656527

The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro
Author(s): Robin E. Sheriff

Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 3-28
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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The Theft of Carnaval: National
Spectacle and Racial Politics in

Rio de Janeiro
Robin E. Sheriff
Florida International University
Rio de Janeiro, many Brazilians and foreigners agree, is a monumental city. The
capital of Brazil until 1960, Rio has both an illustrious history and natural splendor. Steep granite hills, some of them populated by the city's poor, share space
with modern high-rise buildings. The crescent-shaped beaches of the wealthy
South Zone continue to draw tourists from as far away as Europe and the United
States, despite international reports of violent street crime. When I arrived there
in the last weeks of 1990, I felt a tingling sense of achievement. Even poor migrants, whose reasons for leaving the impoverished countryside are anything but
abstract, are drawn to Rio partly by its glamour.
The allure of Rio de Janeiro may be an effect produced less by its startling
topography and breathtaking vistas than by what tourist brochures are apt to call
its "spirit." The magic of Rio is constructed, really, from a collectively imagined
and ideologically managed enchantment. Accepted within everyday discourses
throughout Brazil as something of a metonymic enactment of national culture
and character, Rio is portrayed as exuberantly spontaneous, "racially mixed,"
egalitarian in its ethos (if not in its objective structures), free spirited and casual,
and, during certain days of the year especially, just a little bit shameless. As is
the case with all such national showcases, the magic of Rio is simultaneously
produced within and directed toward both local and transnational contexts.
Rio's claim to represent the most appealing and uniquely Brazilian aspects
of national culture is based largely on the city's performance of the pre-Lenten
festival of carnaval. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta captured the

symbolic resonance and national significance of the festival when he wrote, "it
was not Brazil that invented Caraval; on the contrary, it was Carnaval that invented Brazil" (1984:245). The carioca, or Rio, carnaval is based on samba, a
musical genre and dance style of remarkable tenacity and hegemonic reach. This
article focuses on the historical development of, and contemporary discourses
about, Rio's samba-driven caraval and its relationship to national representation and racial politics. With "racial politics" I do not refer to more explicit
Cultural Anthropology 14(1):3-28. Copyright ? 1999, American Anthropological Association.
3
4 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
forms of political discourse or to organized political activities but to dominant,

everyday understandings about the meaning of "race" in carioca and national
culture and the (largely unheard) responses of poor Brazilians of color to those
understandings. The carioca carnaval, I argue, bears a metonymic relation to the
Brazilian nation in ways other than those typically invoked in everyday discourses that celebrate national and racial unity and civic harmony. Increasingly,
the cultural politics and political economy that underpin the carioca carnaval
have generated a dispute about contested meanings, contested rights, authenticity,
appropriation, and betrayal.
I am only peripherally concerned here with the much debated question of
whether carnaval represents, for Brazil's urban masses, a politically counterhegemonic cultural form or if, on the other hand, it is a conservatively pitched,
ideologically manipulated ritual aimed at the "domestication" of the poor (Queiroz 1985). Persuasive arguments have been presented from both sides (see, for
example, Linger 1992; Queiroz 1985, 1992; Raphael 1981; Vianna 1994), and
anyone who "plays" or participates in the carioca carnaval can perceive that it is
shot through, in ideological terms, with ambiguous and contradictory inflections. I am concerned, rather, with a vision of carnaval-and its historical embedment in visions of Rio and the Brazilian nation-that is articulated from a
particular angle, that of poor people of color residing in the favela, or hillside
shantytown, of Morro do Sangue Bom, where I lived and conducted research between 1990 and 1992.'
The Hill of Good Blood
I first entered the community of Morro do Sangue Bom in 1988, fortuitously, I thought, during the centennial of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. I was
searching for a field site where I might later return to conduct research on the
ways in which poor people of color articulate their understandings of color, race,
and racism. I was determined to live in a favela (a word I quickly learned to

avoid) not because of its reputed exoticism but simply because such communities are inhabited, for the most part, by poor families of color. Rio's morros, or
hills, are densely populated communities of one- and two-story houses built
willy-nilly on many of the city's steepest hillsides. Although lacking paved

roads and constantly vulnerable to the devastation of both small and catastrophic mud slides, many such communities, including Morro do Sangue Bom,
offer magnificent views of the city, a bittersweet irony for those who are often
called, with a mixture of pity, derogation, and fear, favelados ("slum dwellers")
or marginais ("criminals"). For their part, people on the hill look down toward
the city with as much trepidation as envy. Unlike the morro, where "todo mundo
se conhece" [everyone knows each other], the city is made dangerous by its anonymity. It is not only crime that might give the parents of teenagers concern but
also the ever present possibility that the overwatchful eyes of shopkeepers, the
subtle avoidance gestures of white middle-class shoppers, or the arrogant harassment of the police might undermine one's self-confidence, one's sense of
rightful cidadania, or citizenship. People living on Rio's morros call the city as
CARNAVAL IN RIO 5
a whole o asfalto, or the asphalt, a term that highlights the distinction between
the infrastructural investments made in middle-class residential and business ar-
eas and the muddy pathways and open sewers of the morro.
Like many similar communities, Morro do Sangue Bom had a residents' association with elective offices and a day care center. Much of the de facto politi-
cal control of the community, however, was in the hands of the local drugtrafficking gang. The people of Morro do Sangue Bom, many of whom had been
born and raised in the community, spoke disparagingly of crime and its seem-
ingly inevitable consequences, but they were thankful-until 1992-to be living in an epoca de paz, or period of peace. The present leader, unlike the previ-
ously incumbent one, was a son of the community in more than a merely
technical sense; he and his men did not harass the community's five thousand or
so residents, nor did they brandish their guns or engage in public drug use outside of those occasional days that followed police shakedowns.
Jorge, the first person I met in Morro do Sangue Bom, was an unemployed
man of color who had lived in the community since his birth 28 years before. He
occasionally acted, through an informal arrangement, as the assistant to the
president of the residents' association. He was warm and welcoming on my first visit,
and, in response to my question about the predominant concerns and preoccupations of the community's residents, he began to talk about carnaval. Although
peace had settled over the community, the good old days, Jorge told me, were
clearly over. Until recently, Morro do Sangue Bom had had an award-winning
bloco, or carnival parade group. There were several exceptionally talented sambistas, or samba composers, on the hill, and their songs, animated by the beautiful mulatas ("women of color") of the morro, had been the pride of the community. To better illustrate the tragedy of his community's loss, Jorge led me to a
tiny cement structure that housed the ruins of carnavals past. As he pointed out
with a weary gesture, a few fantasias, or costumes, glittering with sequins and
piled haphazardly on the dirt floor, were all that remained. The bloco of Morro
do Sangue Bom was one of the first victims of a deepening recession; the municipal funds that made such local productions possible had evidently dried up.
After our first meeting, Jorge arranged for me to spend a week in the home
of his twin sister, Joia. Married to a man named Daniel since she was 17, Joia had
two sons and lived with her family in a dilapidated house close to the hill's summit. One evening during my stay she began to talk about carnaval, something
that was very close to her heart. The blocos, she explained, were small local
groups composed of the men, women, and children who lived in particular communities or neighborhoods. Although some had received funds from the city,
their creative management and production were in the hands of local people.
Preparations began months in advance as those who composed the music and selected a theme met to hammer out a unifying vision for their parade. Others designed and sewed costumes, choreographed the dancing, and organized the participants. The blocos were competitive, and, as Joia suggested, the creative and
organizational processes, as well as the final parade, were highly emotional focal points that were significant in producing what Joia and others called a sense
of unido, or union, in the community. Although the women and men of Morro do
Sangue Bom worked hard all year long "just to survive," their exuberant carnaval parades had provided the one context in which their labor and creativity
were recognized and applauded not only by middle-class cariocas but by foreigners who came to the city as well. No longer just "slum dwellers" and "criminals," they danced, spun, and sang their way down the streets, leaving a feeling
of dizzy enchantment in their wake.
As Joia explained, however, these local blocos were not the real "bigstakes" caraval. The major competition was between the much larger escolas
de samba, or samba clubs. Like the blocos, each of the escolas-composed of
literally thousands of participants-developed an original samba composition,
costumes, choreography, and a theme. The parades of the escolas were dominated by massive floats that were flanked by alas, or wings, each with its own
conventionalized role, costumes, and choreography. Although the big escolas
de samba were still associated with the hillside communities where they originated, their members were often far flung. They were managed by professionals
and funded by Rio's powerful tourism department and by bicheiros, the million-
aire kingpins of Brazil's illegal numbers game.

It was during our first conversation about camaval that Joia excused herself
and went to retrieve a stack of dog-eared magazines from the back of a drawer.
Flipping through their pages, she showed me pictures of Daniel, dressed in

white, spinning a tambourine on one finger like a top and gesturing toward a
dancing woman. It was, as I later learned, the classic pose of the passista, a traditional figure of the escolas de samba of Rio de Janeiro. Passistas are chosen for
their agility and their good looks; they are loosely partnered with, and provide
percussive accompaniment for, the gyrating mulatas who most personify samba
as a dance form. Although Daniel remained anonymous in the sense that his
name never appeared in the captions underneath the photos, he was clearly, with
his muscled build, his wide smile, his color, and his carioca sexiness, a favorite
of the photographers. "Your husband is famous!" I exclaimed. Joia beamed, but
as our conversation continued she began to suggest, as Jorge had, that the days
of the "real" caraval were over. The escolas used to parade on the wide avenues
of the city, she explained, but since 1984, the event was housed in the Passarela
do Samba, an enormous arena popularly known as the Samb6dromo. "It used to
be so marvelous," she said; "Now you have to pay to get in."
During that week I asked Joia, Daniel, and some of their friends about the
previous carnaval and its relationship to the centennial of abolition. A number of
the samba clubs had had themes about abolicdo ("abolition") and o negro ("the
black"), I was told, but few details were offered. No one, it appeared, had invested much emotional energy in the celebration of the centennial. "We used to
have a bloco right here on the morro, did you know that?" I was repeatedly
asked.
Two years later I returned to the community to begin my research. Al-
though Brazilian "race relations" and "black culture" had fascinated anthropologists and sociologists for half a century, there was as yet no systematic
CARNAVAL IN RIO 7
examination of discourses of color, race, and racism among urban poor people
of color. Like the country it describes, scholarship on race in Brazil has had a
dramatic history. Particularly after the publication and translation of the works
of Gilberto Freyre, Brazil's preeminent sociologist-historian, Brazil enjoyed a
reputation as a democracia racial, or racial democracy. Although Brazil was the
last New World country to abolish slavery, Freyre, like so many of his compatriots, believed it to be immune to the antagonistic, systemic forms of racism that
plagued countries such as the United States.
Following the bloodshed and genocide of World War II, UNESCO sponsored anthropological and sociological research in Brazil, with the hope of
documenting how this enormous nation-composed of the descendants of
"Europeans, Africans, and Indians"-accomplished and maintained its celebrated harmony. The results of these studies were equivocal. Those who studied
the industrialized urban centers of the south-most of whom were Brazil-
ian-documented the existence of racialized prejudice and discrimination (see,
especially, Azevedo 1955; Bastide and van den Berghe 1957; Bastide and Fernandes 1951,1955; Cardoso and Ianni 1960; Costa Pinto 1953; Ferandes 1965,
1969, 1972; Ianni 1966, 1978; Nogueira 1955; Pereira 1967). However, Florestan Ferandes, the most frequently cited author in this body of literature, argued that racism was but an archaic cultural holdover from the era of slavery,
one that would inevitably wither away as Brazilians of color became more fully
incorporated into the developing capitalist economy.
U.S. researchers, who focused on the rural areas of Brazil's northeast, also
documented the existence of racialized prejudice, but they maintained that the
behavior associated with discriminatory practices was based not on color but on
class (see, especially, Harris 1952, 1956, 1964, 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963;
Hutchinson 1957; Kottak 1967; Pierson 1942; Wagley 1963a, 1963b; Zimmerman 1963). While acknowledging rigid class boundaries and the profound poverty of most of Brazil's people of color, Charles Wagley concluded that "Brazil
remains as a lesson in racial democracy for the rest of the world" (1963b:2).
Summarizing both popular and scholarly assumptions, Harris concluded, "Racial identity is a mild and wavering thing in Brazil" (1964:64).
More recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have offered unequivocal and cogent challenges to what is now more often than not called the
"myth of racial democracy" (for example, Andrews 1991; Burdick 1993; Fontaine 1985; Hale 1997; Hanchard 1994; Hasenbalg 1979; Skidmore 1974;
Twine 1998). Central to this revisionist scholarship are those studies that use the
analysis of census data to demonstrate the existence of systemic racialized dis-
crimination (for example, Hasenbalg 1979,1985; Lovell and Dwyer 1988; Silva
1981, 1985; Wood and Carvalho 1988). Nevertheless, many of the questions, assumptions, and debates that animated scholarship from the 1950s through the
1970s continue to be recycled both within and outside of the academy. Partly because many Brazilians avoid using words such as negro and preto, which refer
directly to blackness, it is assumed, for example, that people of color do not
identify as black. The failure of Brazil's small black movement organizations to
attract the "masses" is frequently taken as evidence that people of color do not
experience or do not recognize racialized oppression. The salience of miscegenation-itself difficult to define in a country in which so many refer to themselves as "mixed"-is often taken as prima facie evidence that racism is not a
homegrown Brazilian ideology or set of practices but an imported product, an
aberration of those who are, in one way or another, "not truly Brazilian." Within
the popular imagination certainly, the carioca carnaval continues to embody,
and, in a sense, to enact, the ideology of democracia racial, in that it is thought
to celebrate the "African contribution" to Brazil at the same time that it demands
affectionate, and even promiscuous, mixing between people of different colors

and classes.
Sambistas for Hire
Because I wanted to gain a sense of how people in the community talked

about color, race, and racism in ordinary everyday conversations, it was many
months before I began to conduct focused interviews on these issues. Although
people often referred to color and even race when they described the appearance
of particular individuals, racism as ideology or practice was rarely discussed.
The tepid way in which people had talked about the centennial of abolition two
years before seemed confirmed by patterned silences. When I did begin focused
interviews, however, nearly all of my informants narrated personal encounters
with racism. "No one wants to talk about it," many acknowledged, "but everyone knows it exists." They did not, as their silence in everyday discourse seemed
to suggest, accept the notion that Brazil is a racial democracy.2
Tomas, a dark-skinned 19 year old, echoed many young men on the morro
when he described his experiences with police harassment on the asfalto, the
public streets of the city. Several days before our interview, for example, he had
gone to another morro to attend a dance with his cousin. He began his account by
describing his attempt to return home by cab, an alternative that was almost prohibitively expensive but one by which he might avoid a tedious and possibly
threatening encounter with the police. "Here it's very difficult for people of
color," Tomas explained; "[Cab drivers] think we are going to rob them." He
had waited for over an hour before a taxi finally stopped for him. Almost as
though it were an aside, Tomas added that while he was at the dance he had been
stopped, frisked, and questioned by the police. "Sometimes it's very dangerous
with the police; there can be violence," Tomas said. He chuckled softly and
added, "I don't have much luck when I go out." This type of encounter was very
familiar to Tomas-he knew that he must not only cooperate but maintain a respectful, even obsequious demeanor-but his attempt to laugh off his fear and
wounded sense of dignity was only partially successful.
Like others on the morro, Tomas believed that it was his color, even more
than his poverty, that made him constantly vulnerable to such harassment. I
asked him if he ever discussed such incidents with his mother. "No, no, I didn't
tell anyone, no. I got really sad about what happened," he responded in a soft
voice. For Tomas, as for others on the hill, there was no point in talking about
CARNAVAL IN RIO 9
racism, even among one's intimates. "I know that we have human rights, right?"
he said; "But to complain-there's no way, so you have to let it go. It doesn't do
any good."
The dance that Tomas and his cousin had gone to featuredfunk, largely imported music of the North American rap and hip-hop genres. Such dances, usually held in Rio's morro communities and working-class subutrbios, were typi-
cally frequented by black teenagers, but they were not, for the most part,
conceptualized as a part of cultura negra, or black culture. Tomas's mother and
others of her generation had no fondness for the music, sartorial accessories, and
ritualized leisure activities associated with funk-nor, indeed, did they care for
most genres of foreign pop music. While the raucous and sometimes violent
nighttime world of the funk dances may have represented a kind of generational
marker with a rebellious edge, its connection to politicized notions of black

identity was vague at best.
Although Tomas was engaged in the fashionable and, in many ways, transnational world of funk, he hardly fit the stereotype of the callow, culturally disaffected youth that troubled his elders on the morro and struck fear into the
hearts of the middle-class people living on the asphalt. Tomas respected his
community and the neighborly ethos that held it together, and, contrary to much
of the conventional wisdom about the nature of racialized identity in his country, he embraced a notion of negritude that was not only peculiarly Brazilian but
carioca. When I asked Tomas if he thought there was something in his country
that one might call cultura negra, he said, without hesitation, "There is Macumba,
African music, pagode, samba, our space within popular Brazilian music."
Tomas had named the dominant contexts and cultural genres that conventionally define black culture in Brazil. "Macumba," a catchall word for the West
African-derived religions of Umbanda and Candombl6, provided a context for
the nurturance and modification of sacred music, which in turn constituted what
some historians of Brazilian music believe to be a point of origin for the secularization, popularization, and hybridization of what Tomas called "African music." The term pagode, while sometimes referring to a particular style or styles
of music, is used more generally to describe the informal and playful gathering
of small groups of musicians in more or less public areas; those in the "audience" often add their voices to the chorus and dance singly or in pairs. Although
pagode shares much, in historical terms, with Iberian musical traditions and
street life, it is often associated, in Rio at least, with poor people of color.
Pagode, for Tomas and his neighbors on the morro, is in turn associated with
samba, the world-famous musical and dance genre that was "invented" by the
povo, or people, and more specifically by the negros, or blacks. When Tomas referred to "our space within Brazilian popular music," he meant not only samba
and samba-inspired rhythms but also popular artists of color.
Samba, as Tomas suggested, was more than the beat that animated the activities of caraval week. Although the bittersweet nostalgia that samba seemed
to invoke almost inevitably was anchored in the magic of caraval, it was also,
for people on the morro particularly, a rhythm that accompanied everyday life.
Tomas himself was a percussionist in a loosely organized group of men who

played pagode. Samba was his metier. Usually, as he said, he "played for the
community," but, like other poor musicians, he sometimes played for grana, a
little money, to put food on his family's table. His patrons were middle-class
cariocas who enlivened their birthday parties and barbecues with live pagode
groups. It was only in his role as a sambista, Tomas suggested, that he was
treated decently by the people of the asphalt:
There are many ways, many ways, many ways like this, that we citizens of color
don't have much opportunity. We can be musicians. Because I am a musician and
when I arrive at a place they treat me well, but when I'm not playing, it's another
thing, they treat me differently.... It's a bit difficult for us; it's difficult because
we don't have time to study. We have to work. So, it's difficult for us to open a
window. Because we're workers; most are domestics, women as much as men.
And he who has a better job is the one who knows someone, who has a contact. But
the person who doesn't have that and isn't educated doesn't do anything. So,
there's no chance in life for anything. We don't have a chance, do you understand?
Tomas understood that his tiny professional niche-based on his "authenticity" as a very dark skinned, drum-playing man from the favela-was symbolically and discursively constructed through an ideologically dubious route, but it
was, as he suggested, all he had to bank on as a poor and uneducated black man.
He savored the modicum of respect that the role afforded him and lamented the
fact that because their "instruments weren't good enough" his pagode group had
little success in playing for clubs and other more lucrative venues. When he left
middle-class parties in the wee hours of the morning, he told me, the police, as
though attempting to justify their harassment, often called him a nego safado
("no-account nigger").
As a 19 year old from a very poor family, Tomas had never gone out with a
caraval bloco, nor had he ever been to the Samb6dromo. As a musician for hire,
however, he had a sophisticated sense of the racial and class politics of samba.
"The only thing we receive support for here in Brazil is samba," Tomas told me,
chuckling sardonically: "They gave that to the negros, samba and pagode. And
caraval. ... I play pagode. But we don't have many chances.... There's no investment. No one invests in this. They give us a chance to run along behind but
we are very poor and there's no investment in anything."
Tomas's sense of himself as a sambista who was permitted to "run along
behind" what had become someone else's party was hardly unique. Jorge, who
saw himself as a sambista almost by birthright, also performed for middle-class
patrons. Like Tomas, he was likely to experience a disturbing combination of
pride and humiliation when he was hired to entertain at parties. "The guys, myself, for example-" Jorge said, describing his intimidation on arriving at the
house of a wealthy patron, "I have, even, a feeling of shame when I see this guy's
house. You know how it is?" As Jorge described the occasion, he and his fellow
musicians were initially shown respect. They performed tirelessly, but after a
time they were subjected to racist comments that they were clearly meant to
hear. They were called crioulos, a humiliating racial term that made Jorge's
CARNAVAL IN RIO 11
blood boil. "He spoke like this," Jorge explained, referring to one of the guests,
"'two crioulos together are faggots or they are thieves.' "

The experiences of Tomas and Jorge summarize the ideological and occupational "window" offered to black sambistas and the tenuous, fragile, and shifting nature of both their role and the occasional and evidently ambivalent respect
they derive from it. "They gave that to the negros," Tomas said of samba, and although his comment seems to contradict the assertion of others on the hill that it
was, in fact, "the negros who gave samba to Brazil," it is the tension between
these two notions that defines the theft of both camaval and the contexts, at once
practical and symbolic, that are associated with it.
Histories: The "Little Bird" of Samba and the Carioca Carnaval
The precise history of samba is disputed, but its roots are traced ultimately
to West Africa, the homeland of Brazil's colonial slave population. Batuque (or
batucada), conventionally defined as the rhythmic drumming that accompanies
the Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies of Umbanda and Candomble (and their
predecessors in both Africa and the New World), is thought to represent the basic model from which more explicitly social and secular music and dance styles
developed. Although contemporary samba incorporates the complex blending
of many strands of influence-which involve dance styles, musical genres, and
the evolution of pre-Lenten festivities in the city of Rio de Janeiro-popular accounts continue to emphasize its association with the city's morros. Martha GilMontero, Carmen Miranda's biographer, echoes the romantic language in which
samba's beginnings are conventionally imagined and described:
From 1870 to 1930 the piquant dance and beat developed in the destitute hillside
favelas of Rio de Janeiro-while in town the highbrow Carioca elites listened to
French and Italian opera . . . [T]he orchestras of the former slaves forfeited the
religious essence of their rituals and the batucada became a profane dance and a
melody with a choreography and a rhythm distinctively Carioca. It was in the
splendor of the morros that the batucada also softened and turned into samba....
The blacks clapped their hands or percussion instruments in three tempos-two
fast and one slow-and danced in a circle. The samba had a relaxing, pleasurable,
funny, thoroughly ludic intention.... Social life in the favelas up on the morro
centered around it, and the sambistas who created this music acquired the attributes of gods among the black population. The rest of the town ignored the pleasures of the very poor and considered the sambistas as noxious elements.
[1989:25-26]
Scholarly histories of samba tend to be more nuanced. For example, John

Charles Chasteen has recently argued for a more explicitly "transracial" and
"transcultural" history of samba as a dance form. Although he acknowledges
that "African traditions form the heart and soul of Brazilian dance," he maintains that "it is a mistake ... to see modern samba as a first-generation child of
batuque" (1996:39). Chasteen argues that the lundu and the maxixe, popular
dance crazes of the 19th century, represented the "intermediate stages" and "so-
cial antecedents" of 20th-century samba (1996:32). Foreign travelers, one of
whom Chasteen quotes, described the lundu as "a national dance" in which "all
classes, when they put aside formality, restraint and, I might add, decency, sur-
render themselves" (1996:36). White Brazilian men were similarly said to "imitate the movements of the blacks a good deal" (Chasteen 1996:36). The maxixe,
which eclipsed the lundu in the 1870s, was, like its predecessor, associated with
the popular classes, but during the carioca carnaval of the following decade the
dance became, "with its air of subversive wickedness ... a general diversion of
middle-class males" (Chasteen 1996:39).

The history of the carioca carnaval is distinct from the history of samba,
whether the latter is defined as a style of dancing or as a specific genre of music.
Histories of the Rio carnaval, in fact, emphasize its origins in European traditions. Entrudo, evidently the earliest form of pre-Lenten festivities in the city,
involved neither dance nor music but centered, rather, on unruly water fights
and the general suspension of social norms. Slaves playfully mocked their masters, and women pelted passing men with balls of wax containing scented water.
Partly because civic authorities objected to the social threat implied by entrudo's general mayhem, it slowly waned, and in the 1840s Rio's wealthy imitated the Parisian carnival-exclusive masked balls that involved dancing. The
festivities moved back to the street a decade later, however, as elite men of the
city created parading societies. Although the Rio carnaval is now associated
with the povo, these parading societies and their elite participants originally
controlled the more public celebrations. As Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz

writes, "This type of eminently bourgeois carnival had originated around 1856
in Rio, and for a century only the rich had the right to parade in the streets during
the Mardi Gras festivities. They 'entertained the people,' who were relegated to
the role of simple spectators and were forbidden the possibility of gathering on
the street" (1985:14).
Published sources provide different dates for the collapse of this elite control of Rio's public carnaval, but by the latter part of the 19th century, "groups
of tradesmen, laborers and dockworkers, to which were added fringe elements

made up of the unemployed and hoodlums" began to test the limits imposed by
the authorities (Queiroz 1985:14). According to Chasteen, maxixe converged

with carnaval street dancing in the 1880s, "as black dancers carrying drums,
tambourines, and assorted other percussion instruments initiated a new kind of
carnival parading in Rio de Janeiro" (1996:40). Groups dominated by poor peo-
ple of color-variously called Congos, Cucumbys, cordoes, Ze Pereiras, ranchos, and yet later blocos-emerged from clandestine contexts into public visibility. It was during the 1890s that Rio's journalists began to use the term samba
to describe the dancing performed by these groups (Chasteen 1996:41). Although such groups and their hybrid, evolving polyrhythmic music/dance genres
were officially outlawed, they were particularly difficult to quell by the turn of
the century. "The authorities were doing their best," Chasteen writes, quoting
the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, "but who could police that crowd?" (Jornal do
Brasil 1903, quoted in Chasteen 1996:42).
CARNAVAL IN RIO 13
As Roberto Moura (1983) demonstrates in his detailed history of samba,

carnaval was only one of a number of contexts that promoted the spread of
samba. During the first and second decades of the 20th century, a nightlife culture, once clandestine and largely limited to the popular classes, began to expand and attract the more "bohemian" white men of the elite and developing
middle classes. It was evidently in this context, providing as it did additional
venues for fresh musical compositions and dancing, as well as the context of carnaval, that the "samba do morro" descended into the city. The Festa da Penha,
originally a religious festival celebrated during the weekends of October, became a notorious context in which poor people of color, many of them recent migrants from the northeastern state of Bahia, gathered to "samba the night away."
They were a target of both conservative journalists and the police, the latter
sometimes jailing the participants and destroying their instruments. Both the
Festa da Penha and samba generally were associated with promiscuity, vagrancy, and roguery-the same set of associations that supposedly characterized the hillside communities from which the music and many of its talented
composers had come.3
Journalists and their readerships were divided and ambivalent in their reactions to samba, the increasingly public nightlife associated with it, and the pene-
tration of black-dominated street groups into the formerly "civilized" and

"European" carnaval. Many lamented the "Africanization" of the yearly festival
and bemoaned the collapse of social order it seemed to suggest. One newspaper,
on the other hand, "became a particularly energetic booster" of new carnaval
groups, and in 1906 it organized a contest "to celebrate the efforts of the street
dancers" (Chasteen 1996:42). During this fertile period, legal persecution and
harassment occurred simultaneously with the creative blooming and popular
spread of samba. The contemporary journalist Alma Guillermoprieto captures
something of the ambivalence of Rio's elite in her somewhat tongue-in-cheek
commentary on the history of samba. "It was becoming hard to persecute sambistas for playing the music that all Rio was dancing to," she writes; "Cariocas
could hardly be expected to refrain from putting on a little black music when
they were feeling naughty" (1990:26).
Guillermoprieto's reference to "putting on a little black music" marks the
emergence of the recording industry in Brazil, the development of which occurred simultaneously with that of modem samba music. In 1917, the parodic
samba number "Pelo Telefone" was recorded; most historians of contemporary
samba mark this moment as the first triumph of a musical genre that was soon to
become world renowned. The song, with sanitized lyrics, was a favorite of the
1917 carnaval, and, with burgeoning record sales, samba entered the age of commercialization. When radio was introduced in Brazil in 1922, Brazilian and foreign record producers rushed to capitalize on the growing popularity of samba.
Working- and lower-middle-class sambistas began to see the writing and performing of samba as a strategy for upward mobility (Moura 1983:55). The Semana de Arte Moderna ("Moder Art Week"), held in Sao Paulo in 1922, also
provided a boost for samba; among artists and intellectuals it signaled a movement
away from dependence on European styles and a focus on the themes and images
thought to be "indigenous" to Brazil-including those "African" cultural mani-
festations previously labeled as "barbaric" and "uncivilized." By the mid1930s, foreign record producers were rushing to capitalize on samba, and the
white "Ambassadress of Samba," Carmen Miranda-the stage name of a Portuguese immigrant who had her start in the more "humble" neighborhoods of
Rio-was born. In the context of the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy and its burgeoning music industry, commercially produced images of Brazil's fruity, sensuous exoticism and hip-swinging dances soon became commonplace in North
America and Europe.
The first escola de samba was organized in 1928, and others were quickly
formed (Queiroz 1985:15). Merging the formal internal structure and pageantry
of the elite parading societies with the samba do morro, the escolas competed for
the prizes offered by Rio's newspapers. During the decade of the 1930s, which
began with the coup of Getulio Vargas-who did much to promote certain forms
of popular culture as both national and nationalist culture-the escolas de

samba, along with the music that carried them along, achieved legitimacy. Although some members of the elite continued to turn up their noses at such "popular manifestations" in preference for the music of Europe, the participation of
the escolas de samba in the carioca carnaval was formally legalized and, in fact,
subsidized by the municipal authorities of Rio in 1936.
Recognition and funding came at considerable political and artistic cost.
Only nationalistic themes, which were typically drawn from highly romanticized versions of Brazilian history, were permitted. As Queiroz notes, "The civil
authorities forbade any overtly political manifestation or one which might take
on a protesting note ... The slightest violation of these rules brought on the
automatic declassification of the offending school" (1985:16). While ostensibly
less constrained, the smaller blocos, such as the one that was eventually formed
in the community of Morro do Sangue Bom, respected similar limits. Despite
the explicit control of the state and the rigidly regimented organization of the
escolas de samba themselves, samba continued to be associated, in Brazil and
beyond, with passion, spontaneity, and the unquenchable creativity of the povo.
It was particularly during and after the 1930s that samba and the carioca
carnaval became simultaneously identified both with images of an authenticating "blackness" (or even "Africanness") and with those of the uniquely hybrid,
"mixed" national culture of Brazil. In a sense mediating both images was the
performance of an increasingly self-conscious popular and civic culture in Rio

de Janeiro. Much has been made, in the often passionate language of commentary on samba, of the symbiotic relationship among samba, the magic of Rio,
and the location of both within discourses and images of national self-repre-
sentation. Moura, whose book emphasizes the relationship between Rio's diverse and lively neighborhoods and the development of samba, notes that since
the turn of the century Rio was the "principal center for the production and
consumption of culture" within Brazil and that "the city was the best expression,
and the vanguard of the moment of transition that was then Brazilian society"
CARNAVAL IN RIO 15
(1983:30). Samba itself, he asserts, was inspired by the "fascination of the city
of Rio de Janeiro" (1983:55). Gil-Montero suggests that samba's precursors

were "distinctively Carioca" (1989:25). The rhythm of samba, she writes, "has
poetically and musically defined the emotion of the city of Rio de Janeiro"
(1989:25). Samba's magic was described as irresistible and infectious, however,
for "it traversed street after street in the lips and on the hips of splendid mulattos.
... and seized every opportunity to conquer the world" (Gil-Montero 1989:25).
Samba and the carioca caraval have long been recognized as critical elements in the conventional discourses and imagery of Brazilian national culture,
as monumental representations, really, of what Brazilians and "Brazil

nuts"-foreigners who are drawn to the country's "tropical exoticism"-hold
most dear. "Rio's pre-Lenten carnival and its Afro-Brazilian dance, samba, have
been symbols of Brazilian identity since the 1930s," Chasteen notes (1996:30).
Both the real and imagined histories of samba fit perfectly with the larger development of a national identity that was based, to a significant degree, on the notion of democracia racial and related cultural motifs:
The years following the First World War saw the development of a widely endorsed vision of national identity founded on the idea of racial mixing. To many
Brazilians, the post-1917 apotheosis of samba, understood as a blend of African
and Portuguese musical ideas, stands as one of the most persuasive emblems of a
cherished vision of Brazilian identity, linked through carnival to a myth of social
leveling which, though confined to the few days of the festival, still forms part of
a unifying national spirit. [Chasteen 1996:30]
The cooptation and repackaging of samba by members of the predominantly white middle and upper classes, and its promulgation as a symbol of national culture and sensibility, suggest remarkable parallels with other histori-
cally shifting forms of cultural practice and representation in Brazil. The

political development of the West African-derived religion of Umbanda and the
struggle of middle-class whites to control it is a case in point (Brown 1994;

Brown and Bick 1987). As Fry (1982) has argued in a short but provocative es-
say, modern Brazilian forms of self-representation-whether constituted

through the practices and discourses associated with cuisine, samba, or religion-make liberal use of the "African contribution" to Brazil. Those cultural
elements historically associated with African Brazilians have been, Fry argues,
racially and politically neutralized. As such, they have been harnessed to the service of representing the national mainstream.
Sinho, one of the most renowned of the early sambistas, no doubt intended
to highlight the fluid and flexible boundaries of samba, as well as the freewheeling growth of the genre, when he said, "The samba is like a little bird. It belongs
to whoever catches it" (Alencar 1968:57, quoted in Henfry 1981:81). As the

comments of Tomas, my sambista informant in Morro do Sangue Bom, imply,
however, the continuing transformation of samba has never been a smooth or
neutral process. Perhaps now more than ever, poor cariocas of color suggest that
the "little bird" of samba has been stolen and caged. As written and oral histories
of samba demonstrate, many disempowered poor black composers, who remain
anonymous outside of their own communities, have been offered-if anything-a pittance for their compositions. Poor sambistas recall the injustice that
lies at the heart of the history of samba, and, in a far more general sense, contem-
porary discourses among poor cariocas of color suggest that they have never relinquished what might be called a kind of "spiritual stewardship" of samba.
For people such as those in Morro do Sangue Bom, samba may be embraced by the world-and at the present moment, may be commercialized almost beyond recognition-but it remains an invenado do povo, or an invention
of the people, and, more specifically, a coisa dos negros, a black thing. Although
what my informants called the "true sambista" would readily admit that samba
is not really "African" but a uniquely Brazilian, or even specifically carioca,
synthesis, its "authenticity" is nonetheless conceptualized as rooted in blackness and the sensibilities of pessoas humildes, or humble people.
Although hybridization, white appropriation, commercialization, and

mainstreaming ideological processes have surely been at work since "samba
came down from the hills," its "deracination" and "neutralization" evidently re-
main incomplete. As I would argue is the case for many of the everyday dis-
courses, contradictory ideological currents, symbolic forms of self-representation, and social and political practices that characterize contemporary
Brazilian culture, deeply racialized meanings and oppositions lie just beneath
the surface of public claims of harmony and unity (Sheriff 1997).
Sambodromo Politics
Although attempts to exert political and commercial control over samba

began well before the birth of people like Jorge, Joia, and Daniel, for the sambis-
tas of Morro do Sangue Bom the decisive moment came in 1984 with the construction of the Samb6dromo.4 Designed, like the monumental city of Brasilia,
by the modernist architect Oscar Niemayer, the arena marked a massive shift in
carnaval's local and national cultural ecology. The populist governor, Leonel
Brizola, liked to imagine that the Sambodromo was his gift to the working
classes who supported him, but by the early 1990s people in Morro do Sangue
Bom had begun to speak of it as the final straw that broke the back of authentic
samba and the Rio carnaval. Previously the spotlight had been on the public
squares and the broad thoroughfares where the larger escolas de samba shared
space with the smaller blocos in a more loosely organized street pageant in
which the border between participants and spectators was blurred or even, at
moments, nonexistent. The escolas that paraded in the Samb6dromo were being
"invaded," as many people said, by middle-class whites searching less for magic
than for fame and fortune.5 As before, the spectacle was bankrolled by the city's
powerful tourist department and by organized crime. With the construction of
the Samb6dromo, Brazil's major television networks and their "sponsors"-for
whom, arguably, the arena was built-provided additional promotion and generated even more private profits.
CARNAVAL IN RIO 17
Conversations about the theft of carnaval, as I have previously noted, represented one of the few everyday contexts in which people on the morro explicitly invoked the issue of racism. Daniel, as a former passista in one of the oldest
and most successful escolas de samba in the city (and thus, one must remember,
in the nation and the world), spoke about racism in his country in a very general
and vague way until he hit on the subject of samba. "Samba is a part of black culture," Daniel explained:
Generally the negro is more involved in samba; he has more facility than the white.
It comes from the root, from the blood really.... In the past, there were more ne-
gros in samba. Now it is very commercialized. The true sambista, the sambista
with roots, now he doesn't have the opportunity to parade in an escola de samba
because, monetarily, he doesn't have the conditions. Not even to watch [the carnaval] because it's very expensive, right? Camaval used to be very good. There was a
carnaval of the street.... Now it is very expensive; you can't buy a costume....
You don't participate.
As Daniel would have been the first to admit, parading with the top escolas
de samba had always required an investment of time, sweat, and money. Although most of the clubs' rank-and-file participants were working-class people
of color, the poorest of the poor had always been locked out. In 1977, the majority of those who participated in the big clubs earned between two to five times
the minimum wage (Ribeiro 1981). Club members not only paid monthly dues
but usually had to produce their own funds to pay for the elaborate hand-sewn
costumes. As an air conditioner and refrigerator repairman, Daniel had once
been able to manage. By 1990, as he sadly pointed out, he could no longer afford
the costume of the escola to which he had been devoted, and, adding insult to injury, he could not pay the price of the Samb6dromo tickets, which were by then
sold for at least half of a minimum monthly salary. Daniel hardly relished his
role as a critic on the sidelines, and even could he have afforded the privilege of
observing the spectacle from a seat in the arena, he probably would have disdained it. People like him, he suggested more than once, were supposed to be in
the spotlight, and what was the point of paying hard-earned money to watch
other people having a good time? He had literally been priced out of his own parade.
During the time that I lived in Morro do Sangue Bom, Joia tried to teach me
how to samba. I was, at least, given points for trying, which I was expected to do
at every conceivably appropriate moment. The samba as dance form, I learned

from my first days on the hill, was not reserved for the carnaval season. Like the
music that propelled it, it was practiced anywhere, anytime, and its flourishes
might be mimed to enliven the otherwise tedious tasks of everyday life. Joia's
reaction to my bungled attempts was ambivalent. She suggested that samba was
the forte of people like herself-and indeed, her eight-year-old son Tiago could
dance the samba and the recent craze from the northeast, the lambada, with such
artistry that it brought tears to my eyes-but she often exclaimed, with what
seemed like sincere consternation, "How can a person not know how to samba?"
Our good-humored argument about my failure to "get" samba continued

for more than a year and a half. At countless small moments during the day, I
pointed out to her, mothers would grab the tiny hands of their toddlers-many of
them truly toddling and not yet walking-and samba with them. Once the children could walk across the floor without falling more than once, everyone-vis-
iting aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, neighbors, their own siblings-took

them for little samba whirls, singing the refrains of favorite songs, even when
there was no music on the stereo. When Joia was pregnant with her third child,
she would samba with her swollen belly bobbing up and down, clowning. Sometimes she did this at parties, sometimes when she was doing chores around the
house. "You see?" I exclaimed many times: "Your baby is learning to samba before she has learned how to breathe!" After she was born, Daniel held his daughter in his arms and took small gentle samba steps as he softly crooned samba lyrics into her attentive, up-turned face. Joia, I realized, did not think of any of this
behavior as pedagogical but simply as what one did with small children, like
kissing them loudly on the cheek or tickling their toes. Like Daniel, she thought
that perhaps samba really might be "in the blood," a thing of "roots."
As the carnaval season of 1991 approached, Joia fell more and more to ridiculing the white women-often from middle-class and even elite families-who in recent years had begun to monopolize the carnaval floats and the
greedy eye of the television cameras. Although she had expressed wonder and
even irritation at my failure to learn to samba properly, everyone knew, she suggested, that it was mulatas, women of color like herself, who traditionally performed and personified the samba as a dance form. Somehow, skinny blondes
had literally stolen the show. Joia suggested that her pique was hardly idiosyncratic. Her words were part of a generalized commentary-what she called, in
fact, a polemica ("controversy")-that evidently circulated among the morros
of Rio. "This is a bad controversy," she explained, bringing out the magazines
once again: "It is because they are preferred. They're all white and they have
these nice bodies, you know? None of them are dark. It's bad, you know, because samba is a black thing. It began with the negros.... Look at them!
They're all white, very pretty, but can they samba? No! They can't samba at all!"
Like Daniel, Joia had sacrificed to parade with the big escolas. Carnaval
had always demanded sacrifice from poor people, she told me; but with the advent of the Samb6dromo and what appeared to be the increasing gentrification
and "bleaching" of the Rio carnaval, it had gone from difficult to impossible.
As carnaval drew nearer, Jorge asked me how I was planning to celebrate.
Although I would have a friend visiting from the United States, I refused to consider the possibility of going to the Sambodromo. I was waiting for a plan to congeal among my friends on the morro. Jorge, who was chronically unemployed
(except for his occasional gigs as a sambista at private middle-class parties) had
once had the alternative of going out with the community's bloco. Although
modest and small next to the big escolas, the local bloco had been intimate and
unsullied by the ambitions of outsiders. Jorge's own contribution had been significant, and when he performed disciplined work with the bloco, he became an
CARNAVAL IN RIO 19
artist-far more than the image that people in his own community had of him as
a washed-up malandro, or rogue, who was given to drinking himself into a stupor on Saturday afternoons. But the days of the bloco, as Jorge explained when
we first met, were over. Waving his arm dismissively, he told me how he was
planning to celebrate: "To parade with an escola-even the cheapest-is very

expensive.... For me, it is better to stay home, drinking beer, a little cocktail-
No! A huge cocktail!-and watch it all on television. Get rip-roaring drunk,

sleep, get up, and drink more...."
In the end, my visiting friend and I spent the nights of carnaval on the
Avenida Rio Branco, where we met up with people from the morro. Perhaps we
always arrived too late in the evening or were positioned too far down the avenue, but the blocos-most of them organized on morros and in working-class
neighborhoods-seemed dispirited and exhausted. Several days before carnaval, Daniel had fallen in the shower and cut his hand; he could neither play his
tambourine nor mix alcohol with the antibiotics he was taking. I had never seen
him so reserved at a party. Other than her freshly marcelled hair and an extra
layer of lipstick, Joia had not gone to any lengths to outfit herself for the festival.
We sat toward the end of the avenue, off to the side, where Tomas and several of
his musician friends played old samba tunes for anyone who would listen.
When the caraval season of 1992 arrived, the comments I heard echoed
those of the previous year. Yvonne, who like Joia and Daniel had spent her teens
and twenties in the thick of Brazil's biggest party, also entered her thirties to find
herself priced out and full of nostalgia for the days when poor, dark-skinned
women such as herself were treated, for the five days of carnaval, like the beloved muses of a nation beside itself with adoration. Like most people on the
morro, Yvonne did not like to talk about the prejudice and discrimination that
dogged her attempts to climb out of poverty, but for her, too, the theft of carnaval was racism writ large. "It has ended," she said, her voice edged with a kind
of patriotically inspired anger; "This thing of the carnaval of the negros-it's
over."
As had many others, Yvonne explained that carnaval had been stolen not
just by the wealthy people of the South Zone who bought their way into the more
visible positions in the escolas de samba. To see the floats dominated by white
women from the elite neighborhoods gravely offended Yvonne, but she knew
that the larger processes of the theft were more complicated than the penetration
of what people called the "white model of beauty" into the one area where
women of color had been given a chance to demonstrate their valor, or value.
"Only the rich," I heard over and over again, "only the ricos can get into the
Samb6dromo." Many of these ricos were gringos, or foreigners, Yvonne told
me, who, with their easy money, contributed to the commodification of carnaval
while understanding nothing of what had once been its deeper meaning.6
People on the morro often expressed ambivalence about carnaval's allure
for gringos. It was the beauty and "hot" sensuality of the mulatas and the morenas
("brown-skinned women") of Brazil that brought droves of foreign men to Rio,
many on the morro implied, not the pale offerings of the city's middle-class
citizens and its pricier venues. Even foreign women, I was told, came to Rio in
search of sexual adventures with o negro brasileiro ("a black Brazilian man").
The erotic enchantment of foreigners gave imprimatur to their traditional role as
the stars of carnaval. It was only right that people starving for the sensuous
magic of Brazil should come to the Rio caraval, those on the hill suggested;
and, for their part, they were honored to entertain and charm an appreciative
audience. When I told Joia that the nudity that characterized so much of the modem carioca carnaval would be considered pornographic in my own country, she
invoked the objectification embodied in carnaval-and her own ambivalence
about it-when she responded with laughter, "Yeah, right, you all won't show
your own bundas [buttocks], but you come down here to look at ours!"
Scholarly debates about the ideological role(s) of the Rio caraval and the
racialized meanings that inform them partly overlap with, while remaining distinct from, discourses among the city's poor people of color. Chasteen, summarizing this scholarly debate, defines it as centering around the political thrust of
the festival and its use of samba as a national symbol:
The negative view foregrounds socially and racially exploitative dimensions of
current carnival activities in Rio de Janeiro. Other authors have sprung to the defense of the popular carnival, however, finding in it expressions of resistance to
the cultural hegemony of the dominant class. ... To skeptics the glorification of
an Afro-Brazilian dance is a kind of theft, an appropriation of black culture out of
context.... What does all this imply about samba as a national symbol? In the final analysis, does it represent a boisterous triumph or a subtle subversion of racial
equality in Brazil? Does the ostensible celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture actually undermine the struggle for equity by suggesting that it already exists, as many
have argued? [1996:29]
For the people of Morro do Sangue Bom, I would argue, this kind of "final
analysis" has little bearing on the negotiation of racial meanings in either everyday life or in the extraordinary and ephemeral life of carnaval. Samba may "belong" to negros, it may be a "black thing," an inventao, or invention, of "humble
people," but it is its very role as national symbol that makes it such a valuable
contribuiqdo, or contribution. Without local, national, and international recognition and the commodification that has surrounded it since the 1930s, the "little
bird" of samba, as its traditional stewards know, would never have taken flight.
When people in Morro do Sangue Bom critique the carioca carnaval of the
1990s, they rely less on notions of resistance and cooptation than on the more
concrete and practical processes of theft-those that limit or preclude their actual (as opposed to merely symbolic) participation. The point for them is not that
black culture has been appropriated and depoliticized but that their role as the
nationally and internationally recognized representatives, producers, and performers of the samba-driven carioca carnival has been usurped. Although this
role is based, to a large degree, on racialized stereotypes and gendered, sexualized forms of objectification, it is one that-with something like an ironic wink
perhaps-they have accepted. Although discourses about samba and carnaval

may make use of deeply racialized notions of "cultura negra" and may even
CARNAVAL IN RIO 21
speak of "blood," as Daniel did, the emphasis is not on opposition between

"black culture" and "white culture" or between racially politicized versus racially neutralized versions of caraval practice; the emphasis, rather, is on the
erosion of samba/caraval as a negotiated economic and cultural niche conventionally reserved for poor people of color.
It is evident that the discourses and images associated with samba and the
Rio carnaval as a unifying and, in many ways, monumental national spectacle

conceal a contrary history. Theft, appropriation, and betrayal have accompanied
samba since its inception as a modem genre. The contemporary carioca carnaval, which is conventionally understood as a demonstration of democracia ra-
cial and the temporary collapse of class-based boundaries, is the negotiated

product of a history of racialized struggles for public space.
Although my informants may not be aware of the extent to which their un-
derstandings of the carioca caraval of the 1990s reflect and echo more longstanding struggles, their perception that the construction of the Samb6dromo
marked a dramatic shift in the political economy of the festival is certainly accurate. At the turn of the century, the public performance of poor people of color in
the carnaval was controlled largely through state-sponsored repression-streetlevel practices that involved intimidation, violence, and imprisonment. At the
present moment, the struggle for public space is located within the more "impersonal" forces of intensified commodification. The inflated costs of costumes
and Samb6dromo tickets, the emphasis on television broadcasting, the presence

of middle-class and elite whites in the most visible performance positions, the
increased domination of white professionals in the creative management of the
parade, and the fact that the Samb6dromo competition, as a multimillion-dollar
monopolizing spectacle, has dwarfed, devalued, and stolen public attention

from all other, more local carnaval practices-all of these processes constitute
the theft of carnaval. For people like Daniel, it seems, these "impersonal," struc-
turally racist processes are part of a larger pattern that characterizes the realidade, or reality, of modern Brazil. "They used to beat you with the whip," he
said, explaining the continuity between slavery and the racialized conditions of
modem wage labor: "Now they beat you with hunger."
It was during the carnaval season of 1992-when the poorest people on the
morro prepared to honor the nation and drown their sorrows without leaving the
hill-that I at least imagined that I understood the depth of bitterness and longing that Jorge had conveyed when he told me that he now celebrated carnaval by
watching television and getting drunk. Although the surviving blocos still paraded on the Avenida Rio Branco, the national and international spotlight, the
glory, the money, and the power were, as everyone knew, focused elsewhere.
Rede Globo, Brazil's widely watched television network, broadcast the tightly
packaged Samb6dromo spectacle throughout the nation, mesmerizing viewers
not only in the urban centers of the south but in the farthest reaches of the Amazon.
For people on the morro, I realized, it was not that Rio had ceased to represent
and enchant the nation-if anything, the televised spectacle catapulted the
carioca carnaval into nationalism's truly moder age-it was simply that it had
sold its soul.
Seeing the spectacle for the first time on the television in Joia and Daniel's
home, I was transfixed, and, in empathy with my companions, I felt nearly simultaneous surges of pride and sadness. There on the morro, I was literally rubbing shoulders with people who had actually gone out with the escolas, who had
participated, who had stood (and danced beyond exhaustion) for something. "I
didn't know!" I kept exclaiming. Out of loyalty I had adopted a dismissive attitude to high-stakes carnaval and had not, until then, imagined the truly monumental scale of its production: thousands of people, adorned with sequins, feathers, and metallic fabrics that caught the klieg lights as they whirled about, their
movements obviously choreographed less for the occasional close-up shots than
for the bird's-eye telephoto views. "Sonhar nao custa nada" [To dream costs
nothing], the members of one escola sang over and over, their central float illuminated by enormous gold dollar signs and reclining women wearing g-strings
and hair-to-toe golden body paint. If I stuck my head out the window of Joia and
Daniel's house, I could hear the bass notes of the samba percussion all the way
from the Samb6dromo. "You never told me it was so big, so incredible," I

gushed to Joia; "My country has nothing like this, nothing!" There was pride in
her answering smile. In a close-up shot, a carnavalesco, who serves as the crea-
tive mastermind of each competing escola, was shown with tears streaming
down his face.7 I asked Daniel why he was crying. "It is very emotional," he responded in a low and uneven voice. He seemed close to tears himself.
Although their approach to the issue of carnaval may be more pragmatic
than that of scholars concerned with its ideological implications, people in

Morro do Sangue Bom may also be one step ahead of such scholars in their understanding of the symbolic undercurrents of their own role in the festival. At
once ephemeral and monumental, the carioca carnaval, as both scholars and people on the morro know, is a powerfully moving utopian ritual. Although some
have suggested that it is a ritual of reversal in which the rich and poor trade
places (DaMatta 1981, 1984), it is also a ritual of intensification in which Brazilians celebrate their own vision of themselves as an amorous, optimistic, unified, and color-blind nation. People on the morro might sneer at the notion that
their country is a "racial democracy," yet, during carnaval, they have traditionally conspired in the production of a nationalist illusion. They have done so not
because they are the victims of false consciousness, as some have suggested, but
because they honor the dream, delicate as it may be, on which carnaval, as a festival of national unity, is based. For poor people of color, the carioca carnaval is
less about Brazil as it is than about Brazil as it ought to be.
It is this, ultimately, that makes the theft of carnaval, seen from the vantage
point of people in Morro do Sangue Bom, such a monumental betrayal. Their

bitterness is propelled not only by the fact that the mechanics and profits of the
festival's production have been commandeered by the already privileged

classes-a scenario that many of my informants regarded as "business as
usual"-but also by what they see as an erosion of its prescriptive meaning.
CARNAVAL IN RIO 23
"They're all thieves!" Daniel was fond of remarking. Sometimes he referred to the rich, sometimes to the government, and sometimes, it seemed to
me, to the economic and ideological forces that had mangled samba and turned
the city of Rio de Janeiro into a money-grubbing advertisement not for the nation's fragile and redemptive dreams but for its increasing cynicism and moral
decay.
Soon after that year's carnaval was consigned to memory, Rio de Janeiro
began to prepare for the Earth Summit. Heads of state and their representatives
would, for the first time, meet to hammer out a series of global environmental
policies. Representatives from nongovernmental organizations devoted to protecting the natural environment were also convening in Brazil. The city of Rio,
with its magnificent beaches and breathtaking vistas, was an obvious setting for
the meetings. Perhaps, many in Rio hoped, the city could recoup some of the
tourist dollars that had been lost as a result of the highly publicized street crime
and violence of recent years.
Ominously, several weeks before the summit, many of Rio's street children
seemed to have disappeared. The military and civil police began what would
come to be called a limpeza, or cleansing, of the favelas. The charismatic chefe,
or gang boss, of Morro do Sangue Bom was one of their first victims. His death
left the community vulnerable to the incursion of massive, imperialist drugtrafficking gangs, and, a year after I left, the cohesive and vibrant community of
Morro do Sangue Bom became memory. The war that led to its demise was so
explosive that it drew the attention of international media.
The "spirit" of Rio de Janeiro and, more specifically, of the carioca carnaval, as I have suggested, is taken to be metonymic of what is most alluring in
Brazilian culture and character. As my informants pointed out, the Rio carnaval
is (and perhaps always has been) metonymic of darker forces as well. My informants spoke of carnaval in much the same way that they spoke of racism and
other injustices-including the violence preceding the Earth Summit-that de-
fined their political marginality. Discourses in Morro do Sangue Bom made

much use of not only the theme of theft but also that of concealment and the con-
trast between public visions of the nation and the racialized political economy
that trapped people of color in what they called miseria ("misery") and fome
("hunger"). The glittering surfaces of carnaval, like the polite discourses of democracia racial-both of which are performed not only for Brazilians but also
for a transnational audience-conceal complex forms of contestation that engage both the political and the moral economy of race in Brazil. Although we are
growing increasingly accustomed to discourses that assert the evaporation of
national boundaries in the context of postmoder globalization, the traffic in
commoditized nationalist symbols and performances, and the often subterranean struggles that surround it, continues to bend local experience to its will.
In the wake of the gang war of 1993, which consumed Morro do Sangue
Bom, most of those who survived fled-some with nothing more than the
clothes on their backs. Nearly everyone I knew, including Joia and Daniel, left
the city of Rio de Janeiro altogether. In their new home in Niteroi, where I later
visited them, their teenage son Alberto had learned to play the guitar. "What's
goin' on?" he crooned soulfully, miming the English lyrics of a foreign rock
group called Four Non-Blondes. Daniel, visibly aging and worn but not yet 40,
kept telling me that the younger generation was abandoning its raizes, its roots.
"They disdain the music of their own country!" he lamented; "Samba! Samba is
the best music, our gift to the world!" Although I begged Alberto and his parents
to meet me on the morro, now depopulated and occupied by the military police,
or in the city-anywhere, just to kill saudades, or homesickness-they insisted,
over and over, that they did not miss Rio at all.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article is an expanded version of a paper I delivered in the

session "The City as Contested Nation" at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The idea that certain cities, given their actual or symbolic position as capitals of the nation, are often metonymic representations of the nation, as well
as sites of conflict and contestation over such representation, was proposed by Owen
Lynch, the organizer of the session. I thank him for this and additional insights and for a
close reading of an earlier version of this article. The article also benefited from the com-
ments of Richard Handler, the session's discussant, and from the comments and assistance of Mario Bick, Vincent Crapanzano, Peter Craumer, and Stephen Fjellman. Dan
Segal provided invaluable editorial assistance, and the anonymous reviewers for Cultural Anthropology provided many helpful and insightful comments. The research on
which this article is based was supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation
for Anthropological Research.
1. Morro do Sangue Bom, and all the names I use to refer to informants, are pseudonyms. Sangue bom is a slang expression that literally translates as "good blood." To
say that someone is sangue bom is to suggest that they are "one of us," trustworthy, and
humilde, or humble. For many, the term also has a racial connotation, but unlike so many
other terms that refer to blackness, it has a distinctly positive spin.
2. See Sheriff 1997 for a detailed analysis of the experiential bases and political implications of this silence.
3. Histories of samba, especially Roberto Moura's (1983), also highlight the importance of Tia Ciata, a middle-class woman from Bahia. Her home was said to operate
as both a temple of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble and as something of a nightclub and dance hall. Married to a doctor with political connections and thus protected
from the police raids that plagued other such gatherings, Tia Ciata not only acted as a
kind of patron to budding samba composers but also served as hostess to the more daring,
middle-class whites who clung to the fringes of popular nightlife.
4. Cavalcanti (following Valenca 1983) cogently reminds us that a preoccupation

with, and discourses about, the threatened "authenticity" of samba have existed almost
since its inception. By 1933 there were evidently debates about whether samba was in a
period of decadencia ("corruption and decline") or if, on the other hand, it was simply
undergoing "evolution and stylistic innovation" (Cavalcanti 1990:29).
5. The perception of a white invasion has also been documented by Guillermoprieto, who writes, "More than an invasion, it sounded like a gradual bleaching process:
whereas in the 1960s middle-class whites had been a rarity at rehearsals, by the 1970s
they were accepted members of many samba schools, and in Mangueira in 1988 there
were all-white wings with white chiefs" (1990:159). The increasing involvement of
CARNAVAL IN RIO 25
middle-class and elite whites in the planning and performance of carnaval has been
documented elsewhere as well, although it has occurred in somewhat different historical
and ideological contexts. For example, Fry, Carrara, and Martins-Costa (1988), referring to the period of the early 1980s, detail the strongly racialized competition among
carnaval groups in the northeastern state of Bahia. Focusing on an earlier period, von
Simson (1987) examines the forced adoption of the carioca model in Sao Paulo and emphasizes the competition between more traditional carnaval groups and newer ones,
which were increasingly dominated by wealthier, politically connected whites.
6. Many of Rio's middle-class whites, in fact, flee the city during carnaval. As
many well-heeled cariocas told me, they do this not only to take advantage of the fiveday national holiday but also to escape the noise and lewdness. (Not all cariocas approve
of the explicit eroticism, sexual license, and cross-dressing that stereotypically characterize the modern carioca carnaval.) Although people on the morro insist that middleclass whites have stolen carnaval, many of these whites suggest, usually in polite and
implicit language, that they cannot bear the suspension of everyday etiquette that demands that "favelados" maintain a respectful distance from gentefina, or refined people.
Those who escape to quiet mountain and seaside resorts are replaced, however, by North
American and European tourists, as well as by Brazilians from other cities. Both poor
people of color and middle-class cariocas increasingly complain that the Rio carnaval
has become a spectacle "for the gringos."
7. Each escola de samba has its own caravalesco. Much celebrated by the Brazilian media, carnavalescos are responsible for the design, organization, and creative management of the escolas' themes. Guillermoprieto traces the professionalization of the
carnavalesco role to 1959 (1990:66). Usually middle-class white men with artistic training, carnavalescos are often said to be "from outside." Cavalcanti (following Volvelle
1987) has suggested that carnavalescos are "cultural mediators" who construct and con-
trol the complicated interchange between "elite culture" and "popular culture"
(1990:30). They have thus played a pivotal role in the production of the carioca carnaval
as a competitive, professionalized, and commoditized spectacle. See Goldwasser 1975

for a more detailed, if dated, description of the internal organization of escolas de samba.
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The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

Author(s): Robin E. Sheriff

The Theft of Carnaval: National

Spectacle and Racial Politics in

Florida International University

festival of carnaval. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta captured the

forms of political discourse or to organized political activities but to dominant,

and racism. I was determined to live in a favela (a word I quickly learned to

willy-nilly on many of the city's steepest hillsides. Although lacking paved

aire kingpins of Brazil's illegal numbers game.

Flipping through their pages, she showed me pictures of Daniel, dressed in

Two years later I returned to the community to begin my research. Al-

ian-documented the existence of racialized prejudice and discrimination (see,

affectionate, and even promiscuous, mixing between people of different colors

Because I wanted to gain a sense of how people in the community talked

marker with a rebellious edge, its connection to politicized notions of black

Tomas himself was a percussionist in a loosely organized group of men who

"'two crioulos together are faggots or they are thieves.' "

Scholarly histories of samba tend to be more nuanced. For example, John

cial antecedents" of 20th-century samba (1996:32). Foreign travelers, one of

middle-class males" (Chasteen 1996:39).

controlled the more public celebrations. As Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz

of tradesmen, laborers and dockworkers, to which were added fringe elements

the authorities (Queiroz 1985:14). According to Chasteen, maxixe converged

carnival parading in Rio de Janeiro" (1996:40). Groups dominated by poor peo-

Brasil 1903, quoted in Chasteen 1996:42).

As Roberto Moura (1983) demonstrates in his detailed history of samba,

tration of black-dominated street groups into the formerly "civilized" and

of popular culture as both national and nationalist culture-the escolas de

performance of an increasingly self-conscious popular and civic culture in Rio

of Rio de Janeiro" (1983:55). Gil-Montero suggests that samba's precursors

as monumental representations, really, of what Brazilians and "Brazil

a unifying national spirit. [Chasteen 1996:30]

cally shifting forms of cultural practice and representation in Brazil. The

struggle of middle-class whites to control it is a case in point (Brown 1994;

say, modern Brazilian forms of self-representation-whether constituted

to whoever catches it" (Alencar 1968:57, quoted in Henfry 1981:81). As the

of samba demonstrate, many disempowered poor black composers, who remain

Although hybridization, white appropriation, commercialization, and

Although attempts to exert political and commercial control over samba

at every conceivably appropriate moment. The samba as dance form, I learned

Our good-humored argument about my failure to "get" samba continued

iting aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, neighbors, their own siblings-took

planning to celebrate: "To parade with an escola-even the cheapest-is very

No! A huge cocktail!-and watch it all on television. Get rip-roaring drunk,

invoked the objectification embodied in carnaval-and her own ambivalence

have argued? [1996:29]

perhaps-they have accepted. Although discourses about samba and carnaval

speak of "blood," as Daniel did, the emphasis is not on opposition between

Rio carnaval as a unifying and, in many ways, monumental national spectacle

cial and the temporary collapse of class-based boundaries, is the negotiated

and Samb6dromo tickets, the emphasis on television broadcasting, the presence

monopolizing spectacle, has dwarfed, devalued, and stolen public attention

from the Samb6dromo. "You never told me it was so big, so incredible," I

than that of scholars concerned with its ideological implications, people in

point of people in Morro do Sangue Bom, such a monumental betrayal. Their

festival's production have been commandeered by the already privileged

fined their political marginality. Discourses in Morro do Sangue Bom made

Acknowledgments. This article is an expanded version of a paper I delivered in the

4. Cavalcanti (following Valenca 1983) cogently reminds us that a preoccupation

as a competitive, professionalized, and commoditized spectacle. See Goldwasser 1975

Andrews, George Reid

Bastide, Roger, and Pierre van den Berghe

1987 Religion, Class and Context: Continuities and Discontinuities in Brazilian