When Rio was Black: Soul Music, National Culture, and the Politics of Racial Comparison in 1970s Brazil
2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-2008-043
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Brazilian cultural history and politics
ResumoIn July 1976, the Jornal do Brasil's Saturday cultural supplement ran four full pages with a troubling subject. Rio de Janeiro was turning "black," journalist Lena Frias told readers. A wave of dance parties playing soul and funk music from the United States had overtaken recreational clubs in Rio's subúrbios, the working-class neighborhoods to the north and west of downtown, and was threatening to invade the wealthier (and whiter) neighborhoods of the city's famed Zona Sul. The article described these soul dances and the hundreds of thousands of young people of color who flocked to them as a cultural space, indeed a place, apart from the city mainstream readers thought they knew.This parallel city and its inhabitants, who drew apparent inspiration from cultural and racial identities of black North Americans, constituted for Frias "one of the most provocative sociological phenomena" in Brazilian history.1 She called the parallel city "Black Rio," using the English word black.2Frias's unsettling account sparked a barrage of articles about the soul phenomenon in major national newspapers and magazines, as well as in the city's alternative press, which represented various groups on the left and in the emerging movimento negro, or black movement. Above all, Frias's article attracted the attention of the secret police of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Along with other right-wing observers allied with the military dictatorship then in power, they closely observed the soul dances and debated whether they might constitute some kind of coherent, subversive "movement." The soul controversy thus offers an opportunity to investigate how commentators from across the political spectrum understood the relationship among music, national culture, and racial politics in 1970s Brazil.Despite participants' diverse positions and shrill tone, all those involved adopted Lena Frias's name for the phenomenon. All seem to have agreed that the English word black — as a word referencing race, identity, politics, and culture in a U.S. context imagined as more racially polarized than Brazil — was untranslatable into Brazilian racial terms yet was suddenly necessary to describe processes under way in Brazilian society. Being black was culturally and politically different from being preto or pardo, the terms historically used to designate darker- or lighter-complexioned Brazilians of color; it was different, too, from negro, the word that many politically active people of color had adopted since the first decades of the century to designate a proudly unified racial group.3 In the wake of Frias's article, observers and participants from a range of political backgrounds struggled to define the political implications of soul's blackness. Did soul's proud echoes of foreign racial gestures make it dangerous, as many right-wing observers initially believed? Or, as many on the left countered, did its imported referents make it culturally inauthentic and politically bankrupt? The stakes were high for all involved, for soul trampled on a long-cherished contrast at the heart of images of Brazilian national identity: racist United States versus racially tolerant Brazil.The origins of the idea that Brazil was fundamentally different from the United States in terms of race relations and definitions of race itself stretched back at least as far as the early 1900s. Brazilian and foreign intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century commonly posited that a gentler history of slavery and abolition in Brazil, along with extensive racial intermixture, had produced a society free of racial discrimination. In comparison with the United States, which had a sharply bifurcated racial system that excluded blacks from belonging in a white nation, Brazil, many claimed, had a gradated system of racial identification that included people of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds in a mestiço or mixed nation.4 By this logic, blackness, as a radically oppositional cultural and political identity, was the unfortunate consequence of racism and racial segregation in the United States, but was wholly out of place in the tolerant and mestiço nation of Brazil.Since the 1950s and '60s, however, the favorable comparison with the United States came under increasing attack from a group of intellectuals and activists, many associated with the black movement. In the 1970s, at the height of the soul phenomenon, these critics began to argue that the nationalist myth of a racially and culturally harmonious Brazil obfuscated an underlying reality that was much more similar to U.S.-style racism than most Brazilians liked to admit.5 Since then, many scholars have argued that the deceitful nature of Brazilian racism has perhaps been even more pernicious than U.S.-style racism, for it defused possibilities for "racial consciousness" and racial politics in the style of the U.S. civil rights movement, and even today complicates the implementation of U.S.-style affirmative action programs.6 For several scholars engaged in this critique of Brazilian racism, Black Rio, with its U.S.-style racial referents, was a tonic for Brazil's racial malaise. The oppositional black identities that emerged from the soul dances represented a brief moment of racial consciousness in Brazil — a consciousness long hampered by myths of racial democracy and weak racial movements.7In the 1990s, debates about the comparison with the United States took a sharp turn to the extremes. Some defenders of Brazil's relative tolerance and fundamental difference from the United States accused their opponents of cultural imperialism, of imposing U.S. categories and politics onto Brazil and thereby erasing its specificity. In response, some supporters of the idea that the United States and Brazil shared similar patterns of racism retorted that the defense of Brazilian difference amounted to a denial of, or an apology for, Brazil's virulent forms of discrimination.8 Ironically, these well-meaning arguments on behalf of Brazilians of color ended up presenting them alternately as dupes of national myths of racelessness or as victims of imperialist standards of racial consciousness.9A new, more nuanced position on the U.S.-Brazil comparison seems to be emerging from the din of these polemics. Most recently, some scholars have sought to decouple the argument about whether or not Brazil has racism or racial activism from the condition that these phenomena function as they are perceived to do in the United States. Unlike arguments from earlier in the century, these attempts to understand Brazil on its own terms do not bind scholars to a celebratory discourse of racial tolerance and exceptionalism. Rather, they allow scholars to explore the ways that racial politics, identities, and discrimination can exist just as vividly in Brazil as they do in the United States, though with distinct dynamics and manifestations.10 At the same time, the presumption of a wholly bounded Brazilian racial system, with no overlap or exchange with the United States, no longer holds up. Contact and comparison with the United States (and other international flows of ideas and symbols) were always constitutive of Brazil's internal discussions about race.11The popularity of soul music in Brazil in the 1970s provides a unique opportunity for exploring this complex interplay between international racial referents and national ideologies of race. A few recent studies of the ways Brazilians in this period understood, enjoyed, and produced soul music trace the ways that soul's styles, politics, and racial identities were distinctly Brazilian even when they borrowed consciously from U.S. models.12 This article shifts outward from the music to the public debates over and police investigations into Black Rio, to understand the sense that a range of Brazilians made of these cultural gestures. With exceptional eloquence, these debates not only lay out the opinions of diverse Brazilians about the comparison with the United States in their own time, but they show participants consciously playing with that comparison to define race and national culture in politically expedient ways.Like soul music itself, these contested readings of soul's foreignness in mid-1970s Brazil complicate assumptions often held by scholars on both sides of the comparison debate about the power of U.S. or any foreign racial, cultural, and political models to trump local interpretations, whether positively or adversely. Brazilians on all sides of the soul debate adopted the English word black. Despite the protestations of many that black was a foreign word used to describe a foreign influence, the English word actually helped to explain the shifting terrain of local culture and politics. And again, despite concerns that dancers' enthusiastic adoption of the term black to describe themselves and their styles would destroy or contaminate local racial terminology, Brazilians of all stripes had no trouble adopting the term without substituting it for the Brazilian word negro. In their untranslated use of this foreign "gesture," as Frias put it, all those involved "create[d] original meanings."The Departamento Geral de Investigações Especiais (DGIE) political intelligence wing began its investigations into the soul phenomenon as early as April 1975, over a year before Frias's article "discovered" soul for a broader reading public. The DGIE was a newly reformed branch of the entities commonly known as the "secret" or "political" police, which had existed under several guises in Brazil since the early twentieth century. Though their goal of preserving social and political order remained constant, the secret police's ideals of order and their methods for achieving it changed with the times. Unsurprisingly, the scope and intensity of political policing peaked under repressive governments, like Getúlio Vargas's Estado Novo (1937 – 45) or the post-1964 military dictatorship. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, at the height of the dictatorship's political repression, Rio de Janeiro's secret police forces (then known as the Departamento Autônomo de Ordem Política e Social, DOPS/RJ) worked closely with federal intelligence agencies to assist in the repression of the organized left and urban guerrillas.13When the soul phenomenon came to their attention, Rio's secret police were in transition, in more ways than one. In 1975, the secret police were restructured as the DGIE, with a Departamento de Polícia Política e Social that would act as "police intelligence," collecting information on people and institutions deemed dangerous to national security.14 This institutional reorganization coincided with a shift in the nation's political atmosphere that would change the nature of both political activism and political policing. By the second half of the 1970s, having successfully disarmed the institutional left, and in response to growing opposition from moderate political sectors, the dictatorship entered a phase of decompression (distensão), in which opposition to the regime was less strictly defined, investigated, and punished. The attenuation of state repression allowed for the emergence of new social and political movements articulated around notions of identity like race, gender, or sexual orientation.15 On one hand, this made the political police's tasks easier; these movements worked through peaceful means, unlike the urban guerrillas of previous years. Yet they also presented new problems for the DGIE. As elsewhere in Latin America, these new social movements challenged established political parties organized around traditional left and right ideologies and reconfigured notions of "the political" more broadly.This diffusion of the "political," which became at once all-pervasive and difficult to pin down, confounded the categories of political subversion ("terrorism," "communism," "Cuba") with which the police were accustomed to working. The police faced precisely this challenge with the soul dances, their first major encounter with the black associations and movements that would begin to flourish in the second half of the 1970s. Black organizations, like the Frente Negra of the early 1930s or the Teatro Experimental do Negro of the 1940s and '50s, had previously earned the attention of Rio's secret police, yet only on an ad hoc basis; there was no formal category for black activism on the police's lists. Their initial reports on the soul phenomenon, before the watershed publication of Lena Frias's exposé, reveal the police recognizing soul as a potential threat to public order and safety but struggling to categorize the nature of that threat.On April 19, 1975, DGIE agents infiltrated a large soul dance cohosted by music groups (conjuntos) named Black Power and Soul Grand Prix at the Portela Samba School. The resulting report, whose subject heading (assunto) "Black Power" conflated the name of the group with suggestions of black radicalism, reveals the police's primary concern with the preferential treatment organizers showed to people of color:The group Black Power, the report alleged, had been banned from holding dances in another social club, the Gremio Recreativo Rocha Miranda, "because they [Black Power] did not want to grant entrance to white people."16 Racial discrimination of this sort was technically a crime in Brazil, for it violated the Afonso Arinos Law (passed in 1951 in response to racism against people of color). Yet police in Brazil had never consistently prosecuted the many violations of this law when people of color were the victims of discrimination.17In subsequent reports, the officials who discussed antiwhite discrimination in these soul dances were at odds about whether that form of discrimination was equivalent to or worse than the antiblack discrimination much more prevalent in Brazilian society. A year into the investigation, for instance, a police investigator submitted a report describing as "radicalism" the processes whereby soul dance producers "sought to hamper the entrance of . . . whites," but he explained that such radicalism merely echoed the practices of rock clubs in the whiter Zona Sul, which routinely did the same thing to "negros."18 In their marginal notes on this report, officials debated the question of racial discrimination in ways that reveal a lopsided vision of what it meant to defend Brazil's racial democracy. Police delegate Nahli Jorge Hauat pressed the investigator to specify "in detail to what extent the organizers [of black and white parties] impose difficulties."19 He received no responses regarding the soul dances, suggesting that the police still had no firm leads on the issue over a year after their initial investigations. But another high-ranking officer, Deuteronomio Rocha dos Santos, apparently felt compelled to respond to the passages in the report accusing white clubs of "radicalism" (passages someone marked with a bold "não" in the margins): "Such radicalism . . . consists in the practice, utilized in some associations and clubs of the Zona Norte and Zona Sul, of not permitting the entrance of people who are not members, or who are not conveniently dressed. This creates a series of scuffles between the clubs' doormen and visitors. This occurs in clubs considered of the elite, such as the Iate Clube [Yacht Club] do Rio de Janeiro, Hípico Brasileiro [Riding Club], Clube Militar, etc."20 His dismissal of any distinctions made in admissions to "elite" white clubs as a matter of class or "membership" rather than race was a common trope in conservative defenses of Brazil's racial democracy.Even without much concrete evidence of antiwhite discrimination, the police's initial investigations evince a sense that new forms of racial identification, unsavory and un-Brazilian, were at work among the soul dancers. The first report on the party at Portela went on to describe another dance in late April 1975, in which "the 'Blacks' promoted the concentration of four thousand people of color on the grounds of the Cascadura Tennis Club." The police interpreted as suspicious what they saw as the blacks' explicit attempts to concentrate people of color around a particular form of style and leisure. Their distinction between partygoers in general (pessoas de cor) and those they saw as instigators of racially organized styles and identities (blacks) suggests their sense of the fundamental political difference between diffuse local racial identities and defined imported ones. The report ends by raising a suspicion that frequently accompanied investigations into soul dances in this period: the possibility that a "negro americano" was involved in the Grupo Black (Black Power's business division) or that the Grupo Black was being financed from abroad.21 Troubled by the blackness of soul, but unwilling to consider how Brazilians of color might have developed such oppositional ideas of race on their own, the police looked (in vain) for a foreign infiltrator who might be their source.In fact, soul music had been an important part of Brazilian music and of Rio's social scene at least since the beginning of the decade. Historian Bryan McCann traces the emergence of a Brazilian soul style from the transnational experimentation of musicians like Tim Maia, Tony Tornado, Gerson King Combo, and the band Abolição since the early 1970s. The soul dances in Rio's suburbs, he argues, emerged somewhat independently of these musical trends, as part of the leisure activities of neighborhood soccer clubs (frequented by working-class people of color) or clubs for the middle classes of color, like the Clube Renascença. Though the exact origins of the soul dances are difficult to determine, McCann writes that by 1972, DJs in these recreational clubs were hosting dances that played U.S. soul music, and by 1974 dance promoters had begun to adopt a wider array of symbols denoting and affirming the styles and fashions of U.S. blackness.22By the middle of the 1970s, when the secret police began their investigations, the dances had become large-scale, well-organized affairs. The group Black Power had risen to fame among hundreds of soul groups in Rio, which, as McCann notes, increasingly took over from the social clubs as organizers and underwriters of the dances.23 Members passed out flyers at dances or posted them on walls all over Rio's suburbs and Zona Norte, advertising parties almost nightly. The flyers highlighted featured bands and sought to entice dancers by promising prizes for best outfits, raffles for newly released LPs, and the possibility of appearing on local radio and TV stations.24 Venues ranged from smaller neighborhood social clubs to the spacious rehearsal halls of Rio's samba schools. At their height in the mid to late seventies, the soul dances drew audiences of up to 15 thousand people at a time, from an estimated total of one and a half million soul dancers.25 Brazilian and multinational recording companies rushed to tap into this lucrative market, issuing compilation albums of foreign songs as well as records by homegrown soul artists.26Soul's growing popularity and Black Power's rising visibility as a leading music group fed the secret police's fears that the dances might constitute the beginnings of a mass racial movement with organized backing. In August of 1975, the DGIE brought in for interrogation the members of Black Power — Paulo Santos Filho, Emilson Moreira dos Santos, and Adilson Francisco dos Santos. Confronted with the police's accusations and suspicions, the youths "denied the practice of any kind of racial discrimination, as well as the prohibition against performing at the 'Gremio Recreativo Rocha Miranda,' " and "claimed no knowledge of the presence of a negro American in the Grupo Black."27 That the police called the suspects "jovens de cor" (youth of color) while referring to the potential U.S. ally as a "negro" once again suggests their sense of the difference that ought to exist between Brazilian and U.S. racial systems. The term negro, while not calling attention to itself as dramatically as black, still denoted a stronger, American-style group identity than "of color."While the police's interrogation of Black Power members centered on relatively new concerns about racial movements and "racial discrimination," their archives still mostly held material relating to the longer-standing repression of the organized left. When the police ran the suspects' names through their files, they found, for instance, that Paulo dos Santos (the owner of Black Power) had previously signed a petition in favor of the legalization of the Communist Party, and that João Batista do Nascimento (a member of the Grupo Black) had promoted "subversive propaganda" during the left-center government of João Goulart in the early 1960s.28 In an interview with historian Hermano Vianna several years later, another DJ named Nirto explained that he and his cousin Dom Filó (both of Soul Grand Prix) ended up in jail "because the political police believed that behind those music groups there were clandestine leftist groups."29 In the context of shifting definitions of the political, the police tried to make sense of soul by adapting their established practices and knowledge base (surveillance of the left, links with foreign agitators) to the less familiar identity politics of soul.The police's relatively narrow measures of "subversion" rendered them unable, at times, to fully articulate some of soul's culturally oppositional aspects. This seems to have been at work in a report on a major soul party, the Third Soul Caravan, held in June 1976 at the Império Serrano club. The party's organizers, according to police records, screened the film Wattstax for the first time in Brazil.30Wattstax was the documentary of a soul and funk music festival sponsored by the Stax record label, held in 1972 in the iconic African American neighborhood of Watts (Los Angeles) to commemorate the racial uprisings that took place there in 1965. The film interspersed scenes from everyday life in the neighborhood (such as interviews with residents on issues of race and politics) with commentary from comedian Richard Pryor and clips from the music festival, where Jesse Jackson served as MC. In 1970s Brazil, the military government strictly censored films (particularly American ones) that dealt with racially explicit subjects. Censors were to be on the alert for any movies that, among other things, "depict racial problems in Brazil" or "deal with black power in the United States."31 Yet the secret police saw little to fear in the screening of Wattstax at soul dances. Their report on the Third Soul Caravan noted that "[the] exhibition of the film Watts Tax [sic] was completely truncated, with only some scenes being shown, without any kind of audio system working, in a merely visual presentation that was devoid of any demagoguery."32For the secret police to dismiss Wattstax's political potential on the grounds of soundlessness suggests their limited abilities, at that point in their investigations, to perceive the power of visual images to inspire and communicate new kinds of racial and political identities. Wattstax — with its vibrant shots of almost a hundred thousand black Americans sporting Afros, dashikis, and distinctive soul and funk styles, and filling the LA Coliseum for a majority black community event during which Jesse Jackson led the audience (fists held high) in a rousing rendition of his poem "I am somebody" (its words flashing across the stadium ticker) and the Black National Anthem — communicates an affirmation of blackness and racial pride for which no soundtrack or political oration would have been necessary. Across Rio, soul dance organizers projected soundless slides with scenes from U.S. black movies like Shaft (1971), Wattstax (1972), and Claudine (1974) as a way of underscoring the theme of "black is beautiful." In the famous "Shaft Night" parties at the Clube Renascença, for instance, organizers interspersed those images with pictures of dancers from previous weeks in order to create a proud identification between dancers and famous, beautiful people of color.33 Having the soundtrack available, however, did appear to intensify the film's power. Just a month after the Soul Caravan, Lena Frias described a screening of Wattstax in Rio's Museu de Arte Moderna, where, she claimed, just as in similar screenings across Rio's Zona Norte, members of the audience followed Jesse Jackson, fists raised, as they intoned in unison, "I am somebody."34 Frias added that phrases from the film "are memorized, repeated, embroidered onto clothing, sung, hummed, danced, whistled."35Yet the police, during their first viewing of Wattstax at the Third Soul Caravan, were less concerned with the potential politics of style than with the reassuring fact that "a climate of tranquility" seemed to characterize this and other dances, "without any kind of discrimination or animosity between people of any race, all of them enjoying the same privileges." Even the disproportionate presence of people of color at the dances was "admissible," since the music was from "North American ghettos," and therefore logically appealed primarily to people of color.36 The police, in other words, were searching for concrete evidence of racial discrimination or organized racial movements, not symbolic threats. During their infiltration of the Soul Caravan, the secret police took Tony Tornado, a leading soul singer, at his word when he declared to the public that (as the police paraphrased it) "the movement had no political or social angle, aiming only to integrate people into the musical environment." They found additional confirmation when Tornado, "questioned by one of the observers, who identified himself as a student just arrived from Recife to see him (which satisfied [Tornado] very much), added nothing to what he had already said" about the movement's politics.37It is not clear whether the "observer" in question was a partygoer or one of the agents themselves, posing as an avid soul dancer. This was a technique the secret police in Rio and elsewhere used to infiltrate the meetings of a range of social and political organizations they deemed suspicious or subversive.38 The likelihood that agents posed as dancers raises the question of the class and racial identity of the investigators. It would make sense for the agents selected to infiltrate the dances to be relatively dark skinned, given the conspicuousness of the few whites in attendance. It is also likely that the lower-level officers sent out to investigate events like the dances were of similar class backgrounds as the soul dancers — inhabitants not of favelas but of working- or lower-middle-class neighborhoods. Perhaps the agents' sense of the relative harmlessness of musical styles and fashions — as long as they remained within the boundaries of the law — stemmed from their close contacts with soul dancers they knew from their neighborhoods or families. Whether because of a blindness to the politics of style, then, or a sense of their relative harmlessness, it seems that by early July 1976, on the eve of the publication of Frias's article, investigators were willing to temper their vigilance of soul. It simply did not constitute a threat to what the police then imagined national security to be.Lena Frias's article of July 17, 1976, alerted an array of Brazilian thinkers, including a few members of the secret police, to the possibility that Rio's soul culture had deeper political implications. Specifically, Frias's article spelled out the ways that the racial imaginary encoded in soul styles endangered cherished images of Brazilian national identity. Displaying an eye for the sensational, Frias opened her article on soul in the register of fear: soul was separatist in character and was gaining popularity. She wrote about soul with an almost anthropological eye, as if describing a truly different culture (or even a cult) that had dangerously infiltrated a "proper" Rio. The "initiates of soul," she explained, are "inhabitants of the negro city of Rio, an almost secret city, to the extent that it is unknown, but whose inhabitants know each other very well. They know and recognize each other through their own signs, their own ways of greeting, their ways of dressing and self-presentation." To illustrate this, Frias's article included multiple large photographs (by Almir Veiga) of the "types" that made up Black Rio — close-ups of young men and women wearing berets, Lennon specs, narrow-legged pants, platform shoes, and Afros. (In a clear example of the ways that cultural and political symbolism blended, this hairstyle was sometimes called "cabelo black-power" in Portuguese). Another series of photos captured young men executing what Frias, in her exoticizing caption, called "stages of the complicated Black greeting ritual."39Black Rio, Frias showed, was not just black in its separatist U.S. cultural references and practices; it was literally a black or majority nonwhite urban space. For Frias, as for many others who wrote about the soul movement after her, the category of physical space best captured the nature and troubling implications of soul's racial separateness. The soul phenomenon took root in Rio's working-class peripheral neighborhoods (the Zona Norte and Greater Rio), characterized by a greater percentage of inhabitants of color than the whiter, middle-and upper-class Zona Sul. In Frias's and others' treatments, the fact that mostly black and mulatto cariocas (natives of Rio) attended these dances reinforced images of those neighborhoods as primarily nonwhite (despite the actual ethnic diversity of their inhabitants), literally a black Rio. The comparison with the United States served to make a point about the foreignness to Brazil of such racial segregation. The neighborhoods in Rio's Zona
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