salvador,” Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), December 20, 1951, 3. 51. Lau to Valladares, July 23, 1952, José Valladares, Correspondencias Recibidas, 1951–54, MAB; Valladares to Lau, August 4, 1952, José Valladares, Cartas Expedidas, 1948–58, MAB. 52. Miguel Paranhos do Rio-Branco to Valladares, December 28, 1951, José Valladares, Correspondencias Expedidas, 1951–54, MAB. 53. Valladares to Licurgo Costa, October 21, 1953, José Valladares, Cartas Expedidas, 1948–58, MAB. 54. Livraria Turista issued 1,500 numbered copies signed by Carybé for each 1951 volume. The run for 1955 was probably 4,000 or higher, as one of the volumes I consulted was printed as number 3,745. 55. Tavares, Bahia. Ickes notes the 1961 reprint (“Salvador’s Modernizador Cultural,” 459). 56. Carybé, Sete portas da Bahia. 57. Note the uncredited use of his image in the fi rst and second editions of Torres, Bahia, cidade feitiço, 146, as well as the liberal use of his images in the album published for São Paulo’s anniversary (A. Oliveira, Album comemorativo), which I discuss in the next chapter. 58. Carybé and Rocha, Roteiro do Pelourinho. 59. They cited the images as from his city guide, Sete portas, rather than the earlier Recôncavo collection. 60. Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), September 16, 1951; this printing credited the artist but gave no reference to the Recôncavo collection. 61. Valladares to Carneiro, March 29, 1954, José Valladares, Cartas Expedidas, 1948–58, MAB. 62. Carybé and Tavares, Pelourinho, n.p. 63. Valladares, “Bahia por dois poetas,” 80. 64. Published in the Bahian newspaper A Tarde, January 1, 1957; quoted in Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments, 134. 65. Carybé and Maia, Feira de água de meninos, n.p. Maia was likely referring to tropes developed in the work of Jorge Amado, as runaway boys and lovers were central themes in his 1937 novel Captains of the Sands (Capitães da areia).

290 Notes to Pages 185–188

Chapter 5: “Human and Picturesque” 1. Queiroz, Gestão publica, 317. A federal office for tourism development came some years later, only in 1958. Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture, 210; Secretaria da Agricultura, Bahia. 2. Romo, “Writing Bahian Identity”; Queiroz, Turismo na Bahia. 3. Much of the refi ning had been handed over to factories in São Paulo, where the processing capacity was over ten times higher. Bahia’s refi nery capacity was one of the lowest and was also more limited in the types of products it could produce. Brito, Petrobrás, 109. 4. Milton Santos, “Localização industrial em Salvador,” 248–249. 5. In 1956, only ten products composed 96 percent of the value of the exports leaving its docks, with tobacco and cacao dominating the list. Milton Santos, Centro da cidade do Salvador, 71–72. 6. Milton Santos, 51. 7. Milton Santos, 47. 8. Conducted by the National Commission for Well-Being (Comissão Nacional do Bem-Estar Social); they estimated average income in the city at 240 cruzeiros monthly, while expenses totaled 274. Milton Santos, 48–49. 9. Milton Santos, “Localização industrial em Salvador,” 261. 10. Pedro Calmon, “O Sr. José Lins é a favor do samba,” O Estado da Bahia, July 15, 1939; quoted in Cruz, “Samba na roda.” 11. Both men allied with the National Democratic Union (União Democrática Nacional [UDN]). 12. Changes introduced over different editions of Torres’s guide show that the particular importance held by drawings in the Bahian tourist guides of the 1950s would come to fade. Whereas in 1957 the number of drawings slightly outweighed the inclusion of photographs in the text, this intensified dramatically by the second edition in 1961 (from 11:8 to 32:8). This trend was reversed by 1973, as photographs came to take a starring role in tourist guides more broadly, but the reversal only highlights the exceptional nature of the 1950s and early 1960s. The Official Press of Bahia (Imprensa Oficial da Bahia) gained a new director, Milton Santos, in 1958, and a new editorial board, headed by the journalist Nelson de Araújo. Araújo was interested in folklore, and it might have also been through his urging that the work gained more “folkloric” drawings throughout. 13. Valladares and Thiré, Bêabá da Bahia, 110. 14. A. Oliveira, “Turismo e a cidade de Salvador,” n.p. 15. Oliveira appears to have been the author of the guide itself, which is not stated directly in the guide but has been noted by later scholars. See Queiroz, “Gestão Publica,” 337. 16. This indicates the prestige of being associated with a guide, as earlier municipal guides had been largely anonymous. 17. A decade later, Monteiro would sponsor a bill to establish a National Samba Day, commemorating the visit of Ary Barroso in Bahia (a visit from 1940). Yet despite this later interest in samba and popular culture, his emphasis on popular culture here was fairly restrained, although he did mention lo-

Notes to Pages 188–205

291

cal festivals in passing as an “intensely colorful” attraction for a tourist staying for a longer visit. Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador and Sampaio, Roteiro turístico, n.p. 18. A. Oliveira, “Turismo e a cidade de Salvador,” n.p. 19. He uses “big” in English. Valladares and Thiré, Bêabá da Bahia, 79. 20. The Valladares guide was one of the few guides that did not go immediately to a second edition. One reason might be that he had broken the racial taboo by discussing prejudice. Another might be that the illustrator, Carlos Thiré, proved less appealing to a Bahian audience, since Thiré was from Rio and had relocated there by the time the work was published. 21. W. Costa, Cidade do Salvador. 22. The cover art was by Fernando Diniz Gonçalves. 23. Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador, Album comemorativo, n.p. The note at the end of the text of this volume says only that it was organized by the media, but it was certainly organized by Bahians. 24. Prefeitura Municipal de Salvador, n.p. 25. José Condé, “Escritores e livros: Caminho do encantamento,” Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), May 25, 1958, 18. 26. José Condé, “Escritores e livros: Caminho do encantamento,” Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), May 25, 1958, 18. To name only a few of the journalists who attended: Marques Rebelo, writer and novelist; Henrique Pongetti, a journalist with a daily column for O Globo (Rio); and Valdemar Cavalcanti, who wrote a daily column on literature for O Jornal (Rio). 27. Zweig, Brazil. 28. Brandão, Motta e Silva, and Bastos, Cidade do Salvador, n.p. 29. Authors noted he was an Ogã, or honorary advisor to the candomblé. 30. Darwin Brandão and Pierre Verger (illustrator), “Iemanjá também mora em Itapuã,” O Cruzeiro, April 1949. Brandão’s 1948 book, A cozinha baiana, was published with photographs by Verger. 31. In 1950 he moved away from Salvador. In Rio he was integral to the illustrated magazine Manchete, launched in 1952 and later one of the most widely circulating in Brazil. 32. See, for example, his correspondence with the Afro-Bahian intellectual Clóvis Moura in F. Oliveira, “Clóvis Moura,” 44–45. 33. The two formed the Black Experimental Theater (Teatro Experimental do Negro) in Rio around this same time. 34. An interesting sidenote to his biography is that he was an early advocate for Carolina Maria de Jesus, a writer and Afro-Brazilian favela dweller in São Paulo. This formed a contrast to Jorge Amado, who apparently boycotted the book festival at which she premiered her work and told the press she should be more modest. See Paulo Roberto Pires, “A solidão de Carolina,” Folha de São Paulo, August 1, 2019, https://quatrocincoum.folha.uol.com.br /br/colunas/c/a-solidao-de-carolina. 35. A rough translation of “caminho da querença inicial.” 36. The original drawing faces page 36. 37. Falcão, Isto é a Bahia! 38. Falcão had participated in early efforts of Bahian modernism and

292 Notes to Pages 205–213

had written for Caderno da Bahia, but by this point he appears to have relocated to São Paulo. He had published a massive compilation of photographs in 1940, focused primarily on colonial art of Bahia, as well as other more historically focused guides in the 1940s. 39. Falcão, Isto é a Bahia!, fig. 66. 40. Falcão, figs. 101–102. 41. Maia, Lembrança da Bahia, 14, 11. 42. Maia, 5. 43. Maia, 4. 44. Comissão Nacional do Brasil, Domingues, and Keller, Bahia, 194. 45. Comissão Nacional do Brasil, Domingues, and Keller, 203. 46. Comissão Nacional do Brasil, Domingues, and Keller, 202, 203. 47. Comissão Nacional do Brasil, Domingues, and Keller, 204. Furthermore, although they didn’t note this, it was one that had not improved any in the decade from 1940 to 1950. Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture, 38. 48. With a preface from the minister of foreign relations, Brasil Moderno was perhaps intended especially to appeal to outsiders.

Chapter 6: All Roads Lead to Black Rome 1. Candomblé originated in Bahia with enslaved African people who brought their beliefs into a New World context, probably in the late eighteenth century. 2. Höfl ing, Staging Brazil. 3. Van de Port cites tourist guides such as Brandão’s and Valladares’s as signs of the changing times for Candomblé (Ecstatic Encounters, 134–135). 4. The framing of secrecy in the religion is developed in Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods. The power of Candomblé as a contemporary cultural symbol within Bahia has been noted by many; see, especially, van de Port, Ecstatic Encounters; Parés, “Where Does Resistance Hide?” 5. I identify Candomblé leaders by the name by which they are most widely known. Mãe Senhora’s full name is Maria Bibiana do Espírito Santo. The title used for Mãe Senhora and others in her tradition is iyalorixá, but I have used the English-language term “leader.” 6. Capone, Searching for Africa, 109. 7. Castillo highlights Mãe Senhora in this effort; see Castillo, Oralidade e a escrita, esp. chap. 3. Castillo makes an error, however, in tying Opô Afonjá’s increased prestige to praise given the terreiro in Amado’s 1945 guide, as the praise comes only in his later revised edition of the guide. In a striking but undeveloped parallel, many of these ethnographers (such as Roger Bastide and Pierre Verger) actually fi rst began their careers in Bahia as promoters of tourist or travel narratives. 8. Johnson, however, does not analyze these years in detail. Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods, 151; Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments. 9. Jocélio Santos, Poder da cultura. 10. Van de Port uses three guides as his chief examples (Amado, Vallada-

Notes to Pages 213–220 293

res, and Brandão) but does not develop the idea further (Ecstatic Encounters, 134–135). 11. Hamilton, “African Cults in Bahia.” 12. Within Brazil, these Yoruba-based candomblé are often designated “nagô,” and the Bahian variation is often “gêge-nagô,” but as these are ethnic terms used only within Brazil, I use the term “Yoruban” instead. Within Candomblé, religious deities are paid tribute to in rituals as well as dance and may arrive on earth to initiates in a state of trance. Because there is no one religious text or authority, a diversity of practices have developed, each headed by leaders known as mães or pais de santo (mothers or fathers of the saint). A hierarchy has developed in Bahia and more broadly in which candomblés held to be most African are more esteemed, while those incorporating more diverse traditions (particularly Candomblé de caboclo, which incorporates Brazilian figures into the pantheon) are seen as less “authentic.” Such tensions continue to play out today. The best historical survey is offered in Parés, Formation of Candomblé. For the development of the African ideal, see Dantas, Vovó nagô; Capone, Searching for Africa; Parés, “‘Nagôization’ Process in Candomblé.” 13. Parés, Formation of Candomblé. 14. See, especially, Harding, Refuge in Thunder; Reis, “Candomblé and Slave Resistance.” 15. See Maggie, Medo do feitiço. The penal code remained in much the same form through the year 2000 (Johnson, “Law, Religion, and ‘Public Health,’” 30). 16. Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum; Castillo, Oralidade e a escrita; J. Braga, Gamela do feitiço; Dantas, Nagô Grandma. 17. One controversy is whether the privileging of African traditions as most authentic came primarily from practitioners or from the interests of scholars themselves. The most logical dynamic is one in which scholars and believers both proved influential, with believers undeniably playing the leading role in shaping the practices from day to day. 18. See, especially, J.  Braga, Gamela do feitiço; Capone, Searching for Africa. 19. Quoted in J. Braga, Gamela do feitiço, 166; emphasis mine. 20. Quoted in J. Braga, 175–176. 21. Quoted in J. Braga, 175–176. 22. Quoted in J. Braga, 175–176. 23. V. Silva, Antropólogo e sua magia, 92–93. 24. Parés, Formation of Candomblé, 93–94. As Vagner Silva describes, the selection of an Ogã can come either from a reading of signs, the “jogo-debúzios,” or from the direct intervention of the gods themselves. In the latter case, an Orixá may indicate their choice during a religious ritual or festival, taking the individual by the hands, leading them to sit in a special area, and prostrating themselves in front of the future Ogã. According to the interviews granted to Silva, such an invitation is impossible to refuse. V. Silva, Antropólogo e sua magia, 92–95. 25. This practice was stressed, for example, in Aninha’s interviews with

294 Notes to Pages 220–227

the American sociologist Donald Pierson during this time, as well as by Martiniano do Bonfi m in the proceedings of the second Afro-Brazilian Congress, held in Salvador in 1937. See Pierson, Negroes in Brazil; M. Bonfi m, “Ministros de Xangô.” It is further treated in J. Braga, Gamela do feitiço. 26. D. Santos, Axé Opô Afonjá, 12–13. Mestre Didi became an important artist, using Candomblé ritual objects as inspiration. 27. V. Lima, “Obás de Xangô,” 9. 28. D. Santos, Axé Opô Afonjá, 17. The additional positions were known as Obá Otun and Obá Ossi. 29. V. Lima, “Obás de Xangô,” 11. 30. Santos and Nóbrega, Maria Bibiana do Espírito Santo, 115. 31. Maria Stella Santos, Meu tempo é agora. 32. V. Lima, “Obás de Xangô,” 30. 33. V. Lima, 11. 34. V. Lima, 23. 35. Intriguingly, Black US scholars who arrived to study the religion, such as Lorenzo Turner and Franklin Frazier, were not made Ogã, a question Livio Sansone (“USA and Brazil”) raises in terms of whether Blackness paved an acceptance by the candomblés that needed no official recognition. 36. The process of creating cultural alliances was by no means limited to Opô Afonjá. The leader of Gantois from 1922 to 1986, Mãe Menininha, was particularly active in this as well and played an important symbolic role in the city. Later countercultural figures would become particularly close with her, such as Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethânia. 37. V. Lima, “Obás de Xangô,” 19. 38. Hamilton, “African Cults in Bahia,” 364. 39. Santos and Nóbrega, Maria Bibiana do Espírito Santo, 149. 40. Santos and Nóbrega, 129. 41. Santos and Nóbrega, 58. 42. Eskelund, Drums in Bahia, 39–40. 43. Eskelund, 45–46, 52–53. 44. Universidade da Bahia and UNESCO, Festa de Xangô, 10; D. Santos, Axé Opô Afonjá, 20. 45. Seljan mentions a Swiss attendee who later wrote a book inadvertently describing the event, most likely a reference to Eskelund, who attended with his Swiss and Bahian friend. Seljan, quoted in D.  Santos, Axé Opô Afonjá, 22. 46. Seljan, quoted in D. Santos, Axé Opô Afonjá, 20–23. 47. Hamilton, “African Cults in Bahia,” 366. The terreiro is unnamed, but it seems likely to have been Opô Afonjá, for the author referred to the artists who joined as Obás earlier in the article. 48. Kelsey, Seven Keys to Brazil, 64. 49. Pan-American Union, Brazil, 24–25. 50. Zweig, Brazil, 266. 51. Zweig, 266. 52. Carneiro credits Martiniano de Bonfi m for his own introduction to Candomblé.

Notes to Pages 228–239

295

53. Landes, City of Women, 159. 54. Amado and Martins, Bahia, 163. 55. Valladares and Thiré, Bêabá da Bahia, 85. 56. It is available in Portuguese in Tacca, Imagens do sagrado. 57. The letter was typed, and corrected in pen, but undated, in Verger’s archive. It is reproduced in Tacca, 110–111. 58. Tacca, 110–111; emphasis added. 59. Castillo, “Icons of Memory.” 60. A. Oliveira, “Cidade de Salvador,” n.p. 61. W. Costa, Cidade do Salvador, 263, 87. 62. W. Costa, 205. 63. Diário de Notícias, December 15, 1951; quoted in Groba, “Caderno da Bahia,” 135. 64. A Tarde, October 7, 1952; quoted in Groba, 138. 65. Groba, 133. For the earlier efforts, see Ferreira Filho, Quem pariu. 66. Carlos Vasconcelos Maia to Pierre Verger, November 12, 1955, Correspondence, Fundação Pierre Verger. 67. Nancy Bernabó, in Santos and Nóbrega, Maria Bibiana do Espírito Santo, 151. 68. Santos and Nóbrega, 125. 69. Carlos Vasconcelos Maia to Pierre Verger, November 12, 1955, Correspondence, Fundação Pierre Verger. 70. C. Torres, Bahia, 15. 71. Curiously, this photograph was removed in later editions, perhaps because the religion had traditionally rejected photography to protect the rituals that leaders wished to preserve as proprietary and private. 72. C. Torres, Bahia, 188. In some accounts Rocha had been instrumental in the meeting with Vargas in 1937, as an Ogã for Opô Afonjá, but this story, much circulated, cannot be substantiated. Jocélio Santos, Poder da cultura, 61. This organization was actually the Federação Baiana de Culto AfroBrasileiro, founded in 1946 with Justiniano Emiliano de Souza as the fi rst president and Rocha as vice president. Rocha became president in 1949 and served into the late 1950s. The organization became part of the Federação Nacional de Culto Afro-Brasileiro in 2001. 73. Braga, born in Paraná, had his fi rst show in Salvador in 1956 and by 1957 was included in the Artists of Bahia exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. 74. Caballero and Braga, Bahia, 11. 75. The only image that might be ambiguous in this respect is one of two donkey drivers in the city, but this profession was understood to be Black, and he perhaps chose to use exaggerated facial features in profi le to indicate Blackness as well. 76. Brandão, Motta e Silva, and Bastos, Cidade do Salvador, 3. 77. Brandão, Motta e Silva, and Bastos, 55. 78. Brandão, Motta e Silva, and Bastos, 55. 79. IPHAN, Dossiê 6, 23. 80. Carybé’s guide was technically a fi rst edition, but it reworked his pre-

296 Notes to Pages 239–251

vious writings for the 1951 Recôncavo collection, accompanied by many of the same drawings. Carybé, Sete portas da Bahia. 81. Universidade da Bahia, Bahia, n.p. 82. Universidade da Bahia and UNESCO, Festa de Xangô. Although only the introduction is credited to Lima in the volume, Carybé’s correspondence notes that he authored the full work. Carybé to Pierre Verger, August 15, 1959, folder “Correspondência Bahia 1,” Fundação Pierre Verger. 83. Carybé to Pierre Verger, August 15, 1959, folder “Correspondência Bahia 1,” Fundação Pierre Verger. 84. Cited as August 30, 1959, in D. Santos, Axé Opô Afonjá, 24. 85. Universidade da Bahia and UNESCO, Festa de Xangô, 3–4. Carneiro’s work on Candomblé had just been released as a second edition in 1954. 86. Universidade da Bahia and UNESCO, 8. 87. Universidade da Bahia and UNESCO, 10. 88. D. Santos, Axé Opô Afonjá. 89. Coverage in O Jornal (Rio de Janeiro), August 9, 1959, 8. 90. In Portuguese, “esquisitices.” Camarinha and Viola, “Sartre viu,” 33. 91. Camarinha and Viola; ellipsis in original. 92. Camarinha and Viola, “Sartre viu,” 34. 93. Amado and Damm, Bahia. 94. Wan-Dall Júnior (“Narrativas literárias”) appears to have missed the significant changes to this chapter, casting it instead as a simple renaming. 95. Amado and Damm, Bahia, 174–175. 96. Carybé wrote an article in 1959 for the magazine of the Organization of American States (formerly the Pan-American Union), dedicated to praising Candomblé, accompanied by black-and-white photographs. I will not treat it here, as it was written for an English-speaking audience. Carybé, “Candomblés of Bahia.” 97. Carybé, Sete portas da Bahia, 13, 23. 98. Carybé, 11. 99. Carybé, 19. 100. Soares, Cidade dia sim, 60. 101. Maia, Lembrança da Bahia, 14. 102. Maia, 55. The two main contributors of photos were the airline VARIG and the municipal tourist office, showing the more commercial roots of this press and this guide. 103. A formidable leader from 1922 to 1986, her full name was Maria Escolástica da Conceição Nazaré Assunção. 104. Landes, City of Women, 91–92. 105. A 1966 supplement (cited in Hamilton, “African Cults in Bahia,” 357) makes this clear. 106. Hamilton, 358. 107. Magalhães, Orixás da Bahia, 101. 108. This was law no. 25,095, of January 15, 1976, passed by Governor Roberto Santos. J. Braga, Gamela do feitiço, 186. 109. This petition was published in the local paper, O Jornal da Bahia, and is cited in J. Braga, 181–182. It is interesting to note that Monteiro por-

Notes to Pages 252–258 297

trayed the religion as essentially monotheistic in an attempt to strengthen his point. 110. Quoted in J.  Braga, 187. The development of a festive Bahian ideal together with tourism in the 1970s is traced expertly in Jocélio Santos, Poder da cultura.

Epilogue 1. Zolov, “Discovering a Land,” 244. The Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, for example, extended harsh criticism to the movement for its cooptation by a state catering to tourists to Mexico, referring in derogatory terms to the role of Rivera in such efforts. As Eric Zolov remarks, by the end of the 1950s, the Mexican state utilized a “folkloric vocabulary” that relied often upon standardized types and narratives as a stand-in for “Mexican culture and history, minus the hindrance of actual Indians obscuring one’s view” (244–245). As more recent scholarship has indicated, many of these types had a much longer history; see Moriuchi, Mexican Costumbrismo. 2. Dávila, Hotel Trópico; Alberto, “Para Africano Ver.” 3. He served as mayor from 1967 to 1970 and held the governorship three times (1971–1975, 1979–1983, 1991–1994), as well as served as a senator of Bahia (1995–2001, 2003–2007). His rule has been widely characterized as both populist and corrupt. 4. Amado and Bastos, Bahia. 5. Midlej, “Artes visuais na Bahia.” 6. Midlej, “Artes visuais na Bahia.” 7. Midlej, “Escritura de imagens.” 8. See, for example, their pairing in a celebratory volume, Fundação Cultural do Estado da Bahia, Pelourinho. 9. Butler, Freedoms Given; Collins, Revolt of the Saints. 10. See the clipping collection at the Jorge Amado Foundation: folder J/R b.or [19—]–1994, Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado. 11. His later novels became more explicitly celebratory, as already noted, but he also engaged in direct promotion of the city in frequent ventures with other artists and photographers. This second wave of promotion deserves critical attention but falls outside the scope of this work and is connected with a later political scene. See Amado, Damm, and Carybé, Bahia boa terra Bahia; Amado and Furrer, Bahia; Cravo Neto and Amado, Bahia; Draeger and Amado, Terra mágica da Bahia; Bisilliat and Amado, Bahia Amada Amado; Cravo Neto, Amado, and Rocha, Salvador. 12. Carybé, Iconografi a dos deuses africanos. 13. Höfl ing, Staging Brazil, 93. 14. Tacca, Imagens do sagrado. 15. For major catalogs accompanied by useful essays and documents, see Araujo and Fonteles, Rubem Valentim; Valentim, Pedrosa, and Oliva, Rubem Valentim. See also Conduru, Pérolas negras; Lapin Dardashti, “Negotiating Afro-Brazilian Abstraction”; Pinheiro, “Modernismo negro na Bahia.”

298 Notes to Pages 259–261

16. Araujo and Fonteles, Rubem Valentim, 196. 17. Reproduced in Araujo and Fonteles, 38. 18. Pinheiro, “Modernismo negro na Bahia.” 19. Some of this groundbreaking work can be seen in Polk et al., Axé Bahia. Important work is also being done by Afro-Brazilian artists across Brazil. See, especially, an important exhibition and its catalog, Pedrosa, Histórias afro-atlânticas.

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Index

Page numbers in italic type indicate information contained in images or image captions. “ABC of Bahia,” 110–111 abolition and Black type making, 47–49, 121 abstractionist modernism, 11, 208, 258–260 acarajé (street food), 110, 236, 238. See also “baiana/negra de acarajé” (Baiana food vendor) A Cigarra (magazine), 102, 282n66 Ades, Dawn, 31 Administrative Center of Bahia (Centro Administrativo da Bahia) project (1972), 254–255 Aerovias Brasil, 98, 99 Afro-Bahian culture/African heritage: African diaspora in Latin America, 3–4, 61; African traditions, privileging of, 188–189, 216, 293n17; and Bahian racial identity, 2; deprecation/minimization of, 49–52, 113–114, 165–166; exoticizing of in tour guides, 2, 39, 45, 73, 113, 214, 229; as “folklore,” elite perception of, 8, 98; Yoruban cultural heritage, 112, 196, 214. See also Afro-Brazilian cultural identity; Blackness

Afro-Brazilian Congress 1937, 215–216 Afro-Brazilian cultural identity: Afro-Latin American identity, 3–4; and growth of nationalism, 59; musicians, 194, 195; preservation of, 255; scope and defi nitions, 52, 68–71, 185. See also Afro-Bahian culture/African heritage Afro-Brazilian Federation (Federação Afro-Brasileira), 234, 295n72 Afro-Brazilian religion, 196, 271n35. See also Candomblé Aganju Didê–Ici Mimó (candomblé), 195, 196 Agassiz, Louis, 33 air travel, expansion of, 25, 98, 99 Albuquerque Júnior, Durval, 10 Alinder, Jasmine, 33 Almeida, Renato, 97 Almeida, Rômulo, 179 Alves, Landulfo, 140, 277n23 Alves, Marieta, 130 Amado, Jorge: background and early modernist involvement, 71–72; and Bastide’s visit to Salvador, 106; and Candomblé, 227, 228,

Index

233–234, 239, 245; and Carybé’s 1962 guide, contribution to, 216; influence and legacy of, 19–20, 105, 138, 142, 197; and Magalhães, alliance with, 255–256; and promotion of Path of Enchantment, 194, 195, 196; works during dictatorship, 256–257. See also Bahia de Todos os Santos: A Guide to the Streets and Mysteries of the City of Salvador (Amado) Amaral, Tarsila do, 275–276n16 Amazon region, racial identity characterizations of, 2, 142, 143 Andrade, Mário de: on absence of Black cultural representation, 69, 275–276n16; Carybé’s work with, 142, 143; and defi ning national identity, 62, 63; and historical heritage department, 107 Andrade, Rodrigo Melo Franco de, 106, 107–108 Angotti-Salgueiro, Heliana, 103 anonymizing of Blacks in artistic depictions, 31, 117, 197, 199, 200, 204, 209 Araujo, Ana Lucia, 25 archetypes/stereotypes: development of, 2–4; exoticizing of AfroBahian culture in tour guides, 2, 39, 45, 73, 113, 214, 229; modernist approach to urban tropes, 178, 182, 183, 209; racialization of visual identities, UNESCO study, 94–95, 96, 134–137, 136; and slavery, influence and legacy of, 31–32, 47–49, 121, 272n17. See also Baianas; types, making of architecture, modern, emphasis on, 22–24, 50, 53–56, 63, 141 Argentina, 142, 144, 145 artisans and handcrafters, 15 artists of nineteenth century, foreign and domestic, 24–26, 26–30 atabaque (large hand drum), 78, 79, 246

319

A Tarde (Bahian newspaper), 228–229 automobiles culture and roads, expansion of, 17, 25, 59–60, 184 “a Velha Mulata” (nickname for Bahia), 49 A Xangô Celebration at Opô Afonjá (Uma festa de Xangô no Opô Afonjá) (guide to Camdomblé), 239, 241–242 Azevedo, Thales de, 132, 134 backgrounds for imagery: black/ dark, 89, 204; for photography, 32, 35, 36, 40–41; white/blank, 75, 154, 162, 166, 178, 189, 192, 194, 200, 235 Bahia (state), historical background, 4–7 Bahia, City of Enchantment (Bahia, cidade feitiço) (Torres), 234–235 “Bahia: Berth of Intellectuality” (article), 192–193 Bahia de Todos os Santos: A Guide to the Streets and Mysteries of the City of Salvador (Amado): innovative structure and themes of, 72–74; legacy and impact of, 256; Martins’s illustrations for, 74–90; and new focus on Black heritage and culture, 69, 71; overview, 58, 59, 90–92; revision of 1961, 243, 245 Bahia: Excursion Guide No. 6 (Bahia: Guia da excursão no. 6), 206 Bahia: Images of the Land and Its Povo (Bahia: Imagens da terra e do povo) (Tavares, O.), 159 Bahiana (dance program), 61 Bahian cultural identity. See AfroBahian culture/African heritage “Bahian enigma,” 185 Bahian Federation of Afro-Brazilian Religion (1946), 218–220, 251 Bahian Songbook (Cancionero da Bahia) (Caymmi), 97–98, 114

320 Index

Bahia of All of the Saints and All of the Orixás (Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os orixás) (proposed project), 128 Bahia of All the Saints and All the Demons (Bahia de todos os santos e de todos os demônios) (Caballero), 193–194, 234, 235, 236, 237 Bahia: Traditional and Modern (Bahia: Tradicional e moderna) (state publication), 67 Bahiatursa (state tourism agency), 92, 250, 261 “baiana,” defi nition, 46–47. See also Baianas “baiana/negra de acarajé” (Baiana food vendor), 46, 211, 236, 238 Baianas: Carybé’s interpretations, 169, 171; defi nition and archetypal characteristics, 46–47, 173– 177, 228; sexualization and exploitation of type, 58–61, 117, 119, 146, 175–177, 189, 197, 232, 275n13 Baiana’s Turban, The (O torço da bahiana) (tourist guide), 173–174 baianidade (Bahian identity), 14 Balbino, Antônio, 185–186 Banana da terra (fi lm), 60 Bandeira, Manuel, 63, 65, 276n18 Bank of Bahia art project, 257 Barroso, Ary, 290–291n17 Bastide, Roger, 6, 102, 105–106, 135 Bastos, Carlos, 91, 187, 194, 196, 197–205, 198, 254–256 beaches: exclusion of from urban artistic representations, 73, 88, 204; focus on in tour guides, 190–191, 232 Beauvoir, Simone de, 242–243, 244 Bernabó, Héctor. See Carybé (Héctor Bernabó) Bernabó, Nancy (Carybé’s wife), 224 Blackness: Carybé’s characterizations and techniques, 163–165;

and constructed Bahian/Salvadoran identity, 2, 3, 6; defi nitions of, 7–9; emphasis on, 69–71, 73, 89–90, 93, 188, 192, 197, 199– 205; exoticization of, 73; minimization of, 49–52, 67–69, 130, 188, 197, 199, 232–233; and type markers, exaggeration of, 172– 173, 175–177. See also AfroBahian culture/African heritage “Black Rome,” 234 black/white color choices in drawings, significance of: Bastos’s techniques, 197; Braga’s techniques for Candomblé, 235; Carybé’s techniques, 162, 164, 165, 171–173, 175, 178; Lygia’s portrayals of Blackness, 190; Martins’s techniques, 75–76, 78, 89. See also backgrounds for imagery Bon, Antoine, 128 Bonfi m (patron saint of Bahia): church of, 194, 242; festival, 112, 113, 153, 154 Bonfi m, Martiniano de, 220 Book of the Northeast, The (Livro do nordeste), 62 Braga, Julio, 251 Braga, Lenio, 194, 235, 236–237 Braga, Rubem, 149–150 Branco, Castello, 69, 70 Brandão, Darwin, 194–197, 198. See also Path of Enchantment (guide) (Brandão, and Motta e Silva, J.) Brasil (French publication), 128 Brasil Moderno (magazine), 208 Bravo, Manuel, 104 “Brazilian Rome,” 234 Brazilian Souvenir, The (Briggs), 28–29 Briggs, Frederico Guilherme, 27– 30, 35 Brill, Alice, 205 Caballero, Ernesto, 193–194, 234, 235

Index 321

cabocla/o (Brazilian of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry), 136 Cabral Teive, Joaquim Lopes de Barros, 28, 29 Cachaça, moça branca (Calasans), 151 Caderno da Bahia, 122, 152, 169, 186, 196 Calasans, José, 151 Callcott, Maria, 25, 26, 27 Calmon, Pedro, 68, 185–186 Campos, Silva de, 97 Candomblé: alliances and social networking strategies, 220–226, 245–246, 249–252; Amado’s portrayals of, 73–74, 106, 227, 228; Carybé’s/Verger’s approaches to, 165–167, 169; cultural image and appropriation, strict control over, 38–39, 212, 223–225, 242, 243; evolution of into cultural mainstream, 210–214; growth and expansion data, 216–218 (see also in Appendix); legalization of (1976), 216; legitimization and defi nitions of, 215, 218; Maia’s focus on, 205–206; Martins’s depictions of, 77–78, 79; modernists illustrations of, 212–213; Obás (ministers of Opô Afonjá), 220–223; Ogãs (honorary candomblé positions), 220, 222, 223, 293n24; omission of in tourist guides, 192; origins and history of, 5, 8, 214, 292n1; Orixás (Yoruba/Candomblé deified ancestors), 166, 228, 236, 243, 257, 258; public acceptance and endorsement of, 1960s, 238–249; public relations/promotion, control of, 219, 223–226, 233–234, 243; repression of and negative reputation, 212, 214–215, 217, 227, 228–234, 233, 252; state endorsement of, 251–252; studio photographs of leaders, 36–39;

and tourism culture, acceptance into, 226–234, 234–238, 271n39; Yoruban cultural heritage, 112, 196, 214 candomblés (terreiros). See terreiros (temples, individual candomblés) cantiga (rhythmic chant), 246 capoeira: Carybé’s approach to, 166, 166–169, 173; Cláudio Taveras’s characterizations of, 115; incorporation of into tourist guides, 211; instruments played for, 168; omission of in tourist guides, 192; origins of, 5 captioning of photos, inappropriate, 113, 117, 119, 121, 125–126 Carneiro, Edison, 131, 179, 196, 215, 227–228 Carneiro, Maria Luiza Tucci, 48 cartes de visite (visiting cards) portraits, 31–35 Carybé (Héctor Bernabó): background and early work, 141–148, 227; Black and folk culture focus, 151–152, 163–165, 192–193, 246; and Candomblé/capoeira, 165–169, 228, 245–246, 246, 248; endurance and acclaim for drawings, 179–181; and festival/ celebration, focus on, 169, 177– 178; guide created by (1962), 245–246; influence and legacy of, 19–20, 138–140, 181–182; Path of Enchantment, contributions to, 195, 256; state commission for promotion of Bahia, 149– 150; validity as source of regional perspective, 16; and Verger, parallels and comparisons to, 140, 153–163; works during dictatorship, 257. See also Recôncavo collection Casa de Jorge Amado Foundation, 19 casta ideology, 13 Castillo, Lisa, 213, 230

322

Index

Catholic religion: and Candomblé, 234–235, 239; festivals centered on, 112; focus on, 1970s guides, 256; minimization of in tourist literature, 18, 77; “whitewashing” of representations, 113. See also churches, colonial Cavalcante, Rodolfo C., 110–112, 112 Caymmi, Dorival, 59, 60, 97–98, 114, 117, 230, 242 Celebrations and Dances of Cuzco and the Andes (Fiestas y danzas en el Cuzco y en los Andes), 103 centenary celebration (1949), 129–131 chapbooks and cordel literature, 15 children: and poverty, 82, 178; and working mothers, 42, 43, 45, 46, 78, 82–83 churches, colonial, 66–67, 69, 74, 130, 192, 205, 234–235 City of Salvador: Land of My Heart (Cidade do Salvador: Terra do meu coração) (Costa, W.), 189 City of Salvador: Path of Enchantment (Cidade do Salvador: Caminho do encantamento) (Brandão, and Motta e Silva, J.). See Path of Enchantment (guide) (Brandão, and Motta e Silva, J.) Clark, Lygia, 208 Cláudio. See Tavares, Cláudio Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 228–230 colonial urban environments, 18, 66, 66–67, 74, 130, 177–178, 192. See also churches, colonial; Pelourinho (historic center of Salvador) Commission for Economic Planning (Comissão de Planejamento Econômico, CPE), 185 communism, 71, 77, 89, 91, 114, 256 Conceição, Apolonia Maria da, 42 Conceição da Praia celebration, 112 Concretism movement, 208 Conduru, Roberto, 262, 271n35

Conklin, Alice, 100 cordel literature, 15 Correia, Diogo Álvares, 4–5, 68 Costa, Luiz Menezes Monteiro da, 188 Costa, Weldon Americano da, 187, 189, 190–191, 230, 232 costumbrismo movement, 13, 23– 24, 35 costumes, traditional. See dress and clothing Courier (UNESCO bulletin), 131, 131–137 Cravo Júnior, Mário, 12, 122, 194, 241 “creoula,” defi nitions and interpretations of, 46–47 Cries of Paris (anon.), 30 Cryes of London, The (Laroon), 30 cultural identity. See Afro-Bahian culture/African heritage; AfroBrazilian cultural identity; racialization of types Customs of Brazil (Costumes do Brasil) (lithograph series), 28 Debret, Jean-Baptiste, 25–26 Defense Campaign for National Folklore (Campanha de Defesa do Folclore Nacional), 108 Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP), 69 Dezinho (Arquimedes Gonzaga Nascimento), 195–196 Diario de Notícias, 239 Diário Nacional, 63 Dique (town washing lake), 110 diseases. See health issues Disney, Walt, 60 diversity, racial. See racial democracy Djanira (da Motta e Silva), 149, 196 domestic (Brazilian) tourism. See under tourism industry Domingos, Luiz, 224, 233 dress and clothing: of Baianas, stereotypical, 46–47, 119, 173–

Index

177, 228; Candomblé costumes, 166; jewelry as status symbol, 36, 44–45; as marker of class and status, 117; and national types, 30, 31; pano-da-costa (fi ne African cloth), 36, 46; and regional types, 15, 98, 174; shoes, lack of, as sign of poverty/slave status, 35, 87 Dunham, Katherine, 61 Editora Martins (publisher), 71, 72 elites of Bahia (Black), 8, 223 elites of Bahia (white): and Candomblé, alliances with, 12, 220, 223, 245–246, 249–252; and Candomblé, repression of, 214, 226; and European culture, idealization of, 1, 22, 49–50, 62, 145, 253; exclusion of from urban artistic representations, 177–178; increasing interest in Black folklore, 94, 97– 98; and minimization of Blackness/African heritage, 6, 8, 71, 73; racist perspectives of progress, 48–49, 49–50, 52, 129–131, 130 embranquecimento (whitening) concept, 49–52. See also whiteness, idealization and crafting of Engenho Velho (or Ilê Iyá Nassô, or Casa Branca) (fi rst candomblé in Brazil), 214 escravos de ganho (urban slaves for hire), 33–34 Eskelund, Karl, 224, 225 Espírito Santo, Maria Bibiana do, 292n5. See also Mãe Senhora (leader of Opô Afonjá terreiro) Estado Novo, 66 European culture: art of nineteenth century, influence of, 24–30; colonization of Latin America, 4–5; and growth of modernism, 22, 49, 61–62; idealization of, 1, 22, 49–50, 62, 145, 253; photographers of nineteenth century, influence of, 30–32. See also colonial urban environments

323

exhibitions/expositions: Carybé’s Recôncavo drawings, 152; international, 52, 53; local modern art, 62, 92, 141, 181 exoticizing of Afro-Bahian culture in tour guides, 2, 39, 45, 73, 113, 214, 229 Falcão, Edgard de Cerqueira, 130, 205 feitiço (enchantment/fetishism), 234 Ferrez, Marc, 43–45 festive and celebratory urban culture: and ascension of Candomblé into mainstream culture, 212– 213, 233; modernist emphasis on, 112–115, 169, 170, 197, 203, 204–205; and photographic depictions, limitations of, 247–249. See also street life and culture filhas de santo (Candomblé practitioners), 110 Filho, Godofredo, 66–67, 106, 107– 108, 197 fi lm industry, 59, 60–61, 174 First Republic era (1889–1930) and national identity evolution, 22– 24, 49–57 fishermen, as type, 12, 68, 98, 156, 158–159, 160–161 Fletcher, James C., 271n9 folk culture: African heritage, remaking of as “folklore,” 8, 98; elites interest in Black folklore, 94, 97–98; folklore movement, 97–98; and mainstreaming of Candomblé, 212–213, 251– 252; modernist focus and promotion, 62–63, 107–108, 141–142, 142, 145, 151–152, 158–159, 163– 165, 186; music, traditional, 110, 142, 194; promotion of and focus on Black culture, 17–18, 114– 115, 194–195. See also Indigenous heritage and cultures; popular culture, focus on; street life and culture

324

Index

folklore. See under folk culture food vendors. See vendors Fourth International Colloquium of Luso-Brazilian Studies, 239–242 Fraga, Voltaire, 281n40 Frazier, Franklin, 216 freed Black Brazilians, photographic portraits of, 36–39 Freitas, Newton, 146, 148 French interest in African culture and art, 4, 101 Freyre, Gilberto, 62, 63, 64, 188, 278n59 Frigout, Arlette, 129 Gaensly, Wilhelm, 272–273n31 Galeria Oxumarê (gallery), 141 Gantois terreiro, 36, 37, 38, 214, 247, 248. See also Mãe Menininha (leader of Gantois terreiro) Gattai, Zélia, 242 Gautherot, Marcel, 103–104, 108– 109, 128 gêge-nagô (broadly, linked to Yoruba culture), 245, 293n12 geometric/abstract modernist art. See abstractionist modernism gold, discovery of, 5 Gonçalves, Martin, 194 Good Neighbor initiatives (US), 60 Gordilho, Osvaldo Veloso, 187–188 Graciano, Clóvis, 75, 76, 97–98 Groba, Tiago Santos, 232 Guimarães, José, 92 hats. See headwear as type marker Have You Been to Bahia Yet? (fi lm), 60 headwear as type marker: hats, 103, 115, 117, 153, 154; turbans, 46, 173–177, 228 health issues: diseases from Europe, 5; and poverty, 74, 197, 207, 250 Hebeisen, K. Paulo, 287–288n25 Henschel, Alberto, 47 heritage site designations, 7, 66–67, 255–256

Herskovits, Melville, 4, 6, 216 Hess, Erich, 205 Hildebrandt, Eduard, 29 Höfl ing, Ana Paula, 211 homosexuality, 100, 125 housing inadequacies, 78, 81, 185, 207 Ickes, Scott, 14, 109, 113 Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá. See Opô Afonjá terreiro Ilê Ayé (Carnival street band), 258 Ilê Iyá Omin Axé Iyamassé. See Gantois terreiro illustration vs. photography, 159, 162, 247–249, 290n12 Images of a Mystical Northeast in Black and White (Imagens do nordeste místico em branco e prêto) (Bastide), 105–106 Indigenous heritage and cultures: colonization, effects of, 4–5; minimization of in tourist literature, 18; modern interest in, midtwentieth century, 103, 104; and regionalization of Brazil, 2. See also folk culture; mestiço culture (Indigenous/European mix) industrialization, evolution of in Bahia (1950s), 5, 52, 181, 185–186, 208. See also modernization and progress intellectuals and exiles in Latin America, 60–65, 106, 227, 242– 243, 244 interracial sex, implications of, 188 iyalorixá (leader), 292n5 Jardim, Luís, 63, 64–65, 67, 276n18 Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 291n34 jewelry as status symbol, 36, 44–45 Johnson, Paul, 213 Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (Callcott), 25 Jubiabá (Amado), 71–72, 105, 142

Index

Júnior, Christiano, 23, 32–35, 39, 48 Júnior, José Christiano de Freitas Henriques. See Júnior, Christiano Júnior, Lomanto, 186 Juvenal (capoeira master), 115 Kelsey, Vera, 226 Kidder, D. P., 271n9 Kordon, Bernardo, 142, 145, 147, 227 Kossoy, Boris, 48 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 225 labor/laborers, focus on: postabolition controls and restrictions on, 48; in street life and culture, 58, 60, 72–74, 89–90; as theme, evolution of, 82–83, 86–90; and tradition, emphasis on, 115–117, 158–159 Lacerda Elevator, 67, 78, 80, 190 Lallement, Avé, 5 Landes, Ruth, 6, 216, 227–228 Laroon, Marcellus, 30 Latin America, overviews: African diaspora, 3–4, 61; European colonization, 4–5; exiles and intellectuals in, 60–65, 106, 227, 242– 243, 244; modernist movement, decline of, 208; modernist movement, development of, 11–13; national type making in, nineteenth century profi le, 24–30; photography growth of, 30–31; Verger’s early work in, 101–105 Lau, Percy, 179 Leal, José, 117, 119 Lecy, Tacun, 195 Lenio (Lenio Braga), 194 Lima, Alceu Amoroso, 128–129 Lima, Vivaldo da Costa, 221–222, 223, 241–242 Lindemann, Rodolfo, 23, 39–46, 48 Lühning, Angela, 102, 110, 127, 134

325

Luso-Brazilian studies colloquium, 239–242 Lygia (artist). See Sampaio, Lygia Machado, Helio, 194 macumba (general term for AfroBrazilian religion), 271n35 Macumba (Kordon), 142, 145, 147, 227 Macunaíma (Andrade, M.), 142, 143 Mãe Aninha (leader of Opô Afonjá terreiro), 220–221, 223 Mãe Menininha (leader of Gantois terreiro), 247, 294n36 Mãe Senhora (leader of Opô Afonjá terreiro): as acarajé vendor, 212, 238; leadership and networking skills, 212, 218, 223–226, 233– 234, 241–249; Obás, selection and leadership of, 221–223. See also Opô Afonjá terreiro Magalhães, Antônio Carlos (ACM), 254–255 Magalhães, Juracy, 186 Magano, Carlos (Carlos de Aguiar Magano), 287n15 Maia, Carlos Vasconcelos: and Candomblé, promotion of, 233, 246– 247; as director of tourism, 186; guidebook of, 205–206; on “local color,” 169, 171, 181–182 Majluf, Natalia, 30, 35 Mangabeira, Otávio, 96–97, 138, 140, 149 Maracatú (Freitas), 145, 146, 148 Maragogipinho pottery, 15, 242 Martins, Manuel: background, 275n2; Bahia de Todos os Santos images replaced (1977), 91, 238, 256; modern exhibition, 92; work with Jorge Amado, overviews, 58, 71, 74–90 masculinity: of capoeira, 211; exaggeration/sexualization of, 125, 158, 162, 284n104 Matos, Matilde, 139 Mattos, Anna de, 107

326

Index

Medeiros, José, 230 Meireles, Cecília, 69 Menezes, Jaci, 134 mestiço culture (Indigenous/European mix): emphasis on and promotion of, 68, 69, 114, 188, 189, 215; minimization of in tourist literature, 18, 73; racial labels, 9; Vallardes’s focus on, 189, 192. See also Indigenous heritage and cultures mestizaje concept, 13, 49 Mestre Bimba (capoeira instructor), 257 Mestre Didi, 220, 221, 225–226, 239 Métraux, Alfred, 102, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134 Mexico: Indigenous/racial mixing focus, 1, 13, 30, 49, 103–104; modernist movement in, 61–62, 253, 297n1 military dictatorship (1964–1985), impact of, 19, 156–157, 216, 253– 255, 256–257 Minas Gerais (state), 63, 107 ministers in Opô Afonjá terreiro (Obás), 220–223 Miranda, Carmen, 60–61, 174 mixing, racial. See under racial democracy Model Market in Salvador, 194–195, 206, 236, 238 models, photographic portraits, 33– 35, 41–46 modern art, Odorico/Verger articles on, 124 Modern Art Week events, 62 modernist movement, overviews: abstractionist modernism, 11, 208, 258–260; decline of in Latin America, 208; development of in Latin America, 11–13; government promotional initiatives, 149; growth of, 61–65, 71, 121–129; and impact of art on tourism, 248–249; and marginalization of Black community, 249–252, 258

modernization and progress: air travel, expansion of, 25, 98, 99; automobile culture and roads, expansion of, 17, 25, 59–60, 184; exclusion of from modernist depictions, 177, 204, 208–209; industrialization, evolution of in Bahia, 5, 52, 181, 185–186, 208; national rhetoric/promotion of, 10, 22, 49–56, 50, 65–71, 76, 77; vs. tradition, 62, 65–71, 97–98 Monteiro, Antonio, 251 Moriuchi, Mey-Yen, 30 Motta e Silva, Djanira da, 149, 196 Motta e Silva, José Shaw da, 108, 194–197, 198, 287n16. See also Path of Enchantment (guide) (Brandão, and Motta e Silva, J.) Musée de l’Homme, 100, 103–104, 108 music: and Afro-Brazilian cultural identity, 194, 195; of Candomblé, 215; for capoeira, 166, 168; folklore/traditional, 110, 142, 194; samba, popularity and influence of, 59, 60–61, 68, 97, 194, 290–291n17 mystery trope in promotional materials, 72–73, 112, 197, 204, 235 Nascimento, Abdias do, 196–197 Nascimento, Arquimedes Gonzaga (Dezinho), 195–196 National Commission on Folklore (Comissão Nacional do Folclore), 97, 108 National Council of Geography, 206 National Folklore Commission. See National Commission on Folklore (Comissão Nacional do Folclore) national heritage society. See SPHAN (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional) (national heritage society) national identities, defi ning, 1–2, 13, 62, 63. See also Afro-Brazilian cultural identity; Indigenous heri-

Index

tage and cultures; national types, making of nationalism, 22, 23, 56, 59 National Museum of Lima, 103 national types, making of, 13, 23– 24, 24–30, 30–39, 35. See also Baianas nation making in Brazil, 1–4, 11 Naylor, Genevieve, 280n16 Nazaré, Maria Escolástica da Conceição. See Mãe Menininha (leader of Gantois terreiro) Nazareth, Maria Júlia da Conceição, 36–39 Nazareth, Pulchéria Maria da Conceição, 36–39 Neeser, Herman, 224 “negras da Bahia,” 46–47. See also Baianas negritude, 4, 101 “negrophilia,” 94 Neto, Accioly, 230 New Vision photographic movement, 104, 127 New York Times, 191 Nordestinos (residents of Northeast Brazil), 10 Obás (ministers of Opô Afonjá), 220–223 O Cruzeiro (magazine): background and Verger’s work for, 93–94, 100, 101–103, 109; Carybé and Odorico/Verger, parallels and comparisons, 153–159; controversial Candomblé article, 230; coverage of Sartre/Beauvoir visit, 242, 244; Odorico/Verger projects, 109–114, 121–129 Odorico. See Tavares, Odorico Ogãs (honorary candomblé positions), 220, 222, 223, 293n24 oil industry, 140–141, 208 Oiticica, Hélio, 208 “the Old Mammy” (name for Bahia), 49 Olinda, Brazil, 63

327

Oliveira, Albano Frederico Marinho de, 186–187, 186–188, 189–190, 192 Olympio, José, 280n25 Opô Afonjá terreiro, 212, 214, 218, 220–226, 239, 241–242, 245. See also Mãe Aninha (leader of Opô Afonjá terreiro); Mãe Senhora (leader of Opô Afonjá terreiro) Orixás (Yoruba/Candomblé deities), 166, 228, 236, 243, 257, 258 Ouro Preto, Brazil, 63, 65 Pacheco, Régis, 140 Pacheco Jordão, Vera, 102 Pancetti, José, 122 pano-da-costa (fi ne African cloth), 36, 46 Paraguaçu, Catarina, 4–5, 68 Paris, France: and architecture, influence on, 50; and Black culture, interest in, 94, 101; Clouzot’s negative account of Candomblé, 228–230, 232; and Verger, influence on, 100–101, 108–109, 128 Paris Match (magazine), 228–230, 232 Path of Enchantment (guide) (Brandão, and Motta e Silva, J.), 194–196, 198, 211–212, 234, 235–236, 238, 256 Paulistas (São Paulo residents), 10 Pedreira, José, 164–165, 287– 288n25 Pedrosa, Mario, 259–260 Pelourinho (historic center of Salvador): Carybé’s depiction of, 164, 165, 178; poverty in, 78, 82, 178; renovation project 1970s, 255– 256; and slave whipping post, 78, 90; valuation and preservation of, 6–7 Peru, 1, 13, 30, 35, 102–103, 104 Petrobras, creation of, 140 petroleum industry, 140–141, 208 Photographia Diamantina, 37, 38, 272n27

328

Index

photography: backgrounds used for, 32, 35, 36, 40–41; Candomblé control of, 38–39, 212, 223–225, 243; vs. drawings to illustrate text, 159, 162, 247–249, 290n12; growth of in Latin America, 30– 32; modernization and progress, focus on, early 1900s, 50– 52; New Vision movement, 104; portraits, studio, 31, 36–39, 119, 121, 123; and slavery, influence and legacy of, 36–39, 47–49; and type making, 23–24, 31–32, 39–47 Picturesque and Historical Voyage to Brazil (Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil) (Debret), 25–26 Picturesque Voyage to Brazil (Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil) (Rugendas), 25–26 Pierson, Donald, 216 Pinheiro, Bruno, 95, 115, 260 Pinho, Osmundo, 14 Pinho, Patricia, 284n104 Pixinguinha (Afro-Brazilian musician), 194, 195 “place-image” concept, 9–10 police violence/repression, 7, 9, 215 Poole, Deborah, 26–27 popular culture, focus on: early modernist approaches, 12, 58– 59, 61, 63, 69; popular magazine coverage of, 110, 122; Verger/ Odorico interest in, 108, 109; Verger’s interest in, 123, 128. See also Afro-Bahian culture/African heritage; folk culture; street life and culture Portinari, Candido, 86, 117 portraits, studio, 31, 36–39, 119, 121, 123 Portuguese influence: colonization of Brazil, 4–5; language considerations, 13, 16, 102, 106, 177. See also colonial urban environments

postcards, photographic, 39–47, 49–52 postwar period, focus on, 19, 93–94, 96–99, 217–218 poverty in Salvador: emphasis on, 78, 82, 197, 207, 247, 248; increase in, 1950s Salvador, 185; minimization of, 178; and negative effects of Candomblé/modernist alliance, 250 povo (the people), 11, 114 premodern labor, 115–117, 156–158 preservation movement, 66, 106– 109, 130, 208–209 print culture, development of, 15, 39, 75 progress. See modernization and progress prostitutes, 83–85 Querino, Manuel, 6, 37–38, 97, 215 Quilombo (Black publication), 196–197 racial democracy: festivals as marker of, 112–113, 127; myth of and racial stereotyping, 137, 178; as national ideal, evolution of, 2, 69, 169, 181, 253–254; racial binary concept, 8–9; and racial mixing ideal, 1–2, 6, 49–52, 68, 171, 187–188, 257; romanticization of race/race relations, 13, 21, 25, 91, 130, 162, 169, 199, 204 racialization of types: and costumbrismo movement, 13, 23–24, 35; reductionist approaches to, 142, 171–173; regionalized identities, evolution and construction of, 2–4, 253; and slavery, legacy and influence of, 47–49; terminology and racial categories, 7–9, 39, 46–47, 73, 273n33, 275n4. See also archetypes/stereotypes Rafael (Rafael Borges, artist), 122 Ramos, Arthur, 6, 215, 241 Ramos, Guerreiro, 196–197

Index

Rebel Academy (Academia dos Rebeldes), 71 Rebouças, Diógenes, 141 Recife, Brazil, 62, 63 Recôncavo (geographic area), 115–118 Recôncavo collection: Carybé’s folk themes and tropes in, 164–169; Carybé’s urban themes and tropes in, 169–178; influence and impact of, 179–181; overviews, 151– 152; parallels and comparisons to Verger/Odorico, 153–163 regional identities: competition and power struggles, 4–6, 45, 62, 107–108, 127; dress and clothing, 15, 98, 174; and nationalist policies, 141; racialization of, 2, 6–7, 23; regionalist modernism, 20, 21, 183; regional types, making of, 39–47; region making process and concepts, 9–11; and slavery, influence of, 6, 18 Regionalist movement, 62, 71 regional types. See under regional identities Rego, José Lins do, 68 religion: exclusion of from tourism culture, 226–227; “macumba,” 271n35; representations of (1940s), 112–115; Verger’s work in Africa, 129. See also Candomblé; Catholic religion Riggs, Miriam, 14 Rio de Janeiro: characterizations of vs. Salvador, 127; as early center of photography in Brazil, 32; highway to Bahia completed, 186; modernist literati group visit to Bahia, 194–195; relocation of capital to, 5 Rivera, Diego, 62 Rocha, Carlos Eduardo da, 141, 150, 169, 171 Rocha, Durval Neves da, 277n23 Rocha, Wilson, 152, 156, 158–159 Rodrigues, Nina, 215

329

romanticization: of labor/laborers, 90, 158–159; of race in Salvador, 21, 91, 130, 162, 169, 199, 204; of racial relations, 13, 25 Rosa da noite (Pedreira), 287–288n25 Rugendas, Johann Moritz, 25–26 Salvador, Bahia, overviews: cultural identity, 22–24, 183–184, 210; economic profi le (1950s), 185; modernist perspective on, 11–12; racial demographics, 2–4, 7; urban reforms (1940s and 1950s), 141; World Heritage Site designation, 7. See also Pelourinho (historic center of Salvador) samba, popularity and influence of, 60–61, 68, 97, 194, 290– 291n17 sambistas (samba performer), 110 Sampaio, Lauro, 22, 54–56 Sampaio, Lygia, 187, 189–190, 191, 193 Sampaio, Mirabeau, 138 Sampaio, Theodoro, 52–53 Sansi, Roger, 19, 138, 213, 271n39 Santos, Deoscoredes Maximiliano dos. See Mestre Didi Santos, Edgar, 241–242 Santos, Ednei, 134 Santos, Isis, 41–43 Santos, Maria Stella de Azevedo, 224 Santos, Milton, 185 São Paulo: depictions of, 76, 77, 90; modernism in, 62, 208; racial profi les, 2, 10, 134, 135 São Pedro, Maria de, 224 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 242–243, 244 scholarship: American perspectives and influence, 8–9; on Candomblé, 213, 215–216; and endorsement of African roots in Bahia, 6; on formation of regional identities, 9–11; on impact of moderists on Bahian culture, 19–20, 286n3;

330

Index

scholarship (continued) on use of tour guides as resource, 14 scientific racism, 6, 48 Segala, Lygia, 108–109 Seljan, Zora, 225–226 Senhora. See Mãe Senhora (leader of Opô Afonjá terreiro) sexualization of types: Baianas, 58– 61, 117, 119, 146, 175–177, 189, 197, 232, 275n13; of Candomblé, 232; men, 125, 158, 162, 284n104; of Salvador, 112, 206, 275n13 Sheriff, Robin, 8–9 Silva, José Cláudio da, 138 Silva, Vagner Gonçalves da, 293n24 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 297n1 slavery, influence and legacy of: bare feet as symbol of slavery, 35, 87; and Black type making, 31–32, 47–49, 121, 272n17; and Candomblé, influence on, 214; escravos de ganho (urban slaves for hire), 33–34; exploitation of Blacks, 6, 18; freed Black Brazilians, photographic portraits of, 36–39; historic whipping post, 78, 90; overview, 3–5 source material, 13–19 Soustelle, Jacques, 103 Southeast vs. Northeast antagonism, 62 Souvenir of Bahia (Lembrança da Bahia) (Maia), 205–206 space and sense of place, 9 “spatial turn” in history, 9 SPHAN (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional) (national heritage society), 66–67, 106, 107–109, 196, 205, 209 Stepan, Nancy, 40 stereotypes. See archetypes/ stereotypes street life and culture: emphasis on Black life and labor, 58, 60, 72– 74, 82–83, 89–90; emphasis on

festivity and folklore, 95–96, 110, 112–115, 127, 137, 146, 169–178; modernist influence on democratic period depictions, 183–184, 199, 200–206, 209, 255–258; portrayal as modern and empty, 22–24, 50, 57, 63, 64–65, 75, 76– 77. See also popular culture, focus on; urban types sugar industry, impact and legacy of, 4, 5, 49–50, 129, 130 Surrealist movement, 101 Tavares, Cláudio, 114–115, 122, 131 Tavares, Odorico: Bahia: Images of the Land and Its Povo project, 159, 162; on Carybé’s depictions of Bahia, 150; and defense of Candomblé secrecy, 229–230; influence and legacy, 152, 156, 158; labor/laborers, focus on, 115– 117, 158–159; modern art, articles on, 92, 121–123; use of Carybé’s illustrations, 179; and Verger, 109–114 Teixeira, Anísio, 96–97, 122, 150 terreiros (temples, individual candomblés), 73, 214, 243, 245. See also Gantois terreiro; Opô Afonjá terreiro “The Brides of the Bloodthirsty Gods” (“As noivas dos deuses sanguinários”) (article), 230 Thiré, Carlos: Bêabá da Bahia, 187, 189, 190, 191–193; tropes and themes, 197, 199–200, 201–202 This Is Bahia! (Isto é a Bahia!) (SPHAN guide), 205 Thompson, Krista, 9 Three Caballeros, The (fi lm), 60 Torres, Carlos, 186, 234–235 Touring Club of Brazil, guides released by, 65–66, 285n118 tourism industry: counterculture tourism, 6; domestic, growth of, 17, 25, 59–60, 98, 99, 184–185;

Index

legacy and impact of, overview, 260–261; modernist promotion of, 12–13, 62–63; tourism congress of 1955, 233. See also travel tourist guides, as historical source: and Candomblé growth and expansion data, 216–218; definitions and caveats, 16–19; highlights (1960s), 205–207; overview, 13–16; postwar progress and evolution of, 184 tradition: cultural heritage overview, 1–7; Indigenous, minimization of, 18; and modernism in Latin America, 11–13, 61, 107– 108, 181–182; and premodern labor, 115–117, 156–158; preservation of, 186–187; vs. progress, 62, 65–71, 97–98; and street life, focus on, 128–129. See also Indigenous heritage and cultures; popular culture, focus on; SPHAN (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional) (national heritage society) travel: air travel, expansion of, 25, 98, 99; automobile culture and roads, expansion of, 17, 25, 59– 60, 184; and modernist exploration, 62–63; narratives of visiting foreigners, 15–16; steamships, 25, 60 Travel in Brazil (state publication), 69, 70 tropicality (tropical romanticism), 25, 40, 52–53 trovadores (troubadours), 110 Tupinambá culture, 4–5 turbans as type marker, 46, 173– 177, 228 Turner, Lorenzo, 216 types, making of: costumbrismo movement, 13, 23–24, 35; naming/labeling of, 46–47; national types, making of, 13, 23– 39, 26–29, 33–34, 37–38, (See also Baianas); nineteenth cen-

331

tury trends, 23–24–30; through photography, 23–24, 31–32, 39– 47. See also national types, making of; regional identities; urban types; visual culture and constructed identities Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects, 215, 218 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): Pelourinho named as World Heritage site, 255–256; race study (1950), 94–95, 96, 131– 137, 136–137; Salvador named as World Heritage site, 7 urban types: Carybé’s representations of, 169–178; postcard series of, 39–47; and slavery, influence and legacy of, 31–32, 47–49, 121, 272n17; Verger/Odorico approaches, 117–121, 123, 125–127. See also vendors Valentim, Rubem, 258–260 Valladares, José: on archetypal identity of Bahia, 183; Bêabá da Bahia (tourist guide), 187, 188–189, 191–193, 228; Candomblé, portrayal of, 228; on Carybé’s work, 180–181; folk and popular culture, promotion of, 174, 176, 186–187 van de Port, Mattijs, 213 Vargas, Getúlio, 10, 19, 140–141. See also Vargas era (1930–1945) Vargas era (1930–1945): Candomblé, endorsement of, 215; end of, 19, 93; popular culture, growth of, 59; progress and modernization, focus on, 10, 50, 65–66; tourism industry, development of, 59, 61, 66 Vasconcelos Maia. See Maia, Carlos Vasconcelos vendors: “baiana/negra de acarajé” (Baiana food vendor), 46–47, 211,

332

Index

vendors (continued) 236, 238; focus on and characterizations of, 35–36, 46, 85–86, 171–172 Verger, Pierre: and Candomblé, 165– 167, 169, 229–230; and Carybé, parallels and comparisons, 140, 153–163; and Cláudio Tavares, projects with, 114–115; on “discovering” whites in Bahia, 123, 132; early influences, 105–106; early work in Latin America, 101–105; ethnology career, 95, 257; influence and legacy of, 16, 19–20, 138, 196; labor/laborers, focus on, 115–117; modern art, focus on, 121–129; and Odorico Tavares, overview and fi rst projects, 109–114; overview and background, 93–94, 100–101; Recôncavo project involvement, 152; and tourism, promotion of, 128–129; UNESCO race study commission, 94–95, 96, 109, 131– 137; urban types, focus on, 117– 121, 123, 125–127; works during dictatorship, 257; work with SPHAN, 106–109 Vianna, Hermano, 275–276n16 visual culture and constructed identities: consolidation of, early 1950s, 187–193; consolidation of, late 1950s, 193–197; and modernism, influence of, 12–13; overviews, 2–4; and “place-image” concept, 9–11. See also types, making of

Weinstein, Barbara, 10 Weitlaner, Roberto J., 103 “What Is It That the Baiana’s Got?” (Caymmi), 60 whiteness, idealization and crafting of, 1, 6, 10, 49, 49–52, 69, 226. See also Blackness; “whitewashing” of Salvador “whitewashing” of Salvador: of Candomblé characterizations, 60; and portrayals of Baianas, 60; in tourist promotion, 130–131, 233–234; in urban areas, 255, 261 witchcraft/magic labels and repression of Candomblé, 167, 211, 214, 232 women, 82–87, 166, 189–190. See also Baianas Wood, Marcus, 31 woodcut/block print illustrations: Carybé’s use of, 164, 246; Martins’s work, 58, 75–76, 77, 79–82, 83, 84–88, 89, 256 World War II, influence of: exiled/ foreign writers/artists, 60, 106, 227; postwar growth, 17, 93–94, 96–98, 184, 217–218; restrictions of, 17, 60

Wagley, Charles, 132, 134, 136 Wan-Dall Júnior, Osnildo Adão, 91 wealth: imbalance of, 5, 6, 7, 75, 261; symbols of, 44–45, 46

Zolov, Eric, 297n1 Zózimo, Álvaro, 190 Zweig, Stefan, 60, 195, 227, 228

Xangô (Yoruba/Candomblé god), 220, 221, 222, 224, 243 xaréu (local fish), 110 Yemanjá (Candomblé Orixá), festivals for, 112–113, 130, 165, 166 Yoruban cultural heritage, 112, 196, 214. See also Candomblé