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

By Anadelia Romo

2023 Honorable Mention, Brazil Section Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

This book explores visual portrayals of blackness in Brazil to reveal the integral role of visual culture in crafting race and nation across Latin America.

In the early twentieth century, Brazil shifted from a nation intent on whitening its population to one billing itself as a racial democracy. Anadelia Romo shows that this shift centered in Salvador, Bahia, where throughout the 1950s, modernist artists and intellectuals forged critical alliances with Afro-Brazilian religious communities of Candomblé to promote their culture and their city. These efforts combined with a growing promotion of tourism to transform what had been one of the busiest slaving depots in the Americas into a popular tourist enclave celebrated for its rich Afro-Brazilian culture. Vibrant illustrations and texts by the likes of Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, and others contributed to a distinctive iconography of the city, with Afro-Bahians at its center. But these optimistic visions of inclusion, Romo reveals, concealed deep racial inequalities. Illustrating how these visual archetypes laid the foundation for Salvador’s modern racial landscape, this book unveils the ways ethnic and racial populations have been both included and excluded not only in Brazil but in Latin America as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781477324219

Book preview

Selling Black Brazil

Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia

ANADELIA A. ROMO

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2022

Publication of this book was made possible in part by support from the Pachita Tennant Pike Fund for Latin American Studies.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Romo, Anadelia A., author.

Title: Selling Black Brazil : race, nation, and visual culture in Salvador, Bahia / Anadelia A. Romo.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

LCCN 2021020084

ISBN 978-1-4773-2419-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2420-2 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2421-9 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Culture and tourism—Brazil—Salvador—History—20th century. | Tourism and art—Brazil—Salvador—History—20th century—Pictorial works. | City promotion—Brazil—Salvador—History—20th century. | National characteristics, Brazilian. | Blacks—Brazil—Social conditions. | Indigenous peoples—Brazil—Social conditions. | Salvador (Brazil)—Guidebooks—History—20th century—Pictorial works. | Salvador (Brazil)—Guidebooks—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC G155.B6 R66 2022 | DDC 338.4/7918142—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020084

doi:10.7560/324196

For Lily and Emmett

Contents

Preface

Glossary

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

1. Precedents and Backdrops: Racial Types and Modern Ports

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

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

4. Festive Streets: Carybé and Bahian Modernism

5. Human and Picturesque: Consolidation in the Bahian Tourist Guides of the 1950s

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

Epilogue: Reflection and Refraction

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book began its life as a very specialized study of one capital city in Brazil’s Northeast: São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, more commonly known as Salvador or, simply, Bahia. As I began to write, however, I soon realized that my initial framing was far too limited: this was not just a story of Bahian identity or regionalism in Brazil, two well-respected themes in Brazilian history to which I had intended to contribute. It was, rather, a story familiar across the Americas, even the United States. It was a story of making the local national and of using native elements to build a larger national identity. And it was a story familiar across the diaspora, one that spoke to the deep power of racial stereotypes and the difficult trajectory of Afro–Latin Americans in the larger visual register. I have written, therefore, a book that I hope speaks to these broader concerns, and a book that I believe expresses the larger trajectory of the Americas rather than of Brazil alone.

I have also written the type of book I like to teach. I place Bahia and Brazil firmly within the trajectory of Latin America, rather than as regions best treated apart. I show that ideas of race permeate everything, and I make Blackness, not just Indigeneity, a part of the conversation. I use a close case study to bring texture and life to larger regional trends, with vibrant images as primary sources. And I have tried throughout to write concisely in a language free from jargon and unnecessary complications so that students as well as specialized scholars may follow along.

Equally important to this book is my treatment of images as central to the argument itself. This too came gradually. I started off interested in the many tourist guides written within Salvador, works that I had discovered while writing my first book on racial thought in twentieth-century Bahia. But as I prepared to give a small talk on what I assumed might eventually make an interesting article, I realized that the fascinating part of the story depended upon the guides’ powerful illustrations. Why were some of the top cultural figures in the city wasting their time on these seemingly prosaic projects? And why did some of the most prominent modernist artists of the region join in? Why did Afro-Bahian religious leaders prove so sympathetic to these efforts? And why did the ideas and the images of these works read as so familiar? These guides, I realized, were about more than tourism: they were potent tools for crafting identity. Perhaps more importantly, they had been successful. Understandings of Salvador today, I argue, can be in large part traced to the tropes and patterns developed in the guides of the 1950s.

This focus on images has placed me in unfamiliar but exciting territory, as I am not an art historian. But I have brought art into the narrative because these images are critical to the work undertaken in the crafting of identity, and because Salvador has a particularly vivid and fascinating iconography that deserves more critical attention. Few outside of Bahia know much about this iconography, while those inside Bahia have often taken it for granted or viewed it as a particularly Bahian development. Yet placing this visual culture within the larger story of the Americas allows us to uncover broader parallels and showcases the way in which the visual world has both reflected and driven social change. This particular narrative has much to tell about how incorporation into a national symbolic realm may reveal disturbing limits and how ethnic and racial populations have been simultaneously included and excluded across the hemisphere.

The tension between inclusion and exclusion has deep parallels elsewhere. Descendants of African and Indigenous peoples all across the Americas have spent much of the twentieth century battling for inclusion and equal rights, an elusive outcome far from complete today. Yet the dynamic that has puzzled historians and frustrated activists is not only that progress in these arenas has failed to proceed in linear fashion but that it has advanced unevenly across legal, political-economic, and cultural spheres. More to the point, moments of cultural acceptance have not always mapped on to political and legal rights.

This dialectic—this critical disjuncture between national imaginations and political rights—is everything in the Americas. It makes up the central contradiction of the Americas, from US insistence on its democratic foundations in the midst of slavery to Brazil’s celebrations of racial democracy in what has long been one of the most unequal countries of the world. This book captures this dichotomy in Latin America, where the gap between cultural inclusion and political rights has been particularly stark, and in Salvador, where this gap is key to any understanding of the city and of Brazil.

Glossary

atabaque. A tall, wooden hand drum with origins in West and Central Africa. Yoruba-based Candomblé rituals often employ a trio of the drums, while a single drum is often used as accompaniment to capoeira.

Baiana. Literally, woman from Bahia. The term has come to be more closely associated with Afro-Bahian women and usually references a woman who wears a particular type of clothing: long, full skirts, a shawl, and a wrapped head scarf. That style may often correspond closely to the ceremonial clothing of Candomblé, but in reality women known as Baianas dress in a variety of styles.

baiana de acarajé. A woman who owns or operates a street stall and often wears a traditional Baiana form of dress; an acarajé is a fritter made of black-eyed peas, fried in a West African red palm oil known as dendê, and frequently cooked by Afro-Bahian female food vendors at small stalls on the street.

Candomblé. An African-based religion that gained new roots in Brazil under slavery. It has been particularly associated with the state of Bahia and especially with the city of Salvador. The term refers broadly to a diverse set of practices, although the Yoruba-based practice of Salvador has come to enjoy the most prestige. I capitalize the term when referring to the religion as a whole and use the lower case when referring to one temple, or terreiro, in particular.

capoeira. An African-based form of martial defense that developed under slavery, utilizing rigorous physical movements that are most commonly accompanied today by acoustic instruments and chants or singing. It became more systematized in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly among Afro-Bahian men in Salvador. Although the practice became an important element for Brazilian nationalism, becoming appropriated as a form of national gymnastics, Salvador is often seen as the most important site for its development.

mestiço. A term that serves a similar function as the Spanish word mestizo, conveying mixed heritage. It has also been used as a racial term, most often to refer to individuals with heritage from both Europe and Africa.

Obá. A title given to individuals who serve within the Salvador candomblé Opô Afonjá as one of twelve ministers of the god Xangô, a particularly important deity within Yoruba religions. The leadership of Mãe Aninha inaugurated use of the title in Salvador in the early 1930s, situating the practice as a continuation of African traditions. Under the leadership of her successor, Mãe Senhora, the twelve ministers each gained two additional posts, also broadly defined as Obás, for a total of thirty-six Obás.

Ogã. An ally or sponsor of a particular candomblé who may assist with financing of religious rituals or with navigating relations with outside authorities. Most Ogã go through initiation but do not undergo any religious possession (a privilege reserved for true initiates). An Ogã may serve as an Obá.

Orixá. A god worshiped in Candomblé; the term comes from Yoruba practice.

Paulista. An adjective used to describe someone or something from the southeastern state of São Paulo.

Pelourinho. In general terms, a pillory or whipping post used for public punishment of enslaved people. Salvador’s historic preservation zone is known today as the Pelourinho, in reference to the whipping post once located at the center of its colonial streets. A district dominated by colorfully restored colonial mansions, the Pelourinho was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985 and is the leading tourist attraction in the city.

povo. Although this word refers literally to the people, it carries a more particular nuance that often references Brazil’s popular classes or the underclass.

Recôncavo. The crescent-shaped territory that surrounds Salvador’s bay and surrounds Bahia’s capital city of Salvador. Historically it represented some of the richest sugar land in colonial Brazil and a center for enslaved labor.

terreiro. Translates literally as yard but has a different set of meanings in relation to Candomblé; most often used as a synonym for temple, or a particular candomblé, but can also refer to the religious buildings and properties belonging to a candomblé.

Figure 0.1. Map of Brazil.

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

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

In the following pages, I examine the complexities of nation making and race through both text and image, with a particular case study of Brazil, one of the most fascinating cases of national reinvention. Although Brazil began the twentieth century as a nation intent on whitening its population, it shifted in the next decades to bill itself as a nation with its origins in racial mixture and, ultimately, as a racial democracy. This last ideal, forged through the 1930s, posited that the three foundational components of Brazil—the Indigenous, the European, and the African—had come together in a society free from prejudice. Though patently false, this idealistic vision proved useful in unifying a diverse country riven by deep inequalities and regional divisions, and Brazil’s supposedly unique capacity for racial democracy became a national mantra by the 1950s.³

Even as this mantra became central to Brazil, however, it was always regionalized. Thus, as the twentieth century unfolded, the southeastern state of São Paulo billed itself as the European, or white, element of this triad; the Amazon in the North became known as Indigenous; and the northeastern state of Bahia, and especially its urban capital of Salvador, came to represent the African, or Black, heart of Brazil.⁴ In this book, I turn to the last part of the triad and give close attention to the importance of visual culture in crafting a Bahian identity around Blackness in the postwar era. More specifically, I use a once growing body of illustrated tourist literature, one that peaked in the 1950s, to trace the changing visual register. Locals came to depict the region as a racial paradise as well as the preserve of Brazil’s most authentic Black practices, even as the city struggled to emerge from deep poverty and stark racial inequalities that had deep roots in slavery.

A developing visual culture proved critical to establishing these tropes. Images not only spoke louder than words, as the aphorism goes; they also spoke to a much broader audience in Brazil, where literacy rates remained exceptionally low for most of the twentieth century, than words ever could. Whether in photographs or pen and ink, these depictions consistently portrayed Salvador’s Black majority as festive, as engaged in extensive practice of leisure, and as congregants in a colonial streetscape that limited the portrayals of Blackness to a very precise and narrow geographic location. I demonstrate that the intersection of tourism and a new visual landscape of the city shaped and consolidated pernicious stereotypes of Blackness and exoticized visions of African culture in Salvador. The racialized visual archetypes that developed through the 1950s made Black bodies a foil to urban white space, solidifying the city’s image in corporal, racialized forms that have persisted to the present day. The early years of tourism promotion in Salvador and the concurrent development of a set of visual archetypes laid the foundations for Salvador’s modern racial landscape and reveal the central contradictions of Brazilian racial ideology.

This visual cityscape, like the built landscape of skyscrapers used to depict São Paulo, or the natural crescent of coast used to represent Rio de Janeiro, is often deemed a simple reflection of reality. But just like any landscape, these scenes have been carefully framed to reflect particular social and political needs. As Simon Schama proposes, It is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape.⁵ Though Schama here is addressing natural landscapes, his words ring equally true for examining the construction of urban landscapes. Likewise, it is this constructed ideal I wish to draw upon to emphasize: while the raw matter of Salvador might have been itself real, the artists who portrayed the urban landscape of the city inevitably used their own shaping perceptions to do so. This is important to stress because many of the artists treated in this work have claimed to be, and have often been treated as, documentary recorders of reality and even ethnographers. One of my most basic interventions in this book is to call attention to a fundamental point long taken as a given for social art historians: that images provide a reflection of society’s anxieties and concerns rather than a mere reflection of reality itself. Far from accepting such images as natural, then, or as inevitable, we must question the social, economic, and political forces that created these icons and allowed them to persist.

Salvador’s constructed landscape is both typical and exceptional, revealing all of the complexities of forging identity in the Americas, even as it permits a window into one of the few cases where Blackness became imagined as central in the larger African diaspora. The story of Salvador provides yet another example of how the colonial collisions of race in the Americas have been continually renegotiated and how ideas of race themselves have changed. It provides a microhistory of the way in which nations in Latin America turned to more diverse origins for their national image, even as they remained mired in many older ways of racial thought. Yet at the same time, Salvador’s focus on Blackness has been relatively uncommon in Latin America, where Indigenous rather than African roots have been most commonly drawn upon for national identity myths. With the exception of Haiti, identification of a space with Blackness has been limited to regions rather than nations.⁶ This is not simply a reflection of a heavier Indigenous presence in Latin America. Africans, uprooted by slavery in massive numbers, spread across Latin America beginning with the earliest conquistadors, establishing the foundations and a critical population base for New World societies.⁷ While the contributions of Africans in the Americas have been deep and critical, their visual representations often barely register in the production of images in Latin America, or they have been treated as a racial type isolated from the larger whole. The visual presence of Afro–Latin Americans has been uneven, structured by power relations that simultaneously sought to make Blackness invisible while asserting Black servitude and Black presence as critical to life in the Americas. Indeed, the process of coming to terms with Blackness in the visual representations of Latin America is still very much under way and incomplete.⁸

The trajectory of Salvador shows how deep legacies of slavery continue to surface, even as ideas of race are rethought. The rethinking of race and aesthetics there gained inspiration from other Black movements across the Atlantic, whether the Afro-Cuban ideal of writers such as Nicolás Guillén, Francophone celebrations of negritude, the art of the Harlem Renaissance, or the diasporic studies of African connections led by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits. Salvador also reveals fascinating comparisons with other former sugar zones that have sought to reinvent their economies after the collapse of the plantation system. Unlike the British Caribbean, which has focused on images of the islands as tropical paradises empty of people, Salvador aligns perhaps more closely with New Orleans, where colonial mansion tours often celebrate a whitened sugar past even as they exploit contemporary notions of Black revelry for tourists.⁹ These brief comparisons raise interesting questions of how zones formerly defined by violence, exploitation, and slavery reinvent themselves in modern terms. The case of Salvador reveals, then, the long shadows of the system of Atlantic slavery, one that brought together broad swaths of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in vastly unequal terms.

The Bahian Setting

Salvador began its life at the center of Brazil’s colonial project. The first Portuguese arrival to Brazil landed on Bahian shores in 1500, some two hundred miles south of Salvador, and the foundation of Salvador in 1549 marked it among the colony’s earliest cities. Portuguese settlers intruded into territory long inhabited by Indigenous groups, especially the Tupinambá, creating conflicts that were smoothed over by the marriage of the Portuguese-born Diogo Álvares Correia to a woman known as Catarina Paraguaçu, an Indigenous daughter of a local leader. These alliances, however, could not stem the devastating effects of European illnesses. As was true across the Americas, the Indigenous population in Brazil suffered steep decline due to disease, and Portuguese colonists turned instead to bringing in Africans as their new choice for forced labor.

Salvador rapidly emerged as one of the largest ports of entry for enslaved Africans in world history, bringing in over 1.5 million souls.¹⁰ So heavy was the dependence on enslaved labor that foreigners who walked Salvador’s streets in the nineteenth century marveled at feeling as if they were in Africa itself. Among these was the traveler Avé Lallement, who wrote in 1859, If one did not know that Bahia is located in Brazil, one could easily imagine it to be an African capital, the residence of a powerful Black prince. . . . Everything looks Black: Blacks on the beach, Blacks in the city, Blacks in the low part, Blacks in the high city. Everything that runs, shouts, works, everything that transports and carries is Black.¹¹ This slave economy, which persisted in Brazil until 1888, served to bring enormous wealth to the colonial settlers. The sugar plantations that surrounded Salvador’s bay grew to support opulent churches and a bustling city center and port. Meanwhile, the wealth of the enslaved and their descendants—poor in material terms but rich in heritage from West Africa—allowed for the building up of dynamic cultural traditions even in the midst of a brutal slave regime, from the martial arts and dance of capoeira to the new African-based religions that would become known as Candomblé.¹²

Salvador’s fortunes changed with the rise of new sugar zones in other areas of the world and with the declining productivity of its soil. Furthermore, the discovery of gold in central western Brazil and the rising importance of areas of the coastal Southeast meant Salvador found itself quickly displaced from its role as center of the colony, an insult consolidated with the move of the capital to Rio in 1763. Industrialization, dawning slowly in Brazil’s Southeast at the turn of the twentieth century, largely bypassed Bahia, which continued to rely on primary exports such as minerals, cacao, and hemp. Bahia remained important due to its bustling port and its agricultural bounties. But, increasingly, it faced the scorn of the rest of Brazil, particularly Brazil’s Southeast, which deemed the state backward and outside of modernity itself. Such assessments were of course racialized. Moreover, they were formed within a jockeying for power that was taking place among Brazil’s regions, one in which each strove to insist on its dominant place in the nation.

Bahia’s regional dominance had been assured in the colonial era by its slavery, but as slavery ended and scientific racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gained sway, elites increasingly worried that the capital’s Black population had become a liability. Despite the central importance of Black life to the city, Salvador began the twentieth century much like other regions of Latin America, and very much in the vein of Brazil itself: insisting instead on its whiteness, its modernity, and its progress.¹³ This deliberate crafting of whiteness calls attention to the fact that a Black majority has not always equated to a Black identity for the city, nor an easy acceptance for Black cultures. Indeed, at the dawn of the twentieth century, whites, who made up only 30 percent of the city’s population but monopolized most of its wealth and power, fretted about how best to divert attention from (and repress) the continued, undeniable presence of the city’s large Black population.¹⁴ These calculations began to shift in the 1930s and 1940s as Brazil as a whole began to privilege official celebrations of racial mixing and Brazil’s African roots; Bahia joined, if sometimes reluctantly, in these trends.¹⁵ As pseudoscientific ideas of inferiority lost ground in international circles, as the national sphere embraced an idea of a multiracial Brazil, and as local actors reconfigured understandings of race and space, Blackness became the centerpiece of Bahian identity.

The process of shaping Salvador’s identity around Africa or Blackness had its origins in a variety of sources and groups. Afro-Bahians pushed back against the racism of the nineteenth century to forge their own values in religion, in carnival, and in daily life. The religious space of Candomblé, a religion fusing African beliefs and Brazilian realities, took an especially important role in asserting the value of African roots, as did early Afro-Bahian writers such as Manuel Querino.¹⁶ By the 1930s, academics further endorsed this view, with scholars such as Edison Carneiro, Arthur Ramos, Roger Bastide, Ruth Landes, and Melville Herskovits declaring Bahia a preeminent source of Black culture and African continuities.¹⁷ By the 1950s, the question of regional identity in Salvador was in the midst of significant change, with Black culture seen as a new potential draw for visitors. The next decades brought remarkable consolidation of these trends, as Black cultural manifestations became key not only to official tourist promotions but also to a new countercultural tourism: hippies and leftists flocked to Salvador for a vanishing authentic or primitive culture within Brazil.¹⁸

As institutions of historical preservation expanded their purview during this period and beyond, the largely Black population of the Pelourinho historic center came to be viewed (and to view itself) as just as essential to Bahia’s historical patrimony as the city’s colonial buildings.¹⁹ By the late twentieth century, Salvador had become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, famed equally for its colonial preservation and its role as the cultural capital of Brazil’s African diaspora. It has become a central tourist destination for Brazilians as well as for a much wider international travel circuit. Today over 80 percent of the state’s population, or roughly twelve million people, identify as nonwhite, and the state—itself the size of France—hosts the largest population of Afro-descendants outside of Nigeria.²⁰

While Bahia’s Black culture and African roots have been widely celebrated, material conditions for Black residents have lagged far behind. The result is a city that has often been inclusive in terms of its identity but profoundly exclusive in terms of basic welfare. Recent statistics from 2015 show that Salvador had the highest income inequality between Blacks and whites of any of Brazil’s largest cities, with Black workers receiving only 48 percent of what white workers earned. Within Brazil, horrifying levels of police violence have killed Black citizens in numbers almost unequaled across the Americas; the state of Bahia ranks third in the country for police killings. Even as numbers continue to increase, the shattering 2015 police massacre of twelve young Black men remains a symbol of the vulnerability of Black lives in the city.²¹ Salvador’s inclusionary ideal has concealed the realities of racial exclusion, racial inequalities, and widespread racial violence. In contrast to its projected image of racial harmony, the region has yet to find meaningful solutions for these problems.

Definitions

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

There were always tensions, for example, between those who privileged an African-based identity and those who defined Blackness in Salvador as based on local culture. In general terms, Candomblé practitioners tended to highlight African roots as key to their identity and to their religious legitimacy. This emphasis was not always shared by other members of the Black population in the city, however, particularly its small Black upper class, many of whom rejected any association with Africa to integrate more fully into a mainstream culture that often denigrated such connections. Meanwhile, many white elites sought to define Black culture as a distinctively Brazilian creation, minimizing African influence for a more nationalist vision that all might share and participate in. Their billing of African-based culture as folklore should surely be read as an effort to harness these cultural manifestations to a shared national heritage rather than a racial one. Yet these broad divisions cannot capture the frequent overlaps between the aspirations of all parties, who ended up in many cases working together to build an image of Salvador centered on its Blackness. Although I cannot possibly do justice to all of the nuance within the activities of these individual actors, I draw out some of these distinctions when relevant. My ultimate argument, however, is that regardless of the complexity of the central actors I treat in this narrative, they all ultimately agreed that Black cultural practice was central to Salvador. Although less is known of the broader popular reception among Salvador’s Black populations, available evidence suggests that, at least for some members of the Candomblé community, such portrayals met with approval.

I should note here that some have worried that scholars from the United States impose a binary vision of race onto Brazil in ways that betray the complexity of complex color and class hierarchies. I agree that race is culturally determined and certainly reject any notion that the complexity of race today may be reduced to mere binaries. Not only does the history of Latin America make such an assumption untenable, but on a personal level, as a scholar with both Mexican American and white heritage, I well understand notions of nuance and complication. Yet while I agree that there is a fundamental flexibility of race and color categories in Latin America, I also recognize the important scholarship by anthropologists such as Robin Sheriff who have found that Brazilians, despite their panoply of racial and color terms, generally categorize people in binary terms of either Black or white. Demographers too have revealed that despite the popular idea of pardo (brown) or mestiço (mixed) as independent categories, the largest gap falls between whites and everyone else, with Black, pardo, and mestiço populations all suffering similar levels of exclusion in terms of health, education, and income. More recently, it has also become painfully clear that while gradations of color might matter in some social settings, or in the academic realm, they disappear in the sights of the police, where binary divisions of Black and white have clearly held sway with devastating effects. In this sense, police have not stopped to question gradations of color and instead have unleashed violence on nonwhites more broadly, with Brazil’s nonwhite population decimated by police killings.²² With these larger patterns in mind, I thus follow the practice of the Black movement in Brazil, which groups those of African heritage together. I refer to populations of African descent alternately as Black, as nonwhite, and as Afro-Bahian or Afro-Brazilian, striving throughout to uncover the particular ways in which race became used and understood by inhabitants of Salvador itself.

Space, Region, and Nation

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

Historians of Brazil have stressed this creative process more broadly as critical for the formations of regional identities. As Durval Albuquerque Júnior—one of the earliest scholars to ponder these regional inventions—reminds us, the task for historians is to denaturalize regions, to problematize their invention, and to search for their historicity among layers of practices and discourses.²⁵ With this emphasis of region making as a historical process in mind, we can better frame Bahia’s own invention of itself as one among many. Regional promoters across the nation sought to build up a distinct sense of the regions’ own identity, but always in relation to national discourse in place at the time. A rough sketch would show that the modern shaping of Brazil’s regions took root for most in the 1920s, escalated during the nationalistic years under the leadership of the dictator Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945), and continued to build through the 1950s and 1960s. In this process Salvador has often been regarded as the ultimate symbol of Bahia, as well as, more recently, one of the most significant markers of the region known as the Northeast.²⁶

Racial ideas of difference became central to regional identities early. As Barbara Weinstein demonstrated for São Paulo, the region worked hard to portray itself as the embodiment of whiteness and modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, while the Northeast was set up as its backward, darker counterpart. Such portrayals went further than being merely discursive. As she proposes, such frameworks not only depended on ideas of difference but helped develop policies and decisions that consolidate and exacerbate regional inequalities.²⁷ To put it bluntly, ideas, just as much as any economic reality, have mattered in the creation of the