Claiming Caribbeanness in the Brazilian Amazon: Lambada, Critical Cosmopolitanism, and the Creation...

Claiming Caribbeanness in the Brazilian Amazon: Lambada, CriticalCosmopolitanism, and the Creation of an Alternative Amazon

Darien Lamen

Latin American Music Review, Volume 34, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2013,pp. 131-161 (Article)

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Latin American Music Review, Volume 34, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2013 © 2013 by the University of Texas Press

DOI: 10.7560/LAMR34201

Darien L amen

Claiming Caribbeanness in the Brazilian Amazon:

Lambada, Critical Cosmopolitanism, and

the Creation of an Alternative Amazon

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abstr act: Located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlantic, the port city of Belém do Pará has been an important point of conver-gence for transnational flows of commodities, people, and culture, including a vast array of up-tempo Caribbean dance genres known locally as lambada. Since the late twenti-eth century, inhabitants of Belém and surrounding areas have sought to make a virtue of their liminal position between the hegemonic centers of southeastern Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. This article shows how musicians, dancers, listeners, and culture bro-kers draw on the local history of Caribbean cosmopolitan musicality to articulate an alter-native Amazonian regional identity, one characterized by connectedness and proximity to their Caribbean neighbors rather than by isolation and provincialism. In so doing, the arti-cle contributes to the remapping of the cultural contours of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Am-azon, and Latin America.

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keywords: Brazilian Amazon, circum-Caribbean, lambada, cosmopolitanism, regionalism

resumo: Localizada na Amazônia Oriental a três horas de barco do Oceano Atlântico, a cidade portuária de Belém do Pará tem sido um ponto de convergência importante na circulação transnacional de produtos, pessoas e cultura, assim como a amálgama de esti-los musicais caribenhos conhecida localmente por “lambada”. A partir da segunda metade do século XX, habitantes de Belém e arredores vêm transformando em virtude a limina-lidade geográfica entre o sudeste brasileiro e o Caribe. Este artigo mostra como músicos, dançarinos, ouvintes e gatekeepers culturais mobilizam a história local da musicalidade ca-ribenha-paraense para afirmar uma identidade amazônica alternativa e cosmopolita, assim combatendo as representações hegemônicas que retratam a região como um espaço iso-lado e provinciano. Desta forma procuramos contribuir para um remapeamento cultural do Brasil, do Caribe, da Amazônia e da América Latina.

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palavras chave: Amazônia brasileira, circum-Caribe, lambada, cosmopolitismo, regionalismo

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132 ■ Darie n L am e n

Locals routinely say that the port city of Belém do Pará, located in the east-ern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlan-tic, grew up more attuned to the sounds of the Caribbean than to those of the rest of Brazil. Beginning in the 1960s, it became increasingly common for merchant marines, contrabandists, and other border crossers to bring back sundry vinyl records of circum-Caribbean dance music from their trips abroad. Recordings of merengue, cumbia, and cadence (or cadence-lypso) nourished an especially vibrant but stigmatized local subculture in which Caribbean musical styles became popularized under the name of lambada1 (a regionalism for a “lashing,” used in this context to refer to mu-sic that was tantamount to physical beating when danced to). Fleets of lo-cally assembled sound systems that played almost every day of the week in Belém and surrounding rural areas were crucial to broadly disseminat-ing this grab bag of Caribbean styles. Local musicians were inspired to create their own interpretations of the foreign styles they heard all around them in order to be able to play them live with their dance bands. In the late 1970s and 1980s local entrepreneurs hired many of these bands to record their eclectic Caribbean-influenced music for an emergent Belém-based music industry that labeled this music lambada paraense or, in cases where instrumental lambadas were performed on solo electric guitar, guitarradas. And so, in a seemingly isolated corner of the Brazilian na-tion, members of the underclass developed a cosmopolitan music culture that would eventually come to serve as the basis for claiming an alterna-tive Amazonian identity and, in the process, would position Pará (the state of which Belém is the capital) as privileged gatekeeper and purveyor of Ca-ribbeanness to the nation.2 “It’s like people say,” the used-record vendor Max Alvim told me, signaling that he was drawing on the authority of a broader popular discourse in Pará:

Belém has always been the entryway [porta de entrada] to the rest of Brazil for things coming from above here [aqui em cima]. . . . It was from Belém that Caribbean music went out to the rest of Brazil, be-cause it was here that people first started to get into merengue, and from here it started to reach Recife, [then] Bahia, and it kept going until it reached the south of the country.3

As this article examines, claiming Caribbeanness in the Brazilian Ama-zon has provided Paraenses (i.e., inhabitants of Pará state) a way of both critiquing insidious and pervasive representations of the Amazon as a cultural void and simultaneously challenging the national cultural hege-mony of the southeastern Brazilian metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The use of Caribbean music for this dual purpose is part of what I,

Claiming Caribbeanness in the Brazilian Amazon ■ 133

drawing on Alexander Sebastian Dent’s (2007) work, refer to here as crit-ical cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism, according to Dent (2007, 212), typically criticizes “without framing that criticism in earnest and conventionally political modes, unlike most ‘identity politics.’ Instead of a cosmopolitanism aimed at the explicitly political, we may thus think more broadly of ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanisms that desire to ‘project a new world be-yond the expected’” (citations omitted). In the case of Pará, we can under-stand the lambada as the audible projection of this “new world beyond the expected,” that is, as a sonic representation of a place of longing and be-longing that is nonetheless deeply rooted in northeastern Paraense expe-riences of modernity, migration, and marginalization within the Brazilian nation-state. In this sense, the critical cosmopolitanism of the lambada also articulates a sort of critical regionalism (e.g., Moreiras 2001; Draper 2011) whereby the Brazilian Southeast’s claims to national cultural and po-litical hegemony are contested and revealed as contingent.

When I began my field research in northeastern Pará in 2008, the under lying basis for Paraenses’ identification with Caribbean music across often-considerable linguistic and geographical boundaries posed something of a puzzle. How was it that such a cosmopolitan music cul-ture emerged in a region that has historically been viewed as isolated and provincial, “the last place you can get to by land” (Lamen 2011a, 5) from the metropolitan centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the Brazil-ian Southeast? What do Paraenses mean when they assert that Belém is “very close to the Caribbean,” even though the distance between Belém and sites in the Caribbean proper is roughly equal to that between Belém and Rio? 4 Exactly which “Caribbean” are they referring to, then, and how is it made to feel close? In point of fact, most Paraenses have relatively lit-tle direct contact with the Caribbean proper. They have not traveled to the Dominican Republic, Martinique, or Trinidad—countries whose popu-lar music is intimately familiar to many Paraenses—nor have immigrants from the Caribbean settled in Belém in considerable numbers. And un-like in other cases of circum-Caribbean musical (be)longing—such as the emergence of champeta and so-called música africana in Colombia (Pacini Hernandez 1996) and samba-reggae in Salvador da Bahia (Godi 2001)—shared Afro-diasporic identity is not actively claimed as the underlying basis for transnational musical affinities. However, many Paraenses have had extensive contact with the neighboring Guianas via circular migra-tion, mass-media flows, and transnational shipping, such that these coun-tries alternately serve as filters and as proxies for Caribbeanness within the Paraense imaginary. The borders of the Paraense “Caribbean” are subject to negotiation—in one moment they encompass the neighboring Guianas, and in another they exclude them, enshrining instead a more


nebulous “Latin American Caribbean.” As I suggest, Paraenses’ identifi-cation with various types of Caribbean popular music and the correspond-ing invocation of Caribbeanness turn on a notion of the Caribbean as a space of alternative modernity and cosmopolitan mobility. In the contem-porary moment, the invocation of Caribbeanness also has a great deal to do with its commodifiability within a Brazilian cultural economy built around the exploitation of regional difference (Lucas 2000).

The lack of scholarship capable of addressing very basic questions about the local penchant for Caribbean music was notable as I began conducting ethnographic interviews and combing through newspaper articles, used-record stands, and local fiction in Pará in 2008. The lack of ethnomusico-logical scholarship on the nonindigenous Amazon all told seems to reflect widespread representations elsewhere of the region as “an invidious void” (Ramos 1998, 222), or a demographic and cultural vacuum. One of the ob-jectives of this article is to address this lacuna of basic information about Amazonian popular music. However, I also hope to provide a basis for transregional comparison and to begin placing recent ethnographic work on Amazonian popular music (e.g., Guerreiro do Amaral 2009; Metz 2010; Farias 2009, 2011; Lamen 2011a) into dialogue with studies of cir-cum-Caribbean popular music that have begun to make headway in de-constructing intellectual cartographies overdetermined along linguistic and national lines (e.g., Pacini Hernandez 1996; Waxer 2002; Fernández L’Hoeste 2007; Moura 2010; Pacini Hernandez 2010).

This article is divided into two main sections. The first, “Origin Myths of a Caribbean Amazon,” provides an overview of the lambada’s history and the origins of Paraense Caribbeanness, as narrated by participants and witnesses of the lambada subculture of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The second section, “Regionalist Cosmopolitics and Caribbeanness as Surplus,” considers in greater detail the political “work” that such an al-ternative imagining of Paraense culture does, and could potentially do, within the context of regional and national cultural politics. The final sec-tion provides a sort of epilogue in which I gesture toward the ways that the lambada’s official recognition by Pará’s state government since 2001 and the style’s subsequent commercialization within national cultural econo-mies has in some ways compromised the critical and counterhegemonic potential of local articulations of Caribbean cosmopolitanism.

Origin Myths of a Caribbean Amazon

In a frequently cited interview from 1985, Paraense poet, politician, and composer Rui Barata (1920– 90) explained how a Caribbean musical aes-thetic managed to take shape in the eastern Amazon.5 Drawing on pop-


ular narratives especially familiar to Paraenses born during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, he stated:

All the [Brazilian] radio stations . . . arrived to us with terrible recep-tion. The trick was to tune in stations from the Caribbean which made for better listening. From hearing Caribbean rhythms so much, Pará ended up assimilating the merengue, which was nationalized, among us, with the delightful name of “lambada.” (Qtd. in Lobato 2001, 25, emphasis added)

Barata’s seemingly idiosyncratic use of the word nationalized, as opposed to regionalized or localized, can be understood as an enunciative act of col-lective self-imagining, that is, as an attempt to mobilize existing social po-etics to conjure into being a utopian world that does not currently exist. Barata’s beloved 1970s song “Porto Caribe” (Caribbean Port) provides a similar example. The lyrics state, “I’m from a country called Pará / Whose seaport is the Caribbean / And I know from the records of old [Xavier] Cugat / That I cannot live sin bailar.” Barata’s lyrics, written in a sort of Spanish-Portuguese creole, provide us with a first glimpse of Caribbean music’s importance to formulations of an alternative Amazonian identity. They provide an example of what Shalini Puri, drawing on Sartre, refers to as inspiration speech. “The value of inspiration speech,” Puri writes, “lies not in its literal un/truth but in what its performance of confidence and energy might make possible” (2004, 89). In this section, I am interested in what alternative realities such articulations of Amazonian identity might make possible. While I point out some of the tensions and contra-dictions in the way the past is constructed by my informant collaborators, my purpose here is not to distinguish between the past as objectively ver-ifiable fact, as memory, or as myth, but rather to suggest how the past is re-membered to serve the needs of the present. I argue that the history of the lambada is frequently invoked as a sort of origin myth of an alterna-tive Amazon that contests both hegemonic representations of the region and the concentric hierarchies of place within which Paraenses have been ideologically circumscribed—inhabitants of provincial outposts on the pe-riphery of a nation in the Global South (see Farias 2011).

Max José Nascimento Alvim, born in Belém in 1963, continues his fa-ther’s work as a used-record vendor in Belém’s historical city center. His roughly three-by-eight-foot sebo, or sidewalk stand, is located just one block from the docks on Guajará Bay in the shadow of the colonial-era customs building. It is stocked with an improbable variety of worn and mildewed LPs (long-play records), many of which arrived in Belém from abroad over the past fifty years. These include recordings of merengue, usually those


made in the United States by artists from the Dominican Republic, such as Ángel Viloria and Luis Kalaff; Colombian cumbia, paseaíto, and porro, especially the recordings of Los Corraleros de Majagual; Haitian, Guade-loupean, and Dominican konpa and cadence-lypso by groups such as the Gramacks, Les Aiglons, and Midnight Groovers; Trinidadian and Mont-serratian soca; as well as Caribbean-influenced genres of Paraense popu-lar music such as brega (a romantic song genre similar to bachata, derived from bolero and early rock and roll) and lambada. Sebos like Max’s were among my initial points of entry into cosmopolitan imaginaries of a Carib-bean Amazon, for frequenters never seemed to tire of discussing the ori-gins of the lambada with those curious enough to ask and patient enough to listen. While previewing records on a single modest speaker, the regu-lars at Max’s sebo (generally between fifty and seventy years of age) dis-cussed the artists on the albums and the places they were from, the locals they knew who used to smuggle LPs back from Cayenne or Paramaribo on their fishing boats, and the sound-system dances they used to frequent where this music would play.

In their research on Cali and Cartagena, Colombia, respectively, Lise Waxer (2002) and Deborah Pacini Hernandez (1996) have both written about cases of working-class cosmopolitanism among record collectors, dockworkers, and sailors that bear striking similarities to the Paraense case. Crew members of international ships that docked in Belém on their way south along the Brazilian coast or west to the interior Amazonian city of Manaus brought vinyl records to sell or trade with local contacts dur-ing their stays on land. Transnational shipping is particularly compelling as an explanation for the arrival and naturalization of a “foreign” musi-cality because of the importance of the boat as a symbol of and vehicle for the cosmopolitan imagination, one with distinctively local resonances in the Amazon (see, e.g., Foucault 1986, 27; DeLoughrey, 2007, 3; see also Lamen 2011b).

In addition to the large-ship traffic that converged on Belém’s main port area, a considerable amount of traffic also passed through the hid-den coves and docks around Belém. During the 1950s and 1960s, the port cities of Belém, Cayenne (French Guiana), and Paramaribo (Suriname) came to serve as key entrepôts in a corridor known locally as the zona do contrabando. Coffee, cacao, hides, precious stones, and other items were smuggled from Brazil to buyers in North America and Europe, while per-fumes, whiskey, cigarettes, textiles, home appliances, and even cars were smuggled into Brazil from the farthest reaches of the world. Although there is little evidence to suggest that albums were ever smuggled in large enough quantities or to wide enough markets to warrant targeted repres-sion by Brazilian authorities, the fact that they were brought by contra-bandists alongside other contraband items and played in brothels owned


and frequented by known contrabandists made them synonymous with contraband. The close association between recorded Caribbean dance mu-sic and contraband continues to be a celebrated part of the lambada sub-culture. Within the local popular imaginary, recordings of hot Caribbean dance music are the audible manifestations of this partially hidden un-derworld of dizzying transnational mobility, modern excess, and illicit consumption.

The Paraense contrabandist was beloved among the local underclass for introducing into Belém and surrounding areas modern commodities such as whiskey, perfume, cigarettes, and electronics that would not oth-erwise have been widely available or affordable. Moreover, in managing to do so while simultaneously dodging and subverting the police, the contra-bandist represented that celebrated Brazilian archetype of the malandro, who, according to Roberto DaMatta (1991, 220), is “the hero of ambiguous zones of the social order, where it is difficult to discern right from wrong, justice from injustice.”6 Salomão Laredo recalled how even in the more re-mote areas around Belém:

It was contraband that brought our whiskey, plus the music, the sounds, the stories, and so on. We knew that there was repression, that

Figu re 1. The Kalypysso (Calypso): Boat transport and the circum-Caribbean imaginary, Belém do Pará, 2009.


all this was something forbidden, and that the police used to run inter-ception operations. But [the contrabandists] tried to sneak by, and they did. And I used to like that . . . that they would beat the police, [laughs] you know?7

Within popular discourse, contrabandists are thus romanticized as folk heroes and worldly travelers. This is not only because contraband put Pará in direct contact with capitalist modernity and the wider world; it also rep-resented for the masses of rural migrants the possibility of rapid social ascension. The 1977 novel Náufragos do Carnapijó (The Shipwrecked of Carnapijó Strait), written by Paraense judge, law professor, and politician Sílvio Meira (born in 1919), depicts and ultimately critiques the widespread belief that contraband was a ladder out of poverty, not only for the individ-ual involved in the riskier aspects of the trade but also for Pará more gen-erally. The character João, for example, had managed to make ends meet for his family thanks to contraband, and he could now bring back luxury items from virtually every corner of the world:

João had committed the madness of marrying without being able to, yes, without money. . . . With contraband João already managed some-thing. He had bought a shack over in the Condor neighborhood. . . . He could dress his wife well—Chinese fabric bought for five cruzeiros a meter in the Guianas which cost more than fifty in Brazil; slippers from Hong Kong, soft, so soft that the sight of them recalled the deli-cate feet of the women of the Orient, clean skin, fine like peaches. . . . When he arrived home it was a party! Perfume, nylon panties, dresses, silk socks for his wife; a battery-powered radio for his son, since João al-ready had his own—a large Made in Japan. (Meira 1977, 48)

At a historical moment when the downward pressures of modernization were generating large numbers of rural-to-urban migrants in Pará, contra-band was viewed as an especially alluring means by which to keep up with the demands of supporting a family and accumulating wealth—or at least the outward trappings thereof. Although Meira was an outspoken critic of contraband for the way it undermined the integrity of state institutions and the rule of law, many of his contemporaries viewed the issue in far less Manichaean terms (or at least found ways to rationalize their complic-ity with it). Even as the Brazilian military government equated the Carib-bean with political instability in the context of the Cold War,8 the region also represented for many Paraenses the possibility of an alternative eco-nomic, social, and cultural order to the developmentalist policies imposed by the national dictatorship. Contraband was often implicitly embraced as


a shortcut to Amazonian development, to affluence and modernity, and to political autonomy from the Southeast.

Shortwave radio is also frequently invoked as the means by which hot Caribbean dance music was first popularized in Pará, as for example in Rui Barata’s seminal narrative cited earlier. Although some Paraenses cer-tainly tuned in stations from the nearby Guianas or further afield in the years prior to radio’s mass popularization, if we consider how it was that the underclass participants and creators of the lambada subculture were first exposed to Caribbean musicality, shortwave radio seems unfeasible as a channel of widespread, popular exposure. According to musicians of rural origin with whom I spoke, “só barão” (“only wealthy landowners”) had access to shortwave radios before the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part radio figures only tangentially, if at all, in musicians’ early memo-ries of Caribbean music consumption. Musicians recall beginning to lis-ten to Caribbean music on the radio only in the late 1960s, at which point they were generally tuning in to local AM stations that played long blocks of merengue and cumbia primarily during the midnight hours. In light of these apparent contradictions, one could speculate that the radio plays such a central role in the lambada origin narratives partly because of the way the portable battery-powered radio became an icon—or as one indi-vidual playfully put it, the “technological totem”—of life in the rural Am-azonian interior. The military government’s investment in Amazonian telecommunications infrastructure and radio programming in the 1960s and 1970s helped to enshrine radio as the primary means of regional and national connectedness in this sparsely populated region.9 In addition, the notion of the very air(waves) in Pará being saturated with Caribbean mu-sic provides an especially compelling and naturalizing explanation for transnational cultural affinity.

To return to the question of how hot Caribbean dance music became popularized among the class of musicians and listeners who participated most directly in the lambada subculture, arguably the most important (and intimate) point of contact was the local brothel, or gafieira, where lo-cally assembled sound systems, or sonoros, played. Local sound-system owners were crucial intermediaries and culture brokers who mediated be-tween transnational musical flows and the local listening public. Milton Almeida Nascimento, an established sound-system engineer born in 1939 in the Paraense interior, noted:

The Paraense has had this Caribbean influence since the 1950s, when ships flying French, Caribbean, and Central American flags came to the port to unload material. When they arrived here in Belém they were bringing many records—of merengue, cumbia, soca, guaracha,


bolero—and the folks who worked in the sonoros used to go down and try to buy the records that the sailors and crew brought so that they would have exclusivity to play them in the sound system dances here. So that’s how this large influence of Caribbean music happened.10

The main consumer public for Caribbean dance music and sound-system dances was the growing urban underclass. Like most other ma-jor Brazilian cities, Belém experienced rapid and disorganized population growth during the 1960s, receiving thousands of migrants from the sur-rounding rural areas. Some of them came seasonally to Belém to find temporary work between harvests; others moved permanently with their families so that their children could have access to better education and working conditions; still others passed periodically through the city to buy and sell goods at market, spending a few days in the capital before mov-ing on. This class of migrants, especially those working as stevedores and traders, looked for cheap bars and brothels where they might pass the time as they waited for work or for the next boat out of town. More and more humble musical venues concentrated in the peripheral neighborhoods of Belém along the riverbanks emerged to cater to these individuals. These gafieiras often consisted solely of a bar and makeshift motel rooms built on stilts (palafitas) out over the floodplain, and they regularly hired sound systems to provide the soundtrack for drinking, dancing, and liaisons with sex workers.

The rise of sonoros closely paralleled the rapid urbanization of Belém and the growth of underclass spaces of leisure during the 1960s and 1970s. These mobile entertainment enterprises provided access to professional-quality (albeit canned) musical performance for a fraction of the price of hiring a dance band or maintaining a house orchestra. In 1978, the first year in which a sonoro owners’ union was organized, 112 sonoros were formally registered, although sound-system professionals estimate the total number of functioning sonoros in the city at well over twice as many. As competition among sonoros increased, owners had to devise ways to differentiate their sonoros in order to maintain a faithful audience. These strategies included separating channels, building bigger and louder speakers, adding television screens, creating custom vinhetas (spots), and hiring charismatic emcees. However, arguably the most important means of attracting and maintaining an audience during the 1960s and 1970s was playing rare, exclusive Caribbean albums unavailable on the national market. In this context, LPs of groups like Los Corraleros de Majagual, Midnight Groovers, and Exile One became especially coveted as a way of fazendo farol—literally “lighting beacons,” an especially apt metaphor given Belém’s importance as a port city—for audiences keen on dancing to the latest foreign novelty. To get hold of such recordings, sonoro owners


had to mobilize personal and professional networks, often either calling in favors or shrewdly negotiating with merchant marines, contrabandists, fishermen, and others who frequently crossed the borders between Brazil and French Guiana, Suriname, Colombia, and Venezuela. Sound-system owners affirmed that they generally paid as much as five times the price of a national LP for an exclusive Caribbean record.

Recordings of merengue, especially those of Luis Kalaff and Ángel Viloria released on the New York– based Ansonia and Seeco labels (record-ings, it might be noted, with national releases in Brazil), established them-selves as staples of the early sonoro repertory. It seems highly likely that the accordion-based style of these and other Caribbean artists found its way into the gafieira context with ease because of the earlier popularity of 1950s Brazilian forró music in these spaces. In instrumentation, tempo, and overall aesthetic, early merengues had much in common with forró. Forró recordings by northeastern Brazilian artists such as Luiz Gonzaga and Jackson do Pandeiro tended to be fairly brisk in tempo, and they fea-tured a prominent, rustic accordion sound, “unrefined” vocals, and the occasional extramusical vocalization that evoked a raucous live perfor-mance. The merengues of Ángel Viloria, Trio Reynoso, and other locally popular merengue groups were similar in these respects. Many Paraenses describe these most beloved early merengues as “folkloric” and rasgado (lively and raucous; literally, “ripped” or “torn”), which can be interpreted to mean that these recordings were low tech (typically no electric instru-ments) and lo-fi (often made with two-track technology) but had lots of raw energy that invited, and even compelled, dancing.

Forró recordings that featured travalínguas (tongue twisters character-istic of the northeastern embolada genre), sexual double entendres, yells (such as “bonitinho!” or “pretty!” and “simbora!” or “let’s go!”), and spo-ken banter also had much in common with later recordings made by Co-lombian groups like Los Corraleros de Majagual, who became known for their “brash humor, with tongue-twisting lyrics, occasional risqué dou-ble entendres, whoops, and yells (e.g., ‘nos fuimos!’: we’re off!)” (Wade 2000, 163). Whether or not Paraense listeners understood much of these groups’ Spanish lyrics, the local popularity of Los Corraleros can also be understood as the result of their successful blending of a “rasgado” accor-dion aesthetic (similar to early forró and merengue) with the horn-based jázzi,11 as well as tropical orchestra traditions present throughout Pará in the 1940s and 1950s.12 During that period, the rural towns from which many of Belém’s migrants had come boasted at least one dance band that featured a horn section and specialized in mambos, cha-chas, and boleros.

With the advent of AM radio in Belém during the 1960s and 1970s, the recorded Caribbean dance music that had been almost the exclusive province of Belém’s early sonoros became even more ubiquitous within


the city’s soundscape. As with the emergence of the terms champeta and salsa, the popularization of the term lambada is credited to radio personal-ities, specifically, to Haroldo Caraciolo and Paulo Ronaldo, both of whom were well known in Belém during this period for their on-air clowning. As the electric guitarist Joaquim de Lima Vieira, born in 1934 in the inte-rior of Pará, recalled, “Haroldo Caraciolo . . . would say, ‘Heeeeeeerrrrre comes a lambada [said percussively with an explosive second syllable] on your backs!’ And then he would put on any song, any fast song—a forró, a merengue—and say, ‘there goes a lambada for you!’”13 The term lambada, which in the dialect of the rural mixed-race Amazonian, or caboclo, means a “lashing,” was used figuratively to refer to various up-tempo musical genres that, when danced to, would be tantamount to a physical whipping. People have also described the sensation one feels after drinking hard alco-hol as a lambada. Substituting one regional colloquialism for another, the dancer Nonato Lemos explained, “If you drink cachaça [alcohol made from sugarcane] and it burns inside, then you took a cipoada [literally, a lash-ing with a cipó, or vine] on the inside. That’s a lambada.”14 Carlos Alberto de Aguiar expands on this definition in a post at the website Bregapop .com, explaining that lambada also encompasses “the vertigo, the burn-ing [ ardência], the hotness [caliência] of a pimenta [hot pepper] on the plate and of cachaça.”15 As Vieira points out, the term lambada was initially used in reference to music to refer to “any fast song,” specifically those en-joyed by the underclasses from whose manner of speaking the term was adopted. With time, its meaning shifted to refer primarily to recordings of up-tempo Caribbean genres, from merengue to cumbia to cadence, and later to the local Paraense interpretations of these styles. In short, the term lambada conjures a constellation of regional meanings that involve the ru-ral caboclo, sensual dancing bodies, tropical and corporal heat, the plea-sure of consumption, and the space of the gafieira.

The Paraense affinity for Caribbean dance music was thus shaped by several interrelated factors. In the gafieira context, recordings of contem-porary Caribbean dance music became symbols of mobility because they had been brought by boat from far away and contained sounds of distant but somehow familiar lands. They also became symbols of modernity be-cause of their status as coveted commodities in themselves, because elec-tric sound systems and local radio stations played them, and because they were consumed alongside foreign commodities such as whiskey that served as important markers of status. Finally, they were symbols of the subversiveness, pleasure, and sensuality associated with the underworld of contraband, danced and sweated to in the context of brothels. Moreover, the fact that this music exhibited aesthetic continuity with earlier styles consumed in underclass contexts, above all forró and mambo, also con-tributed to its enthusiastic reception.


Within what might be called the emergent lambada subculture, the consumption of recorded Caribbean music was anything but passive. Lis-teners, sonoro professionals, dancers, and musicians made this music their own by creatively interacting with and altering it. By adapting Ca-ribbean music in a range of ways to fit local performance contexts and aesthetics, Paraenses claim to have made Caribbean music their own. As Salomão Laredo asserted, “We have made it part [of our culture] without debating the fact that ‘[i]t comes from the Caribbean.’ . . . It is inherent and immanent to my condition of being here, . . . my condition as an Amazo-nian.”16 One example of Paraenses actively and creatively engaging with recorded Caribbean music was sonoro controlistas’ use of the pitch control on their turntables to increase the tempo on the dance floor when songs were not fast enough for local dancers—dancers who wanted a lambada in the traditional sense of the word. To this day, when one buys pirated com-pilations of classic merengue, cumbia, and cadence music on the street in Belém, many of these tracks are noticeably sped up by as many as thirty beats per minute. Even in the transition to digital formats oriented toward private listening, the local preference for faster tempos is preserved.

Sound-system professionals and patrons also regularly invented nick-names for foreign-language songs based on creative mishearings of their mostly incomprehensible lyrics. The practice of nicknaming here involves a playful act of (mis)translation, a literal and figurative “carrying across” of meaning from a foreign place and language. One of the best-known for-eign songs within lambada subculture, and perhaps the most emblem-atic of this phenomenon of translation, is Les Aiglons’ smash cadence hit “Cuisse La,” better known in Pará as “Melô do Tipiti” or “Tipiti Tune.” A tipiti (pronunciation: [t∫i-pi-‘t∫i]) is a sleeve of woven palm fronds used in the traditional process of draining and drying manioc flour, a staple of the Amazonian diet. This nickname is derived from the iconic phrase “Oui, petit, petit!” that is sung unaccompanied in the final bar of the song’s in-troduction. Renaming this foreign cadence song after the tipiti, an icon of Amazonian regional identity associated with the traditional way of life of rural caboclos and Indians, exemplifies the sort of sonic translation by which distances between the Caribbean and northern Brazil are momen-tarily bridged.

During the 1960s, it became common for gafieira owners to promote regular merengue dance competitions in which the winning couple might win a trophy and a prize (e.g., a bicycle, a bottle of whiskey). Particularly devoted male dancers came to be known as merengueiros, and they could be recognized by their starched white pants, flowery or brightly colored shirts, and their Cuban-heel, or salto carrapeta, shoes. These outfits were adaptations of cosmopolitan fashion styles popular during the 1940s and 1950s in Cuba, Central America, and Brazil. Although merengueiros were


widely dismissed by members of Belém’s respectable classes as either malandros or dandies, they have nonetheless become romanticized within the local popular imaginary. In the context of the regular dance compe-titions promoted by gafieira owners, the merengueiro came to develop a highly exhibitionist form of dancing that involved a complex choreogra-phy of spins, carries, showy hops, and interlacing of legs that combined a number of cosmopolitan dance styles from the Lindy to the merengue. Ac-cording to one individual, the measure of a true merengueiro was whether he could wring out his sweat-soaked shirt after dancing.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, popular bandleaders in Belém and surrounding areas also adapted the genres of hot Caribbean dance mu-sic they heard on the radio and at sound-system parties to be able to play them live. Song titles such as Vieira’s “Lambada da pachanga,” “Lambada jamaicana,” “Vamos dançar a cumbia,” “Colombiana,” and “Lambada da gafieira” overtly reference this cosmopolitan sound world. Being able to play Caribbean styles live was, to be sure, partly a matter of survival in an era marked by increasing competition from sonoros. Audiences had be-come accustomed to dancing to a little of everything that circulated in the popular soundscape, and they demanded the same of live dance bands. The incorporation of Caribbean styles ranged from literal quotations of Caribbean songs (as in the citation of Pacho Galán’s merecumbé “Cosita linda” in Pinduca’s song “Comanchera, comanchera” from the 1973 album No embalo do carimbó e sirimbó) to the incorporation of discrete rhyth-mic elements (e.g., the 3-3-2 cymbal pattern and tok-totok, tok-tok-tok cowbell pattern characteristic of cadence; the cha-chica-cha scraper pat-terns of merengue and cumbia) to adaptation of harmonic and melodic el-ements (as in the use of an ascending arpeggiated bass line or pentatonic melodies from cumbia). Yet dance bands generally did not perform slav-ish imitations of Caribbean styles; rather, they adapted them by drawing on their enormous store of musical experience, including playing tropical orchestra and jázzi repertory, Amazonian folklore, military-band music, choro, as well as rock and roll in developing a Paraense take on merengue, cumbia, and cadence music. As I discuss in the next section, Paraenses’ versatility in the face of unfamiliar styles has come to stand at the center of a discourse of regional self-affirmation.

As this section has discussed, many Paraenses privilege the 1950s and 1960s in their narratives of Caribbeanization, framing the arrival of re-corded merengue and cumbia and these recordings’ subsequent insertion into a local underclass subculture by way of mobile sound systems as a moment of genesis. However, Caribbean music, albeit of a somewhat dif-ferent sort, was already an integral part of the popular soundscape in Pará during the 1930s and 1940s,17 so we might pause to ask why there is this


apparent amnesia on the part of many of those narrating Caribbeanness in Pará. From the 1960s onward, as most of Brazil turned its attention to rock and roll, the periphery of Belém continued to consume and perform contemporary popular music from Brazil’s Latin American and Caribbean neighbors. Thus, whereas the adoption of Caribbean musical genres such as bolero, cha-cha, and mambo in Belém during the orchestra era repre-sented a convergence with hegemonic national and international trends, with the decline of Caribbean music at the national level, the adoption of recorded Caribbean genres such as merengue and cumbia in Belém’s gafieira subculture constituted a divergence from hegemonic national and local trends. Even though lambada subculture was stigmatized and even criminalized by Belém’s established elite, it was ultimately this subculture that would incubate a unique musical style that was at once local and cos-mopolitan, as well as widely popular.18 The emergence of the institution of the sound system in particular had allowed Paraenses of even the low-est social classes to gain access to Caribbean dance music that was under-stood as coming “directly” from the Caribbean via contraband rather than being filtered through the national radio and recording industries based in Rio de Janeiro. Thus constructed as local, cosmopolitan, and popular, the lambada would later be seen by the local intelligentsia to meet the ba-sic requirements for elevation to the status of official Paraense popular music.19

Regionalist Cosmopolitics and Caribbeanness as Surplus

Having sketched in some of the dimensions of lambada origin narratives, I turn to consider how the history of Caribbean connectedness has been made to articulate with cultural politics on the periphery of the Brazilian nation. It may strike readers as somewhat surprising that claims to Ca-ribbeanness are not framed in terms of shared transnational blackness, indigeneity, or mestizaje or mestiçagem, nor are they used to advance an ex-plicitly racialized identity politics. Although it may reflect a North Amer-ican academic bias to presume that political struggles will of necessity articulate themselves in terms of racial or diasporic identity, the unique-ness of the Paraense case when considered in comparative transnational perspective is sufficient to justify further discussion.

During the second half of the twentieth century, many progressive-minded social scientists held that material and social factors particular to the Brazilian Amazon precluded the positive assertion of a mixed-race or caboclo identity, narrowly defined as the combination of indigenous and European parentage (although, colloquially speaking, the term does not exclude mixed-race Amazonians who also have African parentage).


Whereas racial mixture in other Brazilian regions was naturalized and nationalized through doctrines of mestiçagem during the early to mid- twentieth century as the process of proletarianization produced new po-litical subjects (see Avelar and Dunn 2011), the Amazon remained more marginally integrated into the national political economy until the so-called second conquest of the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Until rela-tively recently, then, hegemonic representations of Amazonian caboclos have tended to cast them as out-of-place remainders of historical processes of colonization and modernization, “the pile of fragments remaining after a process of systematic and asystematic destruction of pre-colonial social formations” (Nugent 1997, 37).

Within everyday usage the term caboclo continues to have the pejorative connotation of uncouth or simpleminded rube and is deployed more as a marker of rural difference than as a claimable racial category in itself. In the introduction to the seminal 1985 volume The Amazon Caboclo, Eugene Parker lamented this fact, writing that, in contrast to Amazonia’s indige-nous groups, “caboclos have neither identity nor supporters. They deserve both” (xliv). Even while advancing a concept of historical “ cabocliza tion” that presented traditional caboclo culture as coherent, accretive, and his-torically well adapted (as opposed to fragmented, degraded, and over-determined by nature and history), contributors to Parker’s volume fretted that caboclos’ migration to urban centers in search of work during the sec-ond half of the twentieth century was worsening their marginalization, and that a process of “de-caboclization, with its attendant loss of indepen-dence, land, culture, and knowledge,” had been unleashed (ibid.). “For 200 years,” Parker lamented, “caboclos have quietly and successfully man-aged to live independently amidst an environment all too often labeled a ‘green hell.’ It is only now that the future of caboclos in Amazonia is un-certain” (ibid.). In the wake of the military government’s drive to colonize the Amazon at any social and environmental cost, the caboclo was cast once again—even by politically progressive social scientists—as a listless and out-of-place remainder of violent structural upheavals, albeit now in a new environment, an “urban hell.”

Of course, it was precisely this population of rural-to-urban migrants that consolidated and participated most intensely in the lambada sub-culture, as musicians, dancers, sound-system professionals, and sex work-ers. These migrants, whose “decaboclization” and alienation seemed all but given for Parker, proceeded to creatively construct a vibrant musical culture whose continuities with previous caboclo culture could be recog-nized in what anthropologists writing more than a decade later described as the caboclo’s penchant for adaptation, versatility, and improvisational ability (Nugent 1997; Harris 2005, 2009). I return to this notion later


when I consider the language that lambada participants use to make sense of their facility with foreign Caribbean music and styles.

The project of consolidating an identifiably caboclo culture that could serve as the basis for a caboclo identity politics has continued, although the lambada has remained largely outside of it. In 1997, Stephen Nugent cited carimbó and lambada music, as well as local cuisine and folklore, as potential resources “available for assembly as caboclo culture” (45). “Were a caboclo culture to emerge—sanctified, officially documented—it would no doubt require the accoutrements demanded of an anthropological ob-ject, and these are available, if not yet widely transmitted (or received).” In point of fact, many of these elements—or accoutrements—were brought together by musicians, culture brokers, and journalists with a nudge from the state telecommunications foundation FUNTELPA in the early 2000s, giving shape and momentum to a slickly produced cultural movement known as Terruá Pará. However, this movement was never framed in terms of caboclo culture (with the class connotations that might imply), but rather in terms of an eclectically pluralistic (and eminently more na-tionally marketable) cultura regional paraense, modeled after the success of the regional music movements of Pernambuco during the 1990s. I con-sider the implications of framing the lambada as música regional paraense in greater detail in the epilogue.

For mixed-race musicians of rural origin, articulating the lambada to a caboclo identity politics is unappealing, as it would seem to compro-mise and circumscribe the style’s fundamentally cosmopolitan orienta-tion as well as its marketability. But what about transnational categories of racial identity? What factors particular to cultural politics in northeast-ern Pará may explain the fact that lambada has neither articulated with a trans national mestizo identity in which indigeneity is valorized (as, for ex-ample, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste [2007] has tracked with the reception of Colombian cumbia in the Andes and in Central America) nor with an Afro-diasporic identity (as has taken place with sound-system audiences in Cartagena, Colombia [Pacini Hernandez 1996], Salvador da Bahia [Crook 2005], and São Luís do Maranhão)?

In other Latin American contexts in which there has been more of a correlation between indigeneity and proletarian class identity (includ-ing that of northeastern Brazil), there has been more room for people of mixed race to reclaim indigenous identity or heritage as part of a strategy for inclusion in the national political economy. In Pará, however, the cat-egories “índio” and “caboclo” have been constructed as mutually exclu-sive and even antagonistic, the former understood as standing outside the national political economy, the latter as standing precariously on its margins, often the very agent of frontier expansion (Nugent 1997). To the


extent that indigeneity might be claimable by caboclos as heritage, inter-nalized racism and the violence routinely visited on indigenous people in Brazil militate against assertions of solidarity on the basis of a common ancestral link.

Pará has an ambivalent relationship to its own blackness as well, even though the state is home to large populations descended from the Afri-cans brought as slaves to the Portuguese colony of Grão-Pará.20 It is tell-ing that the regional musical expressions most explicitly associated with blackness in Pará are rural, folkloric ones such as carimbó and siriá, a fact indicative of the way many Paraenses have kept blackness, like indigene-ity, at a safe remove by tying it to a past, ancestral moment in some remote place in the jungle.21 There may also be a structural explanation for the fact that blackness is not more emphatically claimed within what George Yúdice has suggested is a relational cultural politics of interpretability.22 Paraenses with whom I worked tended to associate blackness more with the inhabitants of São Luís, the capital city in the neighboring state of Maranhão to the east. There, Afro-diasporic culture in the form of reggae sound systems, Rasta subculture, and the folkloric “tambor de crioula” tradition is much more widely claimed and performed. Paraenses also associate blackness more with the comparatively darker-skinned crioulos from French Guiana to the north, with whom many have had direct con-tact through border migration to the French département. Finally, the state of Amapá, located on the border with French Guiana in what was formerly part of Pará, is also increasingly associated with African heritage, particu-larly as marabaixo drumming, closely tied to quilombolo maroon commu-nities there, has been embraced as state cultural patrimony.

Thus flanked by more emphatically Afro-diasporic culture areas, Pará’s claims to Caribbeanness tend not to involve concomitant claims of shared Afro-diasporic identity. Those interviewed occasionally invoked a shared latinidade to account for the naturalization of Caribbean dance music in Pará, yet in these cases Latin Americanness seemed to serve more as a geo-graphical marker than as a racial, ethnic, or even linguistic one, a hypoth-esis supported by the fact that Francophone and Anglophone styles are also considered integral parts of lambada repertory. In fact, if the Paraense identification with recorded Caribbean dance music can be said to have anything to do with race, it is arguably with the way in which these eclec-tic musical styles—which are underdetermined as markers of race in the Paraense context because they arrived in largely surrogate recorded forms, unaccompanied by the original musicians and their cultural politics—al-low local listeners and performers to circumvent such over determined cat-egories of identity.

As Paraenses shrug off the imperative to perform more folkloric or ra-cially essentialized versions of Amazonianness, we might ask whether


claiming Caribbeanness does not also function as a strategy for disavow-ing more politically fraught (and less commodifiable) forms of Amazoni-anness. Timothy Rommen’s theorization of the negotiation of proximity is potentially useful in this regard. Drawing on Michael Herzfeld’s work, Rommen defines the negotiation of proximity as “an exercise in deflec-tion and disfiguration whereby the near is made far and the far becomes immanent and useful” (2007, 89). In the case of Pará, the relative nebu-lousness of the concept of Caribbeanness allows it to be deployed for local purposes without much resistance. At the same time, claiming what is far away allows those aspects of local identity that are considered historically problematic to be distanced, elided, dismissed. With the same rhetorical move by which “the Caribbean” is brought closer as a cosmopolitan hori-zon of longing and belonging, is “the Amazon” not implicitly distanced even as it is dialectically transformed?

With this abiding ambivalence in mind, I want to suggest going forward that the lived experiences of circum-Caribbean connectedness—whether in the form of traveling people, stories, sounds, or commodities—provide the basis for, in a first moment, critiquing and evading capture within he-gemonic constructions of the region, and, in a second, articulating what Shalini Puri calls a “document of desire” whose aim is “to create new enunciative positions from which the question of equality could then be framed differently” (2004, 85). This process entails the transformation of a lived cosmopolitanism—what Gerard Delanty (2009) refers to as cos-mopolitanism as orientation—into the basis for a cultural politics that af-firms that lived local experience. Delanty defines cosmopolitanism as

an orientation that resides less in a specific social condition than in an imagination. . . . Conceived of in terms of an imaginary, it is not then a matter of . . . a purely philosophical or utopian idea but an imma-nent orientation that takes shape in modes of self-understanding, expe-riences, feelings and collective identity narratives. (14)

Part of the critical thrust of Caribbean cosmopolitanism as orienta-tion (and lived musical practice) in Pará is the way it calls into question the boundedness of existing constructions of regional, cultural, and ra-cial identity. As Lise Waxer demonstrated in her ethnography of música antillana in Cali, Colombia, cosmopolitanism “provides a dynamic re-source for negotiating and authenticating new cultural and social pro-cesses that cannot easily be contained within localist, regionalist, or nationalist models” (2002, 15). I am particularly interested in the way Paraenses have channeled Caribbean cosmopolitanism into what I, draw-ing on the seminal work of Cheah and Robbins (1998), refer to as a re-gionalist “cosmopolitics.” One of the objectives of this cosmopolitics is to


transform Pará’s liminal position on the periphery of the Brazilian nation from a liability into an asset, from the basis for marginalization into the source of unique cultural surplus that affirms the local while relativizing the cultural prestige of southeastern Brazilian centers. I wish to consider briefly some of the ways in which my informant collaborators have sought to channel their Caribbean cosmopolitan orientation into a Paraense re-gional politics.

Nonato Lemos (a pseudonym), today a professional dance teacher spe-cializing in Paraense popular styles, grew up dancing within the gafieira subculture from a young age. For as long as he can remember, his fam-ily has been involved in the gafieira business. His uncles, whom he char-acterized as relatively wealthy thanks to their involvement in contraband, owned gafieiras in the Condor neighborhood, and his father, an electron-ics technician, rented out his sound system to venues in the same neigh-borhood. In 1969, when Lemos was only five years old, his uncles began taking him to their gafieiras in the late afternoon. There, he became ac-customed to observing all the preparations that went on behind the scenes before the clients began to arrive at night. It was in this context that Lemos took his first steps in the style he has since come to call the merengue paraense. As a professional dance instructor often invited to Rio de Janeiro to present on regional Brazilian dance styles, Lemos has devel-oped a carefully crafted origin myth of the merengue paraense that serves to highlight the uniqueness of Paraense dance styles while also position-ing him as their authentic representative.

In explaining the dance’s genealogy, Lemos combines the discourse of racial miscegenation—a familiar element in foundational myths of Brazil-ian national identity—with a discourse of versatility that is an important element in a foundational myth of Paraense regional identity:

The mixture of Caribbean music, Paraense music . . . , music from the south [of Brazil], and music from the United States took place precisely in the Condor neighborhood. There was an expression of this mixture in the dance, together with the body language and genetics that had re-sulted from this mixture of Indians, Europeans, and blacks here among us in the região norte—a body that watched and tried to imitate every-thing that appeared in the gafieiras. The prostitutes were obligated to dance what the client wanted. So if the client was American, she went and tried to imitate. If the client was Latino, she had to imitate because she had to satisfy the client.23

Lemos situates the sex worker of the Condor neighborhood as a key pro-tagonist in the genesis of a uniquely regional cultural form, the merengue paraense. The merengue paraense does not represent a stable, definitive


synthesis because the incorporation of new dance elements, like the ac-ceptance of new partners, is always possible and, indeed, obligatory. Even though it is born of imitation and a coercive necessity to satisfy the client, Lemos also uses the formation of merengue paraense as an allegory for re-gional culture formation. Even as he invokes the “mixture of Indians, Eu-ropeans, and blacks” that has been so central to formations of Brazilian national identity as the baseline for Paraense identity, the addition of Ca-ribbeanness represents a sort of regional cosmopolitan surplus that can be converted into cultural and economic capital.

It should be noted that the romanticization of the dancing sex worker of the Condor is widespread in lambada origin narratives and in older men’s accounts of the 1950s and 1960s more generally, as exemplified in Salomão Laredo’s collection of nostalgic poems, quasi-journalistic anec-dotes, and newspaper clippings in Palácio dos bares (Palace of Bars, 2003). In depicting the sex worker as the willing muse of a bygone bohemian era, such male representations tend to downplay both women’s suffering and their agency in local sexual economies. More focused ethnographic work with sex workers of this era would be extremely valuable to developing a counter narrative to the one being traced here.

For detractors, the steps that Paraenses dance in the merengue seem to be no more than an exhibitionist and feigned attempt to dance an unfamil-iar style. Non-initiates often dismiss the Paraense way of dancing meren-gue as “mere caqueado,” a local expression that in this sense refers to an attempt to disguise technical ignorance with flamboyance and showiness. Within the gafieira context, however, dancers and musicians highly valo-rize versatility, often over the achievement of a definitive synthesis. Fazer caqueado is therefore readily resignifiable as an enviable ability to impro-vise and make even an unfamiliar style one’s own, perhaps somewhat akin to the national concept of the jeitinho (see, e.g., Neves Barbosa 1995).

The privileging of versatility and improvisation is also common among Paraense lambada musicians who have had to make do with available technology and musical skills to stay abreast of popular musical trends. Most musicians who played for the urban underclasses were born in the rural interior and came to Belém seasonally to gig, or they moved to the capital in search of more stable employment. In the same way these mu-sicians generally had to cobble together an income in a variety of occu-pations (from boat mender, to mechanic, to carpenter, to electronics technician), they also had to cobble together a variety of styles that cir-culated in the popular soundscape to please their audiences. Within the reigning twentieth-century dance-band context, they were expected to be fluent in the various styles in their midst to keep their dance bands com-petitive. Caribbean music historically represented only one of numerous possibilities that could enrich local performance practices (it was only


with the pressure to insert their music into regional and national cultural economies that specialization came to be viewed as potentially advanta-geous). The electric guitarist and popular bandleader Solano, born in 1943 in Abaetetuba in the interior of Pará, explained his approach to playing Caribbean music as one of going pela beira—literally, along the margins or banks:

[These styles] aren’t ours. They came from the Caribbean. . . . [A]ll of it is from there. Except we take it and go pela beira. Understand? Listen, my style isn’t rock, [but] if you come and play rock for me, even though I don’t know it, I can play a solo. Like we say around here, “Eu duvido se eu não vou beirando! Eu vou beirando!” [roughly translated: I don’t doubt I’ll get by! I’ll get by!] If you repeat it twice, I’m already more or less rehearsed. Even though it’s not my style . . . , if the guy plays, I go pela beira.24

The aesthetic philosophy to which Solano subscribes dovetails with a com-monly heard regionalist discourse that celebrates the Paraense musician’s unique capacity for adaptability. Popular bandleader Aurino Quirino Gonçalves, born in 1937 in the rural town of Igarapé-Miri, asserted:

The Paraense musician is one of the best in Brazil, you know. Be-cause he plays everything. Any genre, he can play it. Why? Because he was very influenced [ele foi muito influenciado]. . . . For example, you can see that the musician from São Paulo or from Rio has diffi-culty playing certain genres. But the Paraense musician has no diffi-culty playing any genres. If you put a record on for him to listen to, he can already do every thing—electric guitar, drum set, bass—he does everything.25

Gonçalves, better known by his stage name, Pinduca, is one of several musicians who claim to have “invented” the Paraense lambada. His pro-nouncements on Paraense identity smack of shameless self-promotion, yet we should not be too quick to dismiss him. For example, it is espe-cially noteworthy that he foregrounds the Paraense musician’s “influence-ability.” Privileging outside influence would appear to contradict a more conventional form of regionalism that insists on the uniqueness and “au-thenticity” of the local while rejecting the presence of the foreign. The discourse of “influence-ability” plays into a regionalist cosmopolitics that provincializes the southeastern Brazilian musician from Rio or São Paulo. Those musicians, not having had the exposure to such a range of styles, are therefore considered less competent and versatile.


The discourse of Paraense versatility might well be understood in rela-tion to what Mark Harris (2009), in his article “Sempre ajeitando: Always Adjusting,” describes as the hallmark of caboclo culture, celebrated by the population itself, namely, the capacity for creative adaptation in the face of the new. Yet rather than giving voice to a caboclo identity politics, this older generation’s discourses of musical versatility have dovetailed and in some cases been folded into a younger, university-educated generation’s discourses of regionalism, cosmopolitanism, and aesthetic freedom.

As I discuss in the next and final section, the revival of the lambada un-der the name of guitarrada in 2003 (Ribeiro dos Santos, Silva das Neves, and Lima 2006, Lamen 2011a) inspired many younger Paraense musi-cians to explore “Caribbean cosmopolitan” approaches to regional musi-cal production, without the overriding concern for roots and rootedness that characterized earlier regional music movements in the other na-tional peripheries (e.g., the 1990s Pernambucan mangue bit movement; see Galinsky 2002). As electric guitarist Felipe Cordeiro, university-edu-cated son of the well-known 1980s lambada producer Manoel Cordeiro, asserted:

We finally freed ourselves from the weight of authorities. When I say authority I mean the idea that, “a [single] concept of Amazonian iden-tity exists. Follow it.” That’s authority. Today, we think like this: there isn’t a single concept of Amazonian identity, just as nothing is fixed, stable, and eternal. Today, we live in a flux of experimentation with our very selves. . . . I think all artists here are playing with their manner of being musically all the time. They’re reinventing themselves every day, they’re playing at inventing themselves every day, without the empti-ness of European nihilism, but with the quentura [hotness], with the passion of Latin Americans [laughs].26

Cordeiro walks a fine line in this interview, as in his own music, between a postmodern everything-is-valid perspective with decidedly liberal bour-geois overtones and a strategic essentialism that seeks to convert his own cultural difference into cultural capital. In his playful invocation of Latin American hotness and passion, Cordeiro knowingly performs his own otherness for his North American ethnomusicologist interviewer. In an analogous manner, many Paraense musicians have taken to performing Caribbeanness—that ever-shifting and nebulous constellation of sounds, practices, and narratives sketched out here—before Brazilian audiences (including Paraenses) as a means not only of remaking Amazonianness in the way Cordeiro articulates but also of achieving greater circulation for their music.


Epilogue: Pará in the National Cultural Economy

Since the 1990s, the Brazilian cultural economy has increasingly come to depend on the commodification of musical difference from the country’s geographical and social peripheries, which has resulted in a phenomenon Maria Elizabeth Lucas (2000, 44) refers to as the “nationalization of the regional.” This has in turn contributed to the reification of the marketing category música regional, that is, music whose value and “authenticity” is understood as residing in its direct and “organic” relationship to a given place on the national peripheries. In the twenty-first century, artists from Brazil’s peripheries still face the imperative to frame their work as some-how “regional” in order to achieve more widespread national exposure; however, the question of what types of sounds might effectively “count” as regional has been opened up to anti-essentialist debate. As a natural-ized part of Paraense popular culture, Caribbeanness has come to serve as one of the region’s signal differences that can be commodified in the pursuit of greater insertion within national cultural economies. As Alain Herscovici has written, “Each geographic space needs to differentiate it-self and construct its media image in order to valorize itself in relation to the exterior and in that way insert itself into [larger] networks; culture is amply utilized in the construction of that media image” (1999, 58– 59). As I have argued, the fact that most of Brazil is cut off from the musical and cultural trends of its Latin American and Caribbean neighbors means that the cultivation of Caribbean musical cosmopolitanism in Pará can con-stitute a sort of regional surplus that may be used to valorize the region within national cultural economies.

George Yúdice (2003) points to the way musical difference has increas-ingly come to be viewed as an expedient for achieving not only economic gain but also public interpretability. Although a fuller consideration of this question is outside the scope of this article, understanding the way in which the increasing entanglement of cultural politics and the cultural economy in Brazil has contributed to the (re)production of diverse catego-ries of cultural difference (e.g., regional, racial) is critical to understanding the expediency of claiming Caribbeanness in Pará and the recent surge in interest there in the lambada. State institutions, the mainstream me-dia, and capitalist music industry professionals have all been major play-ers in the new wave of lambada-related cultural production, yet it should be noted that the academy has also played an important, if at times prob-lematic, role in “authenticating” new cultural forms and reproducing such reified categories as música regional. In this sense, I am sensitive to the political implications my own work may have within Brazilian cultural, political, and intellectual economies.


Over the course of the past decade (2001–2011), a great deal of intellec-tual and cultural production in Pará has been devoted to documenting, memorializing, and publicizing the history traced in the first section of this article, to furthering the cosmopolitics discussed in the second, and to achieving insertion within national cultural economies gestured at here in the third. In 2001, Pio Lobato, electric guitarist and then-undergraduate student at the Federal University of Pará, completed an ethnographic the-sis on the history of the lambada, inspiring several other academic studies of the genre and its pioneer musicians within the disciplines of ethnomu-sicology and communications (e.g., Ribeiro dos Santos, Silva das Neves, and Lima 2006; Farias 2009). Following on the heels of his thesis re-search, Lobato went on to form a lambada revival group in 2003 known as Mestres da Guitarrada.27 The group’s initial success was locally interpreted as evidence that a Paraense “regional music movement” in the mold of the earlier mangue bit movement in Pernambuco state was not only vi-able but also potentially lucrative.28 With the Mestres project as inspira-tion and cornerstone for a new regional music movement, FUNTELPA set about coordinating and sponsoring a series of cultural initiatives that the mainstream media went on to dub “Terruá Pará” (after the French terroir,

Figu re 2 . Lambada icons Joaquim de Lima Vieira and Manoel Cordeiro share stories during a rehearsal for the filming of the documentary and lambada all-

star concert Mestre Vieira: 50 Years of Guitarrada, Belém do Pará, 2012.


the unique growing conditions that allow certain products—like cham-pagne—to be produced in only specific places).

Terruá Pará afforded a particularly important platform for lesser-known forms of Amazonian musical expression, serving both to contest hegemonic depictions of the Amazon and to provide opportunities for Paraense musicians to connect with new audiences and markets. Between 2003 and 2006, FUNTELPA invested the equivalent of US$2.9 million in the production and dissemination of “Paraense popular music,” lending its studio to record numerous instrumental and “prog” lambada albums, using its television and radio networks to broadcast new regional mu-sic, and mobilizing its political and commercial connections to produce three days of performances in São Paulo’s state-of-the-art Ibirapuera Au-ditorium in 2006. Following these performances, the mainstream media euphorically (and almost obsessively) began heralding Pará as the “new Pernambuco,” suggesting the degree to which regional musical expres-sions serve as fuel for a national consumer market starved for novelties. Despite the numerous local private-sector initiatives that followed in the intervening years, the movement’s vitality has been woefully contingent on the changing partisan landscape in Pará. At the moment of this writ-ing, the excitement among Paraense musicians is palpable as Pará seems, once again, poised to become the next of what Dan Sharp has ambiva-lently called Brazil’s “canonized peripheries” (Sharp 2010). Yet this term and the power dynamics it implicitly points to should give us pause. Who has the authority to canonize whom, to baptize a “regional movement”? Whose interests are ultimately served by the centripetal consolidation of the centrifugal creative energies of the periphery?

This article has considered the ways in which the lambada’s history serves as a sort of origin myth for an alternative Amazon. This alterna-tive Amazon has been for many Paraenses a site of cosmopolitan longing and belonging that openly challenges hegemonic representations of the region as excluded periphery, provincial outpost, and cultural void. How-ever, even as the act of claiming Caribbeanness in Pará can be understood as advancing a form of critical regionalism, its counterhegemonic cosmo-political thrust is always in danger of being blunted as it is channeled into political, cultural, and intellectual economies that thrive on the reification of cultural difference.

Notes

I wish to thank Timothy Rommen, Carol Muller, Yolanda Martínez San Miguel, and the graduate students of Carol Muller’s diaspora seminar for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. This research was also assisted by a generous In-


ternational Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Sciences Research Council.

1. To be clear, this article does not deal with the late 1980s world-beat style epitomized by the group Kaoma. However, a few words are in order on the con-nection between that international dance craze and the older Paraense lambada I examine in this article. Following the lambada’s “discovery” by a French pro-ducer on holiday in the northeastern Brazilian beach city of Porto Seguro, Bahia, lambada became enduringly associated with Bahia, helping to cement that state’s reputation throughout the 1990s as a seemingly inexhaustible treasure trove of re-gional musical novelties. Media attention surrounding “the forbidden dance” had the rather unfortunate aftereffect of obscuring the histories of Amazonian and circum-Caribbean connectedness that gave rise to the lambada in the first place.

2. Or at least a particular form of Caribbeanness, since many Paraenses will-fully and strategically overlook the fact that Belém is not the only Brazilian city with a musical claim to Caribbeanness (see Moura 2010; Godi 2001; Crook 2005).

3. Personal interview, Max José Nascimento Alvim, Belém do Pará, Febru-ary 2, 2010.

4. Belém is located 2,254 kilometers from Fort-de-France, Martinique; 1,967 kilometers from Port of Spain, Trinidad; 2,441 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro; and 2,455 kilometers from São Paulo.

5. Because the state of Pará is immense (more than twice the size of Texas) and culturally diverse, I use the term Paraense advisedly and as a convenient shorthand for “Belém and surrounding areas in the lower Amazonian basin,” the microregion in which the lambada phenomenon was most concentrated during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

6. The malandro is understood as an individualist who is not interested in transforming the existing social hierarchy, but in surviving and living well within its interstices, often at the expense of others.

7. Personal interview, Salomão Laredo, Belém do Pará, December 6, 2010. 8. The carefully manipulated specters of communism and contraband served

to legitimize and infuse with urgency the aggressive defense and colonization ini-tiatives the government envisioned for the Amazon.

9. During the Círio de Nazaré festival, which attracts hundreds of thousands of Catholics to Belém every year, artisans sell traditional miriti (Amazonian balsa-wood) toys in the shape of boats, birds, snakes, and AM/FM radios—all “iconic” images of Amazonia. On the importance of Amazonian radio, see Vieira and Gonçalves (2003), Nogueira (1999), and Ferreira (2005).

10. Personal interview, Milton Almeida Nascimento, Belém do Pará, Octo-ber 29, 2009.

11. Scholarship on early twentieth-century dance bands in the Brazilian Ama-zon is scarce. See Salles (1970, 1985).

12. Peter Wade writes that Los Corraleros de Majagual were especially note-worthy for pioneering the fusion “between what had until then been two rather different line-ups: the orchestra, usually concentrating on porros, fandangos, and cumbias, and the accordion conjunto, which . . . focused more on paseos, meren-gues, and sones” (2000, 161– 62).


13. Personal interview, Joaquim de Lima Vieira, Barcarena, Pará, Decem-ber 24, 2009.

14. Personal interview, Nonato Lemos, Belém do Pará, September 24, 2009.15. Carlos Alberto de Aguiar, “Brega Calypso—Um ritmo da Amazônia Ca-

ribenha Pai-Dégua Demais,” BregaPop, http://www.bregapop.com/servicos/his toria/320-carlos-alberto-de-aguiar/50-brega-calypso-um-ritmo-da-amazonia-cari benha-pai-degua-demais-carlos-alberto-de-aguiar.

16. Personal interview, Salomão Laredo, Belém do Pará, December 6, 2010.17. During the 1930s and 1940s, bolero and rumba enjoyed widespread dis-

semination throughout Brazil via national radio in the voices of Bienvenido Granda and Nelson Gonçalves, among others. In concert with cosmopolitan trends throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the orchestras in Belém—with names such as Os Namorados Tropicais (The Tropical Boyfriends) and Los Crioulos (Hispanicized rendering of The Creoles)—incorporated these and other genres such as mambo, cha-cha, and cubanacán into their repertories. Even in ru-ral Pará, town dance bands performed Caribbean genres and popular songs from sheet music obtained by mail from publishing houses in Rio and São Paulo.

18. In contrast to older forms of Caribbean dance music such as bolero, rumba, and mambo, most of the genres encompassed by the term lambada were synon-ymous with marginality. The association of lambada with crime can be seen in Salomão Laredo’s 1989 novel Guamares, particularly in colorful descriptions of the musical goings on in the Caboré dos Bandidos (Thieves’ Cabaret).

19. The lambada is one of six Paraense musical genres (three of which are folkloric) listed on the state government’s official website. It is also the longest entry because its genealogy is still contested and its connection to the Ama-zon seemingly less naturalized than that of folkloric music such as carimbó or siriá. See the website Governo do Pará, “Música,” http://www.pa.gov.br/O_Para /musica.asp.

20. For a historical treatment, see Salles (1971).21. This is quite literally the case in the narrative that carimbó icon Pinduca

tells of how he “invented” a modern, electric form of carimbó in the late 1960s that incorporated elements of merengue, mambo, and rock and roll. Upon over-hearing a carimbó drum circle “in the middle of the woods” while en route to a gig with his dance band, Pinduca stopped to observe the goings-on. After join-ing in with some of his bandmates, Pinduca was convinced that playing carimbó with his dance band would go over well with urban audiences. See Leão da Costa (2008, 169) and Guerreiro Amaral (2003).

22. As Yúdice writes, “Claims to autonomy and legitimacy on the basis of [a group’s] particular culture does not take place in a vacuum; it is made possible by the conjuncture of a welfare state that defines clients by group, by a media and market system that targets consumers, by the juridical means available to chal-lenge discrimination. . . . [R]elations with others and with institutions also demar-cate a sense of community” (2003, 56).

23. Personal interview, Nonato Lemos, Belém do Pará, September 24, 2009.24. Personal interview, José Félix Solano Melo, Belém do Pará, July 6, 2009.25. Personal interview, Aurino Quirino Gonçalves, Belém do Pará, July 8,

2009.


26. Personal interview, Felipe Cordeiro, Belém do Pará, January 19, 2010.27. For two drastically different interpretations of this revival’s impact and its

“complicity” with an exploitative capitalist culture industry, see Lamen (2001a, chap. 1) and Ribeiro dos Santos, Silva das Neves, and Lima (2006).

28. The mangue bit movement, based in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, Pernambuco, emerged during the early to mid-1990s. It proposed the fu-sion of regional folkloric styles such as maracatu and coco with global pop idioms such as hip-hop and heavy metal. The movement has been celebrated for putting Recife “on the musical map” of Brazil and helping reinvigorate what had been stigmatized as “backward” musical traditions.

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