3. Nationals

Salvador da Bahia and São Paulo, 1930–1945

During the First Republic, the whitening ideologies that valued European immigrants above black workers had turned the word nacional into a derisive euphemism for pretos and pardos. To be a “national” in the Republic, as writers in São Paulo's black press ruefully pointed out time and again, was essentially to be a second-class citizen, or in their terms, a foreigner in one's own land. This situation changed dramatically after November 1930, when a bloodless coup by Getúlio Vargas put an end to the Republic and inaugurated a fifteen-year nationalist regime.

Like other nationalist leaders taking power across Latin America in this period, Vargas vowed to do away with the political and economic structures and sharp social divisions of an earlier oligarchic regime. In Brazil, this meant that the nation would no longer be run by alternating groups of landholders from the agricultural powerhouses of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. It would be centralized in the national capital of Rio de Janeiro and would (in theory) respond to the collective will of an expanded electorate. The Republic's model of export-led growth, unable to prevail against the effects of the international financial crisis of 1929, would be replaced by an industrial economy. In place of class struggle, Vargas would rule over the nation with a firm but fair hand, tending to the needs of the disadvantaged as a “father of the poor.”¹ And instead of a citizenry divided by race, ethnicity, and language, Vargas would promote brasilidade, or Brazilianness—a sentiment that combined patriotism, nationalism, and a racially and culturally integrated national identity. “A country,” he proclaimed in a speech on May Day 1938, “is not just the conglomeration of individuals in a territory; it is, principally, a unity of race, a unity of language, a unity of national thinking.”²

In this spirit of nationalist unification, Vargas reversed many of the policies that had made black intellectuals feel like outsiders in the Republic. He curtailed immigration from Europe and passed laws to ensure that native-born Brazilians would be fairly represented in the workforce. Vargas also made many of the ideas about black belonging expressed in the Mãe Preta campaigns of the late 1920s, and espoused by black thinkers since the early 1900s, into an ideology of state. Africans and their descendants, Vargas's speeches and cultural policies announced, were essential members of the Brazilian community—more so, in fact, than many European newcomers who still resisted full assimilation. The politics of brasilidade, meted out with an increasingly authoritarian hand after the mid-1930s, thus fulfilled two of the projects dearest to black thinkers in previous decades: casting doubt on the belonging of foreign immigrants, and affirming the place of black and brown Brazilians in a nation imagined as racially inclusive.³ In this context, black thinkers shifted the terms on which they argued for their belonging. Leaving behind sentimental appeals to fraternity, they found new meaning, and new pride, in boldly affirming their standing as “nationals.”

This status, however, came at a price. The Vargas regime's definition of a mestiço national race and culture drew primarily on the rich popular culture of Rio de Janeiro, and made that city's particular mix of African and European influences stand for all of Brazil's. Outside the national capital, black thinkers struggled to take advantage of the cultural politics that included them as “nationals” while resisting the homogenizing tendencies this term necessarily implied. In Salvador da Bahia, a majority black and brown city with a deep African cultural heritage, leading practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé developed, in tandem with regionalist intellectuals, a countervailing view of “pure” and unmixed African traits based on ongoing ties to Africa. It was these authentic, uncorrupted African traditions, they argued, that should be recognized as the cornerstone of a multiethnic Brazilian identity. In São Paulo, a city with a large white majority, a preto minority, and even fewer recognized pardos, where literate and economically stable pretos organized independent political journals and clubs around a distinctly black identity, black activists and journalists took the political opportunities opened by Vargas's regime to found the institution that became the nation's first black political party, the Frente Negra Brasileira, or Brazilian Black Front. The Frente's politics of belonging, which stressed the idea of a separate, culturally unmarked negro race, resonated with a broader rejection among black Paulistano thinkers of precisely the sorts of culturally African identities emerging in Bahia. For black thinkers in Bahia and São Paulo, then, the already familiar challenge of seizing the inclusive potential of ideas of mixture without forfeiting racial or ethnic distinctiveness took on a particular regionalist cast under Vargas's nationalist regime. They struggled to defend the particularity of their local visions of blackness or mestiçagem not just against the national ones coming out of Rio de Janeiro but also against each other's.

The Shadow and Birthmark of the Negro

The most prominent exponent of what would become the official view of Brazilian racial identity in the 1930s was Gilberto Freyre, a young white scholar from the northeastern state of Pernambuco. Freyre's intellectual biography illustrates how international intellectual trends, northeastern Brazilian regionalism, and the particular discourses about mestiçagem coming out of Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s converged to reshape ideas of national identity in this period. After obtaining his bachelor's degree at Baylor University in Texas in 1920, Freyre went on to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University, where he was greatly influenced by the theories of anthropologist Franz Boas.⁴ Boas, who conducted work on immigrants to the United States, rejected the notion of race as determinant of conduct and character, emphasizing instead the influence of culture and environment.⁵ This view of the formative power of culture rather than race, together with older notions of Brazilian racial harmony, shaped Freyre's perspective on Brazilian national identity.

In Casa-grande e senzala (1933), released to great acclaim just three years after Vargas came to power, Freyre portrayed the social and sexual relations among people of European, indigenous, and African origins in the sugar plantations of his native Northeast as the source of Brazil's unique character. Contrasting Brazil with the United States, Freyre argued that it was precisely these intimate connections among Brazil's three founding ethnic groups—particularly between Africans and Europeans—that had given rise to a mestiço nation relatively free of the scourge of racism. Moreover, to the extent that people of color occupied lower social positions in the past and present, Freyre argued, culture and historical circumstances, not innate racial traits, were to blame. For Freyre, the sort of racism that plagued the United States was unthinkable in Brazil, where “every Brazilian, even the light-skinned, fair-haired one, carries in his soul and his body the shadow, or at least the birthmark, of the Indian and the negro.”⁶ Tellingly, the inclusion of “the Indian” in Brazilians’ spiritual and physical makeup came as an afterthought—in the first edition of Casa-grande, Freyre only mentioned the negro, reflecting the growing trend among Brazilian intellectuals of conceiving of mixture principally in terms of relations among Africans and Europeans.⁷

In many ways, Freyre's discourse celebrating Brazil's racial and cultural hybridity recapitulated the paternalistic logic of the white proponents of the Mãe Preta statue in the previous decade. Casa-grande e senzala (later translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves) spoke of Brazil's racial mixture and harmony in terms that recalled the nostalgic, patriarchal view of society embraced by many elite Cariocas in the face of increasing social unrest during the final years of the Republic. Freyre's idealization of a colonial and imperial past, in which class, gender, and racial hierarchies were respected as the bases of society, was likewise a response to the modernizing policies of Vargas's regime, and to the loss of privilege they entailed for members of a traditional agrarian elite, like Freyre himself.⁸ As it did for writers in A Notícia, the concept of cross-racial fraternity played a central role for Freyre in Casa-grande. He detailed, for instance, the fraternal (though extremely unequal) bonds among the children of masters and the children of slaves who played together in and around Brazil's “big houses.” He made African wet-nurses central characters in his story, crediting these Mães Pretas with cementing early bonds of brotherhood between Brazil's black and white children. Finally, Freyre posited sexual intimacy between European men and indigenous and African women, which he described as “fraternization among the victors and the vanquished,” as a model for cultural fusion and social integration in a nation newly proud of its negro birthmark.⁹

Though Freyre was perhaps the most prominent regionalist intellectual then celebrating the Northeast as the cradle of an Africaninflected Brazilian identity, he was not the only one. In the 1930s, in dialogue with new trends in Brazilian and international thought about race, other thinkers and artists began to sing the praises of the African-derived cultures of the states of Bahia, Pernambuco, and Recife. This “black cycle”¹⁰ in northeastern cultural production, which included the anthropological treatises of men like Gilberto Freyre and Arthur Ramos, the novels of Jorge Amado, and the music of Dorival Caymmi, cast the region's African foods, music, or religious practices as the essence of Brazilianness. Many of these regionalist writers and performers singled out Salvador and the state of Bahia, in particular, as the source and unique repository of Brazil's African traditions. Ruth Landes, a U.S. anthropologist working in Bahia in the late 1930s, noted this emergent trend: “What the Negroes do in Bahia is [considered] ‘typical’ of Brazil. . . . Out of Bahia come forms and symbols for national chauvinism to cling to.”¹¹

Freyre's theories of Brazil's cultural fusion drew primarily on the world of the sugar plantations of his native Northeast, but the African-inflected popular culture of Rio de Janeiro—and in particular the Mãe Preta monument campaign—seems also to have influenced his thought at an early stage. In 1926, in the midst of A Notícia’s campaign for a monument to the Mãe Preta, twenty-six-year-old Gilberto Freyre visited Rio de Janeiro for the first time. One night, a group of fellow intellectuals took Freyre to see the black theater troupe Companhia Negra de Revistas and their show Tudo Preto (All Black)—which ended with an “Apotheosis of the Mãe Preta.” This experience, particularly the revue's musical accompaniment (led by the famous black samba musician Pixinguinha), made a deep impression on Freyre. In an article he published later that year titled “On the Valorization of Things Black,” Freyre recounted his introduction to samba by these black musicians as a transformative moment: “As we listened, [we] could feel the great Brazil that is growing half-hidden by the phony and ridiculous official Brazil where mulattos emulate Greeks.” Freyre, it appears, not only succumbed to the charms of Rio's African-inflected popular culture but also imbibed many locals’ emerging views of that culture as the basis for a more authentic national identity, distinct from those of Europe and the United States. “In Rio,” Freyre pronounced approvingly, “there is a movement to assert the value of things black”¹²—a movement that gained momentum with the Mãe Preta campaign of the 1920s but which in the following decade would find its greatest champion in Freyre himself.

Casa-grande e senzala was an immense success when it was published in 1933, largely because it captured, in a style at once erudite and earthy, ideas about national culture that had been circulating among different sectors of Brazil's population for at least a decade.¹³Casa-grande and Freyre's subsequent writings helped crystallize the transition, begun by black and white Brazilian intellectuals in the 1920s, from a paradigm of “whitening” to one that celebrated cultural hybridity, racial mixture, and racial harmony as uniquely Brazilian traits. Though Freyre's work was in many ways a reaction against the changes taking place under Vargas's regime, the ideas of a mixed national identity that he helped to popularize dovetailed with the regime's ongoing project of promoting a national culture capable of overarching the country's class, racial, and regional divisions. In his first decade of rule, Vargas made the ideas that Freyre popularized into the ideological core of his regime's cultural policy. Vargas and his advisors converted select symbols of Brazil's mixed Afro-European heritage, like samba and carnival, into icons of Brazil's unique, racially inclusive national identity. Through increased state control of cultural sites ranging from commercial radio stations to carnival parades, the regime helped to raise samba—originally the music of Rio de Janeiro's African-descended underclass—to the status of a national rhythm. In the hands of nationalist promoters, samba stood for Brazil's easy and unconstrained racial and social relations. Both official and popular proponents of samba held up its purportedly unimpeded flow between the white(r), wealthier neighborhoods of Rio and the darker, poorer morros and favelas as evidence of the city's (and by extension the nation's) hybrid and tolerant culture.¹⁴

Yet just as Freyre's work celebrated mixture within a firmly paternalistic framework, Vargas's projects to endorse a mixed national identity reveal the hierarchies that nonetheless structured his attempts at class, regional, and racial integration. The commercialization of samba under Vargas, for instance, tended to benefit middle-class white entrepreneurs and artists more than their collaborators in the favelas. Furthermore, though Vargas's institutionalization of Rio's carnival in the 1930s invited the residents of Rio's favelas (descendants of the people who, in earlier decades, had been cleared from the center of a whitened and sanitized city) back downtown in the form of carnival groups, it did so on the condition that they perform prescribed roles in a controlled nationalist ritual. Finally, the regime's nationalization of samba in the 1930s and 1940s echoed precisely the self-congratulatory, assimilationist aspects of elite celebrations of the Mãe Preta that many black thinkers had criticized in the previous decade. In this period, proregime sambas that exalted the Brazilian nation proclaimed the absence of racism as a reality rather than an ideal. And like Freyre's celebration of African “contributions” to Brazilian identity, the nationalization of samba emphasized the peaceful mixture and dilution of African musical roots rather than highlighting their distinctiveness. Africanness and blackness, “civilized” by white agents, were celebrated not on their own terms but for enriching Brazil's European cultural matrix and softening its social relations, helping to elevate Brazil above the economically and politically powerful but morally and culturally bankrupt nations of the North Atlantic.¹⁵ As scholars of immigration, education, sanitation, and cultural policy in the Vargas years have made clear, officials and intellectuals allied with the regime continued to imagine the desired outcome of Brazil's racial and cultural mixture in terms of the phenotypical and social attributes of whiteness.¹⁶ If Africanness, as Freyre famously claimed in Casa-grande, was the cultural heritage of every Brazilian regardless of ancestry, it was also to be carefully controlled and circumscribed—within a few discrete areas of cultural life (like music, carnival, or religion), a particular space or region (the favelas of Rio or the state of Bahia), or the past (as in the works of Freyre and other prominent anthropologists).

The nationalization of samba also reveals the tensions between regional and national identities under a centralizing regime. During his first years in power, Vargas struggled to centralize a deeply federal nation, subduing a series of regional revolts and ensuring the states’ submission by placing loyal political bosses in charge. In 1932, for instance, dissenters in the state of São Paulo staged an armed uprising against Vargas (whose Revolution of 1930 had preempted the elected candidate, a Paulista, from taking power) and demanded that he return the nation to a constitutional order. Vargas responded with relatively restrained, but ultimately victorious, military force.¹⁷ His cultural policies echoed those attempts to subordinate the country to the federal government in Rio de Janeiro and to make that city the undisputed center of national life. The elevation of samba to national icon, after all, was the elevation of the music of Rio de Janeiro and of that city's particular racial dynamics to the status of national model.

Vargas, who also saw the Northeast as a bastion of popular support, acknowledged in his cultural policy an African-inflected regional identity emerging from the Northeast and particularly from Bahia. He did so, however, in ways that strengthened his project to subsume all regional identities to the creation of an overarching national one, rooted in Rio de Janeiro. As part of the federal state's increasing regulation of carnival celebrations throughout the 1930s, for instance, Vargas's government stipulated that all carnival groups’ parades should contain, among other things, a wing of Bahianas.¹⁸ In a national context, Bahianas referred to the Afro-Bahian women who sold food on the streets of the city of Salvador. Bahianas, then becoming icons of Bahian regional identity in songs, novels, and anthropological literature, were known for their elaborate white dresses and headpieces (echoing the fashions of earlier centuries) and for their reputed links with Afro-Bahian religions. In the context of Rio de Janeiro, however, Bahianas referred to the women (African-descended migrants from the state of Bahia) who in the early 1900s had been instrumental in the birth of samba by hosting musical gatherings in their homes.¹⁹ In part, then, Vargas's recognition of these women and his requirement that all carnival parades include a wing of Bahianas signals the increased salience of a regional Bahian Africanness in celebrations of a mixed national identity. But it also underscores Vargas's Rio-centered approach to defining national culture: not only were these carnival Bahianas usually black Cariocas dressed in folkloric regional attire, attending a celebration purportedly national in scope but local in practice, but their presence was a tribute less to Bahia than to an episode in Carioca cultural history.

Africans

However limited in scope and fidelity, the consecration of an African-inflected Bahian culture on the national stage of Rio's carnival symbolized the sorts of changes under way in Brazilian ideologies of race and culture in the 1930s. Local and national elites had long regarded Salvador da Bahia's “African” character—the demographic and cultural product of centuries of slave importations from Africa—as the city's greatest handicap. “African,” however, meant different things to different people at different times. In the colonial period, traders and planters applied the term africano (and also preto) to the slaves who arrived in Bahia, generically signaling the place of their birth, their color, and their unfree legal status.²⁰ This stood in contrast to the practices of slaves themselves, who organized their loyalties, work, religious devotion, and associational lives around the much more specific category of nação (literally, “nation”), like those of Angola, Jeje, or Nagô. Nação is frequently glossed as “ethnicity,” though with the caveat that naçães did not simply (or even primarily) reflect slaves’ place of birth or lineage. Rather, they were collective identifications mediated by, and reconstructed in light of, factors that included slaves’ port of embarkation, their broader language group, and personal affiliations developed in the course of the Middle Passage or in the process of integration into Bahian society.²¹

Slaveholders and administrative officials in colonial Bahia and elsewhere in Brazil encouraged the formation of these distinct ethnic identifications among slaves, hoping that rivalries among the nações would keep slaves as a group from rising up against the small white minority that ruled them. And indeed, these divisions—along with distinctions between slave versus free, mulatto versus preto, and Brazilian-versus African-born—structured the participation of members of the population of color in the series of uprisings that shook Bahia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1835, most famously, a group of Malê or Muslim slaves in Salvador, recently arrived from Africa and steeped in that continent's wars of Islamic expansion, staged the largest urban slave revolt in the Americas. As historian João José Reis has shown, the revolt was supported by many African-born slaves and some freedpeople, particularly those of the Nagô nation (the Brazilian term for the Yoruba people of present-day Nigeria and Benin). But it garnered much less support among crioulos or Brazilian-born slaves, who had found their own ways of coping with slavery. Although authorities eventually contained the revolt, its careful and competent organization—through scraps of paper written in Arabic—reminded white Bahians of the dangers of foreign Africans and their subversive cultural practices.²²

In the wake of the anti-African backlash that followed the 1835 uprising, the category of “African” took on new meanings, no longer simply denoting a person's place of birth or servile status. For members of Salvador's ruling classes, African, in explicit tension with creole or Brazilian, also came to connote foreign, unassimilated, and dangerous people and cultural practices.²³ Many African-born people, however, as well as many Brazilian-born Bahians of diverse African origins, increasingly claimed the term African for themselves. As the century progressed, they used its implications of a separate, alternative cultural identity to unite descendants of different nações around a common heritage proudly distinct from European cultural standards. In the 1890s, for instance, carnival groups made up of mostly Brazilian-born people of color named themselves the “African Embassy,” “African Revelers,” “Sons of Africa,” or “African Knights.” Some of these groups, like the African Embassy, sought to present Africa as the seat of a noble and opulent civilization, invoking (like their Paulista counterparts a few decades later) famous African leaders including the Ethiopian king, Menelik. Other groups, like the African Revelers, took as their theme the defense of persecuted Afro-Brazilian religions, featuring parades with batuques (ritual drumming) and other elements of what local elites dismissed as “uncultured Africa.” Despite their varied approaches, however, none of these carnival groups was able to override elite Bahians’ distrust of African culture as foreign, separate, potentially dangerous, and primitive. The central organizing committee for Salvador's carnival banned them all in 1905.²⁴

Scholars have argued that the combination of strong ethnic affiliations among Salvador's African-descended population and the heavy persecution of African culture by local elites, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focused the politics of self-determination and resistance among people of color in that city on the defense of African cultural prac-tices.²⁵ In particular, Candomblé—an African-derived religion devoted to the cult of divinized ancestors known as orixás—provided a crucial organizing force for the preservation of alternative African cultural and ritual practices. Since at least the early nineteenth century, Candomblé ritual communities and their physical grounds, known either as candomblés or terreiros, functioned as “refuges,” culturally and often physically separate from mainstream society, in which free, freed, and (to a lesser extent) enslaved people of color could find protection, community, solace, and meaningful engagement with an African cultural and ritual world. Relying on a principle of spiritual kinship, senior priests and priestesses in the terreiros became spiritual fathers (babalorixás in Yoruba and pais de santo in Portuguese) or mothers (iyalorixds in Yoruba and mães de santo in Portuguese) to their initiates, who then became each other's siblings. Pais and mães de santo ministered not only to followers’ religious needs but also to their need for physical healing, spaces of leisure, and social support, such as help with employment or protection from the police (or, in the case of runaway slaves before 1888, from masters and their agents). They also gave their members a strong spiritual identification with a particular African nação or ethnic group, one that was often independent of ancestry.²⁶

In the 1930s, U.S. anthropologist Ruth Landes reported that in the Candomblé community, to be called “a son of Africans” was among the highest compliments one could receive. Unlike black thinkers in São Paulo, who in this period increasingly embraced the term negro as a proud marker of a racially separate but culturally unmarked identity, many Bahians of color read the term as an insult linking them to slave status and preferred instead to be identified by their distinct African heritage.²⁷ This contrast highlights the continuing role of ethnicity, rather than race, as the primary factor shaping the identities of African-descended Bahians into the twentieth century—a contrast partly explained by Bahia's distinct social and demographic patterns.²⁸ In São Paulo, people of color were a small minority in a city swelling with white immigrants. In Rio de Janeiro, despite a larger population of pretos and pardos, people of color were still a minority. In postabolition Salvador, by contrast, those categorized as pretos and pardos together made up the majority of the city's population, remaining relatively stable at 61 to 65 percent between 1890 and 1940. Moreover, unlike São Paulo, where censuses identified most people of African descent as pretos (suggesting an emphasis on racial descent rather than color), Salvador had a significant pardo category—larger even than Rio's. Between 1890 and 1940, while pretos remained steady at 26.3 percent of Salvador's population, the number of people identified as pardos grew from 35.1 to 38.4 percent.

The preponderance of people of color in the city, some scholars have argued, made Bahian society somewhat more open to the upward mobility of people of color than cities in the South—a flexibility partly confirmed by the public recognition of a large pardo category. This supposed flexibility should not be overstated, however; people of color were and still are far from being proportionately represented in Salvador's positions of power. And, as scholars have pointed out, the existence of a large pardo category reveals the emphasis Bahians placed on color gradations, even if they did not necessarily see pretos and pardos as members of a single and immutable “race.” But in postabolition Salvador, where no mass immigration existed to push pretos and pardos out of the workforce, there was more equality among people of color and whites engaged in manual labor than elsewhere in the country (though, as elsewhere, pretos had less access to white-collar employment).²⁹ Many lighter-skinned pardos were able to enter the “world of whites,” winning jobs with relatively higher status and pay. Without the sharper color line that prevailed in São Paulo, then, most people of color in Bahia (like some of their counterparts in Rio) did not see the adoption of racial identities like negro or preto as a necessary or useful strategy for combating discrimination or securing social advancement.³⁰

In Salvador, a greater obstacle to social advancement than race or blackness was the open embrace of the African ethnicities and cultural practices city elites had long since identified as dangerous. In the early years of the twentieth century, members of Salvador's elite, like their southern counterparts, fought to extirpate expressions of African culture from their city's public life. Reformers, backed by medical doctors, the press, and the police, targeted “Africanisms” in food and language, in public celebrations like carnival, and in popular religious practices. To these reformers, Bahia's large African-descended population and its visible African culture, along with the absence of large-scale European immigration, placed their city and state shamefully far behind the modernizing, whitening Southeast, compounding the loss of stature that had begun with the transfer of the national capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, southern newspapers in this period, building on long-standing references to Bahia as a preta velha, the old black woman, commonly caricatured the state as a “fat [Afro-]Bahiana, wearing a turban and making angu [an Afro-Brazilian dish].”³¹ In Salvador itself, journalists and politicians fretted that the city showed foreigners “aspects of the Coast of Africa, of savage tribes without government,” and generally lamented the African presence as a “sore” on their state's public face.³²

Of all the African cultural practices that concerned Bahian reformers during the Republic, Candomblé was the most worrisome. Despite assurances of freedom of religion in the Constitution of 1891, from the early years of the century through the late 1920s Bahian police patrolled and repressed the city's many terreiros. Newspaper coverage of police raids in this period depicted Candomblé as immoral and dangerous through sensationalized (and often invented) descriptions of violent animal sacrifices, black magic rituals, or orgies among male and female priests and followers.³³ The work of white medical doctor and criminologist Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, a turn-of-the-century authority on Afro-Brazilian cultural practices, contributed to this perspective. Though Nina Rodrigues did not support violently raiding the candomblés, he held Africans to be racially inferior and saw their religions as evidence that Africans were incapable of anything but the most primitive forms of spirituality. He linked these religions, and African cultural practices more broadly, with psychological deviance, cultural and racial degeneracy, and criminality. Nina Rodrigues's research established him as a founder of Afro-Bahian anthropology. But his work, shaped by the racism and cultural fears of his day, ultimately presented African cultural practices as dangerous foreign influences which, if not carefully monitored and controlled, threatened to undermine Bahia's (and eventually Brazil's) tenuous veneer of European civilization.³⁴

The Revolution of 1930 did not immediately change the precarious situation of the candomblés. Bahian police, acting on tips from crusading journalists and private citizens, continued to break up ceremonies and arrest spiritual leaders as dangerous charlatans well into the 1930s.³⁵ But in the wake of shifting conceptions of national identity, a group of northeastern intellectuals began to look at Candomblé, and at Bahia's African traditions more broadly, with new eyes. Alongside Gilberto Freyre, other scholars in the 1930s and 1940s began to portray Bahia's African culture not as something shameful but as a positive factor in Brazilian civilization, and indeed, a unique regional trait from which a broader Brazilian identity had arisen. Reaching back to regionalist gestures made earlier in the century by Nina Rodrigues himself, leaders of a new generation of anthropologists, like Arthur Ramos, asserted the superiority of the Nagô (Yoruba) people, the largest ethnic group in Bahia—“tall, robust, courageous, and hard-working, better-tempered than the others and noted for [their] intelligence”—over the “physically weaker,” “quarrelsome” Bantu slaves who initially made up the slave population of Rio de Janeiro and other southern regions. In particular, Ramos put forth Bahia's candomblés as the sites par excellence of the preservation of the noblest, “best,” and “purest” Yoruba traditions, while reserving disdain for the “polluted,” “diluted,” “artificial,” and commercialized Bantu-based macumbas of Rio.³⁶

By the 1930s anthropologists like Freyre and Ramos thus no longer presented Bahia as having fallen from the grace of a distinguished colonial past. Instead, they portrayed Bahia in particular and the Northeast in general as bastions of tradition (African and otherwise), essential repositories of Brazil's true nationality in a time of rapid modernization.³⁷ As early as 1926, Gilberto Freyre, in his Regionalist Manifesto, called the Northeast the place where “values that had once been seen as merely subnational or even exotic”—particularly African values—“are in the process of being transformed into Brazilian values.”³⁸ These views were not confined to the world of academia. In Bahia, the celebration of African folklore (especially food, music, and clothing) as local and regional characteristics gradually worked its way into public consciousness by the final years of the Republic and the early years of the Vargas regime, slowly displacing earlier concerns with “de-Africanization.”³⁹ In 1929, for instance, Salvador's Diário de Notícias wrote proudly of Bahia as “the cradle of our adolescent Brazil, . . . a place so deeply intertwined with the black race, particularly in its culinary delicacies.”⁴⁰ If the Brazilian South was to be admired for its progress and whiteness, it was, in the context of the new cultural nationalism, equally to be reproached for “denationalizing” itself with excessive European and other foreign cultural influences. By the late 1920s, and particularly after the Revolution of 1930, some elite Bahians could portray their capital city, state, or region as a bulwark of brasilidade—a steward of Brazil's colonial cultures and traditions, and a tonic for the Republic's noxious Europhilia.⁴¹ Their arguments found confirmation in Brazilians’ enthusiastic embrace of works by northeastern intellectuals, particularly Freyre's Casa-grande, as the bibles of a new, partially Africanized national identity.

It was not just white intellectuals who worked actively to present Bahia as the repository of uncorrupted and noble African traditions but also, and perhaps primarily, a group of African-descended practitioners of Candomblé. Indeed, Ramos's and other intellectuals’ fascination with African and particularly Yoruba traits in 1930s Bahia reflected transformations within Bahia's leading candomblés themselves. Until the mid- to late nineteenth century, African-born people had dominated the candomblés’ leadership, building their religious practices and institutions from memories of their experiences across the Atlantic. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, as African-born Bahians became scarce, Brazilian-born leaders of several Bahian candomblés began to look directly to Africa in their search for new sources of what they considered authentic religious knowledge.⁴²

Avenues of contact with Africa and Africans became a valuable commodity in this context. Though greatly reduced from previous centuries, a few regular shipping routes still existed between Bahia and Africa's western coast in the first decades of the twentieth century. Over the course of the 1800s, some Bahian freed slaves and their families had made the return voyage to West Africa, founding communities of Brazilian returnees in coastal cities like Lagos (in present-day Nigeria) or Whydah (in present-day Benin).⁴³ Many returnee merchants along the Bight of Benin still made a living, until the 1930s, trading African textiles and ritual objects for Bahian goods like dried meat, tobacco, or cane alcohol.⁴⁴ In the first decades of the twentieth century, direct or indirect contact with the returnees not only provided practitioners of Bahian Candomblé with necessary items for their religious practice (hawked by their purveyors as “authentically African”) or with information about specific rituals. It also introduced them to an emerging local vision of the splendors of Yoruba culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Brazilian returnees of Lagos were key actors in a cultural renaissance that exalted Yoruba ethnicity in the face of the increased infiltration of British colonial power. Promoters of this cultural nationalism sought to recover a dignified Yoruba history and “traditional religion,” taking pride in Yoruba names, dress styles, and even discourses of Yoruba racial purity. The Brazilian returnees of Lagos, many of them fluent in Yoruba, English, and Portuguese, were in a unique position to communicate these ideas to traders or religious visitors from Bahia.⁴⁵

The ideas about the integrity, purity, and superiority of a Yoruba race and culture that Bahian travelers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gleaned from their visits to places like Lagos also contributed to a renaissance of sorts among what would become Bahia's leading candomblés. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a handful of terreiros whose leaders claimed deep roots in Bahian Candomblé began a process of re-Africanization, during which fidelity to “pure” African, and particularly Yoruba, ritual practices became the gauge of each house's authenticity and prestige. Between 1911 and 1938, Mãe Aninha (Eugenia Anna dos Santos), the founder and leader of one of these terreiros, the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, became particularly successful in using transatlantic routes of commercial and intellectual exchange to raise the profile of her house as one that adhered strictly to purportedly unadulterated African traditions. She enlisted several transatlantic travelers, like the Bahian-born, Lagos-educated diviner Martiniano do Bomfim, to bring back information on rites and practices from their travels to Africa.⁴⁶ Following the implementation of one of Martiniano's Nigerian-inspired innovations, Aninha boasted, “My temple is pure Nagô, like Engenho Velho [the original Nagô candomblé from nineteenth-century Salvador] . . . But I have revived much of the African tradition which even Engenho Velho has forgotten.”⁴⁷ These transatlantic contacts and the appearance of orthodoxy they conferred not only increased the symbolic currency of Aninha's candomblé in a highly competitive spiritual marketplace; they also provided economic benefits.⁴⁸ Aninha frequently traded with Brazilian returnee merchants in Africa to obtain the ritual objects necessary for what she presented as an authentically African, liturgically correct practice. Revenue from her sale of African products at Salvador's downtown market allowed her to support her terreiro, even providing the funds with which she had initially purchased the land on which it stood.⁴⁹

By the 1930s, the Candomblé houses that had taken the lead in the process of re-Africanization—including Aninha's Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá as well as Gantois, Engenho Velho, and Alaketu—emerged as the most powerful and prestigious of the Bahian candomblés, standards of liturgical authority for many others in the Yoruba tradition.⁵⁰ This enhanced status resulted in no small part from an informational feedback cycle between the leaders of these candomblés and the scholars who studied them. In the quest to find the purest African traditions for her candomblé, for instance, Aninha avidly read the works of scholars (like Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, and others) who celebrated the preservation of pure Yoruba ritual practices.⁵¹ Yet it was precisely religious thinkers like Aninha and Martiniano do Bomfim who had shaped anthropologists’ fascination with Yoruba purity in the first place. Martiniano, who had imbibed ideas about the nobility of Yoruba culture during his sojourns in Lagos, had been one of Nina Rodrigues's main informants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and continued to work with subsequent generations of scholars. Aninha and other Candomblé leaders who maintained regular ties to Africa similarly collaborated with scholars whose interest in pure African survivals both reflected and reinforced spiritual leaders’ own parameters of prestige.⁵²

As channels for academic production expanded in the 1930s and 1940s, northeastern intellectuals’ perspectives on Candomblé as a legitimate religion worthy of study reached new audiences. In Brazil, scholars like Ramos and his disciples found employment in the anthropology departments of the federal universities founded under Vargas, and major presses published and circulated their works. The supposedly pure African traditions of Salvador's most prestigious candomblés, endorsed and amplified by the writings of local anthropologists, in turn gave the city new stature in an emerging international field of African and Afro-American studies. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, a pioneer in the field of Afro-American anthropology, visited Salvador and its leading candomblés in the early 1940s, making it a key case study in his work on African “survivals” or “retentions” in the New World.⁵³ Other U.S. anthropologists and sociologists, like Ruth Landes and Donald Pierson, were also drawn by Bahia's reputation in the 1930s and 1940s as one of the most authentically African sites in the New World. Pierson observed that “the connection between Africa and Bahia is perhaps more intimate and has been maintained over a longer period of time than any similar connection elsewhere in the New World.”⁵⁴ The work of these foreign scholars, together with that of locals, helped to circulate influential Candomblé leaders’ own visions of the power and prestige of Bahia's “pure” African culture across national and international academic circles, contributing to an image of legitimacy and respectability for the religion in their city and state and, to some extent, on a national stage.

This growing academic endorsement played an important part in easing state and police repression of Candomblé. In 1934 and 1937, respectively, Gilberto Freyre and anthropologist Edison Carneiro staged the first and second Afro-Brazilian Congresses in Recife and Salvador. Aimed at increasing the acceptance of Afro-Brazilian culture and especially religion among regional and national audiences, the congresses brought together academics and a range of people from Recife's and Salvador's African-descended population—primarily Candomblé practitioners who presented papers, attended events, or sold food at the gatherings. Bahia's congress of 1937 saw particularly high involvement by Candomblé practitioners, with forty local groups participating, and in some cases, holding related events in their own terreiros. Their greatest accomplishment during the congress was the creation of a Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects to defend the freedom of religious practice, and to help establish norms of “purity” and “authenticity” among candomblés themselves. Aninha's Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá played a leading role in the union's formation, and her colleague Martiniano do Bomfim became its president. Adherence to the rituals established by the Opô Afonjá and other leading candomblés in the Yoruba tradition, in this sense, became the standard of orthodoxy through which legitimate terreiros could be distinguished from inauthentic and potentially criminal practitioners of witchcraf and “black magic.”⁵⁵ The creation of the union, together with a petition directed to local authorities, helped to end persecution of Afro-Brazilian religions in Bahia. More broadly, as organizer Edison Carneiro remembered, the radio and newspaper publicity surrounding the congress—which included broadcasts of Candomblé music and interviews with priests and priestesses—“contributed to creating an environment of greater tolerance toward those much maligned religions of people of color.”⁵⁶

Candomblé leaders were as active in constructing the images of legitimacy and respectability that academics helped publicize as they had been in constructing images of their religion's Yoruba purity. Since the nineteenth century, priests and priestesses had adopted the practice of conferring the honorary title of ogan on powerful Africans whose wealth could help sustain the community in times of need. In the first decades of the twentieth century, as police raids intensified, leaders of the most visible candomblés (who were by then almost all female) began to confer that ceremonial title on powerful white members of mainstream society (all male) who not only could provide financial support but also could use their social influence to protect the terreiro. Politicians, artists, and academics became ogãs in the major Candomblé houses in the first decades of the century.⁵⁷ Such ties of goodwill with powerful figures from mainstream society also created new avenues for female leaders of the most prestigious terreiros to engage in public displays of respectability in response to a host of negative associations surrounding black women. Not only had anti-Candomblé articles in Salvador's early-twentieth-century mainstream press portrayed female priestesses and initiates as morally and sexually dissolute, but black women in Bahia's public spaces had come under particular attack throughout the early 1900s as members of the city's privileged classes sought to “de-Africanize” their streets. Reformers typically identified the city's African-descended women—whom they saw as beggars, prostitutes, or vendors of unhygienic Afro-Bahian street food—as major threats to a respectable, patriarchal, sanitized social order. Female street vendors in particular came under suspicion for their links to Candomblé—many advertised their wares in Yoruba. Often these women were young initiates who used income from their sales to pay for ritual obligations. Seeking to cast black women, and particularly Candomblé women, in a more positive light, priestesses like Mãe Aninha publicly emphasized their role as “mothers” of their congregations, taking advantage of the authority that contemporary conceptions of female honor conferred on motherhood, family, domesticity, and self-sacrifice. Most of the famous Candomblé priestesses in the 1930s and 1940s did not marry, for reasons that may have included a desire to protect their own and their terreiros’ financial independence, or to preserve their reputations as spiritual leaders.⁵⁸

To an extent, then, Bahian Candomblé leaders’ active engagement with Brazilian and foreign anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s allowed them to spread their regional vision of cultural self-determination as “Africans” into national public life. Taking advantage of contemporary transformations in national identity that placed new value on African traits, these religious thinkers made inroads into an academic public sphere which helped legitimate cultural practices that had, until recently, been energetically persecuted by the law. Through their collaborations with local and foreign scholars, they helped spread a vision in which distinctly Yoruba traits—not diluted and mixed, as in dominant ideas of mestiçagem, but pure and untainted—could be held up as the true essence of a Bahian, and by extension Brazilian, identity. This vision of an exalted Yoruba culture, moreover, encoded ideas about the regional superiority of the Afro-Brazilian cultures of the Northeast over the allegedly less noble (and in any case, corrupted and watered-down) Bantu-derived religions of Rio de Janeiro. Finally, while the celebration of Yoruba purity among the leading Nagô candomblés was not typically an explicitly racial discourse (though Martiniano do Bomfim reportedly exalted African racial purity alongside Yoruba cultural purity), it was in many ways an alternative definition of blackness. Celebrating a “clean,” “aristocratic” Yoruba heritage conferred dignity on a group of people who identified strongly with their African ancestry in the face of racial and cultural discrimination against the “black religions.”⁵⁹

It was this vision of an Africanized Bahia that organizers of Rio's carnival in the 1930s and 1940s helped popularize when they made the Bahianas mandatory elements in every carnival group's parade. The figure of the Bahiana, with her white colonial-era dresses and headpieces, her iconic presence at Bahian street corners selling Afro-Bahian foods, and her strong association with Candomblé, no longer seemed (as she had to Republican elites) a carrier of physically and morally contagious African traits. Instead, she came to stand specifically for Bahia's African cultural treasures, and more broadly, for Brazil's newly valorized African traditions. Rio's carnival organizers may have cast Bahianas as a regional subplot within an event that increasingly celebrated the centrality of a Rio-based view of cultural and racial mestiçagem. And for many in the national capital, Bahianas might have symbolized a primordial Africa (and its archaic Brazilian home, Bahia) from which a more modern, mestiço Brazil had subsequently emerged. But as rising icons of an Afro-Bahia, the Bahianas also bore the outlines of the pure, unmixed Africanness that Candomblé leaders had produced together with a new generation of regionalist anthropologists, even as hybridity and mixture became the rage in discourses of national identity.

“God, fatherland, race, and family”

Like northeastern regionalists, many members of São Paulo's political and intellectual elite resisted Vargas's attempts to identify national culture with the culture of Rio de Janeiro. As Barbara Weinstein has shown, the Paulistas who led a constitutionalist revolt against Vargas's central government in 1932 were fiercely opposed not just to his politics but also to his cultural vision for the nation. The rebels vehemently rejected images of a mestiço national identity, with some going so far as to call the Vargas regime a “dictanegra,” or black dictatorship, for its courtship of nonwhite Brazilians. They championed a regionalist ideal of Paulista whiteness, which they traced back to São Paulo's colonial history as a frontier region. Drawing on a long-standing local motif, Paulista insurgents argued that the intrepid bandeirantes who had explored the state's interior, together with São Paulo's legions of European immigrants, had forged a modern, prosperous, enterprising people—the pioneers of a new Brazil. Paulistas put forth this image of regional superiority in their conflict with the centralizing government in Rio, but also in explicit contrast to what they saw as the stagnant and tradition-bound Northeast, from which the regime drew crucial support as well as much of its African symbolism.⁶⁰

Among black Paulistano intellectuals, however, Vargas's new cultural politics of brasilidade generally received a warmer welcome. In 1931, O Progresso, the same black newspaper that in the late 1920s had expressed admiration for the Syrio-Lebanese monument to ethnic integration, published an article hailing samba as Brazil's “national hymn” and praising its once maligned African influences. Samba's rhythms contained “all the heat and languor of the tropics,” its delightful melodies “full of the lascivious and disorganized jungle.” Above all, samba, with its unabashed embrace of “barbarity,” represented a new Brazilian philosophy—one of “horror toward the artificiality of European civilization, too quickly assimilated [by Brazilians].”⁶¹ Like Freyre who, following his night of bohemian fun in Rio, discovered that a true, black and mulatto Brazil was hiding under a European veneer, this writer for one of São Paulo's leading black papers celebrated samba precisely for its African primitivism and its rejection of European cultural values. He was not alone. Since the late 1920s, several writers in O Progresso had embraced ideas about Brazil's cultural and racial hybridity (a minority vision in São Paulo's black press), celebrating this heritage as part of the artistic and cultural production of people of African descent worldwide. Progresso writers punctuated their coverage of economic and political events in Africa and the diaspora with cultural articles about jazz, modernist musicians like Heitor Villa-Lobos, or the dizzying international successes of black cabaret star Josephine Baker.⁶² Having spent much of the late 1920s developing precisely the sort of vision of national identity that would take root under Vargas, these writers happily celebrated samba as Brazil's hybrid national rhythm.

But it was the nativism informing Vargas's cultural policies that generated greatest enthusiasm among São Paulo's thinkers of color. Throughout the 1920s, writers in the black press had argued that they should be recognized as “nationals” in contrast to immigrants. They therefore took satisfaction from new laws under Vargas that preferred national workers to foreigners and that cracked down on immigrant enclaves. Early on in his tenure as president, Vargas instituted new immigration restrictions, as well as a labor nationalization law stipulating that two-thirds of employees in industrial firms be Brazilian-born. In 1938 Vargas identified unassimilated immigrant colonies in the South of Brazil as potential threats to national security and integrity, especially in light of their close ties with totalitarian politics in countries (like Germany or Italy) then preparing for war. He warned the nation of the need to “defend ourselves against the infiltration of elements that could transform into foci of ideological or racial dissent within our borders.” To “Brazilianize” these citizens, Vargas outlawed foreign-language schools, clubs, and newspapers.⁶³ The tides were turning, with once prized immigrants identified as interloping foreigners, and people of color—once treated like “foreigners in the land of their birth”—placed at the forefront of new definitions of brasilidade.

Especially in its early years, Vargas's regime also seemed to provide an institutional opening for black Paulistano politics. In the months following Vargas's rise to power, São Paulo's leading black newspapers, O Clarim and O Progresso, expressed elation at the changing political climate. In particular, they voiced hopes that the new government would finally provide the city's black thinkers and activists the opportunity to create a broad political organization.⁶⁴ This dream became a reality in September 1931. After months of intense work among leaders of the city's black social and political groups, former Palmares Center president and Clarim contributor Arlindo Veiga dos Santos read the statutes of a new organization, the Frente Negra Brasileira, or Brazilian Black Front, to an audience of more than one thousand Paulistanos of color.⁶⁵ Consistent with the definitions of belonging developed in the black newspapers of the 1910s and 1920s, the Frente Negra's statutes proclaimed the organization to be a “political and social union of Black Nationals [Gente Negra Nacional], aimed at affirming their historical rights in light of their material and moral activity in the past, and reclaiming their social and political rights in the present.”⁶⁶ This use of the word national to describe black Brazilians echoes the ways that many black writers in the 1920s, and particularly Arlindo Veiga dos Santos himself, had deployed nativism and the historical contributions of the “black race” to claim precedence over the foreigners who predominated in São Paulo's working class. It also reflects the encouragement that this sort of politics received from the Vargas government, which through its labor, immigration, and cultural policies had helped to rehabilitate the term national and turn it into the leading political precept of the times. Under the new regime, black Brazilians in the Frente—as nationals—could finally, realistically, hope to obtain recognition in the present for their ancestors’ past contributions to their nation, thereby approximating the sort of symbolic belonging to which so many thinkers of color had aspired throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

The Frente's activism drew on the practices developed in the earlier black social clubs of São Paulo, especially the Centro Cívico Palmares. As with earlier clubs, Frente leaders sought to promote racial unity and consciousness through journalism. At first, the Frente addressed itself to black audiences through O Progresso, but after 1933 its leaders relied on their own newspaper, A Voz da Raça (The Voice of the Race). In Sunday meetings called domingueiras, famed black orators like Vicente Ferreira, Alberto Orlando, and Arlindo Veiga dos Santos conveyed messages of racial pride and uplift before turning the meetings over to activities designed to promote sociability and community building. Young people flocked to these weekly meetings to socialize, court members of the opposite sex, play in the Frente's jazz band, or enjoy the leisurely exchange of ideas. Beyond these gatherings, the Frente also provided a range of social services to its members—from a hair salon and a dental office to economic and financial advice, labor advocacy, an elementary school, and adult literacy courses. Though implemented on a modest scale, as membership dues and members’ own volunteer efforts permitted, these services seem to have filled a need for many young and working-class Paulistas of color at a time of national economic hardship. Frente Negra chapters spread into São Paulo's interior and across the states of Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Rio Grande do Sul, and Bahia. Estimates (made by leaders) of six thousand members in the main São Paulo branch and up to one hundred thousand nationwide were probably exaggerated. But given that previous black social and political associations had memberships that rarely surpassed the very low hundreds, the Frente's membership, almost certainly in the thousands, signals an organization of unprecedented reach.⁶⁷

The Frente's success in attracting members also reflects changes in national politics. Vargas's government encouraged certain kinds of working-class mobilization and, at least initially, was open to the Frente's model of political action along racial lines. The Frente's 1931 statutes captured this opportunity, promising to give the “Black Brazilian People” a greater say in local and national politics by working to elect black representatives. In 1933 the organization made its first foray into national politics by running Arlindo Veiga dos Santos as an independent candidate for the Constituent Assembly.⁶⁸ Though this initiative failed, it generated momentum for those who wished to see the Frente involved in electoral politics, a project that would culminate in the Frente's registration as a political party in 1936. More important, perhaps, under the new regime the Frente Negra could exert political influence through nonelectoral channels as well. Vargas's early government was corporatist, granting representatives of institutionally recognized social groups—like workers or industrialists—a measure of political influence through direct ties to the president. Members of the organized women's suffrage movement, for instance, obtained the vote for women in 1932 by appealing personally to Vargas.⁶⁹ The Frente's leadership likewise presented itself as the legitimate institutional representative of a distinct group in the Brazilian body politic—black Brazilians—in order to press its claims with the state. Most notably, in 1932, a delegation of Frente members visited Vargas in Rio de Janeiro to request his help in integrating São Paulo's informally segregated Civil Guard (something the Palmares Civic Center had attempted earlier, without success). Vargas assented, ordering that the guard begin immediate recruitment of black officers. The Frente used similar techniques with local officials, appealing to São Paulo's chief of police to end racially discriminatory practices in city businesses, with some success.⁷⁰

In the months following the Frente's foundation, however, enthusiasm gave way to doubts and internal strife. Almost immediately, dissent emerged over who would lead the new organization. Amid much contention, Arlindo Veiga dos Santos became president and his brother Isaltino secretary-general. Though Leite and his group at O Clarim had misgivings about the Santos brothers’ authoritarian tendencies as Frente leaders, they cautiously backed them, fearing that too much internal squabbling might destroy the Frente just as it had doomed its predecessor, the Palmares Civic Center.⁷¹ This fragile alliance, however, came to an end in early 1932, following an incident involving the alleged seduction by Isaltino Veiga dos Santos (who was married) of a young black woman during an official visit to a small town in Minas Gerais. The young woman's outraged family, receiving no responses from the Frente, appealed directly to Leite to obtain a public apology. Leite presented the family's grievance to the Frente, calling for Isaltino's resignation.⁷² Isaltino refused to step down, and Arlindo refused to depose him, instead dismissing Leite and his group as “Judases of the Race” for making the issue public. In response, Leite and his colleagues at O Clarim began to publish a newspaper titled A Chibata (The Whip) specifically to criticize the Santos brothers and call for new leadership of the Frente. A Chibata’s first issue (in February 1932) was full of satirical articles portraying Isaltino as “cynical, hypocritical, and vain,” reminding him of the “respect due to black women,” and reprimanding Arlindo for failing to punish his brother.⁷³ Their second issue demanded, more pointedly, that Arlindo stop using “an association maintained by the money of the race” as a “cover for his brother's lack of moral manliness.”⁷⁴

A Chibata, however, only lasted for two issues, for just as Leite and his colleagues were preparing the type plates for the third issue, the Santos brothers had Leite's home workshop sacked. The attack took place one evening in March 1932, while Leite and his family stood by. According to Leite and other witnesses, a group of drunken men armed with heavy sticks smashed and overturned furniture and typewriters, threw bookcases out of windows, shattered dishes, and physically intimidated Leite and two of the household's women. The men stopped short of destroying Leite's typesetting machine, which was out of sight in a small room.⁷⁵ The incident had repercussions beyond the black community; in the following days, for instance, São Paulo's Diário Nacional ran a front-page article on the attack, along with a picture of Leite's destroyed workshop.⁷⁶

Divisions within the Frente, however, did not simply reflect individual struggles over power, or even concerns with the honor and respectability of São Paulo's (and Brazil's) foremost black organization. Increasingly, divisions between the Santos brothers and Leite's group—all formerly colleagues at O Clarim—reflected the deepening schisms of national politics. The political strategies of Arlindo Veiga dos Santos and José Correia Leite had already begun to diverge in the late 1920s, with the former, a nativist conservative, penning some of Clarim’s sharpest anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the latter, a left-leaning internationalist, expressing admiration for immigrant organizations and their strategies for ethnic inclusion. This division deepened in the context of the political polarization of the early 1930s, as São Paulo's black activists increasingly split their allegiances between socialism and the emerging Brazilian fascist movement known as Integralism. In the early 1930s Arlindo Veiga dos Santos expressed strong Integralist sympathies and became the leader of a deeply conservative Catholic and monarchist movement known as patrianovismo.⁷⁷ Leite, in contrast, became increasingly committed to socialism and international movements like pan-Africanism. In A Chibata and O Clarim he began to criticize not just Santos's “absolutist” leadership style but also his political ideology (which Leite characterized as backward-looking) and his use of the Frente as a platform for these “political maneuvers.”⁷⁸ Though in 1932 Santos had not yet begun publishing the newspaper that would most clearly convey his own conservative ideology, his smashing of Leite's workshop early that year announced many of the political ideals and tactics he would shortly thereafter advocate in writing: factionalism, violence, and disdain for democracy and freedom of the press. (A year later, in an early issue of the Frente's newspaper, Santos threatened violent retribution against his opponents, warning that “against the free press we will freely use the stick.”)⁷⁹ Santos tolerated no political disagreements within his ranks. Over the course of 1932, in the context of São Paulo's failed military uprising against Getúlio Vargas, the Frente Negra's leadership officially declared its neutrality in the conflict and allowed members to act according to their consciences.⁸⁰ Yet former members recalled that Santos and others in the Frente's leadership, which supported Vargas, expelled from the organization frentenegrinos sympathetic to the São Paulo movement. Among those who left the Frente willingly or by force in this period were orators Vicente Ferreira and Alberto Orlando and lawyer Joaquim Guaraná de Santana. Santana went on to create the Legião Negra (Black Legion), battalions of black soldiers who fought on São Paulo's side in the constitutionalist uprising.⁸¹

In consolidating his own power over the organization, Santos sought to push the Frente Negra toward the political right. He developed and disseminated his ideology in front-page editorials of the Frente Negra's official newspaper, A Voz da Raça. A Voz, published weekly from March 1933 to November 1937, built on the structure of the Paulista black newspapers of the second half of the 1920s. It dedicated prime space to editorials on racial issues and Frente activities and reserved secondary space for society pages, fiction or poetry, and advertising. A Voz was the first black newspaper to reach mass distribution levels—one to five thousand copies of each issue circulated weekly among the Frente's chapters in São Paulo and across Brazil.⁸² Though Arlindo Veiga dos Santos would step down as president of the Frente in 1934, his editorials set the tone for much of the newspaper's subsequent ideological production and for the Frente's projection of its ideology to members nationwide.

Santos and other prominent writers in A Voz da Raça condemned democracy and portrayed liberal ideologies as “exotic” importations that had contributed to disinheriting black Brazilians.⁸³ In particular, they blamed Republican projects of “whitening” through the promotion of European immigration for blacks’ marginalization and used A Voz to call for immigration restrictions. Building on the nativism he had begun to articulate in the late 1920s, Santos, in an article detailing his political platform, demanded the suspension of immigration for twenty years so that the black and mixed populations of Brazil—newly valorized under Vargas's regime—could “assimilate all of the newcomers nationally and racially.”⁸⁴ In marked contrast to white opponents of black immigration to Brazil in the early 1920s, Santos feared the threat that white newcomers posed to Brazil's mestiço essence. The theme of blacks’ disinheritance during the Republic in favor of “Aryan” immigrants ran powerfully through his and other frentenegrinos’ writings, showing that resentment toward foreigners, and toward having been made to feel like foreigners, was still raw among many Paulistanos of color in the early 1930s. As Arlindo's brother Isaltino Veiga dos Santos saw it, the Frente's reason for being was to work “in favor of the black Brazilian, who has always been an outsider in his own land and a mere THING in society.”⁸⁵

A Voz da Raça also published frequent tirades against communism, which Arlindo dos Santos referred to on several occasions as a “worldwide Judeo-cosmopolitan bolshevist revolution,” one of several “dastardly” plots orchestrated by “foreign or semiforeign slime.”⁸⁶ His choice of words expressed not only his anti-Semitism (a common trait among conservative nationalists) but also his deep rejection of the supposedly cosmopolitan in favor of the rigidly national. Just as racism was an unholy import by “foreign slime,” so was labor radicalism. In opposition to communism, Santos championed “organico-syndicalism,” a corporatist-authoritarian state that resembled European fascism as well as the evolving Vargas regime.⁸⁷ As a fervent monarchist, Santos advocated a strong, father-like leader who would rule the different social groups under his command like the limbs and organs of a national body. He looked back fondly on the colonial period, when Portuguese monarchs had enacted “an organic conception of the State, not yet afraid of free corporations within it.” This idea of independent “corporations” protected by a strong state was essential to Santos's racial politics. “We did not have [then], as today,” he wrote, “the antinatural monism that desires the DISAPPEARANCE of blacks. . . . The natural truths within our Social and Political Unity were recognized.”⁸⁸ In a corporatist nation, blacks would be recognized as distinct but “natural” and integral parts of the body politic.⁸⁹

For Santos, the ideal example of the rightful relationship between negros as a corporate group and the state was the black brigades that fought in Brazil's seventeenth-century wars against the Dutch, particularly their leader, the “exalted” Henrique Dias.⁹⁰ Dias was the Brazilian-born son of freed Africans who organized and led a detachment of free Africans to repel Dutch troops in the Northeast, and whom colonial officials accepted as a legitimate general. The essays of Santos and others frequently portrayed blacks as loyal soldiers guarding the nation against external threats, and the example of Henrique Dias and his black troops helping to repel a foreign invasion provided a fitting precedent.⁹¹ Frente leaders also frequently reminded members that they should be prepared to use violence in the joint project of integrating blacks and defending the nation. In this vein, A Voz urged members to join the Frente's militia or “civic-military phalanx.”⁹² Militaristic metaphors of authority, discipline, righteous violence, and respectful subordination not only structured black Brazilians’ relationship to the nation but described the power hierarchy of the Frente Negra itself. Power resided almost completely in the president and the Grand Council, whose members received military titles like “major” and “colonel”; dues collectors were called “corporals.”

An organization that imagined citizens and members as soldiers, and whose hymn urged “Black People” to “raise up their manly brows,” clearly understood ideals of political participation and citizenship to be gendered male.⁹³ It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that women made up more than half of the Frente's membership, and were among its hardest-working supporters, according to Francisco Lucrécio, secretary-general of the Frente after 1934. Black women were drawn to the Frente, Lucrécio believed, for the help it provided them in obtaining and keeping the jobs that, in many cases, supported entire families.⁹⁴ Yet it seems that despite their participation in numbers far greater than those in previous black organizations, women's roles in the Frente remained limited, constrained as in earlier years by ideas about “properly” domestic and feminine spaces. Frentenegrinas’ most visible participation was as “Black Roses,” an auxiliary created to host fund-raising parties for the Frente and as teachers in the Frente's elementary-school classes.⁹⁵ In November 1937 A Voz da Raça inaugurated a section dedicated specifically to women. This first appearance of the “Feminine Section” (also its last, since the newspaper ceased publication thereafter) did not promise great changes in the roles envisioned for frentenegrinas—it consisted mainly of several pieces of romantic prose, along with some “beauty tips.”⁹⁶

What Arlindo dos Santos proposed for the Frente was a politics of black recognition blended with the emerging political ideals of fascism, especially its Brazilian variant, Integralism. Editorials in A Voz expressed admiration for the authoritarian regimes of Italy and Germany, and frequently praised Hitler, whom some writers saw as rightfully defending his race against degeneration and infiltration by outsiders. “Hitler is right!” Santos proclaimed in an editorial titled “The Affirmation of the Race.” The Brazilian government, he argued, ought to have “affirmed our Luso-indigenous-black race, rather than making our national home into an international orgy.” By courting immigrants and emulating Europe, the leaders of the Republic had “denied our Black People, making them stand . . . at the margins of national life, yielding their place to the opportunist newcomers.” In another article Santos reasoned, “Hitler affirms the German race. We affirm the Brazilian Race, especially its strongest element: THE BLACK BRAZILIAN.”⁹⁷ Writing in the early to mid-1930s, well before the Nazis would carry their racial vision to its most murderous consequences, the Frente's leadership defended Hitler's “racism,” by which they meant pride in one's national race. The enemies Santos and others attacked were “antiracist” governments, like the Republic, which had betrayed Brazil's native races in its concern with “the so-called GENERAL ARYANIZATION of the Brazilian nation.”⁹⁸

The Santos brothers’ use of A Voz as an almost personal political mouthpiece in its early years—and the uniformity of opinion they appear to have required of other editorialists in their paper—conceals nuances of political views that must certainly have existed among the leadership and broader membership. Historian Kim Butler argues that the Frente's official ideology only represented the viewpoint of its rather idiosyncratic leadership, standing at odds with the political ideas of most of São Paulo's black activists. Indeed, in its seven years of existence, the Frente underwent six major factional disputes, four of which had the effect of creating rival associations (at least two of them, the Black Legion and the Socialist Black Front, firmly on the left). As for the largely working-class membership, Butler contends, most joined more for the Frente's social services than out of adherence to its political ideas. The memories of former Frente member Aristides Barbosa confirm this view. He recalled that many young members were attracted by the group's “appearance of grandeur” rather than by its specific political visions.⁹⁹ Moreover, as political scientist Michael Mitchell points out, though São Paulo's Frente Negra chapter was by far the most nationally prominent of the organization's branches, the particular political ideologies and alliances of different branches varied widely. For instance, in the neighboring port city of Santos, where traditions of labor activism among black port workers ran deep, the local Frente Negra frequently allied itself with the Socialist Party.¹⁰⁰

Many defectors from the Frente Negra, and still more Brazilians of color who had never joined explicitly black social and political organizations, saw the attractions of the Left in this period. The Brazilian Communist Party, intermittently outlawed since the early decades of the century, attempted in 1935 to bring together other proworker, antifascist groups to create the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL, or National Liberation Alliance). The ANL sought to battle foreign imperialism, champion workers’ rights, demand land reform, and to a lesser extent, challenge xenophobia and anti-Semitism, while calling for racial equality and celebrating instances of black revolt.¹⁰¹ Across Brazil, the ANL attracted working-class members in urban and rural areas. Many of these were people of color who chose to pursue their rights to racial and economic equality not through explicitly racial movements like those that gave rise to São Paulo's black press (which were, in any case, largely directed toward an anticommunist, privileged sector of the population of color), but rather through class-based organizations.¹⁰² The ANL and other leftist movements were not a viable opposition force for long. In 1935, citing a series of attempted uprisings by the Brazilian Communist Party (whose dangers the administration intentionally exaggerated), Vargas declared a state of siege that suspended the constitution and granted emergency powers to the executive. The ANL, lacking widespread mass support, and internally divided, fell victim to Vargas's intensified anticommunist campaigns. The Integralists, though also closely watched by Vargas's secret police, fared better in this increasingly authoritarian climate.

Given the Vargas government's early persecution of communism, its flirtation with European fascism, and its relative openness to the political demands of the Frente Negra's leadership, it is no surprise, as one Frente Negra member later remembered, that an ambitious but vulnerable black organization would have cast its lot with the right-leaning nationalism increasingly earning the state's favor.¹⁰³ It is crucial to recognize, however, that the Frente's ideology and rhetoric, as voiced primarily by Santos and a handful of other writers in A Voz, contained ideas about race, history, and national belonging that were in fact a continuation of the majority view emerging in the black press of 1910s and 1920s São Paulo.

Writers associated with the Frente Negra resembled writers in the black press of the preceding decades in two main ways. First, they generally espoused the view that black belonging was earned through a history of vigorous participation in nation building. In essay after essay, writers in A Voz portrayed blacks as integral contributors to the pátria or fatherland, past and present—as slaves who tilled the country's fields or as soldiers who defended the nation against foreign invasion. Their preferred heroes were all homegrown, like abolitionists José do Patrocínio and Luiz Gama, soldier Henrique Dias, or Zumbi, warrior-king of the maroon community of Palmares.¹⁰⁴

Second, and most prominent, the Frente's leadership attempted to balance the politically inclusive potentials of new nationalist discourses of racial mixture with a desire to preserve blacks’ racial distinctiveness and group unity. On the one hand, the notion of mestiçagem could be useful in contesting visions of Brazil, or São Paulo, as exclusively white. In one article, for instance, Arlindo dos Santos urged Frente members to work in the “unitarian and racist spirit of the Bandeiras of yore, which . . . were made up almost exclusively of mestiços of all kinds.”¹⁰⁵ Reconfiguring bandeirantes’ brutal slave-raiding expeditions as the early precursors of contemporary nationalist ideas of racial pride, Santos suggested that the participation of mixed-race people in the life of their state took historical priority over the more recent, foreign ideals of whiteness put forth by state elites, particularly during the revolt of 1932. On the other hand, while writers in A Voz saw official views of a “mestiço” Brazilian race as preferable to earlier ideas of whitened nationhood, they nonetheless took pains to emphasize that Brazil was made up of distinct communities of black, white, and indigenous people. All three races, in this view, had legitimate claims to Brazilianness as distinct entities.¹⁰⁶ They were highly suspicious of mixture as an individual or collective category of racial self-definition, especially when mixture seemed to stand in for whitening. In a poem titled “The Mulatto,” Arlindo dos Santos dramatized his disdain for people of color who embraced intermediate racial categories instead of negro: “Mulattos, in order to be good / Must keep their kinky hair / Or they are fakes / . . . they are neither black nor white.”¹⁰⁷ The Frente Negra's official racial vocabulary—its proud and insistent repetition of the term negro as the proper category of racial identification for people of African descent—finalized the transition from Paulista activists’ earlier use of color categories like preto or de cor to a unified black racial category imagined as a fixed community of descent.¹⁰⁸ As the Frente's motto, “God, fatherland, race, and family,” made clear, race was the second-tier corporatist entity (immediately above the family) to which people of color belonged, and through which they would intervene in national life.

In this context, we might read Santos's early call (1933) for “a fraternal Brazil, devoid of petty prejudices, in which the Black brother and the White brother stand arm in arm” as auguring a continuation of the “two races” politics of fraternity developed by black Paulista writers since the turn of the century.¹⁰⁹ As they came to reject the Republic and its political underpinnings, however, the leaders of the Frente Negra soon discarded racial fraternity, particularly in its sentimental forms, in favor of other metaphors that would better capture their ideals of interracial social and political relations.¹¹⁰ The figure of the Mãe Preta, in this context, nearly disappeared from A Voz, except in a very few rare instances, as when Arlindo dos Santos used her as an image not of racial fraternity but of the suffering of a race forced to yield its jobs, its well-being, and its nation to “thieving” foreigners.¹¹¹ The Mãe Preta had made sense as a symbol of black politics during the Republic, when a weak central government allowed black writers to imagine fraternity as an interpersonal dynamic independent of the state, through which they, as black men, could claim brotherhood directly with their white conationals. Under a centralizing regime in which Vargas portrayed himself as a “father” of the nation, however, writers affiliated with the Frente Negra described political belonging in terms of family metaphors that were not primarily horizontal, but vertical. The Mãe Preta, with her sentimentalized message of cross-racial fraternity, was replaced by military figures, benevolent kings, and metaphors of soldierly discipline and hierarchy, suggesting that Frente writers newly understood citizenship as a filial and martial relationship between loyal negro sons and soldiers, on the one hand, and the state, on the other.

This shift in the style and content of familial metaphors of belonging among Paulistano black activists reflected not just the Frente's ideology but also the broader political atmosphere of early 1930s São Paulo, where ideals of soldiering and military violence as paths to citizenship held wide appeal. Only Leite's Clarim continued to promote the idea for a monument and a holiday for the Mãe Preta during this period; Leite later recalled that the projects gradually faded from public view because they were incompatible with the transformed national climate.¹¹² Lawyer Joaquim Guaraná de Santana also invoked the ideal of the black mother when he left the Frente Negra to form the Black Legion in 1932, making her a rallying point in his foundational “Manifesto” to the “descendants of the raça negra in Brazil.” Tellingly, however, he reconfigured her as the Mãe Negra, a word that in the context of São Paulo's contemporary racial politics carried a stronger racial identification than the adjective preta, preferred in 1920s celebrations of the wet-nurse, which only described her color. Negros, Santana proclaimed, were “the builders of the economic greatness of our fatherland, who with our blood have redeemed it of all oppression.” The “milk of the Mãe Negra,” Santana continued, had imbued her children with “great love for Brazil,” making them “some of the greatest soldiers of this crusade [the 1932 constitutionalist uprising].” The Mãe Negra, Santana seemed to suggest, was mother only to the black race, and as such she was no longer a sentimental symbol of national conciliation. Instead, she was a symbol of black soldiers’ military heroism and of black Paulistas’ rightful belonging as patriotic sons of their state and nation.¹¹³

Though the Frente's leadership moved away from metaphors of racial fraternity, Santos's repeated calls to celebrate the “fiercely nationalistic conscience of all black countrymen” and to discourage “any sort of alliance with foreign blacks” show them to have continued the trend, common to most black Paulistano thinkers in the 1920s, of disavowing any ties with Africa or diasporic Africans.¹¹⁴ Francisco Lucrécio, a member and leader of the Frente Negra, remembered, “We exchanged some correspondence with Angola, we knew about Marcus Garvey's movement, but we did not agree. We always affirmed our identities as Brazilians and positioned ourselves thus, with the logic that our ancestors, from Zumbi of Palmares to the black abolitionists, worked, sacrificed themselves, and battled in Brazil. . . . We did not wish to lose our identity as Brazilians. So we followed the line of our ancestors.”¹¹⁵ As a result, apart from an early mention of correspondence with a sympathetic black newspaper in Lourenço Marques (as Maputo, capital of Mozambique, was known during colonial times), and the occasional opinion column signed with the pseudonym “Menelik” (no doubt the work of the former editor of O Menelik, Deocleciano do Nascimento, by this point a convert to the Frente Negra's brand of nationalism), no positive references to Africa appear in A Voz.¹¹⁶ The militant racialism of the Frente Negra was a defense not of Africans but of black Brazilians.

Leite and other left-leaning black activists who split with the Frente Negra differed on this point. Leite's Clarim started off the 1930s with increased pan-Africanist fervor. Beginning in January 1930, Leite dedicated a full page of his newspaper to international news concerning blacks, paying particular attention to the activities of Marcus Garvey and his “Back to Africa” movement. Aside from conveying information on events in the United States, Ethiopia, Haiti, and other parts of Africa and the diaspora, including special contributions from African and African American writers, this international page frequently ran articles from Garvey's publication The Negro World, transcribed and translated by a collaborator from Bahia, Mário Vasconcelos.¹¹⁷ In late 1930 the title of Garvey's famous publication, rendered in Portuguese as “O mundo negro,” became the title of Leite's black internationalist page.¹¹⁸ By mid-1931 Garvey's ideas and those of Clarim’s editors became increasingly blurred: articles transcribed from The Negro World were no longer clearly labeled as such, and Garveyist slogans like “Blacks of the Old and New worlds, unite!” or “African Fundamentalism” floated in large bold typeface across Clarim’s pages, unconnected to any given piece.¹¹⁹ Other publications, like Cultura (the organ of a politically independent black social and athletic organization Leite founded in 1934), as well as O Clarim (a short-lived offshoot of O Clarim d'Alvorada after 1933) and Tribuna Negra (a collaboration with members of the former Black Legion), all included several internationally focused articles reminiscent of “O mundo negro.” In particular, Mussolini's aggression toward the “Black Empire” of Ethiopia in 1935 received indignant attention from these black internationalists besieged, in their home city, by fascist Italian immigrants and by ultranationalist, quasi-fascist frentenegrinos.¹²⁰

Yet while writers for O Clarim d'Alvorada and members of the Frente Negra differed sharply in their views on Africa and pan-African politics, both factions, comprised of middle-class black Paulistanos, rejected certain kinds of African culture in Brazil itself. In his writings, for instance, Arlindo dos Santos at times used words related to Afro-Brazilian culture, especially religion, as a vocabulary of political denigration. The term macumbeiros (a derisive name for practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions), appears as a euphemism for political traitors and fakers; batuque, the term for Afro-Brazilian ritual drumming, was used to characterize the excess and decadence of the Republic; and defenders of democracy appeared as “primitives.”¹²¹A Voz da Raça, despite its tactical endorsement of national ideas of racial mixture, did not celebrate the African imprint on Brazilian culture in the fashion of the aesthetic modernism of the 1920s or of Freyre's Casa-grande. Instead, its articles directly or indirectly enforced a notion of black Brazilian identity in which Christianity and respectability went hand in hand. A writer by the name of Castelo Alves, for instance, declared, “We are good Catholics, we like religious festivals and encourage all respect for religious rituals, but we cannot abstain from protesting the terrible habit of certain party-makers in performing samba and batuque in front of churches.” Not only did these practices “drag victims into a culture of the most infamous habits,” like alcoholism, but they more generally undermined the public respectability of hardworking blacks, like those in the Frente. “We must put an end to the bombo and pandeiro [the drum and tambourine used in Afro-Brazilian music], because they are a war cry against frentenegrinos!”¹²²

These uses of Afro-Brazilian culture as markers of social or political barbarism reflected the ideas of not just the Frente Negra leadership but São Paulo's black activists more broadly. The Paulistanos of color who frequented São Paulo's black social and political associations were mostly staunch Catholics who saw their religion as central to what qualified them as true, unmarked Brazilians. Therefore, as Leite remembered when asked about Afro-Brazilian ritual practices, he and other politically active blacks were not only “uninterested in those things,” but saw them as antithetical to the goals of their racial politics—a “sort of backward move in the process of obtaining social progress for blacks.”¹²³ In its own way, the pan-Africanism that Leite espoused ran parallel to the ideals of the Frente Negra in its commitment to hierarchies of culture and civilization. Marcus Garvey and Ras Tafari were modern, rational, political black men, not superstitious primitives.

The rejection of Afro-Brazilian religions by vocal members of São Paulo's black community had a regionalist cast as well. Candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religious forms had persisted and even flourished clandestinely in other parts of the country, like Rio de Janeiro and especially Salvador da Bahia, which in the 1930s was gaining positive visibility for its preservation of African culture and religion. Yet until the early 1940s, São Paulo's police strictly repressed Afro-Brazilian religions, pushing those practices even further to the margins of society. As sociologist Reginaldo Prandi notes, until the 1970s Candomblé in particular was seen by most Paulistas as “a curiosity . . ., imagined as a holdover of an Africanness that was maintained in Bahia.”¹²⁴ Elite Paulistas, in their rejection of Vargas's “dictanegra,” explicitly contrasted the regional identity of São Paulo as modern and white against the backwardness and Africanness of the Northeast. In this context, black thinkers, even as they sought to retell the history of São Paulo to emphasize its mestiço origins, implicitly profiled themselves as modern intellectuals from an industrializing, vanguardist city, against what they saw as the backward practices of African-descended people in other parts of the nation. Therefore, both the Frente Negra's subtle but palpable rejection of Afro-Brazilian culture and opponents like Leite's embrace of a contemporary, political pan-Africanism portrayed São Paulo's black politics as essentially modern, while excluding certain kinds of African manifestations deemed “primitive” and rejecting the reevaluation of African culture rooted in the Northeast and in the national capital.

For much of the 1930s the Frente Negra was the predominant black organization in São Paulo, and indeed in Brazil. Its detractors, particularly José Correia Leite, had a difficult time creating viable alternatives to the organization and its powerful newspaper. Leite suspended O Clarim d'Alvorada in mid-1932, shortly after the Frente's attack on his workshop. He attempted to continue his internationalist pursuits in a series of short-lived newspapers with which he subsequently collaborated (including some of the ones cited above) and by creating an alternative black organization, the Clube Negro de Cultura Social, which he soon thereafter abandoned due to its increasingly recreational character.¹²⁵ The Frente Negra, by contrast, enjoyed broad support, probably because its politics articulated more easily with those of the Vargas regime. Its leaders espoused compelling, if extreme and simplified, messages that resonated with dominant nationalist and regionalist ideologies, while continuing to push for racial recognition and advancement.

In 1936 the Frente registered as a political party. Yet it was precisely the Frente's success in obtaining this formal status that made it vulnerable in 1937, when Getúlio Vargas staged the internal coup that inaugurated the most repressive phase of his regime. Under the Estado Novo or New State (a name borrowed from the fascist dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal), Vargas built up the secret police and the army, increased censorship of the media, and outlawed all political parties. The Frente Negra ceased to exist.¹²⁶ Some members attempted to reconfigure as a cultural club, but they failed to draw a wide membership. Straggling members of the Frente Negra held their last meeting in 1938, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery. In the seven-year dictatorship that followed, explicitly political black organizations and publications in São Paulo and elsewhere virtually ground to a halt, until the fall of Vargas and the return of democracy in 1945.

Bahian Negros

São Paulo did not have an exclusive claim on explicitly “black” politics in the 1930s. Indeed, the events that had marked the political thought and activism of self-defined negro men in São Paulo since the late 1920s—in particular, the Mãe Preta celebrations and the Frente Negra—had repercussions elsewhere. Even in the far-off city of Salvador da Bahia, with its strong traditions of activism based on the defense of African culture, a group of men of color with connections to São Paulo's black activist institutions developed a Paulistano-style racial politics as culturally unmarked, Catholic black Brazilians. Yet the brevity and limited visibility of their endeavors illustrates how political strategies developed with success in the specific social context of one city were transformed, in their meaning and resonance, as they crossed into another.

One of the most notable examples of such cross-regional political borrowings momentarily takes us back to 28 September 1929. On that date, a year after José Correia Leite had proposed the creation of a holiday for the Mãe Preta in São Paulo's Clarim, a group of Bahians of color led by one Ascendino Bispo dos Anjos helped organize city-wide celebrations in honor of the Mãe Preta, securing the support of Salvador's most prominent politicians, intellectuals, journalists, artists, musicians, religious leaders, and educators. The festivities began with celebratory gunfire at dawn, followed by a special mass at Salvador's Basilica and a civic procession that wound through the streets of the center city. During the procession, public figures made speeches and read poems about the Mãe Preta as a symbol of the black race's contributions to Brazil, echoing the articles politicians and intellectuals in Rio de Janeiro had produced in support of their monument project three years earlier. Schoolchildren sang a hymn to the Mãe Preta that stressed her equal love of her black and white children. Foremost among the participants in the procession were the dark-skinned members of the Centro Operário (Workingman's Center), who had the honor of escorting Bahian artist Presciliano Silva's painting of the Mãe Preta, specially commissioned for the occasion, through the streets of downtown Salvador. The day ended with a “solemn session” at the Centro Operário, though judging from their exceedingly brief mention of this portion of the otherwise lavishly detailed celebrations, it seems that no journalists for Bahia's mainstream newspapers attended the event run by working-class Bahians of color. The speeches by Centro Operário leaders in honor of the Mãe Preta do not appear to have survived.¹²⁷

Who were Ascendino dos Anjos and the men of the Centro Operário, and what can their role in these celebrations tell us about the variety of views on race and culture among Bahians of color? Relatively little is known of Ascendino dos Anjos. Bahian historian Cid Teixeira describes him as a “black leader [liderança negra],” and O Clarim d'Alvorada described him as a clerk at Salvador's Polytechnic Institute and a part-time journalist, declaring him a “figure of great renown among our class [of color] in the Bahian capital.”¹²⁸ To plan the Mãe Preta events, Anjos joined forces with the Centro Operário, a trade-based organization founded in 1893 by workers of color to “organize and unify” the “trades, crafts, and proletarian classes.”¹²⁹ It is unclear whether Anjos himself was a member of the Centro, though contemporary reports mention he was known for his efforts to create a school for workers—a project that may well have taken place within the Centro itself.¹³⁰ The Centro, for its part, was one of several collectives for preto men in the Bahian capital, like the more famous Sociedade Protectora dos Desvalidos (a mutual aid society) which, though not explicitly dedicated to racial activism, had an exclusively preto membership and was committed to improving the lot and reputation of its members as people of color. The Centro, unlike the Sociedade, does not appear to have made preto skin a prerequisite for membership, but like other trade associations, it nonetheless acquired a largely African-descended membership because of the concentration of people of color among tradesmen, port, and unskilled workers in contemporary Salvador. Kim Butler has shown that the Centro Operário and the Sociedade Protectora shared leaders and members, suggesting some overlap in a vision for race-based collective activism through these organizations.¹³¹

Though contemporary accounts make clear Anjos's and the Centro's leading roles in organizing Bahia's Mãe Preta celebrations, only São Paulo's O Clarim d'Alvorada made mention of their race, calling them “Bahian negros.”¹³² The Bahian press's coverage of the events gives too little insight into the motivations of these men of color to know whether they themselves would have adopted the term negro, along with the overtones of racial distinctiveness and pride the term was then acquiring in São Paulo. But the outlines of the event they helped to plan provide a glimpse into their possible racial politics. Like celebrations of the Mãe Preta championed by most black writers in São Paulo, the Bahian festivities of 1929 largely stressed the integration of people of color into mainstream Bahian culture through displays of fluency in dominant cultural, civic, and religious norms. That they sought out the patronage and participation of the highest Bahian political and cultural figures, including the Catholic Church, suggests that Anjos and others at the Centro Operário wished to portray the descendants of the Mãe Preta as a legitimate part of a broader Bahian, and Brazilian, identity, even (or especially) in a city where a separate, African-based cultural and religious identity was a real alternative. Indeed, the choice to celebrate the Mãe Preta in Salvador would have had particularly integrationist meanings, given local officials’ obsession with “de-Africanizing” the city's public spaces in the last decades of the Republic. In contrast to the black street vendors, Candomblé priestesses, or prostitutes these reformers vilified, the Mãe Preta provided a respectable example of Brazilian blackness, a dark-skinned embodiment of the self-sacrificing dedication to children demanded of the “honorable” women of Bahia's upper classes.

The greatest parallel between the celebrations organized by Salvador's and São Paulo's men of color lay in the specific iconography through which both chose to represent the Mãe Preta. The painting that members of the Centro Operário paraded down the streets of Salvador was an exact replica, by a Bahian artist, of a work by (white) artist Lucílio de Albuquerque (1912), which portrayed a seated Mãe Preta breastfeeding a white child while gazing longingly at her own black baby lying vulnerably at her feet. This painting had once appeared on the front page of Rio's A Notícia as part of its monument campaign in 1926. Aside from the iconic drawing O Clarim published yearly after 1928 for its Mãe Preta campaign, this appears to have been the only other image of the Mãe Preta then in circulation that included the mother's own black child. In São Paulo, the inclusion of the black child in that picture had set the tone for asserting the distinctiveness of otherwise equal black and white races; perhaps it had the same meaning for the men of color who organized the Bahian festivities and placed the painting at their center.

The Mãe Preta celebrations suggest that a group of socially active men of color in Salvador embraced an identity and politics as Catholic, culturally Brazilian negros similar to the identities developed in Paulistano black organizations and newspapers like Clarim. Indeed, Clarim may have directly influenced the Bahian group's politics. Since the beginning of its “second phase” in the late 1920s, Clarim had reached out to readers in other states. In Bahia the paper had secured a group of local contributors, all men of color—Urcino dos Santos, Marciano P. da Paixão, J. Soter da Silva, and Mário de Vasconcelos (the translator of Garvey's The Negro World). According to Clarim’s editors, by 1930 their paper had reached an “elevated” number of readers in the Bahian capital, thanks to its placement in the newsstands of a “very popular” news agency.¹³³ Given that mainstream Bahian papers gave no coverage either to Cândido de Campos's monument campaign in 1926 or to Clarim’s holiday proposal in 1928, it is quite possible that Ascendino dos Anjos got his idea for a Day of the Mãe Preta directly from Clarim’s recurring campaigns. In any case, Anjos and the Centro received coverage of and direct support for their Mãe Preta celebration from Clarim on a number of occasions.¹³⁴

Three years after the Mãe Preta celebrations, in another salient example of the far-reaching repercussions of Paulistano black politics, the Frente Negra came to Salvador. Marcos Rodrigues dos Santos, the founder of and inspector general for the state chapter, was a small-town Bahian by birth, but he had spent much of his youth traveling across his state as well as in São Paulo and Minas Gerais. In the city of São Paulo in the late 1920s, Santos had joined the Centro Cívico Palmares, where he met José Correia Leite as well as two men who turned out to be Santos's distant relatives: Arlindo and Isaltino Veiga dos Santos, future leaders of São Paulo's Frente Negra. In the early 1930s Marcos Rodrigues dos Santos moved to the Paulista port city of Santos, where he founded the local Frente Negra chapter (known for its working-class, socialist leanings). In late 1932 he returned to his adopted home of Salvador, bringing with him many of the ideas and strategies he had learned in the negro organizations of the South.¹³⁵

The Frente Negra da Bahia opened its doors in November 1932. In public meetings and in interviews with Bahia's press, Marcos dos Santos presented the goal of his organization as the “moral uplift of the race” through the promotion of literacy and employment.¹³⁶ Though operating on a much smaller scale and budget than the São Paulo branch, Salvador's Frente Negra provided a similar range of services and events, including classes (elementary education, adult literacy, languages, and typing), fund-raising parties, a music band, a women's group, and an employment agency.¹³⁷ Also like its Paulista counterpart, the Bahian branch sought to become active in national politics, proposing a black candidate for the Constituent Assembly and staging frequent political rallies in downtown Salvador.¹³⁸A Frente Negra, a weekly publication dedicated to the “general interests of the men of color,” helped spread the word about the organization and its political programs.¹³⁹

Bahia's Frente Negra was ideologically similar to São Paulo's, though with the significant absence of militarized or fascist rhetoric. As in São Paulo, Frente leaders in Salvador aimed for the full integration of blacks—as racially distinct but culturally unmarked citizens—into the dominant society, and saw themselves as the elite chosen to guide the black masses in the project of uplift. In his interviews with the Bahian press, Marcos Rodrigues dos Santos presented himself as an educated man and a “Catholic” and emphasized the importance of teaching “our savages”—that is, poor and uneducated blacks—to “believe in, love, and venerate a civilized Brazil.”¹⁴⁰ Santos, whose Frente Negra operated in an even more traditional and patriarchal society than its Paulista counterparts, placed particular emphasis on the sacredness of a “legitimately constituted family” in elevating the morality of the black race. Echoing the concerns that appear to have animated black organizers of the Mãe Preta celebrations in Bahia, Santos emphasized the role that proper training of “the black female elite” would play in securing the respectability of Bahians of color.¹⁴¹

In his speeches and events, Santos, like his distant cousins the Santos brothers in São Paulo, highlighted the role blacks had played and would continue to play in Brazil's “national greatness.” On the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1933, for instance, the Frente held a “civic session” in which orators remembered the great abolitionist figures of 1888 and placed flowers at the graves of Bahians they considered central to the antiracist struggle. Beginning with renowned mulatto poet and abolitionist Castro Alves, their procession then visited the graves of Ascendino dos Anjos (who passed away in 1931, not long after organizing the Mãe Preta celebrations), Manoel Querino, and Maxwel Porphírio de Assumpção.¹⁴² Querino was a famous mulatto politician and intellectual—a founder of modern Afro-Bahian anthropology, an advocate for the cause of Bahians of color, and a member of leading preto organizations like the Sociedade Protectora dos Desvalidos and the Centro Operário. Maxwel de Assumpção was a lawyer and a member of one of Bahia's most distinguished families of African descent, the Alakijas. On several occasions throughout the 1920s, he wrote open letters to Bahian newspapers affirming his pride in the negro race and protesting racist acts, such as Congress's proposed bans on black immigration in the early 1920s.¹⁴³ By honoring the graves of these men, the Frente's members expressed their shared commitment to the political project of defending and uplifting the black race in Bahia.

Yet however consonant with the goals of many black Paulistano activists, the Bahian Frente Negra's focus on racial uplift and unification, and its explicitly antiracist stance, were a rarity among preto organizations in the city of Salvador. In the majority African-descended capital of Bahia, as we have seen, a unified notion of “race” or “blackness” was neither the primary vector of discrimination nor the primary identity around which most people of color sought to organize. Even organizations like the Sociedade Protectora dos Desvalidos or the Centro Operário, which in some senses functioned as race-based collectives, were far from gaining the adherence of a majority of pretos in the city.¹⁴⁴

For these reasons, scholars of the Frente Negra in Bahia have argued, the organization failed to attract the cross-class, cross-color constituency of its Paulistano counterpart.¹⁴⁵ The Frente's strong negro identity and program of uplift gained some support from working-class Bahians of color (mostly pretos), who were suffering from the economic depression and from government efforts at worker repression and co-optation in the early 1930s, and for whom racial issues were one of several historically important aspects of labor activism. Yet the Frente failed to attract upwardly mobile pretos and pardos in Bahia, most of whom preferred what they saw as more respectable, nonconfrontational mechanisms of social ascension. A “mulatto informant” told researcher Thales de Azevedo in the early 1950s that dark-skinned people of higher social ranks had looked on many of the Frente's actions with distaste, as in the case of a parade of poor blacks down one of Bahia's main thoroughfares designed to display the misery in which people of color lived. The informant added that the Frente was “destined to failure from its very birth,” since it had been organized “as a sort of revolt.”¹⁴⁶ Lacking the moral and economic support of middle-class people of color (so fundamental to the success of São Paulo's black organizations), and increasingly under pressure to fold into the twenty or so labor unions controlled by the local government, the Frente Negra closed its doors in August 1933, less than a year after it was founded. Around the same time, the Centro Operário also shut down, a casualty of government co-optation and of the increasing redundancy of mutual-aid organizations in an era of expanding government-based social security.¹⁴⁷

The experiences of Bahia's Frente Negra and Centro Operário suggest that a group of Bahians linked directly or indirectly to the black politics of São Paulo adopted those activists’ defense of a proud, distinctly “black” Brazilian identity in the face of dominant discourses of racial mixture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and in a city with strong African traditions. Yet this Bahian contingent remained very small. The Frente Negra, in its 13 May 1933 celebrations, did not have many black leaders’ tombs to revere, and some of the figures they honored (like Ascendino dos Anjos and Maxwel de Assumpção) have remained largely obscure. Likewise, despite the commitment of Clarim’s Bahian contributors, the fact that they had to publish in a paper based in far-off São Paulo reveals the absence of viable comparable publications in Salvador. The scarcity of these kinds of black organizations in Bahia, together with the greater visibility of culture-based activism and its resonance with shifting ideas of national culture contributed, from the 1930s onward, to cementing Bahia's profile on a national stage as the seat of Brazil's African traditions.

POLITICAL, CULTURAL, AND INTELLECTUAL transformations in Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s allowed people of color in places like Salvador da Bahia and São Paulo newly to imagine themselves as Brazilian nationals. In many ways, the ideas of black belonging emerging from these two cities starkly contrasted. Building on “two race” ideologies from earlier in the century, black journalists and activists in São Paulo sought to make a culturally unmarked blackness and a history of participation in nation building the basis of their identities as Paulistanos and, more broadly, as Brazilians. Leaders of the Frente Negra in particular, eager to show their patriotism, vehemently rejected any ties to Africa, Africans, or blacks elsewhere in the diaspora. This position was not shared universally among São Paulo's activist community, many of whom continued to report on contemporary African and pan-African events. What was shared among black leaders as different as Arlindo Veiga dos Santos and José Correia Leite was a sense of black Paulistanos’ position as modern political subjects—a position increasingly crafted through contrasts involving racial, religious, and regional identities, and one which gained meaning in direct opposition to practices, such as Bahian Candomblé, these thinkers considered primitive and politically damaging. Southeastern activists would sharpen this critique of both Afro-Brazilian religion and Bahia throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s.

In Salvador only a small minority of people of color adopted the vision of black belonging championed by São Paulo's black thinkers. Many more Bahians, like Candomblé leaders, their followers, and the anthropologists with whom they collaborated, put forth a view of belonging primarily defined not by race or blackness but by a pure and unmixed African culture. Unlike their Paulistano counterparts, these religious thinkers and activists argued implicitly for the right to be considered Brazilian nationals by embracing what they construed as traditional African practices. Though they did not comment explicitly on the contrast, they clearly rejected Paulistano activists’ paths toward inclusion through the denial of all African cultural connections. Undoubtedly, they would have objected to those activists’ belittling of Candomblé as apolitical and backward.

Whether presenting themselves as “blacks” or as “Africans,” however, black thinkers in the cities of both São Paulo and Salvador in the 1930s and 1940s productively used the acceptance of Brazil's African past by a new generation of nationalist intellectuals. In Salvador, the Candomblé community won the right to practice its religion freely and made inroads in the battle against pervasive cultural discrimination. In São Paulo, activists pushed further than before their demands to be full Brazilians with equal access to jobs, public spaces, and dignity. Above all, both groups struggled to assert their rightful inclusion as nationals (either as negros or as members of an African ritual community) while resisting the racially and culturally assimilationist aspects of official mestiço identities emanating from Rio de Janeiro.

Both groups found opportunities as well as challenges in the tumultuous period between 1930 and 1945. The Frente Negra, which flourished in the first few years of Vargas's regime, eventually fell victim to the Estado Novo, as did all other formal black social and political associations in São Paulo and across Brazil. Leaders of Bahia's most famous Candomblés forged a newly supportive environment for themselves by the end of the 1930s, but they would face increasing obstacles as World War II cut the ties to Africa that had sustained their claims to legitimacy. With the end of the war and Brazil's return to democracy in 1945, activists in both places—together with new colleagues in Rio de Janeiro—would eagerly take up their struggles in a new political and cultural context.