Special Issue: Consuming, Creating, Contesting: Latin American Diasporic Practices. Canadian Journal...

Canadian Journal of Latin American andCaribbean Studies/Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbesEditor in Chief / Rédactrice en chef

Catherine Krull (Queen’s University)

Managing Editor / Directeur de la gestion

Amitava Chowdhury (Queen’s University)

Editors / Rédacteurs Melanie Newton (University of Toronto)Cynthia Wright (York University)Candace Johnson (Guelph University)Lyse Hébert (York University)Andrea Moraes (Ryerson University)

Book Review Editor / Rédactrice de critique de livre

Tanya Basok (University of Windsor)

Assistant to the Editor in Chief / Assistant à la Rédactrice en chef

Asa McKercher (Queen’s University)

Editorial Board/Comité de rédaction Judith Adler Hellman (York University)

Maxwell A. Cameron (University of British Columbia)Hugo DeMarinis (Wilfred Laurier University)Kalowatie Deonandan (University of Saskatchewan)Philippe Faucher (Université de Montréal)José Antonio Giménez-Micó (Concordia University) Ricardo Grinspun (York University)Laura Macdonald (Carleton University)Julia Murphy (Kwantlen Polytechnic University)Gerardo Otero (Simon Fraser University)

PUBLICATIONS MAIL AGREEMENT NO. 40064590RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO:CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES8-17 YORK RESEARCh TOWERYORK UNIVERSITY4700 KEELE STTORONTO, ON M3J 1P3email: [email protected]

The Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies acknowledges the financial support of the Social Sciences and humanities Research Council of Canada.

CONTENTs / sOMMAiREVol. 37, No. 74, 2012Foreword / Avant-propos ......................................CAThERINE KRULL 5

ArticlesConsuming, Creating, Contesting: Latin American

Diasporic Practices ......... OLIVIA ShERINGhAM and MARIA DAS GRAÇAS BRIGhTWELL 11

The 503 Days of “El piquete de Londres”: A Diasporic Space and Moment ................................................... CAROLINA RAMÍREZ 17

On the Move and In the Making: Brazilian Culinary Cultures in London ................................. MARIA DAS GRAÇAS BRIGhTWELL 51

Maracatu New York: Transregional Flows Between Pernambuco, New York, and New Orleans .......................DANIELLE MAIA CRUZ 81

Brazilian Day Festival and the Cleansing of 46th Street: Representing Brazilian Identities in New York City ................................................................NATALIA COIMBRA DE SÁ 109

“Can you take a picture of the wind?”: Candomble’s Absent Presence Framed through Regional Foodways and Brazilian Popular Music ............................................. SCOTT ALVES BARTON 137

We Are What We Now Eat: Food and Identity in the Cuban Diaspora .....................................................IVÁN DARIAS ALFONSO 173

Research Note / Note de rechercheEst-ce que l’environnement a une influence sur la migration

internationale au Canada? Note de recherche sur le cas de la diaspora haïtienne à Ottawa-Gatineau ............................................... AMINA MEZDOUR et LUISA VERONIS 207

Looking Back and Moving Forward— Reflections on Latin American and Caribbean studiesClass, Gender, and Race in the Caribbean: Reflections on

an Intellectual Journey ............................................. hELEN I. SAFA 219Reviews / RecensionsÁngel Rama, Writing Across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation

in Latin America .............................JOSé ANTONIO GIMéNEZ MICó 243

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4 CJLACS / RCELAC 37/74 2012

Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina ..............................................................JEAN GRUGEL 245

Pierre Sean Brotherton, Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba ...................... DENISE ChALLENGER 247

Julie M. Bunck and Michael R. Fowler, Bribes, Bullets and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in Central America ................................................................... JULIA BUXTON 249

Molly Doane, Stealing Shining Rivers: Agrarian Conflict, Market Logic and Conservation in a Mexican Forest ............................................................. MIChAEL K. McCALL 251

Ifeona Fulani, Editor, Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music .........................MIKE ALLEYNE 254

Sandra Lazo de la Vega and Timothy J. Steigenga, Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, Florida ....................................... RUTh GOMBERG-MUñOZ 259

Barry S. Levitt, Power in the Balance: Presidents, Parties, and Legislatures in Peru and Beyond ....... MAXWELL A. CAMERON 262

Laura A. Lewis, Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the Making of “Black” Mexico ..........JOAN BRISTOL 264

Jorge Nállim, Transformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930–1955 ........................................BENJAMIN BRYCE 266

Jason Seawright, Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela .............................................. hENRY DIETZ 268

henry Veltmeyer and Darcy Tetreault, Editors, Poverty and Development in Latin America: Public Policies and Development Pathways .....................................................CARMELO MESA-LAGO 270

Notes on the Contributors / Nos Auteurs .................................. 273

Manuscript Preparation / Préparation des manuscrits ........ 277

FOREWORD / AVANT-PROPOs

CATHERiNE KRuLLQueen’s University Editor in Chief, CJLACS Rédactrice en chef, RCéLAC

I am especially pleased to present Issue 74 as it marks the first “Spe-cial Issue” during my tenure as Editor-in-Chief. The guest co-editors, Olivia Sheringham (Oxford University) and Maria das Graças Bright-well (University of London), bring together an impressive collection of vibrant and insightful papers that closely examine an array of important themes pertaining to the hitherto under-analyzed area of Latin American sociocultural diasporic practices. With a range of international scholars from different disciplines—geography, migra-tion studies, cultural studies, food studies, sociology, and journal-ism—diverse Latin American diasporic practices are assessed and put into context. These articles explore critical “diasporic moments” in “transnational spaces” focusing on elements of—and the connec-tions among—diasporic political protests, street commemorations, international migration and the environment, transnational networks, culinary cultures, identity, and religious practices, all major issues in terms of creating, consuming, and contesting diasporic and transna-tional spaces and practices. The papers address not only these issues but raise important questions that are central to diasporic studies.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce an exciting new feature in the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Entitled “Looking Back and Moving Forward—Reflections on Latin

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Vol. 37, No. 74 (2012): 5–9

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American and Caribbean Studies,” each issue will feature an inter-view with or essay by a leading scholar on their life’s work, on their views of the state of the field, and on where Latin American and/or Caribbean Studies are headed. Our premier essay is by helen Safa, Professor Emerita at the University of Florida and past president of the Latin American Studies Association, whose work on class, race, and gender in the hispanic Caribbean revolutionized the discipline and continues to influence scholars.

I would also like to extend our appreciation to the scholars who reviewed papers for this issue. Their expertise and insightful comments have contributed to producing a vibrant and thought-provoking issue. Recent efforts to promote the Journal at the international meetings of CALACS, LASA, and the CSA have been fruitful in not only increas-ing the volume of submissions from a diversity of disciplines but also in increasing the participation of scholars from outside Canada, espe-cially from Latin American and the Caribbean. I am indebted to our Editorial Assistant, Dr. Asa McKercher (Queen’s University), for his considerable assistance not only in these promotional efforts but also in assisting me in getting this issue ready for press. I also appreciate the dedicated work of our Book Review Editor, Dr. Tanya Basok (Uni-versity of Windsor), who has once again contributed a wide-ranging collection of excellent reviews, as well as that of our Managing Editor, Dr. Amitava Chowdhury (Queen’s University), and Isabelle Plessis (University of British Columbia), who continues to assist us with French translation, sometimes at the last minute. I would also like to acknowledge two individuals, Judy Powell at the University of Calgary Press (Journals Manager and Project Coordinator) and Eileen Eckert (Copy Editor), whose tireless efforts to turn our work into a polished and aesthetically pleasing journal only further enhances its scholarly reputation.

At the same time, I am very pleased to feature on the front cover the art Círculo da Cura (The healing Circle) by Marcia Mar, a London-based Brazilian multimedia artist, poet, performer, singer, and experimental composer who plays an altered electric bass guitar, the “MarBass,” with sea shells. Considered to be a leading Brazil-ian visual artist in the UK, she won the 2012 Brazilian International Press Award. Informed by both syncretism and multiculturalism, her art reflects “the aesthetic, ethical and co-creative equality of multiple

Foreword / Avant-propos 7

possibilities expressed by people’s transformative wisdom as inher-ited from a timeless time and proclaims that we are what we envisage” (www.marciamar.com). In addition to being a first-rate artist, Marcia is also a human rights activist and is devoted to counselling refugees from Africa and the Middle East. I appreciate Marcia’s generosity in allowing us to reproduce her work; it is especially fitting for the cover of this special issue on “Consuming, Creating, Contesting: Latin American Diasporic Practices.”

Je suis particulièrement heureuse de presenter la 74ième édition de cette revue étant donné qu’il constitute la première « édition spe-ciale » durant mon mandat comme Rédactrice en chef de la Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et Caraïbes. Les corédac-teurs invités, Olivia Sheringham (Oxford University) et Maria das Graças Brightwell (University of London), rassemblent une collection de dissertations impressionante, vibrantes et perspicaces qui portent sur un éventail de themes importants qui se rapportent au domaine des pratiques socio-culturelles diasporiques de l’Amérique latine. Il s’agit certes d’un domaine grandement sous-analysé jusqu’à présent. Avec une variété de chercheurs internationaux issus de différentes disciplines comme la géographie, les études sur la migration, les études culturelles, les études alimentaires, la sociologie, et le journal-isme, les diverses pratiques diasporiques de l’Amérique latine sont évaluées et mises en contexte. Ces articles explorent les « moments diasporiques » critiques dans les « espaces transnationaux ». Ils se concentrent sur les éléments tels que les manifestations politique diasporiques, les commémorations sur la rue, la migration interna-tional et l’environnement, les réseaux transnationaux, les cultures culinaires, et les pratiques religieuses ainsi que les liens qui les unissent. Ce sont toutes des questions importantes qui concernent la création, l’utilisation, et la contestation des espaces et des pratiques diasporiques et transnationales. Les dissertations dans cette publica-tion abordent non seulement ces problèmes, mais elles soulèvent aussi de nouvelles questions centrales pour les études diasporiques.

Il me fait grand plaisir de vous présenter une nouvelle rubrique dans la Revue canadienne des Études Latino-Américaines et Caraïbes. Intitulée « Regarder en arrière et aller de l’avant—Réflexions sur les études latino-américaines et caraïbes », chaque numéro comportera


un entretien avec, ou un essai écrit par, un éminent chercheur portant sur l’œuvre de leur vie, sur leur vision de l’état de ce champs, et sur la direction que prendront les études latino-américaines et / ou cari-béennes. Notre premier essai est d’helen Safa, professeure émérite à l’Université de la Floride and ancienne présidente de l’Association des études latino-américaines (LASA), dont les travaux sur la class, la race et le genre dans les Caraïbes hispaniques ont révolutionné la discipline et continuent d’influencer les chercheurs.

Je souhaite aussi remercier les chercheurs qui ont révisés des arti-cles pour ce numéro. Leur expertise et leurs commentaires éclairants ont contribués à la production d’un numéro dynamique et apte à sus-citer la réflexion. Les efforts déployés récemment afin de promouvoir ce journal dans les conférences internationales du CALACS, de la LASA, et du CSA ont servi à augmenter le nombre de soumissions par diverses disciplines, mais aussi à augmenter la participation de chercheurs de l’extérieur du Canada et tout particulièrement de l’Amerique latine et des Caraïbes. Je suis redevable à notre assistante à la rédaction, Dr. Asa McKercher (Queen’s University), pour son aide considérable au chapitre non seulement de la promotion, mais aussi à celui de la préparation de la présente édition. De surcroît, je reconnais le travail acharné de notre éditrice de la critique du livre, Dr. Tanya Basok (University of Windsor), qui a encore une fois assemblé une vaste collection de d’excellentes revues. De plus, je souligne le travail de notre directeur de la rédaction, Dr. Amitava Chowdhury (Queen’s University) et d’Isabelle Plessis (University of British Columbia), qui continue à nous aider avec la traduction française, parfois à la dernière minute. J’aimerais aussi rémercier deux person-nes, soit Judy Powell de l’University of Calgary Press (directrice de la rédaction et coordinatrice de projet) et Eileen Eckert (réviseur), qui ont toutes deux aidé à renforcer la réputation de ce journal dans le monde académique en polissant ses oeuvres et leur donnant une apparence attrayante.

Enfin, c’est avec grand plaisir que je présente l’œuvre « Círculo da Cura » (Le cœur guérissant) de Marcia Mar, une poète, artiste multimédia, chanteuse et compositrice experimentale brésilienne basée à Londres, qui joue à l’aide d’une guitare modifiée par des co-quillagues qu’on surnomme la « MarBass ». Considérée comme étant l’une des artistes visuelles brésiliennes de haut niveau à Londres, en

Foreword / Avant-propos 9

2012 elle a gagné le « Brazilian International Press Award ». Guidée par le syncrétisme et le multiculturalisme, son art réflète « l’égalité éthique, esthétique et co-créative de plusieurs possibilités exprimées par la sagesse tranformative des peuple, héritée d’un temps intem-porel, qui proclame que nous sommes ce que nous envisagions » (www.marciamar.com). En plus d’être une artiste de première classe, Marcia est aussi une activiste des droits humains devouée à conseiller les refugés de l’Afrique et du Moyen Orient. J’apprécie la générosité de Marcia, qui nous a permis de reproduire son oeuvre, car elle est particulièrement appropriée pour la couverture de ce numéro spécial qui porte sur « Consuming, Creating, Contesting : Latin American Diasporic Practices. »

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies www.tandfonline.com/cjil

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies www.tandfonline.com/rlac

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studieswww.tandfonline.com/cjsc

Journal of Medieval Iberian Studieswww.tandfonline.com/ribs

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research www.tandfonline.com/rjil

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia www.tandfonline.com/cjla

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americaswww.tandfonline.com/rrev

Colonial Latin American Review

www.tandfonline.com/ccla

www.tandfonline.com

Latin American Studies JournalsFrom Routledge

Bulletin of Spanish Studies:Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America

www.tandfonline.com/bss

CONsuMiNG, CREATiNG, CONTEsTiNG: LATiN AMERiCAN DiAsPORiC PRACTiCEs

OLiViA sHERiNGHAMInternational Migration Institute, University of OxfordMARiA DAs GRAÇAs BRiGHTWELLDepartment of Geography, Royal holloway, University of London

having long been a region of immigration, the 20th century saw a reversal of this trend as Latin America became characterized by widespread patterns of emigration (McIlwaine 2011). The majority of these migratory movements were toward the US, yet since the early 2000s—in part due to the increasing immigration restrictions following 9/11—there has been a diversification of destination coun-tries with large numbers of Latin Americans turning toward Europe, in many cases following ancestral ties dating back to the European migration to the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Solimano 2003).1 While scholarly attention has begun to capture these diverse migratory trends, there remains a lack of comparative ethnographic research into the lives and practices of Latin Americans in particular places. Moreover, a tendency to focus on the socioeconomic aspects of migrant life—such as integration, employment, and transnational remittances—has led to a lack of attention being paid to migrants’ cultural practices, and the different ways in which diasporic groups carve out spaces of belonging in and engagement with host society settings. Finally, we argue that turning attention to more recent migra-


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tory flows—of Latin Americans toward Europe, for example—should not ignore the fundamental role that older diasporic movements have played in the cultural and social life of the Americas. With a view to-ward providing a broader conception of the notion of “diaspora” in the Americas, this special issue brings together articles that explore the diasporic practices of Latin Americans in London and New York, and Brazilians of African heritage—the West African diaspora in Brazil.

This collection of articles—most of which were originally pre-sented as part of two panels at the 2012 Latin American Studies As-sociation Congress—does not aim to capture the complexity and wide geographical breadth of migration to and from Latin America, focus-ing more specifically on Chilean and Brazilian migration to London and New York and African influences in the northeast of Brazil.2 Yet, brought together as they are in this collection, the articles draw atten-tion to the ways in which diverse sociocultural practices—including food, music, religion, protest, and street commemorations—represent “diasporic moments” (hall 2012) in “transnational spaces” (Jackson, Crang, and Dwyer 2004) and contribute to the creation of a sense of belonging in these locations. Moreover, despite the collection focus-ing on only three diasporic groups, the distinct migration trajectories and experiences allow for fascinating comparisons, parallels, and contrasts between these three contexts, between these three ethnic groups, and between different generations within the groups. Mov-ing beyond the abstract realm, all five articles provide grounded and situated approaches to current debates on diaspora, transnationalism, and material culture.

Influenced by broader conceptions of diaspora, such as Brah’s (1996) notion of a “homing desire”—which she distinguishes from a “desire for homeland”—this interdisciplinary set of articles also points to the different manifestations of “the diasporic” through so-cial and cultural practices. Thus, rather than conceptualizing diaspora as representing a single homogeneous group, united by a desire for a single specific homeland, the articles examine different diasporic moments, places, and practices. In all cases diaspora becomes a “heuristic device” (Fortier 2000) that can refer to “diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices and so on” (Brubaker 2005, 13). These articles also draw on conceptualizations of “transnational spac-es” (Jackson et al. 2004) that, like Brah’s (1996) “diaspora space,”

Sheringham & Brightwell / Latin American Diasporic Practices 13

encompass many more people than just those who migrate or whose lives are lived—physically—across borders. Finally, these articles, in different ways, explore the complex circuits and interconnections that link people and places across the dynamic and constantly shifting globalizing context, constituting what Appardurai (1996) has termed “ethnoscapes.” The role of the media as shaping and shaped by these ethnoscapes emerges as a pertinent theme across the articles.

Carolina Ramírez Cabrera’s article in this issue, which examines the 503 days of protest—el piquete—among Chileans in London dur-ing the arrest and detention of General Augusto Pinochet, conceives diaspora as a field of interaction, which is embodied and affective as well as historically actualized. Reflecting on these processes, the article argues that the 503 days of el piquete are part of a crucial diasporic moment and space relating to specific historical and po-litical conjunctures. As well as contributing to a reformulation in their sense of home, displacement and belonging, Cabrera argues that el piquete represented a moment when the Chilean diaspora’s distinctive connections to Britain were visibly (re)articulated. Maria das Graças Brightwell’s article on Brazilian “culinary cultures” in London looks at the role of food practices and places in the creation of complex diasporic identities among Brazilian migrants—from several different regions in Brazil—in London, and points to how such places and practices contribute to a sense of being “at home” in London while at the same time helping to create connections with “back home” in Brazil.

The role of food is an example of how these articles explore, in different ways, to what extent practices of consumption can shape diasporic and transnational identities. While in Brightwell’s article ethnic food is primarily produced by Brazilians to by consumed by Brazilians—hence her engagement with the notion of economia da saudade (nostalgia/homesickness economy)—Danielle Maia Cruz’s discussion of the percussion group Maracatu New York explores how a Brazilian cultural practice—maracatu, whose origins lie in the northeastern state of Pernambuco in Brazil—is recreated and reinter-preted in New York through its consumption, or practice, by Brazilian and US musicians. As such, the creation of this “transnational space” encompasses both migrants and non-migrants, reflecting how such spaces are not static or homogeneous but, rather, are “multiply inhab-


ited” and “multidimensional” (Jackson et al. 2004), formed through the overlapping practices of multiple actors.

The role of creativity in the formation of diasporic and transna-tional identities and spaces also emerges in different ways throughout these articles.

Exploring the ways in which food in the Cuban diaspora is used to construct notions of identity and nation, Ivan Darias Alfonso’s article argues that “if what constitutes Cuban in Cuban food is expanded in diaspora, so is the power this modifier (Cuban) acquires to construct notions of cultural identities.” One way that this expansion—of Cu-ban food and national identity—happens is through the encounter of migrants with unfamiliar versions of Cuban food in the diaspora through recipe books and a variety of different ingredients. Thus Al-fonso argues that food—and the creation of a “Cuban” cuisine—plays a crucial role for members of the Cuban diaspora in their sense of becoming “more” Cuban in London.

Meanwhile, Natalia Coimbra de Sá’s article examines the creation of Brazilian spaces in New York through the Brazilian Day Festival and the Cleansing of 42nd Street, both held annually in Manhattan. More specifically, through a discussion of how these events have changed since their emergence in the 1980s (in the case of Brazilian Day) and in 2008 (in the case of the “Cleansing”), it explores the complex negotiations between the Brazilian community in New York, the community media, and the massive Brazilian media companies such as Globo in the (re)invention and reinterpretation of these Bra-zilian diasporic spaces. In a similar way, Scott Alves Barton’s article explores how the media plays a crucial role in (re)creating and dis-seminating certain images of Baianidade or “Bahianess” (from the Brazilian northeastern state of Bahia). Creativity and the diasporic experience is also central to Cruz’s article on Maracatu New York, which discusses how musical forms originating from New Orleans (in the US) and Pernambuco (in Brazil) fuse together to create new musical forms through the practices of the participants in the percus-sion group. And finally, Cabrera’s article points to the creative and “performative strategies of appropriation of space,” which reflect the diasporic experience of living in two worlds.

These articles also reveal how the creative and consumption practices that contribute to the formation of these diasporic and

Sheringham & Brightwell / Latin American Diasporic Practices 15

transnational spaces of belonging are also characterized by contes-tation. Thus Cabrera’s article reveals not only the ways in which Chileans were brought together through a political protest against Pinochet, but also the intergenerational and political tensions within the Chilean community in London that emerged during this hugely significant “diasporic moment.” Brightwell’s article brings out the tensions between regional and national identity within the creation of a Brazilian diasporic cuisine in London. While food from the central states of Goiás and Minas Gerais becomes popularized as representative of “national” cuisine, Brightwell argues that this notion of “Brazilianness” is contested by Brazilians from other re-gions—and from different social classes—who have a different view of what should constitute Brazilian “national” cuisine. In the case of the Cuban diaspora in London, Alfonso argues that gender identities are also revisited. The male Cuban migrants interviewed by Alfonso used cooking as a way to perform their diasporic identities and in so doing challenge traditional gender prejudices. Barton’s article draws attention to the use of food, religion, and music in the creation of Afro-Brazilian regional identities. Yet it also reveals how these cul-tural practices are somewhat contested by the powerful practices of the media, whose (mis)representation of Baianidade often erotizes and objectifies Afro-Brazilian women and ignores the intricate skills involved in the preparation of Comida de Santo (holy food). Finally, Coimbra de Sá’s discussion of the Cleansing of 42nd Street points to different levels of contestation as this “transnational commemora-tion” comes to represent a “counter-event”—in contrast to the more mainstream and commercialized Brazilian day—but is also stripped of its original religious significance and reinterpreted in the diasporic context.

All six articles thus explore how, in different ways, certain di-asporic and transnational spaces and practices created by diasporic groups shape, and are shaped, by the receiving setting. These spaces and practices are not just replicas of those “back home” but rather involve processes of recreation, reimagining, and reinvention, and the production and negotiation of something new in new contexts. This collection of articles thus not only provides a deeper insight into the creation of different diasporic practices and spaces, but also how they are created, consumed, and, indeed, contested.


Notes1 It is interesting to note that many of these migratory trends are reversing

once again in the wake of the economic crisis in Europe, as many Latin Americans are returning home and people from Southern Europe are mi-grating to Latin America, particularly to Brazil and Argentina (Phillips 2011).

2 The sessions at LASA 2012 were titled “Empowering Latin American Community in London: A Construction of a Transnational Cultural Space” and “Economies of Performance: Brazilian Subjectivity and Cultural Pro-duction in the United States.”

Works CitedAppadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globaliza-

tion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London:

Routledge.Brubaker, Rogers. 2005. The “diaspora” diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies

28.1: 1–19.Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2000. Migrant belongings: Memory, space, identity.

Oxford: Berg.hall, Stuart. 2012. Avtar Brah’s cartographies: Moment, method, meaning.

Feminist Review 100.1: 27–38.Jackson, Peter, Phil Crang, and Claire Dwyer. 2004. Introduction: The spaces

of transnationality. In Transnational spaces, edited by Peter Jackson, Phil Crang and Claire Dwyer, 1–23. London: Routledge.

McIlwaine, Cathy. 2011. Introduction: Theoretical and empirical perspectives on Latin American migration across borders. In Cross-border migration among Latin Americans: European perspectives and beyond, edited by Cathy McIlwaine, 1–17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Phillips, Tom. 2011. Portuguese migrants seek a slice of Brazil’s econom-ic boom. The Guardian, 22 December. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/22/portuguese-migrants-brazil-economic-boom>. Ac-cessed 20 September 2012.

Solimano, Andres. 2003. Globalization and international migration: The Latin American experience. CEPAL Review 80: 53–69.

THE 503 DAYs OF “EL PIQUETE DE LONDRES”: A DiAsPORiC sPACE AND MOMENT

CAROLiNA RAMÍREZGoldsmiths, University of London

Abstract. This article looks at the picket lines formed during the detention of Pinochet in London in October 1998. El piquete de Londres (“the picket of London”) involved the rerouting of a worldwide dispersed group of members of the Chilean diaspora to London, the recreation of a repertoire that combined contention and commemoration, politics and emotions, as well as local and international domains. Reflecting on those processes, the article argues that the 503 days of el piquete are part of a crucial moment and space: that of the diasporic. Through this, the Chilean diaspora’s distinctive connections to Britain were visibly (re)articulated while their sense of “home,” displacement, and belonging was, once again, reformulated. Along with turning our attention toward Britain’s “new” diasporas, this piece contributes to a critical tradition in migration studies which—while challenging essentialist approaches—con-ceives “diaspora” as a field of interaction, which is embodied and affective as well as historically actualized.Resumen. Este artículo analiza los piquetes formados durante la detención de Pinochet en Londres en octubre de 1998. El piquete de Londres implicó el re-enrutamiento de un grupo globalmente disperso de la diáspora chilena hacia Londres, la recreación de un repertorio que combinaba contención y conmemo-ración, política y emociones, así como también dominios locales e internacio-nales. Reflexionando sobre este proceso, el artículo propone que los 503 días de el piquete son parte de un espacio y momento crucial: aquel de lo diásporico. A través de éste, la conexión entre la diáspora chilena y Gran Bretaña fue visible-


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mente (re)articulada, al mismo tiempo que su sentido de hogar, desplazamiento y pertenencia fue, una vez más, reformulado. Junto con dirigir nuestra atención hacia “nuevas” diásporas del Reino Unido, esta intervención contribuye hacia una tradición crítica en estudios migratorios, la cual—desafiando enfoques esencialistas—concibe “diáspora” como un campo de interacción, el cual es material, afectiva e históricamente actualizado.

Everywhere where Pinochet was, we went and stood outside, and screamed and shouted, and banged drums, and cried and laughed, and we spoke about the day’s events, and we even had a barbeque outside one of his residences. And for 503 days we followed that man wherever the British authorities decided to put him. And it was an international campaign. We had del-egations coming from Belgium, we had people coming from Sheffield [someone from the public shouts “Escocia!”], Scot-land, we had people from all over the world when they could come and join the picket. And when Jack Straw, under the guidance of the British government, decided to send Pinochet back, that was something that ripped our hearts out. But there was also a sense of keeping what we’d reestablished. What we’d reestablished was a network of human rights activists that had already existed from September 11, 1973, onwards … And part of that were people like me and Alicia and other young people who joined together with their parents in those picket lines as we hadn’t been able to do back on September 11, 1973. We were those little kids running around, pretty much like Lea is today [a girl who plays in the scenario and starts grinning at the public when she hears her name]. And we were able to take part in that movement. And there was a strong sense not to lose that momentum when Pinochet just went back. We could just go home and cry, and we did cry! But then, we also made a resolution to ourselves: that we wouldn’t let the horrors of the Pinochet machinery be forgot-ten once again! (Ana, public talk, August 2011, emphasis in the original speech)1

Ana is a Chilean Londoner and an activist in her mid 30s. In the con-text of a Latin American festival in Machynlleth, Wales, she speaks

Ramírez / The 503 Days of “El piquete de Londres” 19

energetically to an audience made up mostly of English, Welsh, and Latin American people, including an intergenerational group of (British-born) Chileans (see Ramírez and Serpente 2012). Ana is de-scribing el piquete de Londres (“the picket of London”). This 503-day protest emerged during the government of the United Kingdom’s trial to decide whether to extradite the former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, to Spain on an arrest warrant that had been issued by a Spanish magistrate in October 1998. Like el piquete—that series of mobile demonstrations she describes—Ana’s speech transports and moves those who are transiently congregated at that event. It takes our attention and emotional registers to different levels. Personal recollections, contradictory feelings, and bodily reactions converge in the making of a multicultural public in a distant town in Wales. Somehow, her mode of bearing witness to a pivotal moment for the Chilean diaspora resembles, consciously or not, the characteristics of the process that she tries to depict.

I argue that el piquete de Londres is crucial for comprehending the changing fields of belonging of an intergenerational group of Chileans who inhabit a post-dictatorial and diasporic context. As Ana’s speech vividly illustrates, el piquete involved the assembly of a dispersed group and a form of mobilization in which political claims were performatively appropriated and led. Transnational connections and intergenerational interactions were also at play. El piquete comprised the emergence of public diaspora space through political claims that, as we shall see, have affective and “carniva-lesque” dimensions. By “making noise”—as the picketers often describe what they did—“interferences” and “disturbances” intruded into the well-settled patterns and displays of the official national dis-courses (Attali 1985, in Puwar 2011, 332–333). With these actions, those who had not participated in the historical consensus in Chile and had remained largely unnoticed in the daily fabric of the city of London, became publicly perceptible and recognizable. Internal conflicts and differences also re-emerged. Through these processes the Chilean diaspora’s sense of home, displacement, and belonging was, once again, reformulated.

El piquete has some commonalities with other diasporic social scenes, which have been analyzed by several authors. Demarcations between private and public domains, and these domains’ temporal


margins, were contested (Blunt 2003; Blunt and Dowling 2006, 196–252), as were the affective affiliations that are often presumed by migration scholarship to count in migrant home-making—for ex-ample, kin, ethnic community, the Nation (for a critical approach see Fortier 2003; Cvetkovich 2003, 121–124; Ahmed 1999). Moreover, the processes involved in el piquete converse with a conceptualiza-tion of diaspora and diasporic belonging as “a process” (Mavroudi 2007), which, however, is “situated” through affective, symbolic, and embodied connections (Brah 1996, 184; Ahmed, Fortier, Castañeda, and Sheller 2003; Knowles 2003; Fortier 2000). But there is something else. After all, the spatial and social configuration in question was invigorated by an assembly of actors whose migrant routes are not clearly connected to Britain’s imperialist legacy and whose performative politics are not mobilized by a postcolonial struggle (cf. Gilroy 1993 and Werbner 2002). Latin Americans are not directly linked to the Commonwealth or to Britain’s former colonies. As such, they provide an interesting standpoint from which to look at other emerging diasporic formations (Román-Velázquez 2009). Bearing in mind the particularities of the Chilean diaspora of London, one could ask: What made this specific diasporic space and moment possible? What kind of social, spatial, and historical routes of the Chilean diaspora, and connections to Britain, were (re)fash-ioned? What has the emergence of this diasporic moment and space made visible and speakable for the diaspora? Before answering these questions, I describe below the context in which this diasporic mo-ment and spatial formation emerged, as well as the theoretical and methodological tools which I used to interrogate it.

Pinochet’s Detention and el piquete in ContextIt all started on 22 September 1998, when General Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), the former Chilean dictator, visited London. The in-ternational news transmitted the images of a joyful 82-year-old man wandering around the city, buying souvenirs with his wife, Lucía, and drinking tea with his longstanding friend and ally, Margaret Thatcher. But the media could not foresee what was about to come. Thirteen hours of travel from Santiago to London had affected his ageing body, and so, on 9 October, he was interned in the London


Clinic to have relatively simple back surgery. In the midst of his recovery, while rumors of his death “on the operation table” were denied (“Pinochet in London Clinic” 1998) and with a growing local awareness of the presence of “a murderer among us,”2 the unex-pected happened. In the late evening of 16 October, detectives from Scotland Yard entered Pinochet’s room, secured the building’s exits, and disarmed his bodyguards. The groundbreaking news: Pino chet was under arrest to face, for the first time, a trial for the crimes against humanity committed during his military regime between 1973 and 1990.3

In the 1970s, decades before Pinochet’s detention, Chilean exiles were Britain’s most visible Latin American group (McIlwaine 2011, 3–4). Changes in British migration policies allowed entry by refu-gees who were fleeing from Pinochet’s dictatorship (Kay 1987, 51; Román-Velázquez 2009, 107), a regime that had overthrown Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government on 11 Septem-ber 1973. During the 1970s and 1980s the presence of Chilean exiles in London was visible, not so much in numbers, but because of their active presence in the public sphere through solidarity campaigns and other organizations that connected the Chilean left with the lo-cal public of the UK (Bermudez 2011, 225–226; see also Wright and Oñate 1998, 9–10; Wright and Oñate 2005).4

Pinochet’s detention took place 25 years after the coup d’état and 8 years after the re-establishment of Chile’s democracy. By 1998 movements back to Chile and the end of the dictatorship had vis-ibly diminished Chileans’ presence in the UK. Also, migrants from other Latin American countries had been arriving in the UK continu-ally since the 1980s (McIlwaine 2011, 4; Román-Velazquez 2009, 106–107) and Chileans were becoming a minority among the UK’s Latin American population.5 Communities founded in national poli-tics were increasingly refashioned by alternative activities, lifestyles, motivations, and loyalties (Ramírez 2011). The social activities of Chilean exiles were gradually incorporating the wider Latin American and British milieu (Ramírez 2013). In Chile, meanwhile, “forgive-ness” was becoming part of a political program of consensus-building and looking forward to the future, displacing the experiences of those who were still living with the scars of the past (Richard 2000, 9, 11; Gomez-Barris 2009, 4–5). Following Stuart hall’s conception of the


diasporic, I approach the detention of Pinochet as a pivotal point in this specific “political, historical and theoretical conjuncture” (hall 2012, drawing on Brah 2012 [1999])—a moment of the “here” and “there,” when an awareness of a “double inscription” (re)surfaces; when structures of inclusion and marginalization, sameness and dif-ference, and multiple belongingness come to the fore—“the moment of the diasporic” (hall 2012, 29, 30).

The analysis here is not located within discussions of citizenship and multiculturalism (Yuval-Davis, Kannabiran, and Vieten 2006). Unlike other political mobilizations led by Latin American migrants in London, el piquete did not emerge as a response to migrants’ deprivation of citizenship rights and the resulting need for policy change (Però 2011; Kemp, Raijman, Resnik, and Schammah Gesser 2000). Nor was their political action a strategy to contend with the consequences of migrants’ negative stereotypes. Indeed, in 1998 the burgeoning debate about the “multiculturalism backlash” had not yet fully entered Britain’s public sphere (cf. Però 2011, 119–121). The claims at stake in el piquete contested other forms of invisibility such as those rooted in myths of historical progress and disavowal, claims that were intergenerationally embraced and directed to a worldwide audience (cf. Bermudez 2011).

Pinochet’s detention has been studied sociologically from the perspective of human rights and cosmopolitanism (Nash 2007). This approach has unsettled the taken-for-granted-ness of national bor-ders, going, interestingly, beyond the transnational frame—“human rights do not just cross borders,” Nash states. “They contest, disrupt and sometimes re-configure them” (2007, 419). From Chile, the cultural theorist Nelly Richard focuses on the national impact of Pinochet’s detention. She describes it as a process that “quickly and confusingly remobilized history and memory as zones of political enunciation, of social intervention and media performativity” (2003, 265). In her analysis, women’s occupation of the public sphere (with their claims and public appearance), “updated” the suppressed memories and the divided versions of national political history. With this, the “strategies of national unity” that were in play were sub-verted (Calhoun 1999, 226). I find Nash’s assertion about borders and Richard’s reflection on the reconfiguration of national publics illuminating. Yet my approach to the “Pinochet case” sees it neither as the opening of a new era in the international human rights arena


nor as the shaking of the amnesiac history-lines of Chile, but as a new stage for an intergenerational group of Chileans exiles making “home” beyond the nation(s).

“New Diasporas” and Their search for a Home in Britain’s Public sphereBy the Chilean diaspora I mean those who arrived in the UK in the context of the Pinochet dictatorship and their offspring, specifically those who have remained abroad living in the multicultural landscape of London. In line with a classic approach to diasporas (Safran 1991), the “Chilean diaspora” has been a category used to describe a world-wide dispersed group in terms of their condition of victimhood, their preservation of common identity, their maintenance of memories of their country of origin, and a mythical scenario of return (Bolzman 2002; Wright and Oñate 2005). This body of work often considers the experiences of first-generation exiles only (a recent exception is Olsson 2009). As a result, the changing sense of “home”—in relation to both Chile and the country of settlement—of a multigenerational group during the post-dictatorial era has still not been paid adequate attention.

In Britain, “diaspora” has been a heuristic device used mostly to reflect upon the experience of settlers from the former colonies. Diasporas emerge from “a ‘syncretic dynamism’ set in motion by de-colonization and trans-global migration” (hall 2012, 29). Yet further forms of displacement are still creating “new diasporas” (Brah 2012, 173; Van hear 1998). I want to look at those whose diasporization results from other geopolitical routes: Latin American dictatorships and exile. While acknowledging these aspects as important points of departure, I propose that researching the lives of this group in a post-dictatorial context, in a global city like London, requires going beyond “exile” and looking at them differently in the present. I want to look at how Chilean exiles have come to produce “diaspora space” (Brah 1996). This is a terrain where a “homing desire,” rather than a “desire for a homeland,” is forged (Brah 1996, 180). It promotes the “making of a home away from home” (Clifford 1994) through immaterial aspects—memory, discourses—as well as localized and tangible outcomes such as bodies, performances, and textures. It


does so by putting in creative tension a “mythic place of desire,” conceived as original, with the “lived experience of locality” (Brah 1996, 192). Diaspora spaces are not simply sites of trauma, mourn-ing, and dislocation, but memories of past homes can have a produc-tive and tangible force in the creation of new places of belonging in the present (Blunt 2003; Brah 1996, 193).

Members of the Chilean diaspora are not from Britain’s former colonies, and yet their position is also framed in terms of geopo-litical displacement and global disparity. They are not as visible as other ethnic minorities, and yet their presence has also developed forms of syncretism and complicated ideas of purity and origins. By overlooking Chileans’ racial complexity we might imagine them as hidden behind a normative (hispanic) “whiteness,” and yet processes of racialization and “otherness” have also pervaded their lives in the UK. The encounter with London’s less “diverse” context of the 1970s often involved a sense of estrangement. Settings like the neighbourhood and the school were not as welcoming as those created by the British left. More or less subtle forms of “misrecogni-tion”—as Werbner (2002, 18) qualifies acts of xenophobia or rac-ism—are particularly mentioned by exile children and teenagers, whose early days in the UK were often pervaded by a sense of being “different.”

I am interested in the search for a “home” in the public sphere (Puwar 2007). Werbner uses the notion of a “diasporic public sphere” to define interconnected “alternative” arenas where emancipatory discourses—directed to both Britain and the diasporic communi-ties’ dominant official scripts—are debated and celebrated through alternative claims and performances (Werbner 2002, 15, 262–263; see also Anthias 2006, 25–26; Gilroy 1993). Looking at “home” as made in public space implies that belonging is a political quest rather than a naturally given state (Yuval-Davis et al. 2006). It suggests that “homing” requires establishing connections and being “in line” with the wider social context and with the features of the world we inhabit rather than living detached from it (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 14; Ahmed 2006; see also Ingold 2011). Public terrains might be intimately appropriated through the perception of a common lived history and publics might be formed through an engagement with embodied, sensuous, and affective experiences (Cvetkovich 2003).


In the next section, I elaborate on the methodological demands to investigate this process.

MethodologyThis article is based on the analysis of the material of a larger research project that explores the Chilean diaspora’s changing landscapes of belonging within the UK. During different periods between 2009 and 2011 I developed an ethnography that combined biographical interviews and participant observation with less con-ventional methodologies and objects, including vernacular archives and photographs. Through these fields, I “followed” a web of social scenes within the UK through their participants’ routines and life stories (Fitzgerald 2006). This multi-method approach allowed me to construct the field of this research considering historical and contemporary dimensions (Amit 2000; Fitzgerald 2006). This spe-cific article is closer to the former dimension. By keeping a focus on the UK I attempt to develop a grounded approach to belonging. This raises the relevance of situated-ness and local attachments in a context in which migration studies have privileged (and even fet-ishized) dislocation and deterritorialization.

The account that follows draws mostly on the analysis of ethno-graphic interviews, including elicitation exercises and informal inter-viewing during fieldwork. This research was conducted with men and women from three generations: those who went into exile as adults, those who arrived as children, and British-born Chileans. Through life stories, different spaces are allowed to emerge and individual trajec-tories collide with public and even global processes, which mutually overlap (Auyero 2003; Portelli 1991). Inspired by Auyero’s (2003) ethnography on the memory of protest, I explore recollections of Pinochet’s detention, particularly how the process was lived from the picket lines. I engage with the participants’ own struggles, silences, and their different and sometimes contradictory interpretations at the moment of recalling—interpretations that are, nevertheless, valuable as they enable us to get close to people’s experiences, emotions, and viewpoints at the time (Auyero 2003, 11–12). Collections of images as means of “elicitation” (harper 2002) or “emotional translation” (Moreno-Figueroa 2008) also helped me to mobilize or get closer to my interviewees’ feelings and what often remains unsaid and taken


for granted. Moreover, as Cvetkovich (2003, 8) stresses, memories and “ephemeral and personal collections of objects stand alongside the documents of the dominant culture in order to offer alternative modes of knowledge.”

During my fieldwork, either spontaneously or in response to my requests, some interviewees shared their personal archives with me. These consisted of photographs, leaflets, banners, and selected news reports (see Figure 1). In relation to photographs as “objects of memory,” Edwards states that “[t]he act of keeping a photograph is an act of faith in the future” (1999, 222). Similarly, collecting those objects says something profound about the Chilean diaspora’s desire to keep some memories working in the present and potentially in the future, so others can indirectly bear witness to an important milestone in their lives. By being located in people’s houses, public cultures of the past become intimately appropriated in the places of the present. Keeping these objects in itself challenges spatial and temporal mar-gins. My attention to these sources is in line with the complexities of the public/private interface involved in home-making and the multi-layered approach that is required to engage with it.

Figure 1. Pamphlets and selected news clippings collected by the picketers during Pinochet’s detention.


“All Those People, All That History”: Creating a space of Connection

“I remember it was a Saturday, a Friday night, and my brother called us. We went to the London Clinic. It was 3 or 4 in the morning and people got together. It was amazing!” (Alicia, exiled as a child)

When Pinochet was arrested, the news about his detention travelled primarily by word of mouth in London. “Chileans coming from every-where”6 pouring toward the London Clinic gave shape to a growing vigil, marking the beginning of the 503 days of el piquete de Londres. This was a social body in permanent motion. Mobilization was liter-ally what was happening. They moved from their houses to the road and across the city, rearranging and redirecting their spatial routines both day and night and occupying different locales, such as the ar-eas around the London Clinic, the houses of Parliament, Pinochet’s home-detention residence in Virginia Water, and Belmarsh Magis-trates Court. This movement away from, between, and within places is, as Ahmed suggests, “affective: it affects how ‘homely’ one might feel and fail to feel” (1999, 341). It involves a form of home-making in the city where dwelling and movement are deeply entangled and rearranged (Knowles 2003).

These participants did not simply meet there but were connected from earlier. Nancy, who arrived as a teenager, says,

This was the product of years of campaigning. Years of organi-zation by different groups. Years of being informed and mobi-lized. And when Pinochet is arrested you have all of that. That net which was constant, was active, but it consolidated then…

El piquete was created through “entangled” pathways (Ingold 2011), an entanglement that suddenly materialized and was reactivat-ed through this milestone. For some people, such as Nancy, el piquete was the continuation of an ongoing trajectory of activism. Nancy had been working in human rights and solidarity initiatives since her arrival as a teenager. her political activism had included dancing in folk groups, working as a translator for Amnesty International, and archiving information about the desaparecidos (disappeared) and


the ejecutados politicos (those executed for political reasons). Yet, unlike Nancy, the majority of those who partook in el piquete were not involved in these kind of initiatives when Pinochet was arrested.

Alicia, who arrived in the UK as a child, became involved in el piquete only a couple of months after ending a long-term relationship with Adrian. This separation involved distancing herself from the social scene around football in which they both used to participate. While breaking that bond and leaving that familiar space involved a moment of disorientation, the arrest of Pinochet was a turning point that unexpectedly gave a new direction to her life.

I split with Adrian in early 1998 and Pinochet was arrested in October 1998! So I was kind of grieving for the relationship when I had to [she makes a body gesture which suggests “re-move”] a lot of people I never saw again … When Pinochet was arrested, before I knew it, I was immersed in this cam-paign … It was so intense! It was so absorbing! My energy, my time, my emotions, my everything! … In that sense, I felt a loss but I didn’t mourn … I met other new Chileans. I met Chileans I hadn’t seen for years.

Ahmed (2006) uses the image of “lines” to depict and to ask how people become oriented in the world by following certain paths. According to Ahmed, we are oriented when we are “in line” with others and with the features of the world—a sense of orientation that emerges from an increasing sense of “familiarity.” For Ahmed, “the question of orientation” is profound. This is not only a question “of how we ‘find our way’ but how we come to ‘feel at home’ in the world we inhabit” (7). After losing two important points of orientation in her life—the social football scene and Adrian—Alicia could find her way and make herself at home again through her participation in the picket lines. An initial disruption soon became a chance to take a new direction (18). Suddenly—“before I knew”—immersed within the emotional intensity of this social body, she became an activist, a role that she still embraces through her participation in Ecomemoria, a human rights and ecological project (Ramírez and Serpente 2012).

“In the middle” of a period of grief caused by the loss of a familiar terrain, el piquete helped Alicia to move on. In line with her experi-ence, many others refer to their participation in el piquete as a chance


for “healing” their achaques (aches and pains) both emotional and physical. “I think that all the people who were ill recovered there,” remarks Luisa, a first-generation exile, “so you can see the power of passion!” Not only momentary but also longstanding disruptions and distressful feelings were here renegotiated. El piquete “gathered peo-ple who had lost all their hopes,” says Alex. “hope,” “ire,” “stress,” and “impotence” joined the “excitement,” “euphoria of being to-gether,” and “delight” at having Pinochet in captivity “here, at home”; feelings that were also intermingled with the enjoyment of becoming part of a “spontaneous” social encounter among the Chilean diaspora. Describing how complex the emotional intensity was, one person says that “it was a beautiful time, because all the people there were kind of demonstrating their anger or, in a way, releasing their ire.” Somehow, the “beauty” of sentiments like “anger” and “ire” that might otherwise be taken as undermining people’s temperance acquired, conversely, a liberating potential. Challenging divisions between political and affective domains, this social formation reminds us that “feelings are central to public life” and that “affects can be mobilized and circu-lated to create new and counter-cultural forms,” as Cvetkovich and Pellegrini remark (2003). Through these feelings the demonstrators could publicly manifest that, along with a relegated part of Chilean recent history, they were still very much alive.

When Pinochet was arrested, Alicia and many others treasured recollections of those “old times” of active public engagement. Dur-ing the 1970s and 1980s, children and adults, both women and men, had participated in activities of public protest, contention, and com-memoration. Amongst those scenarios were solidarity demonstra-tions for Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador; miners’ strikes during the Thatcher administration; commemorations for the desaparecidos and ejecutados políticos; and protests to defend exiles’ right to return. Now, in 1998, they were connected through those same memories and repertoires, which had been largely inactive and came out in situ through diverse forms of exchange and interaction.

Some of those who had participated in Allende’s “revolutionary project” refer to their involvement in el piquete as a second opportu-nity to play a role in an historical process. It came to represent a space of renewal and revival. “So it was like a new activity, like coming back to strong political activism,” Luisa remarks, adding:


Then again you create a sense of unity. My house was abso-lutely transformed! Not only was it always full of people but also, sometimes, we had to make banners and we stayed over-night. It was like going back to the times before or during the Unidad Popular [Allende’s government], when you worked all night and you didn’t have any sense of time.

Regardless of the resonance of these processes in their past experi-ences, their participation in el piquete also constituted a unique prec-edent. This was not only in terms of the structural transformation in the international legal domain, such as initiating international trials for genocides, but also in relation to their personal chance to have a favorable involvement in history. Alex reflects:

Some people decided to stay at home. I will never understand them. What opportunity do most people who have been vic-tims of history have to become participants in history?! … Any exile has that opportunity, any exile! To pass from being a victim—I don’t want to say to become an “actor” but—to be a participant in something so important, not only on a personal and national level, but also on a worldwide level. Something that allows us to have a little bit of justice with what has hap-pened. Not only with what happened to my father [who was tortured and imprisoned for three years] or to my brother who is still disappeared, but to all those people, all that history …

As Alex’s words indicate, the trial of Pinochet was for many—“all those people”—a chance to come to terms with their own experiences of loss, oppression, and displacement—“all that history.” El piquete was somehow lived as “the gift of an unexpected line,” which gave to some members of the diaspora “the chance for a new direction and even a chance to live again,” to use Ahmed’s words (2006, 18). This process was not lived externally but as an extension of their personal and collective history. It contained the potential for them to overcome their victimhood and the mitigation to their agency imposed by state-sponsored repression in the past.

Alex’s words also suggest that not everyone partook in el piquete. As he says, some of them even “decided to stay at home.” Pinoc-het’s detention updated shared experiences and a common agenda as


much as it enlivened internal tensions. During exile, “open conflicts” were mostly linked to political party allegiance (Olsson 2009, 666). Different parties embraced dissimilar revolutionary principles and versions of the causes of and responsibilities involved in the end of Allende’s government. These divisions took a different shape in a post-dictatorial era. Sergio, a militant of a political party that was part of the Concertación—the coalition that was governing Chile in 1998—states that “people who participated there [in el piquete] have never had any political weight and they will never have it!” Those who participated in el piquete refer to it as a nonpartisan terrain. Yet those exiles, like Sergio, who were Concertacionistas only initially took part in it. In Luisa’s words, they did not sympathize “with all the bochinche (turmoil) that we made.” however, the Concertacionistas affirm that they did not marginalize themselves from el piquete due to a different agenda. Unlike the Chilean government—which wanted Pinochet back in Chile to be judged there—they affirm that they also wanted Pinochet to be extradited to Spain. They distanced themselves from el piquete due to the perceived suspicion and scorn toward them. There are different versions of the facts of this division. What appears as consensus is that this moment refashioned a break, particularly within the first generation, that still remains.

On Appearance and RecognitionIn his reflection about the meaning that the picketers give to la pue-blada—an uprising that took place in two oil towns in the southern province of Neuquén in Argentina—Auyero proposes that “[b]eing-in-the-road has the power to rescue them from the official oblivion, offers them the chance to emerge from indifference” (2003, 76–77). Similarly, when people talk about el piquete they are not simply reviving the case in question but also their own protagonism. The attention of the press meant that the case appeared on the front pages of the most important newspapers. This coverage and the support that they felt from British society, which they identify as “sympathetic” and showing “solidarity” and “genuine support,” strongly marked the experience of the campaigners. Notable politicians from the Labour Party such as Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbin, alongside ordinary British people, supported them. Some of them became committed


members of the picket lines during the 503 days and others showed their support more informally by bringing food and coffee or by mak-ing gestures of support and festive noises with their car horns while they were passing by the demonstrations. Carmen declares that “it felt good that people recognized what had happened in our country and what we were doing.”

The picketers were, in their view, supported by “the people” while Pinochet was supported “from above,” particularly by the Chilean government lobby and by emblematic British figures like Thatcher. The pinochetistas (Pinochet’s supporters) who came to London dur-ing the crucial dates of the trial were also seen as having a privileged position through the economic support of the Fundación Pinochet. This confrontation with the pinochetistas was not simply symbolic. It was also physical, particularly at Belmarsh on the day of the resolu-tion about the extradition of Pinochet to Spain. Julio remembers that the pinochetistas made gestures, passing their fingers across their necks, suggesting that the opponents of Pinochet would be killed. “They tried to scare the people,” he says. Johanna recalls how “they made a sound across the [metallic] fences and said ‘here are your lit-tle dead, here are your little dead’ (referring to the desaparecidos).” This encounter was perceived as a “taste” of how things were under dictatorship in Chile, a perception that suggests that the spatial and temporal connections that el piquete triggered were not always pleas-ant nor resulted in the formation of alliances.

The imbalance between the Pinochet supporters who had the money and the anti-Pinochetistas who had the “manpower” was de-scribed by one newspaper as “a real David and Goliath struggle.”7 In particular, the remarkable encounter between Pinochet and Thatcher during the case—she thanked him for his help during the 1982 Falklands War and for “bringing democracy” to Chile—illustrated the continual but changing character of this imbalance (BBC News 1999). The Pinochet-Thatcher alliance during the dictatorship and later during the dictator’s detention, symbolized, according to Nidia, a first-generation exile, “two different moments.” As she notes:

Before they had a relation which was very strong, which we couldn’t break…. But the second one, to compare, that was an emotional joy for us.… We said (laughing), “leave them to do


what they want, to make a fool of themselves!” We could de-nounce them, we were prepared to denounce them and make a lot of noise. And that’s what we did: a lot of noise!

In el piquete, “making a lot of noise,” the desire to “be heard” and “noticed” or to become a “participant in history,” appear, to use Auyero’s terms, “as a cry against invisibilization, against the threat of disappearance” (2003, 76). Noise became a disturbance produced by the entrance of those bodies that have been drummed out from estab-lished versions of “national” history—“a disturbance that cannot be placed in a recognizable pattern … a disorder” (Attali 1985, 26–27, in Puwar 2011, 332–333). By literally and figuratively “making noise,” experiences that have remained unnoticed can finally be granted ex-pression. And so we can also ask, “who is this ‘we’ who want to be seen, acknowledged, recognized?” (Auyero 2003, 77).

The Pinochet case and el piquete enlivened a sense of “we” through the creation of a diaspora space where a mixture of oppres-sive experiences under the Pinochet regime came together. Alex’s words (“All those people, all that history”) refer to those who were disappeared and murdered by the regime, to the tortured victims, and,

Figure 2. Graphic image of Thatcher and Pinochet (“Friends again”) from the author’s personal collection of slides.


more ambiguously acknowledged, to the exiles themselves. Absent and present bodies came to visibly occupy the same space. As some forms of activism in Latin America have shown, the alliances forged while dealing with the losses involved in state-sponsored repression can even surpass what is conceived as human, proximate and fully knowable (e.g., Sosa 2011; Gordon 1997, 108–115). As we shall see, this liaison became performatively visible through forms of com-memoration and mobilization in the city.

The quest for recognition enunciated from el piquete touches upon (in)visibility as a key dimension of belonging (Puwar 2006; Werbner 2002, 10). From here I want to propose that if the situated politics of belonging involves a concern with violence, the kind of violence that is contested from el piquete is that which comes from invisibilization (Yuval-Davis et al. 2006, 5). What is disputed is the recognition of some histories that somehow appear to have never happened either in Britain or in Chile, and yet they are still happening everywhere. hidden connections and complicities, geographical disruptions, and marginalized ghosts have all been treading on the paths of the Chilean diaspora of London and in others’ trails as well. In the next section I will explore how some of these invisible (hi)stories, and pervasive inhabitations become tangible and articulated in the city “in stone, ritual and flesh” (Puwar 2006, 81).

“New” Languages, New Enactments, New inhabitationsIt is 23 March 1999, on the eve of the house of Lords’ resolution regarding whether Pinochet is immune from prosecution or not. his detractors and his supporters in the UK, Chile, and around the world are waiting to find out if the dictator will be extradited to Spain to face trial for the human rights crimes committed during his military rule. In the meantime, between buildings and statues that glorify Britain’s colonial expansion, thousands of small handcrafted wooden crucifixes have been planted in the green lawn of the square opposite Parliament. Inscriptions with the names of the desaparecidos and ejecutados políticos of the regime, and black-and-white portrait photographs of them, have been attached to the horizontal line of some crucifixes. Diverse people wander around, either as members of a growing vigil or as part of the daily social fabric of the city of London. Among them are a small number of people dressed in black and wearing white


masks. They wander around, embodying the absent presence of the disappeared and the murdered victims. It is already getting dark, and the light of Big Ben reflected in the ivory forest of crosses and in the pale masks of the unknown faces lights up this haunting scene.8

In el piquete new and old formulas were enacted. A “repertoire of contention” was both enlivened and reinvented. “The notion of a rep-ertoire,” Auyero states, “invites us to examine patterns of collective claim-making, regularities in the ways in which people band together to make their demands heard, across time and space” (2008, 573). El piquete was the product of “an impressive period of creativity,” which combined new ways of occupying public space with traditional leftwing forms of protest. Among the latter we can mention display-ing the portraits of the disappeared, reading out their names, and recalling well-known leftist utterances (Ramírez and Serpente 2012, 196). These ceremonies created social spaces through contestation and mobilization that momentarily intruded into the daily flow of the city landscape, disrupting the assumed meaning of certain symbolic locations (Auyero 2008, 574; cf. Werbner 2002, 16). The compell-ing act of planting crucifixes with the names and photographs of the

Figure 3. Press images of the vigil held outside the British Parliament on 23 March 1999.


desaparecidos near Parliament both transgresses and appropriates the meaning of that particular spot. The crucifixes bring to the space of the living what is assumed to be gone. Presenting the names and portraits of the desaparecidos interrupts the selective erasure that has been inherent to the construction of national history. Over a terri-tory that memorializes Britain’s imperial past through a melancholic sanctification of past glories and war (Gilroy 2004), the history of another repressive sovereign system is engraved. The connection has always been there. It has been there throughout the routines of the di-aspora in London; in the Thatcher-Pinochet alliance and the Malvinas/Falklands; and in the procession for the Chilean statesman Bernardo O’higgins (1778–1842) that takes place every year in Richmond.

Inspired by Sosa’s experimental approach to one of the most em-blematic “performances of mourning” of Latin America—Las Madres de la plaza de Mayo (the mothers of the May Square) in Buenos Aires, Argentina—I have come to see this fleeting yet powerful act of spatial appropriation as one that brings to the open a “public secret” (Sosa 2011, 69, following Taussig 1999). Yet, far away from Latin America, it does so from a diasporic angle. What are being performed are not simply the private experiences of loss and survival—disappearance and exile—or only the transnational seizure of matters of “national” public concern, namely state-sponsored repression. The crucifixes planted in front of that worldwide recognizable spot are also a stark reminder of the pervasive existence of some silent, hidden, invis-ible (hi)stories; of happenings that inhabit that specific corner of memorabilia and the more complex web that expands from there. By appropriating Sosa’s compelling question, “Can you dare to affirm that the spectacle that is being performed right in your face does not belong to you in an uncanny sense?” (2011, 69), I propose that what the performance above delineates or exposes is not only a dialogue between intimate and public domains, or simply a transnational inter-change, but a contestation and a reconfiguration of assumed territorial and historical official demarcations.

This mixture of familiar and unusual enactments links to another dimension of belonging, which has to do with the domination of actu-al city spaces and the chance that such spatial domination makes vis-ible, even if only transiently, some “im/possible inhabitations” (Puwar 2006). In this line like other demonstrators, Miguel, who came into


exile when he was three years old, affirms that “we were the first ones who occupied that space in front of Parliament. They couldn’t take us out!” The campaigners state that they were not treated with suspicion by the authorities. Yet the constant presence of the police—perceived as being “on our side” and “supporting us”—suggests that they were under a degree of surveillance. After all, they were occupying spaces that had not been intended for them. Still, during the 503 days of el piquete they were not requested to leave those territories. Apparently, they soon moved from being occupants of those spaces—or okupas (squatters)—to being legitimate inhabitants of the place (cf. Puwar 2011, 338–339).

Such performative strategies of appropriation of space were, according to some demonstrators, a reflection of the experience of “living in two worlds”: of the daily “schizophrenia of living in an English world, and participating in all its aspects, and then having a Chilean life,” Alex states. Recalling his participation in an anti-homophobic demonstration in the 1980s, which consisted of dressing in black and “winking” at people passing by in the street, he says that “they had very entertaining campaigns, very clever. So we learned all those methodologies and we applied them in the campaign against Pinochet.” he adds:

It was very notorious at what age people arrived here, be-cause the people who were too Chilean continued with their old form of protest in a very traditional, very partidist way, a very partidist discourse. You listened to them and it was like going back to the 1970s! While we, who had been here for the same number of years, who had integrated into this society, who had worked in miners’ strikes, who had participated in the university, who had participated in the schools … just like English people! We saw that this work had to be different! “It wasn’t about right or left, it was about right or wrong” [he switched into English when he used that phrase]. The Chileans continued with their super partidist discourses … and they were right! All their analyses were correct! But it wasn’t the language of this society; it wasn’t the language that people could understand. We talked another language. It was the language that we had learned in practice, living in this society.


Speaking the language of “this society” meant an embodied and growing understanding of the British public’s cultural codes and, therefore, the skill to establish a dialogue with a wider public (draw-ing on Ingold 2000). Distinctions between those who were “too Chilean”—and adhered to a partidist (i.e., oriented toward political party allegiance) nationalistic political logic—and those who engaged with an international and human rights framework (if not a humani-tarian “common sense”) are frequently asserted, particularly by exile women, exile children, and the second generation. That “old form of protest” was seen as the inability to engage with the broader local and global context, and the unwillingness to embrace a more inclusive and transnationally oriented sphere of action.

Despite their renovation, public performances did not exclude vernacular Chilean cultural forms. These were reconfigured and reconstructed in dialogue with the local context (Gilroy 2002, 284–285). Following Bakhtin’s Dialogical Imagination (1981), Werbner (2002) explores how diasporic publics emerge “dialogically” through encounters among diasporic actors who occupy different positions within their societies and communities. “Dialogical encounters,” she states, “disclose broader processes of cultural contestation and hybridization” (Werbner 2002, 7). Only through the “doing” of per-formance, she argues, can we explore diasporas’ “double or multiple consciousness” (2002, 11; Tölölyan 1996). The Chilean diaspora developed these “dialogical encounters” by subverting traditional ways of acting that had been mostly male and first-generation-led. Yet, these encounters not only involved diasporic actors, but also created conductive spaces to interact with a wider environment. In what follows I expand on both these performances’ character and the interactions in play.

The Carnivalesque As Means of Public EngagementApart from performances such as the planting of the crucifixes, el piquete’s processes of spatial appropriation, meaning-making, and public convocation included playing drums, singing, jumping, shouting and cheering, dance competitions, barbecues, concerts, and talks. Sometimes they used masks to represent the disappeared or to mock figures of power such as Pinochet and Thatcher. “We sang


music of protest,” Carmen adds, referring to Nueva Canción Chilena (new Chilean song).9 “We were very united; we were singing all the time.” Carmen got a drum for her grandson to play at Virginia Water where Pinochet was under home-detention. Together with him and others, she sang the national anthem but modified the lyrics to put them in line with the contingencies of the Pinochet case. These routines did not deny the seriousness of the claims at issue, but made the humorous and the festive equally official as a means of public demonstration.

Some scholars inspired by Bakhtin (1968) focus on the public sphere, considering both its discursive and aesthetic dimensions (Gardiner 2004; Werbner 2002). Gardiner attends to embodied, ex-periential, and affective aspects, without reducing people’s relation-ship with their social and non-human environments to the merely discursive or rational, or individuals’ attempts to find a place within dominant public arenas (Gardiner 2004, 44). According to Gardiner, this stance points to the strategies of representation of excluded and underprivileged groups, which might differ in their forms and goals from those of their more privileged counterparts.

Figure 4. Program of different activities held at el piquete.


El piquete combined political claims with some patterns of play and spectacle. Its enactments involved formulas and aesthetics that differed from the dominant ones. however, as should be clear by now, its strategies of representation took place within and alongside official public spaces (cf. Gardiner 2004). They were not hidden from the public eye (cf. Werbner 2002, 15).

Remembering the different routines and interactions in play, Julio, a second-generation British-born Chilean Londoner, recalls:

The young talked with the old. It was a good environment; it was free; it was not something very serious. It was also like a party, like a carnival! Sometimes they beat drums; there were events. It was almost like celebrating the fact that Pinochet was detained, and the young had a good time together…. At that moment you felt as if you were Chilean, as if you were in Chile!

Luisa adds:

Imagine a picket that is in the street, with people coming from everywhere, and you cannot control it! You don’t have the right to control it either! People who had had terrible experiences [would go], other people [would go] because they enjoyed la chuchoca (the disorder) and because it was encachao (attractive), because other people were coming or simply because someone was playing the guitar. For different reasons! But they were all motivated by the Pinochet thing and the people were united! The more people the better and they were all well hosted.

There are few people who would dare to call el piquete “a carnival” as Julio does. Yet denying its carnivalesque dimension in favour of the official business that was at stake will undoubtedly lead us to “distort the picture” (Bakhtin 1968, 6). Luisa’s and Julio’s words suggest a suspension of regulations and hierarchies: the creation of an environ-ment that “was free,” where “nobody had the right to control” the others and where intergenerational exchange between “the young” and “the old” and among “people coming from everywhere” were in


play. The relocation of forms of expression such as music, language, and dance and the migrant bodies themselves disrupted geographical distinctions, creating a space that at times was imagined and felt as “like being in Chile” (as Daniel said above) or like “the times of the Unidad Popular” (as Luisa stated before).

Julio also suggests that connections emerged among the second generation, connections that were somehow latent. Carmen, who came into exile with three children, says that “our kids were criados (brought up) on the pickets,” making reference to the demonstrations of the 1970s and 1980s in London. Indicating a common experience of inhabiting the same social web, Sara, a second-generation Chilean, comments that “we all were in the wheel but we didn’t know it.” Alicia states, “We recognized each other!” making a reference to the experience of knowing others who, like herself, had grown up as part of an exile family and community. “We had such a similar upbringing, such a similar upbringing, that we connected immediately!” she says.

A parallel intergenerational and ideological disconnection never-theless complicated these connections. This disconnect was founded in the dismissal of party allegiances, nationalism, and ranks. Given the weight that partisan politics had in exile during the dictatorship, such dismissal is significant. New generations often talk about their rejection of the poliquería (politicking), a term that refers to pointless and empty political discourses. Gender peculiarities are mentioned in this context, particularly by younger demonstrators in reference to the behaviour of their parents’ generation. “The man would be giving a discurso político and kind of trying to rationalize something that was very practical and about direct action … But they [her mother and Luisa] were very quiet behind the scene,” Alicia states. This sense resonates with the gendered character of home and belonging in which women are expected to transmit, cultivate, and preserve na-tional ideologies and practices, while male voices are expected to act publicly “to represent the cultural need of the group” (Anthias 2006, 22, 24; McIlwaine 2010). Interestingly, in el piquete the next genera-tions came to acknowledge their different social location in relation to their parents’ stances in the public domain.

Following Gilroy, these breaks can be seen as opening “opportu-nities to be more creative, to be more future oriented,” an important point because very often diasporic communities’ affection for the past,


he argues, promotes “patterns of political work” that are “strongly authoritarian in character” (Bell 1999, 26). In this context, creating new spaces of belonging does not simply involve incorporation into existing forms of organization but, as Yuval-Davis et al. helpfully remind us, it “may entail a transformation of those very forms” of collective engagement (2006, 8). In line with this view, in el piquete, new forms of political expression, organization, and aesthetics were displayed. In this arena, the carnivalesque as a mode of expression, exchange, and translation allowed the making of a space of fun and celebration as well as one of disputes and contestation (Werbner 2002, 187–210). As Alex’s phrase “today it isn’t about right and left but about right and wrong” suggests, the intergenerational break was largely about revealing and subverting how politics (and being po-litical itself) had been understood and performed before and how it should be conducted in that diasporic terrain.

Even so, it would be misleading to take el piquete as just a fes-tive jubilee. “Dramatic” moments and accounts of “terrible” events were also recalled. During our interview Fernanda, exiled as a child, read aloud for me an excerpt that came from a selection of printed quotations that were gathered and then distributed in el piquete by a collective of filmmakers. With these documents, she brings to life one of those “painful” testimonies:

Our father died in Chile in a prison in Santiago during Pino-chet’s regime. The results of the autopsy revealed a brutality beyond horror.… Our father’s autopsy reported that they broke every bone in his body, they burned him from the neck down with a flame-thrower and then they shot him about 20 times. They didn’t mess with his head because they wanted him to be conscious of the pain he was suffering during the three days they tormented him from the moment of his cap-ture.… I ask you—how many times can a man be killed?10

Through affiliations and confrontations, performances and speeches, some British-born Chileans became aware of the burden of the dicta-torial history of Chile and of the magnitude of its repression. Ricardo and Johanna, a married couple who arrived separately as teenagers in the 1970s and 1980s, saw Pinochet’s arrest as “something that marked our lives.” “It was good,” Joanna said, “because our children


understood the reason why we are here.” In el piquete, memory and understanding of the past were generated within a common pattern of life activity (Ingold 2000, 138) rather than simply being “transmitted” from one generation to another, or from survivors to witnesses (see Taylor 2003). A past of migration and its ghosts acquires visibility through a process that does not simply involve mourning and grief but is also productive (Blunt 2003), in this case by developing (dis)connections between generations and between the diaspora and its context, and by allowing new subjectivities and collective formations to emerge.

After 18 months of legal battles, despite the fact that the magistrate had given consent for extradition, Pinochet failed the senility test and was sent back to Chile on medical grounds. Among the protesters, feelings such as “disillusion,” “pain,” “nausea,” “sadness,” and “an-ger” were in many cases suffused with a sense of imbalance between the victims’ experiences and the treatment that Pinochet received in London. “he was like a king! he was visited by his family. he didn’t have freedom but he had a house with everything in Virginia Water, like a rich man!” Carmen says. Yet for some of them, it was “successful anyways, because everyone knew,” Ricardo claims. For others, taking part in el piquete “defined” them in terms of their al-legiances, beliefs, and convictions. “It reaffirmed various things” in relation to Britain. The process was lived differently. however, it largely involved a new stage for its participants. For Nancy,

it was a recognition that we weren’t wrong … as if history absolved you a little bit (laughs). That we weren’t those mad extremists, evil communists, who only wanted the destruction of the country—which was a very successful campaign [in Chile]. But also, from the personal point of view, [it meant] stopping being a victim.

Since the end of the trial “a lot of Chileans have been falling apart,” getting together mostly at specific events. One of these events was that one at which the speech that opened this article was deliv-ered. El piquete subsists through personal material recollections, and it has a pervasive presence in everyday tales. The desire to bear wit-


ness to this moment manifests itself today through some demonstra-tors’ personal memoirs (Alegría 1999) and some grassroots organiza-tions’ systematic recordings of the process (see www.memoriaviva.com). Just as the Chilean diaspora’s memories of Chile and of settling and growing up in London were transiently revived and recombined on the picket lines, the memories of el piquete are also actualized and reorganized from time to time in the local present of the Chilean diaspora’s every day lives in London.

ConclusionsEl piquete shows us how “diaspora” emerges as a space and a mo-ment in relation to specific historical, political, and theoretical con-junctures (hall 2012, 29). Through the creation of zones of contact that troubled geographical and temporal margins, el piquete forged a transnational public space from a diasporic vantage point. The public appearance of an intergenerational group of exiles, and their claim for justice for the desaparecidos and ejecutados politicos, brought to light the existence of those who were assumed to be as-similated and gone. During this process, Chilean history became visibly entangled with the local context of Britain. Active histories and memories, such us those related to Thatcher’s administration and the political climate of the 1970s and 1980s, were enlivened through situated interchanges and enactments. The recognition of “noisy silences and seething absences,” to use Gordon’s words (Pu-war 2011, 335), became part of the creation of a hospitable space. “Voluntary silences” related to the internal distinctions and tensions within the diaspora itself were also acknowledged (Werbner 2002). Such awareness does not simply signal endless conflicts, but also comprises an opportunity to open up other forms of organization and public participation.

More generally, el piquete helps us, to appreciate new diasporas’ distinctive connections to Britain, and how such connections are made visible, activated, and woven in the places of the present while resiz-ing them. Through the encounter among the Chilean diaspora—an entity in formation—and a wider public context, they have re-centred Britain as a significant locus. Yesterday’s “forced migrants” from Latin America, such as Chileans, have come to form “new” diasporic configurations that are affective, physically as well as historically


actualized. The diasporic moment and the space made through el piquete have allowed us, I hope, to appreciate part of that complexity.

AcknowledgementsI am deeply grateful to the participants of el piquete whose recollec-tions and voices helped me to develop this account. I changed their names to guarantee anonymity, yet I hope they can recognize them-selves in my writing. I offer special thanks to the participants of the NYLON research network annual conference (London, 2013), par-ticularly to Ruth Sheldon for her generous and insightful comments, as well as to Max Besbris, Shani Orgad, Vic Sidler, Nick Couldry and Eric Klinenberg, who helped me to make this article better. Also, thanks to Caroline Knowles and Nirmal Puwar for their ongoing encouragement, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue for their valuable observations.

Notes1 The original intonations in speech—that is, considering the actors’ intona-

tion and how they actually speak—are preserved in italics throughout the article, as are Chilean folk terms and slang.

2 The Guardian, 15 October 1998, “A Murderer Among Us” by hugh O’Shaugh nessy, Chairman of the Latin American Bureau (Robertson 2002, 396, quoted in Nash 2007, 5).

3 The detention was solicited by Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge who argued that the crimes committed during Pinochet’s regime were “against humanity” and could therefore be judged in Spain according to international law. See a brief review of the legal case by David Sugarman in <http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-arrest-of-augusto-pinochet-ten-years-on>.

4 About 3,000 Chilean exiles were counted at the end of the 1970s; a small number but big enough to become the largest Latin American group in London at the time (Kay 1987).

5 Considering country of birth, Colombians and Brazilians, followed by Ecuadorians, Bolivians, and Peruvians, form the majority of the Latin American migrant population in the UK—the fastest growing migrant group in London (for a detailed demographic description see McIlwaine 2011).

6 These phrases and words in quotation marks, which appear without a specific source while describing situations, scenes, or atmospheres, are


extracted from different interview accounts. Given their generic content, in some cases I do not make reference to specific people. They are preserved with quotation marks to keep the multi-voiced nature of the account that follows (mine through theirs) and to capture their own way of talking about the processes in question. Within this framework, I also try to develop an account in close connection to the “lived” dimension of el piquete.

7 The Guardian, 23 March 1999, “Pinochet Allies and Enemies Prepare for Lords Ruling.”

8 This account is reconstructed through the picketers’ personal recollections, including their memoirs and personal archives of printed press and photo-graphs.

9 The Nueva Canción Chilena was popularized during Salvador Allende’s electoral campaign and during his government. It is widely recognized as a musical movement with a clear left-wing political militancy.

10 Small films, “Pasaporte a la Justicia,” documents with testimonies collected and distributed in el piquete.

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ON THE MOVE AND iN THE MAKiNG: BRAZiLiAN CuLiNARY CuLTuREs iN LONDON

MARiA DAs GRAÇAs BRiGHTWELLDepartment of Geography, Royal holloway, University of London

Abstract. This article examines how the sale and marketing of Brazilian food in London is implicated in the making of a “diasporic” national cuisine. One of the main findings is that the emotional geographies of longing are the principal drivers of Brazilian food commerce in London, the aptly named economia da saudade (homesickness/nostalgia economy). This article is based on qualitative research gathered through observation in Brazilian food commerce in London and semi-structured interviews with chefs, owners, and staff as well as Brazil-ian migrants. The article argues that Brazilian food as a cultural product has a paradoxical role: it reinforces and plays an active part in the construction of the idea of being Brazilian away from home, but it also can be an arena where meanings of “Brazilianness” and its representations are disputed.Resumo. Este artigo examina a relação entre a comercialização e venda de co-mida brasileira em Londres e a construção de uma cozinha nacional diaspórica. Uma das principais constatações é que as geografias emocionais da saudade movem esta atividade - cunhada por empresários brasileiros como ‘economia da saudade’. O artigo baseia-se em pesquisa qualititativa coletada a partir de períodos de observação em comércio de alimentos em Londres e entrevistas semi-estruturadas com chefes, proprietários, funcionários e imigrantes brasilei-ros. O artigo argumenta que a comida brasileira enquanto um produto cultural tem um papel paradoxal: ela reinforça e é central na construção de uma certa noção de ‘ser brasileiro longe de casa’ mas também pode ser uma arena onde sentidos de ‘Brasilidade’ e suas representações são disputados.


51


introductionOver the last two decades Brazilian migrants have forged and ex-panded networks of food distribution and provision in London, creating new communities of food consumption. This expansion was fuelled principally, but not exclusively, by a growing demand for Brazilian groceries from an increasing number of Brazilian migrants in the British capital. Brazilian entrepreneurs have aptly named their activity economia da saudade (homesickness/nostalgia economy), a term that highlights the strong diasporic focus of their activity and the economic potential of nostalgia.

In this article I argue that the transnational commerce of Brazil-ian groceries has created distinctive cultures of food consumption in London where notions of “Brazilianness” are constructed, repre-sented, and contested. This process of making and contesting operates through both the material culture of food provision (shops and the

Figure 1. Plate of rice and beans served in a Brazilian restaurant in London. Source: Maria das Graças Brightwell.

Brightwell / Brazilian Culinary Cultures in London 53

foods and brands they stock, restaurants and the cuisines they feature) and the social lives of these spaces. Furthermore, these transnational food practices and places have been central to the fashioning of di-asporic identities for Brazilian migrants who live in London through the fostering of a sense of “home away from home” and the creation of spaces of collective belonging.

Diaspora is used in this article as a “heuristic device” (Fortier 2005) to think about questions of belonging, home, and identity in the experience of dislocation for a relatively new migrant group. By interpreting how Brazilian food cultures are being developed in London, I hope that more can be learned about the interplay between national and regional imaginings of diasporic identities. In so doing I pay attention to “how national identity gets reworked and re-imagined through such movement and mobility,” to borrow Conradson and Latham’s words (2010, 228). I also engage with some of the chal-lenging questions about the notion of “home” posed in the literature on transnational migration, transnational communities, and diaspora (Ahmed 2000; Al-Ali and Koser 2002; Brah 1996) and more gener-ally on the geographies of home (Blunt and Dowling 2006) through an exploration of the role of material culture in migrants’ practices of belonging and home-making and how identity is both reinforced and communicated in these processes.

The discussion is drawn from a wider study carried out for a PhD investigation, which analyzed the role of transnational food practices in fashioning Brazilian diasporic and migrant cultures in London. The investigation undertaken included desk research on food provision systems, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic field research with Brazilian food providers across London, focus group discus-sions with Brazilian migrants, periods of observational research in case study shop and restaurant outlets, and ethnographic domestic research with case study Brazilian households in harlesden, Brent, an area of London with marked Brazilian immigration over the last decade. Exploratory fieldwork in food outlets was carried out in 2008 and followed by visits and interviews in 2009 and 2010.1 Overall, 30 people who either worked in or owned Brazilian food outlets took part in the in-depth interviewing process (out of a total of 59 outlets visited). The ethnographic research for the outlets in the two case studies was conducted during June and July 2010.


The first section of this article places my research within wider discussions on cross-cultural food consumption and contemporary food globalization. I argue that despite discussions on the politics of “ethnic food” being critical of the uneven relationship between consumers and providers, these discussions have nevertheless been unable to address questions of agency, often portraying migrants as victims. In the next section I suggest that an engagement with scholar-ship on transnationalism, diaspora, and material culture can provide a way to redress the balance by looking at how migrants’ everyday practices of food provision and consumption enable them to recon-struct and communicate their diasporic identities. The subsequent empirical section begins with a contextual narrative of Brazilian mi-gration to the UK. Against this context, I then present the empirical results to discuss how “Brazilianness” is constructed, represented, and contested in diasporic culinary culture(s) in London. I conclude by arguing that the “making” of Brazilian food in London is a wider culinary-cultural production that entangles commerce, commodities, and also migrants’ longing.

Bringing a Diasporic Focus to Food, Globalization and its Cultural GeographiesThe impact of current globalizing forces upon cultural processes in general has been a prevalent subject of debate among scholars (Inglis and Gimlin 2009). On the one hand, Marxists and radical critics con-sider that local cultures are being homogenized and a global cuisine is being promoted by the spread of large American food corporations such as McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza hut, and Starbucks (Ritzer 2000; Simpson 2008). On the other hand, some cultural analysts and anthro-pologists counter that economic forces are not entirely in charge of cultural processes, thus emphasizing the complexity of the relation-ship between culture and globalization. In this last view, some cultural anthropologists (hannerz 1996) and post-colonial scholars consider the agency of cultural actors and the emergence of “hybrid” and “creole” cultures. Such mixtures may result in “glocal” cultural forms (Robertson 1992) insofar as “different forms of food globalization have variously homogenizing and heterogenizing effects, sometimes simultaneously” (Inglis and Gimlin 2009, 23). The anthropologist Richard Wilk (2002), for example, argues that globalization processes


do not simply wipe out local cultural manifestations but produce local cuisines, cultures, and identities. he contends that “the strengthening of local and national identities and global mass-market capitalism are not contradictory trends but are in fact two aspects of the same proc-ess” (Wilk 2002, 245). Through his study of Belizean national cuisine he showed that, in fact, such “national cuisine” was created under the influence of transnational flows of people, tourists, sojourners, and media, and especially by Belizean migrants who went to live in the United States and returned many years later. Wilk’s research high-lights several important points. First, it reveals how migration changes the symbolic and economic value of food; second, it highlights how food collapses scales—linking the body to wider economic processes, connecting the economic to the symbolic, the past to the present. Food thus represents an ideal topic through which cultural and economic globalization processes can be investigated.

My research draws on and expands discussions on migrants’ food (Abbots 2011; Abdullah 2010; Counihan 2009; Frost 2011; Law 2001; Mata-Codesal 2010; Ray 2004, 2009, 2011) by looking at the fashioning of diasporic food cultures under the conditions of contem-porary globalizing forces. As Inglis and Gimlin (2009, 7) point out: “Global iz ing forces can upset, reconfigure and also re-establish such connections between food and feelings of belonging.” Drawing on this perspective, I propose—with a distinct and grounded diasporic focus—to unpack how migrants’ everyday practices of food provision and consumption enable them to reconstruct and communicate their diasporic identities.

Another strand of research on food and globalization refers to the internationalization of food consumption and cross-cultural consump-tion. International cuisine has become increasingly popular among the urban middle class since the beginning of the 20th century with the propagation of foreign eating habits through travel, mass media, and printed foreign cookbooks. It is also linked to the expansion of so-called “ethnic” restaurants in Europe and the United States and their association with processes of immigration (Cwiertka and Walraven 2002; Gabaccia 2000, 2002; Möhring 2008; Payani 2002; Rabikowska and Burrel 2009).

This scenario implies the commodification of cultural differences, in this case culinary cultures, as they become selling points for cus-tomers eating outside their cultural boundaries. Drawing on wider


academic debates on material culture, commodification, ethnicity, and hybridity, Cook, Crang, and Thorpe reflect on how “ethnic” food has also allowed for the production and consumption of “multicultural imaginaries” in the UK (1999, 228). Cook et al. offer a critical route map of “a world of cultural and culinary diversity [which] is currently being served up to British food consumers on their plates, their super-market shelves and their high streets” (228). Not only linked to the food itself but to the people that are associated with those foods, “eth-nic food” is generally a “mark” assigned by “others” that remains out-side the ethnic labelling. Ethnic food is, they argue, therefore bound up in, and often central to, wider issues of multicultural politics, such as diversity, “otherness,” authenticity, self-representation, and hybridity.

Discussions of the cultural politics of ethnic food consumption have been critical of the notion that “multiculturalism is defined according to the availability of ethnic restaurants for cosmopolitan consumers” (hage 1997, 99) or that multiculturalism “becomes a problem to be coped with by the offering up of cultural treats, thereby evading a more profound engagement with the possibilities for cul-tural transformation” (Parker 2000, 78). In his article about Chinese takeaways in the UK, Parker argues that this form of multiculturalism “is held within the confines of service industries at the disposal of the dominant” and that they therefore “do not operate wholly on their own terms.” It also, he argues, “simplifies the terms of contact between cultures, overlooking the unequal terms of interchange between Eu-rope and Asia in both past and present” (79).

Uma Narayan (1995) also alerts us to the deceiving notion that the acceptance of a migrant’s food may lead to an acceptance of their presence in mainstream culture. She exemplifies her argument through an historical analysis of the incorporation of curry into British food, saying that British people fabricated their own version of Indian culture. Narayan (1995, 77) believes we should not overlook the fact that “mainstream eaters would remain privileged consumers, benefit-ing from the structural inequalities and unpleasant material realities that often form the contexts in which ‘ethnic food’ is produced and consumed.” In a similar vein, Payani (2002) argues that the recent expansion of the ethnic food sector with the availability of sauces, spices, and ready meals from supermarket shelves in the UK does not mean an approximation between cultures. Commonly it means a further “ghettoization,” with mainstream communities purchasing


what they conceive as ethnic foods from “safe” and mainstream busi-ness outlets instead of patronizing ethnic retail spaces (Payani 2002). The uneven relationship between the diner and the “ethnic other” has been termed “consumer cannibalism” or “culinary imperialism” by bell hooks (1992, 39). For hooks (1992), food consumed in ethnic restaurants has been stripped of its original cultural significance and difference turned into a commodity for the benefit of mainstream consumers (see also heldke 2001).

however, as Cook et al. (1999, 233–234) argue, posing com-modity culture as the guilty party for removing cultural forms from their context and then packaging them to be sold fails to show how commodity culture can also facilitate the reproduction of culture in different settings, establishing new forms of communication. With-out a doubt, “ethnic food” is inscribed in a field where relations of cultural power and domination are present (highmore 2009), but portraying the “ethnic other” as a passive victim strips migrants of agency. Such an approach investigates migrant food mainly in relation to mainstream markets and palates, thus omitting the migrants’ own accounts from the research agenda and their role as both consumers and disseminators of their culinary cultures abroad.

Analyzing the consumption of Mexican food in restaurants in Los Angeles, Ferrero (2002, 198) argues that food became “a means to break into the American economic and cultural system, a way of legitimizing social networks and establishing new ethnic roots.” The consumption of ethnic food can transform the “exotic” to “familiar,” “inedible to edible,” and can promote the acceptance, even if partially, of ethnic minorities into mainstream society (Bentley 2004 cited by Abarca 2004). Davis (2002, 74) believes that there are aspects of inclusion and exclusion in the eating experience, but reiterates a two-way relationship: “the act of dining and vending in an ethnic restau-rant fill both native and immigrant needs.” Frost’s recent research on the role of curry houses in the regeneration and rebranding of Brick Lane in East London (2011) is also telling in its emphasis on the ap-plication of cultural difference as a proactive migrant approach.

My research showed that there are indeed Brazilian restaurants in London that cater to stereotypical expectations of Brazil: as an ex-otic, tropical paradise, with beaches, sexualized bodies, carnival, and football, portraying mainly images of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. These cultural images of Brazil do exist on a cultural circuit of consumption


aimed at Londoners and displaced Brazilians (Frangella 2010). how-ever, my research suggests that alongside and intersecting with this circuit, another, much stronger, commercial food and cultural scene is being formed. Spreading fast across London, bars, restaurants, cafés, and grocery shops are mobilizing other cultural signs of “Brazilian-ness.” These are social spaces that cater to the needs of a new wave of Brazilians coming to London from the Brazilian states of Goiás, Mi-nas Gerais, São Paulo, and Paraná, with their particular tastes in food, music, and so forth. So not only are these migrant Brazilian business owners actively mobilizing their newfound “ethnicity” as “Brazilians in London” as an economic resource, but they are also circulating specific cultural products that are linked to the tastes of their custom-ers. I sensed that the performance of identity in those spaces could not be framed only in terms of how “Brazilianness” was commodified to be consumed by the “other.” As some of these establishments are deeply engaged in the construction of collective spaces of belonging for displaced Brazilians in London, they called for an examination of how “Brazilianness” was a process negotiated and constructed on an everyday basis through food narratives and practices.

This article thus seeks to recentre migrant agency through a more diasporically attuned approach to the internationalization of food. It does so by bringing migrants’ voices and experiences to the fore and by exploring the social and cultural relations arising from commercial spaces of a new migrant group as they recreate and negotiate their food culture under diasporic circumstances.

Adding Food (as Material and immaterial Culture) to Diasporic GeographiesIt is now widely recognized that food represents one of the cultural and material practices most closely connected with the maintenance, expression, and reworking of identity for migrant groups (Avieli 2005; Brown and Mussell 1984; Douglas 1984; Fischler 1988; Ga-baccia 2000; Kneafsey and Cox 2002; Parker 2000; Ray 2004). how-ever, one of the dangers when researching migrant food cultures is to essentialize and bound these cultures to discrete spheres. In reality, food cultures are always on the make, borrowing and adapting as they go. They have a flexible and dynamic relationship, not only with the homeland, but also with other surrounding cuisines.


Studies of diaspora and material culture can provide possibilities for thinking about the constitution of diasporic identities as everyday responses present in ordinary acts of dwelling in the context of migra-tion. Such a focus requires attention to the materialities of everyday life in the settling processes of migrant populations. The need to ad-dress such emotional, embodied, material, and quotidian practices in migrants’ lives has been put forward by a number of scholars (Basu and Coleman 2008; Choo 2004; Conradson and McKay 2007; Wise and Chapman 2005). This body of work argues for more attention to be paid to the role of material culture in migrants’ practices of belonging and home-making and to how “diasporic identities are forged through the production, circulation and consumption of material things and spaces” (Crang 2010, 139). Such work has addressed the relation-ship between migrant home-making and material culture through an engagement with architecture and gardens, furniture and personal belongings, and everyday activities and performances (Datta 2008; Morgan, Rocha, and Poynting 2005; Savaş 2010; Tolia-Kelly 2004).

Although to some conceptualizations of diaspora a relationship with the homeland is central (Cohen 1997; Safran 1991; Tölölyan 1996), I do not consider diasporic subjects as a homogeneous group simply because they come from the same country. As pointed out by Fortier (2005), the new “terrains of belonging” created in the new place of settlement have to rearticulate migrants’ multiple locations, times, experiences, and identifications. James Clifford’s understanding of di-aspora (1994), for example, is concerned with a form of awareness and resistance developed by those who do not “fit in” in their new place of settlement. Diaspora, he suggests, is a “loosely coherent adaptive con-stellation of responses to dwelling in displacement” (Clifford 1994, 310). These more recent and open definitions of diaspora also recog-nize that migrants maintain multiple connections across more than one nation—they may feel at home in the place of settlement while still having longings for, and attachments to, a homeland (Clifford 1994; Ver to vec and Cohen 1999). Brah (1996, 197) goes further, differenti-at ing between a “homing” desire and a “desire for homeland.” She points out that maintaining identification with their place of origin does not mean that people want to go back to live there. More open and fluid understanding of home has accounted for the experiences of people who move across different places and times, thus challeng-ing the apparent opposition between “home” and “away” (Blunt and Dowling 2006).


Diaspora studies emphasize, therefore, the cultural forms associ-ated with migrant populations, casting light on how diasporic social formations forge their own distinctive senses of identity (Brah 1996). Of course, as Brah argues, “the identity of the diasporic imagined community is far from fixed or pre-given. It is constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively” (Brah 1996, 183). Diasporic identifications are, for Brah (1996, 194–196, original italics), “multilocal, […] networks of transnational identifications encompassing ‘imagined’ and ‘encountered’ communities.”

Brazilian Migration to the uKAlthough Brazilians represent a significant “new migrant group in the UK” (Evans et al. 2007; Evans et al. 2011), London’s Brazil-ian community remains largely invisible within existing migration studies and the public consciousness. This article thus draws on and contributes to the recent scholarship on Brazilian migration in the UK (Bloch, Sigona, and Zetter 2009; de Souza 2010; Dias 2010; Evans et al. 2011; Evans et al. 2007; Frangella 2010; Kubal, Bakewell, and de haas 2011; Sheringham 2011).

Precise numbers of migrants are not available, and estimates vary greatly. The Brazilian government estimates that 180,000 Brazilians live in the UK and, similarly, community leaders and Brazilian re-searchers in the UK give the number of Brazilians living in London as somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 (Evans et al. 2007; Evans et al. 2011), 30,000 of whom reside in the Borough of Brent alone. A recent research project on London’s Latin American population shows a more modest number of 186,500 Latin Americans (includ-ing Brazilians) in the UK and 113,500 Latin Americans in London (McIlwaine 2011).

Despite such disparity in the figures, there is a consensus that Brazilian migration to the UK has increased since the 1990s and ac-celerated in the 2000s, albeit with a slight decline from 2007, due both to the recent economic recession and the tightening of immigration controls (Kubal et al. 2011; McIlwaine 2011). Brazilians in London are a highly diverse group with regard to factors such as generation, gender, occupation, migration experience, social class, region of


origin, and religious affiliation. Studies have shown that despite a relatively high level of education, the great majority lack language skills and appropriate documents; they thus tend to find work in low-skilled, low-paid service sector jobs such as cleaners, construction labourers, couriers, and waiters.

Being Brazilian Outside Brazilhow can some sort of binding “Brazilianness” be attributed to, con-structed, and maintained by such a heterogeneous group of people as the so-called Brazilians? It has already been noted that expressions of diasporic cultures cannot be reduced to some sort of cultural homo-geneity that travels untroubled between two locations (Fortier 2000; Gilroy 2000). Borrowing from hall (1993) and from recent diaspora studies, I would suggest that Brazil is itself a “diaspora space” and that the “system of representation” that constitutes Brazil as an “imag-ined community” is already the product of cultures of hybridity (hall 1993, 362). Indeed, the Brazilian diaspora in London cannot in any way be considered as a “culturally unified grouping” (Fortier 2005, 183) on grounds of a common national origin, and thus these internal divisions and diversity were key considerations in my research. As other scholars have argued (Glick-Schiller 1997), cultural differen-tiations related to locality, region, and nation can emerge or become more salient via transnational processes.

A first point to remember is that in Brazil individuals rarely need to identify themselves as “Brazilians.” Instead they will refer to the city, region, or state in which they live or from which they come, as well as their social class. As Margolis (2007, 213) points out: “Brazilian becomes a marked category within the context of international migration because it raises questions of ethnic iden-tity with which Brazilians have had little or no prior experience or consciousness.” Most scholars agree that Brazilian identity abroad is built upon difference, a perspective that “we’re not like them,” which can refer to both ethnicity and social class (Margolis 2007; Torresan 1995; Martes 2003). It is worth noting that the process of reinforcement of national identification caused by migration and the fact that identities are constructed upon difference are not specific to the Brazilian case.


Ethnic encounters through migration have shaped the way Brazil-ians identify themselves in many ways. Torresan (1995, 35) argues that London’s multi-ethnic context was central to the construction of new personal, national, or ethnic identities for Brazilians. her inter-viewees avowed that they “became more Brazilian in London” and “how it is different to be Brazilian in Brazil and in London.” It could also be added that for many Brazilians it is the first time they will have experienced living with other Brazilians from different regions, and are thus able to better understand regional differences and get a sense of Brazil as a “whole” (Torresan 1995, 36). In Rezende’s (2010) work with Brazilian PhD students in France and England, she found that Brazilian identities had to be rearticulated due to the host society expectation: they saw themselves through the eyes of the “other.” Such stereotypical images of Brazilians could be negative (lack of discipline and punctuality, poor academic background, always par-tying) or positive (a left-wing orientation), but had little to do with people’s personal characteristics (Rezende 2010).

It is also worth briefly mentioning two further aspects related to food and identity in wider Brazilian contexts. First, food and its places of consumption have been mentioned as playing an important part in the lives of Brazilian migrants in different geographical contexts (Lin-ger 2001; Margolis 1994; Martes 1999), but it has largely remained on the fringes of the research agenda. Second, Brazilian food itself is the “fruit of a process where different elements from different ethnic and cultural contexts are articulated resulting is a heterogeneous, diverse, variable and unequal food system” (Maciel 2005, 4).2 That said, I now move on to the empirical discussion.

Brazilian Foodscapes in London: Making, Representing, ContestingThe commercial activity of Brazilian entrepreneurs in the food business and the (re)creation of a “Brazilian” cuisine is a recent but dynamic enterprise in the UK. Whilst it does not compare with other established culinary diasporas, such as the Indian and the Chinese, it shows a notable growth. Based on information provided by long-established owners and Brazilian migrants residing in London, as well as my own mapping of current Brazilian food outlets (primarily shops


and restaurants), the sector has grown tenfold since 2000 to around 70 establishments, catering mostly (but not exclusively) to fellow Brazil-ians. The movement of food followed the movement of people. Apart from shops, restaurants, and cafés, the number of “Brazilian” beauty salons, churches, magazines, and other community associations has also grown considerably.

A general finding was that Brazilian migrants play a fundamental role in both the provision and the consumption of Brazilian food. For instance, the setting up of importing systems by Brazilian entrepre-neurs—a sector previously dominated by Portuguese traders—was central to the development of a stronger Brazilian food scene in London (see also Aguiar 2009). It allowed for the expansion of the Brazilian grocery trade and the establishment of a more varied circuit of food provision. Whilst concerns about commercial confidential-ity prevented the construction of precise sales figures, according to the general information provided by shop owners, the most popular products sold in grocery shops are meat, beans, rice, flour (maize and manioc), a mixture of cheese and bread, and Guarana Antarctica, a Brazilian soft drink made from the tropical berry Paullinia cupana, which grows in the Amazon region. These businesses also stock a selection of other Brazilian mass-marketed products with small profit margins such as herbal teas, coffee, biscuits, sweets, soft drinks, fro-zen snacks, pulp juices, sauces and spices, cake mixtures, tinned and preserved food, confectionery, and some food utensils, as well as non-food items such as toiletries. Brazilian grocery shops are frequented by other ethnic groups (from Portugal, Poland, Portuguese-speaking African countries, and other South American countries), but very few Brazilian entrepreneurs in the grocery business venture outside their own enclave, either to market Brazilian products to non-Brazilians or to sell non-Brazilian products in their shops. Brazilian groceries are also sold in non-Brazilian outlets in areas such as harlesden, popular with Brazilian migrants.

Brazilian importers have therefore been key agents in providing the material reconnection to the homeland via the food they import. Regional and local Brazilian products and brands are obviously missed by clients, but shopkeepers and importers cater to a clientele framed in national terms and have to adhere to few national brands. As on importer and shop owner told me:


I import products to sell in my shop. I go [to Brazil] once a year to research and an agent will buy things for me.… So 40% of the products I sell are exclusive.… In terms of de-mand for regional food, people from the state of Goiás have their very own taste and people from the South are also very demanding. People want a brand from Putinga, do you know what I mean? In Putinga you buy beans from a local food cooperative and people come here and want the same, or a brand of maté tea they buy there. If I already sell two types of beans here, I am not going to bring another type just because it is regional. I am going to bring a brand which is nationally known so I can serve everybody. I am not an outlet special-ized in selling gaúcha [from the state of Rio Grande do Sul], mineira [from the state of Minas Gerais] or baiana [from the state of Bahia] food. I am a Brazilian shop. I mean, I have a Brazilian shop. (Interview with I., female, 45 years old, shop owner and importer, 21 October 2009)

“Brazilian” is deployed by shop owners as a label that can work across all sorts of differences. Brazilian food retail in London is therefore involved in the creation of a homogenizing food culture that enabled the reproduction of a national culture in the diaspora.3

The situation is slightly different in the restaurant sector. here, although there is also a strong focus on the Brazilian migrant popula-tion as a customer base, for many outlets this combines with selling Brazilian food and a Brazilian experience to a wider range of London residents. Such cross-cultural marketing, along with the demand for Brazilian imported products from non-Brazilian entrepreneurs, points to a widening of networks of provision beyond any “ethnic enclave,” and thus endorses the call for a conceptualization of these transna-tional spaces of food provision as “multiply inhabited,” as suggested by Crang, Dwyer, and Jackson (2003).

Brazilian entrepreneurs draw on London’s wider culinary circuits in many ways. In some cases, these approximations are with the food-scapes of other migrant groups. Owners of restaurants reported tap-ping into Afro-Caribbean food suppliers, especially for manioc root, okra, whole coconuts, mangoes, papayas, coriander, manioc flour, and other products not sold by Brazilian traders. Indeed, this also occurs


amongst other migrant communities. In her research with Ecuadorians in London, Mata-Codesal (2010) reported how Ecuadorian migrants in London seek and adapt other ethnic groups’ food resources, buying yucca, green bananas, and plantains from Afro-Caribbean suppliers in Brixton, south London.

Furthermore, many Brazilian chefs developed their careers in London, having worked in various catering businesses until they decided to open their own. Take the example of J., the owner of an upmarket restaurant in Camden who defines his restaurant as serving “Brazilian northeastern food cooked in French style with a Caribbean twist.” J.’s cooking draws from many sources of inspiration and from his large experience in catering: in the last 10 years he has been back and forth between Brazil, Europe, and the UK working in several restaurants. When he first came to the UK in 1996 to learn English he worked in a Caribbean restaurant called Cotton. he was completely taken by it and decided that that was the kind of cooking he wanted to do. “I suppose I do a bit of fusion cooking, although Caribbean food has a lot in common with Brazilian northeastern food,” he said to me in an interview. In J.’s kitchen, Caribbean and northeastern Brazilian cuisine are cooked in a French style, but in the plate these latter two traditions do not mix. So what is served is “the Caribbean number 1”—jerked chicken wings; grilled butterfly prawns “served the Carib-bean way”; salt cod fritters, “one of the Caribbean’s favourite dishes”; bobó de camarão, an “iconic recipe from Bahia” (tiger prawns cooked in coconut milk, cassava cream, and palm oil sauce); or “Brazil’s national dish,” feijoada (traditional Brazilian black bean stew).

The interviews with Brazilian chefs and restaurant owners also suggest a constant process of research into Brazil’s vast culinary culture, of trial and error, adaptation, and improvisation in search of dishes that suit both Brazilian and non-Brazilian palates: a “best seller.” One entrepreneur had a café in central London and two stalls in London’s markets where he tried out different dishes:

First of all we looked for what is a common eating habit among Brazilians; and secondly what a person that visits Brazil tries—which is feijoada, rice and beans, picanha [rump steak].… Coxinha de galinha everybody knows. And some English clients come asking for coxinha and pão de queijo.


That was the base … We looked for and worked with Brazilian ingredients: manioc, coconut, sweet potato, banana, pineapple … we started with these kinds of cakes and tried it out. Some of them we don’t bother anymore because they did not prove popular—for example the cornmeal cake, it is a nice cake to have with coffee, but can be a bit dry. It is a very simple cake, some love it but it is not everyone’s cake. So we stopped sell-ing it. The one made with coconut and manioc, three to four are sold in a day in the market. here in the café that’s a best seller, along with the banana one. (Interview with S., male, 59, owner of a café in central London, 22 October 2009)

In this reconstruction, some culinary forms become more popular than others. Examples of this include the popularity of churrascarias de rodízio (barbecue or steakhouses) in London’s restaurant provision of Brazilian food, the role played by simple dishes like beans and rice for the majority of Brazilians, or indeed the emergence of particular brands like farofa Yoki (a side dish of seasoned toasted manioc flour) and Guaraná Antarctica as representations of “Brazilianness” in gro-cery shopping. In part, then, the construction of a “Brazilian food” involves a simplification of the complexity of food provision and consumption in Brazil—rich in its regional variations and seasonal ingredients—and the emergence of particular forms that come to represent “Brazilianness” in London, such as those dishes from the states of Minas Gerais and Goiás, as I will discuss later. On the other hand, there was also flexibility in this production of “Brazilianness.” For instance, the research documented both the sale and the domestic customization of fast food in a “Brazilian style,” such as pizza with a greater variety of toppings (palm and chicken hearts, for example), hot dogs, and hamburgers. This reflects not only how global food trends have been incorporated into Brazilian palates in Brazil but also how these trends are appropriated by Brazilians in London who, through a process of adding and changing, come to consider them as their own culinary culture.

Nonetheless, the overall picture is one in which Brazilian food in London has a primarily diasporic rather than more generally glo-balized quality. Brazilian migrants are prime actors as both providers and consumers. The large influx of Brazilian migrants from Goiás and


Minas Gerais made the cuisines from these regions—such as feijão tropeiro (cooked beans mixed with cassava flour), tutu de feijão (re-fried mashed black beans), galinhada (chicken pieces cooked with rice), arroz com pequi (rice with souari nut) among others—popular within the Brazilian diasporic culinary circuit. Even though “rice and beans” are the staple food of Brazilians regardless of social class and regional background, Brazilian restaurants in London end up having to cater to those Brazilian clients who are bored with what they per-ceive as plain and ordinary food and become more exigent in terms of variety. Brazilian customers are constantly asking restaurant owners and chefs to reproduce the regional varieties they were accustomed to back in Brazil:

When we started it was more improvised. We started with feijoada, picanha (beef steak), grilled fish.… Afterwards we introduced moqueca (a stew from the northeastern regions of Brazil, flavoured with palm oil and coconut milk) risotto, manioc fried balls; we added more things to our menu. Peo-ple from Bahia would come and say: “Why haven’t you got moqueca, bobó de camarão (dish from northeastern regions of Brazil containing fresh shrimp in a purée of dried shrimp, manioc flour, coconut milk, cashew, and peanuts, flavoured with palm oil), escondidinho (a dish from the northeast of Brazil made with shredded beef jerky, mashed cassava, and grated cheese curd)?” Sometimes we knew it but had never tried cooking it. “Why not? What’s escondidinho like?” “So, that’s it? Let’s take it to the restaurant!” So we have them as specials on weekends; they are not on the fixed menu. Braised beef with tomato sauce … “So you haven’t got rolled beef like my mother’s?” We make it … We are not limited to the menu. (Interview with P., female, 40 years old, restaurant owner, 23 September 2010)

As another restaurant owner added: “The other day they wrote a list [of dishes]. The other day I cooked oxtail broth and someone asked: ‘Why don’t you cook a manioc one?’ … a lot of people say I should cook acarajé … I have never done that in my life. I should try once a month” (Interview with E., male, 30 years old, 15 July 2010). “We


are used to people calling and asking if there’s tutu de feijão,” added a female restaurant owner. “If there is not, we make it. And pudim for desert” (Interview with P., 35 years old, 23 September 2010).

Daily specials, as well as themed nights with regional music and food, especially from Goiás and Minas Gerais but also from Bahia, and clients’ suggestions are ways of allowing for a more varied Brazil-ian cuisine in London. These diasporic tastes were in fact responsible for bringing a diversity of Brazilian tastes to London. In this way, owners, chefs, staff, and Brazilian clients are involved in creating a Brazilian culinary culture that is strongly regional, flexible, and at-tuned to diasporic food longings.

RepresentationsChurrascarias are the most successful culinary model sold to non-Brazilians in London and in other global capitals (Lopes 2009). In Brazil, churrascarias were associated for a long time with low-quality roadside eateries, but in the last 35 years they have become popular within the middle class urban culture, with the expansion of success-ful chains such as Porcão and Fogo de Chão in the main Brazilian cities. Although churrascarias still refer to the gaucho style of bar-becuing, they have become, in fact, the meeting places of different culinary cultures: apart from the carved meat, they also serve a smor-gasbord with salads, hot food (such as beans, rice, and fried plantains), fried snacks, and sushi and sashimi. It is clear that the price excludes many Brazilians from these places, an issue also noted by Lopes in her discussion of Brazilian churrascarias in New York (Lopes 2009).

London’s churrascarias market themselves as upmarket and tend to capture a clientele of Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish tourists and residents, some already familiar with the rodizio concept. They are marketed as a “carnivore’s delight” for healthy appetites. Although there is an emphasis on the exotic, especially with reference to the gaucho techniques of preparing and serving the meat (roasting it over a charcoal fire and carving it at the client’s table), adaptations are the rule. The buffet steers toward a more international cuisine to please international palates.

My research in other spaces of food consumption—more geared toward Brazilian customers—revealed that other representations


are at stake. Diasporic longing is actively deployed as an emotional marketing tool by Brazilian food entrepreneurs to entice customers, hence the term economia da saudade. Advertisements for Brazilian shops, for example, use the phrase “as if you were there” to sell the idea that the diasporic subject can have “a trip back home” by con-suming Brazilian food.

In truth, many Brazilian entrepreneurs I spoke to felt that their business took care of the “emotional aspects of migration.” My eth-nographic research in Brazilian shops brought evidence to show that these shops play an active role in forging significant, visible, public spaces of belonging for some Brazilians in London. One of the main ways in which they developed this community role was through their forms of sociality, which in turn provided comfort, familiarity, and a “sense of home” to many Brazilians. “Because I am shy,” one male interviewee stated, “I would never go to a place where people spoke English. I wanted to be served by someone that spoke the same lan-guage as me … It made me feel good to see people from Brazil … see them talking, speaking Portuguese, they made me feel good” (W., 28 years old, from Espírito Santo, interviewed on 24 November 2009). A female restaurant owner added:

I see people from all levels and religions, to be honest—ordi-nary people from a humble background to upper middle class people. We receive everyone and that’s what’s nice. [They are] students, families with father, mother, and child who share a plate to economize. Or even families who are doing well here … Sometimes people say: ‘I came from the other side of town to eat this picanha, it is delicious.’ They miss it. Or maybe it is the wife’s birthday. People who have been here longer miss things more. B. has this atmosphere that we have created, this feeling of home. When people come here they don’t feel they are not welcome; children come here, prams, babies … They make a hell of a mess on the floor, but we don’t care; we are here to receive people. Even on Friday night when we have live music … So this makes people feel relaxed … It is an important moment for them to come and eat picanha, rice and beans. You realize that. So we make this moment to be special for them. You can choose the music you


want to hear: ‘Can you play Dudu Nobre, country music?’ I think people travel back home. (Interview with P., 35 years old, 23 September 2010).

Restaurant owners were aware that they were selling more than just food; they sold the sensorial experience of being at home away from home afforded by food, echoing what Assunção (2011) noted in her research with Brazilian migrants in Boston.

In the case of grocery stores, as well as offering a service or a product, these businesses try to impress on the consumer the image of being “a Brazilian place.” The first sign of the “Brazilianness” of the place is the façade and its use of many visual cues: blue, yellow, and green—the colours of the Brazilian flag—as well as the image of the Brazilian flag itself; logos using the map of Brazil and the national flag; use of Portuguese words (mercearia, açougue instead of grocery, butcher’s); and phrases in Portuguese. In fact, these food outlets are the most visible signs of the Brazilian presence in London, creating images of Brazil for Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike.

Inside the shops, the “Brazilianness” of the place is promoted by the creation of a familiar Brazilian atmosphere: communication with the public is in Portuguese, as is the description of the products on the shelves and in price lists; a TV is tuned to a Brazilian channel; there are Brazilian papers and magazines, a notice board, a small library with Brazilian books. Despite the cramped conditions in some of the shops, they are important social spaces, and customers will linger whilst drinking a guaraná and eating a pão de queijo or a coxinha (Brazilian savoury snacks).

In my ethnographic work I witnessed the capacity of familiar brands to evoke memories and emotions for homesick clients. Brazil-ian products from well-known national brands sold in grocery stores in London are, in Brazil, more commonplace—mundane commercial products that are not considered special. however, these consumer objects acquired new meanings in the diasporic setting, namely the capacity to evoke familiarity for a large number of Brazilians, thus enabling the construction of collective spaces of belonging based on shared tastes and consumption practices. These brands became a way of giving form to diasporic culture and a means to “transport” consumers “home.” As Sutton (2001, 84) points out: “there is an


imagined community implied in the act of eating food ‘from home’ while in exile, in the embodied knowledge that others are eating the same food.” in the diasporic context, “Brazilian” food can become a “mundane reminder that keeps national identity near the surface of daily life” (Palmer 1998, 192).

ContestationsThe research findings presented here show how Brazilian food comes into being in London. Brazilian social and regional divisions are represented imaginatively in food provision in London. This diversity, and its associated contestations, is evidenced, for exam-ple, by the popularization of goiano and mineiro food and culture in London, reflecting trends in migrants’ origins and tastes. Migrant food culture has therefore given visibility to alternative forms of “Brazilianness” that go beyond those represented by the cultures of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, which are more popular in London’s mainstream imaginings.

That these tastes may come to represent “Brazilianness” in Lon-don is a point of contention among Brazilian themselves, however. This is clearly seen in the discourses of Brazilian chefs, many of who come from different social and cultural backgrounds than their Brazil-ian clients and thus consider their tastes as limiting:

We have a lot of ideas but we have to observe that a lot of people who are here are from Goiás and Minas. They don’t come from a high social and intellectual background. We have to adapt to that. What do they normally eat? They want rice, beans, and meat. That’s why everybody offers this. You cannot make it too sophisticated. Ninety-five percent of the people that come to the market to eat are of this type. We have pies, but that is for people from Rio, São Paulo, and Santa Catarina. I cannot offer them lobster because they won’t eat it. I have various clients who don’t eat seafood … We tried to sell prawn pie, but it wasn’t very successful. We realize that’s not their habit. As they are from the countryside, they are not used to eating seafood. (Interview with S., male, 59, owner of a café in central London, 22 October 2009)


The popularity of regional food from Minas Gerais and Goiás as representative of “Brazilian” cuisine in London is also challenged by Brazilian “foodies.” What comes to represent “Brazilian” food lends itself to challenge because it is deeply marked by the tastes of its diasporic subjects who may not represent the tastes of “foodies” or other gastronomic élites. In the Brazilian BBC blog À Mesa, a post by Thomas Pappon questions which Brazilian culinary models are successful outside Brazil, apart from churrascarias. A reader replies, pointing out that

Most Brazilian places in London serve “home-made food,” a term in fact used to cover precarious facilities, improvised service and lack of creativity in the food. Food served in buffets stays exposed all day. The menu is always the same: half-way between the Mineira and Goiana culinary traditions. Rarely find a fish or seafood dish. It is as if Brazil was a big wilderness, without sea. (Pappon 2010, Author’s translation)

The previous section also showed how food outlets form commu-nity spaces for some Brazilians. In fact, all Brazilians relate to these spaces in some way or another, whether by visiting them regularly or occasionally, or by avoiding them. however, there was also testi-mony from research participants about how Brazilian food could be implicated in an anxious parochialism that curtailed the cosmopolitan possibilities of diasporic living:

The other aspect is that this is an area full of Brazilian people, Brazilian restaurants, Brazilian cafés … That is what happens: there are a lot of Brazilians and they only consume Brazilian food when they can … They are stuck in a circle and they do not open their eyes to learn other things. They do not live the country’s culture; they don’t even know the country’s geogra-phy … And when they see Guaraná, they buy Guaraná, when they see coxinha, they buy coxinha and they eat coxinha and drink Guaraná. I honestly don’t eat coxinha and Guaraná and I’m not going to pay for it. It is not that I don’t like it, but I am not here to live the Brazilian life. I came to broaden my tastes (laughs)” (Interview with V., female, 40 years old, lives in harlesden, 7 October 2009)


In these accounts, Brazilian food, especially in the somewhat simpli-fied forms that it often took in the diasporic setting, constrained the development of wider identity projects through the incorporation of new tastes.

Furthermore, the sense of belonging provided by being in the familiar environment of grocery shops, cafés, and restaurants should not be assumed. For example, one worker reported feeling trapped within his own cultural boundaries. This resonates with similar feel-ings from respondents in the general research, some of whom were business owners who were frustrated by the fact that they were selling Brazilian culture when the objective of coming to the UK was to get immersed in the host culture.

As mentioned above, Brazilian shops in general are one of the most visible signs of the Brazilian presence in London, dissemi-nating images and meanings of “Brazilianness” for Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike. Such overt, placed branding of Brazilian iden-tity—and more generally the visibility offered by Brazilian retail spaces—can also be considered problematic for some members of the Brazilian community. Brazilian migration in the UK is marked by a high number of undocumented migrants—many of whom are regular customers of these places—who would rather not draw atten-tion to their presence. For undocumented Brazilians, the success of making Brazilian identity visible in harlesden is not entirely welcome as it makes shops a target for the policing of migration status. At the same time as they offer a place of sociability, these shops therefore also make such sociability a risky activity. For the shop owners such visibility is double-edged: it is central to attracting custom as well as being a source of personal pride, but it can also compromise the viability of their business, as their main consumers tend to shy away after raids. Instead of being considered solely places of refuge or posi-tive affirmations of Brazilian presence, retail spaces can, sometimes, represent a place of danger and vulnerability for those for whom presence in the national space is denied.

Concluding RemarksThis discussion of Brazilian food provision in London has highlighted how the spread of food commerce is intertwined with the develop-


ment of a notion of “Brazilianness,” both as a category and as a cultural-culinary form. This “Brazilianness,” I have argued, is not an essentialized cultural form travelling untroubled across national borders but is “on the move and on the making.” Brazilian food as a cultural product has a paradoxical role: it reinforces and plays an active role in the construction of the idea of being Brazilian, or more specifically a Brazilian away from home, but it also can be an arena where the meanings of “Brazilianness” and its representation are disputed. Also at stake, as discussed above, were the forms that Brazilian identity might take and their relationships with the complex contours of identity within Brazil, notably with respect to regionalism and socio-cultural background. Thus Brazilian food was a medium through which performances of being Brazilian in London could be staged; through which Brazilian identity could be articulated to others; but also through which inclusions into, and exclusions from, Brazilian identity in London were forged.

The provision system of Brazilian food in London is therefore characterized by its disconnections from and reconnections to Bra-zil, and the material evidence of this come from the accounts of the importing systems as well as from the movement of chefs and ingredients. “Brazilianness” as a cultural and culinary category is a constant compromise between diasporic longings and tastes, main-stream tastes, chefs’ abilities and entrepreneurial activities. A further dimension of such disconnections and reconnections has more emo-tional tones and is linked to food’s ability to take one back home. Such emotional geographies of longing are the motor of the commerce of Brazilian food. Economia da saudade shows the entanglement of commerce, commodities, and longing in diasporic food practices.

AcknowledgementsA version of this article was initially presented at the Latin American Studies Association International Congress in San Francisco, in 2012, for which I was awarded a travel grant. I am very grateful for the fi-nancial support received from the Overseas Research Award Scheme (ORSAS) and a departmental grant from Royal holloway, University of London during my PhD studies. My gratitude also extends to my supervisor, Professor Phil Crang, and advisor, Professor Felix Drive,


who provided invaluable intellectual and pastoral support across the duration of my studies. Last but not least, I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve the article.

Notes1 During the exploratory phase, I also visited larger restaurant food chains in

London that sold Brazilian dishes, as well as Portuguese delicatessens and non-Brazilian grocery shops that sold Brazilian products in areas where there was a strong Brazilian concentration, such as harlesden in the London Borough of Brent. Although these visits helped to contextualize Brazilian food provision in London, they do not form much of the reported empirical basis of the study; rather, they helped me to frame my research questions and subsequent research practice. I also took part in birthday parties, church festivities, and other Brazilian gatherings with friends and acquaintances, to gain a sense of what they might suggest for further investigation of Brazil-ian food consumption by Brazilians in London.

2 “Assim, a alimentação brasileira não é formada por um mero somatório de itens de procedência distintas, mas é fruto de um processo onde diferentes elementos com origens em contextos étnicos e culturais muito diferentes são articulados resultando em um sistema alimentar heterogêneo, diverso, variável e desigual.” (The quote is an interpretation of Gilberto Freyre’s conception of the Brazilian food system by Maciel, 2005.)

3 For a similar discussion on Indian grocery food stores in the San Francisco Bay Area see Mankekar (2005, 204).

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MARACATu NEW YORK: TRANsREGiONAL FLOWs BETWEEN PERNAMBuCO, NEW YORK, AND NEW ORLEANs

DANiELLE MAiA CRuZ Department of Sociology, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil

Abstract. This article focuses on Maracatu New York, a percussion group based in Brooklyn. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2012, I discuss the significance that maracatu, a Brazilian cultural practice, acquired in New York. The group attracts participants of different nationalities, includ-ing Brazilians and Americans. however, it is specifically the flows of people between Brazil and the United States and also the symbolic values that emerge from the mixture of musical rhythms and cultural elements from Pernambuco and New Orleans—combining baque virado with “second line” rhythms—that trigger feelings of belonging for both Brazilians and Americans in the group.Resumo. O presente artigo discute os significados que o maracatu, uma ma-nifestação cultural brasileira, adquire nos Estados Unidos. As reflexões aqui apresentadas, resultado de uma etnografia conduzida em 2012, tomam como referência empírica as atividades do Maracatu New York, um grupo percussivo situado no Brooklyn desde 2002. Pessoas de diferentes nacionalidades e idades participam desse grupo, incluindo brasileiros e, sobretudo norte-americanos. Dados os marcantes fluxos de pessoas, ideias e sonoridades entre Brasil e Estados Unidos, entende-se o Maracatu New York como um espaço trans-nacional. Contudo, são os fluxos transregionais, particularmente as mesclas sonoras entre o baque virado do Pernambuco e o second line de New Orleans, os principais desencadeadores dos sentidos de pertencimento em ambas as nacionalidades.


81


This article discusses the significance that maracatu, a Brazilian cul-tural practice, has acquired in the United States. My ethnography of the Brooklyn-based group Maracatu New York provides the basis for an analysis of how transregional cultural and musical flows between Pernambuco and New Orleans—based on claims of a common Afri-can ancestry—come together in New York. Maracatu, both culturally and musically, has little visibility in Brazil. It is best known in the northeastern region, particularly in the states of Ceará and, primarily, Pernambuco, where secular percussion groups perform maracatu rhythms and two “traditional” kinds of maracatu: maracatu-nação or baque virado (turned-around beat), and rural or baque solto (loose beat) maracatu. Despite a great deal of variation among the groups (with the exception of rural maracatu), a maracatu performance typi-cally involves dance, music, and stock characters that commemorate the royal coronation ceremonies of so-called “black kings” in Brazil during the period of slavery.1

Until recently, maracatu was practiced by individuals living in the peripheral neighbourhoods of cities in northeastern Brazil. however, in the 1990s a rhythm called maracatu baque virado, autochthonous to Pernambuco, gained visibility in Brazil and on the international stage. Since then, a number of percussion groups that play the rhythm have appeared in Brazilian cities and abroad. These groups are not homogeneous, but, inspired by maracatu-nação, they generally at-tempt to perform the rhythms of this maracatu subgenre. The rhythms of the Pernambucan maracatu-nação groups are distinct from one another (Carvalho 2007).

My interest in maracatu as an object of enquiry began in 2006, when I conducted ethnographic research with maracatu groups located in the state of Ceará, Brazil.2 For the past few years, I have observed a significant growth in the number of percussion groups inspired by Pernambuco’s maracatu nations. After learning about maracatu groups forming outside Brazil, I became interested in issues related to Maracatu New York in particular. What caught my attention was the fact that this percussion group had been founded by an American, that it attracted people of different nationalities (mainly Americans and Brazilians), and that it intended to break into the American music industry, particularly the production of Brazilian music for American audiences. Another compelling factor was the group’s deliberate mix

Cruz / Maracatu New York: Transregional Flows 83

of musical sounds and cultural elements from Brazil and the United States, particularly the combination of the baque virado rhythm from Pernambuco and the “second line” rhythms from New Orleans. A number of questions arose: What new meaning does maracatu acquire outside of Brazil? Why is the group interested in mixing musical gen-res from Pernambuco and New Orleans? What feelings of belonging can such a group incite for Americans or for Brazilians who are in a diasporic situation?

In this article, I engage with authors such as hannerz (1997, 2001), Appadurai (2001), and Inda and Rosaldo (2001) not only to examine the flows of people, ideas, and musical sounds across na-tional borders, specifically between Brazil and the United States, but also to capture the complexities as they move and settle. In doing so, I provide rich empirical data that maps the networks of cultural exchanges—in this case maracatu—across national borders, and I unpack how this cultural practice acquires new meanings as it settles in a different context. I draw from and add to conceptions of “transna-tional space” (Crang, Dwyer, and Jackson 2003; Jackson, Crang, and Dwyer 2004). Maracatu New York can be conceived as a transnational space “multidimensional and multiply inhabited,” “encompassed by the circuits, flows, trajectories, and imaginaries,” and including “a wide variety of actors who have varying investments in, experiences of, and expressions of transnationalism” (Crang et al. 2003, 449). Yet I take this meaning further to show the complex transregional geog-raphies present in Maracatu New York as it brings together rhythms and cultural elements from Pernambuco and New Orleans and triggers feelings of belonging for both Brazilians and Americans.

The group Maracatu New York was founded in 2002 by American jazz percussionist Scott Kettner after he lived in Brazil, where he became familiar with maracatu baque virado. The percussion group is currently based in the borough of Brooklyn, where it offers work-shops and short-term courses on diverse Brazilian rhythms, mostly from the northeastern region. The group’s objective since its founding has been to attract people of different ages and nationalities who are interested in learning Brazilian rhythms, principally the baque virado, unique to the maracatu nations. Although participants from various cities around the United States participate sporadically in Maracatu New York, those who participate most frequently are those who live in


New York. According to what I was told during interviews, people of different nationalities also attend the courses. During the period of my research between February and June of 2012, I observed participants between the ages of 20 and 50, all residents of New York City, from Puerto Rico, France, Chile, and predominantly from Brazil and—above all—the United States. My ethnographic field research included 19 interviews, informal conversations, and observations of Maracatu New York’s shows in New York City, as well as the Saturday classes in Brooklyn, when I observed rehearsals. My analysis focuses on the participation of Brazilians and Americans due to their predominance in the group and to the evident cultural and musical flows between Brazil and the United States.

This article is organized in four sections. The first section presents the theoretical underpinnings of my research. In the second section, I discuss the differences between Pernambuco’s maracatu nations and the percussion groups that have been inspired by the Brazilian cultural practice. In the third section, I define and contextualize the general dynamics of Maracatu New York. In the final section, I return to my argument by exploring Maracatu New York as a transnational space. My analysis suggests that Brazilian members identify with the group because of the musical rhythms and cultural elements from Brazil, as well as the participation of other Brazilians. These three elements—music, culture, and compatriots—allow them to consider the percus-sion group as a “Brazilian community” in New York City, or, rather,

Figure 1. Class in 2012 at the headquarters of Maracatu New York. In the


as a symbolic space that connects them with feelings associated with their nation of origin and with the diasporic context in which they now live. Many of the Americans in the group also consider Mara-catu New York as a “familial” space where friendships develop and where people who live in common situations in New York and who share an interest in Brazil meet. Consequently, the local dimension of the group becomes another relevant consideration, as the feelings of “Brazilian community” and “family” attributed to it directly relate to the particular experiences of Americans and Brazilians in New York. however, it is specifically the flows of people between Brazil and the United States and the symbolic values that emerge from the mixture of musical rhythms and cultural elements from Pernambuco and New Orleans that trigger feelings of belonging for both Brazil-ians and Americans in the group. As can be seen, the empirical data of this article articulates different levels of local, regional, national, and transnational interconnection, thus pointing to new theoretical avenues for further, more complex, analyses.

Maracatu New York as a Transnational space: situating the DebateDiverse processes like the expansion of trade, navigation, and mi-gration have long fostered the flow of people, ideas, and objects

photo you can see alfaia, caixa, and abê drums.


between different places. But the intensification of these exchanges is intimately related to the process by which the growth of productive forces, particularly the communication, information, and transporta-tion industries, have provoked the “shrinking of the world” or the “compression of time-space” (harvey 1989; hannerz 2001; Tom-linson 1999). In doing so, these processes have engendered marked movements of global interaction and interconnectivity, as Inda and Rosaldo (2001) suggest, creating a world with porous borders per-mitting people and cultures to be increasingly in contact. Yet these processes are not free of negotiations and symbolic struggles. It is understood that the intensification of flows between nations that occurs through the phenomenon of globalization is a complex and multifaceted process that simultaneously operates in diverse fields: cultural, economic, political, environmental, and so forth (Inda and Rosaldo 2001, 10).

According to hannerz, as a result of the significant intercon-nectivity of the contemporary world, it has become more difficult to understand the world as a “cultural mosaic, of separate pieces with hard, well-defined edges” (1992, 218). The circulation of social and cultural processes beyond the borders of nation states allows individuals to design diverse transnational cartographies (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Appadurai 1998). It is, thus, a world “characterized by objects in movement that include ideas and ideologies, people and markets, images and messages, technologies and techniques” (Appadurai 2001, 4).

It is in the context of this interconnectivity of people and places across national borders that the concept of transnationalism comes to the fore. According to Glick Schiller (2007, 440), the term refers to the flows of people, objects, and capital across the borders of the na-tion state. Crang et al. (2003) affirm that the concept of transnational-ism has operated within a broad set of definitions. That is, it refers to topics ranging from the formation of diasporic societies to senses of identity, cultural globalization, and even the political and economic experiences of migration.3

Bearing in mind the varied use of the concept of transnationalism, especially in relation to migratory processes, Crang et al. (2003) draw on their research on the transnational commercial flows of fashion and food between the Indian subcontinent and Great Britain to propose a


broader perspective by using the term “transnational space.” Based on Avtar Brah’s notion of “diaspora space” (1996), they argue that transnational space is a space “encompassed by … circuits, flows, trajectories, and imaginaries” (Crang et al. 2003, 449). For these au-thors, those who participate in this space are actors with a variety of investments and experiences.

As Jackson et al. (2004, 3) explain, transnational processes create transnational spaces into which “people from various back-grounds enter … with a whole range of investments and from various positionalities.” It is also worth noting that transnational cultural processes may include—but do not depend on—direct people-to-people relationships and interaction. According to Glick Schiller (2007, 457), transnational social fields include individu-als who have never crossed borders themselves but who are linked through social relations to people in distant and perhaps disparate locations.

Whilst the notion of transnational space has been useful in its inclusion of non-migrants, it does not allow for the complexities of regional or even local ties and flows. For example, in his work on Brazilian music, Stanyek (2011) asserts that the roda de choro (informal gatherings of musicians who play Brazilian choro music) in the United States can be understood as “transregional,” with its own accent/style and musical and social attributes specific to its diasporic context. According to Stanyek, the term “transregional” is related to the symbolic games present in the roda de choro, such as the improvised musical conversations inherent to the genre. here, my aim is to utilize the term to map complex transregional geographic networks present in Maracatu New York, especially the cultural and musical fusions between Pernambuco and New Orle-ans. Additionally, the term allows me to understand the feelings of belonging triggered by these flows in Brazilians and Americans. In this sense, I problematize the concept of transnationalism, defining its limits by reflecting on the transregional geographies present in field observations.

My distinct focus is that in considering the propagation of Brazilian cultural manifestations in the United States, we must not view them solely as diasporic practices among Brazilians through the mobilization of national symbols. In this article, I argue that the


belonging incited in Brazilians and Americans by Maracatu New York stems from the different levels of interconnection present in the group. On the one hand, the experience of living in New York allows some participants to understand the group as a space for sharing common feelings. On the other hand, I argue that Maracatu New York draws together a common past between Brazil and the United States by citing regional contexts that privilege the African ancestry present in the formation of the regional cultural heritage of these two countries. As such, it triggers feelings of belonging for individuals of both nationalities. For the Brazilians, the group incites a feeling of participating in a practice that connects them with their country of origin and, at the same time, facilitates their entry into a new national context. From the perspective of some Americans, the symbolic values that emerge from these transregional flows incite feelings of belonging because they promote a sensation of being “here and there” at the same time—that is, in Brazil and the United States, or even Pernambuco and New Orleans. As Ribeiro argues, the flows of cultural practices from different places are processes that suggest a central concern: “the relationship between territories and different socio-cultural and political arrangements that guide the ways people represent belonging to socio-cultural, political, and economic units” (1997, 2). As a percussion group inspired by the maracatu-nation practices of Pernambuco—and those of Recife’s Estrela Brilhante in particular—but marked by the flows of people, sounds, and ideas from both Brazil and the United States, Maracatu New York offers a compelling analytic lens through which I discuss transnationalism and its more complex facets.

identity Borders Between Maracatu Nations and Percussion GroupsTo precisely define maracatu is a complex task, given the multiplic-ity of meanings given to the term in different locations. Assigning a single meaning to the term therefore implicitly homogenizes the practice and ignores its plural and processual character. Although maracatu groups exist in various locations in Brazil, I only discuss the maracatu-nação (or baque virado) practice, unique to Pernambuco (where there are currently more than 30 groups), as the percussion


groups I describe take inspiration from this style of maracatu by performing its rhythms.

The so-called maracatu-nação groups (maracatu “nations”) in Pernambuco are groups—at times secular—in the neighbouring cities of Recife and Olinda and the surrounding metropolitan area. Among some of the most notable characteristics of these “nations” are the affiliations with communities and religions rooted in African and indigenous practices, such as Umbanda, Candomblé, and Jurema. Lima and Guillen write that “a ‘nation’ has strong affiliations with a community of individuals of African descent, who identify with its religions and strongly relate to a sense of tradition” (2007, 26).

Currently, the maracatu-nação groups in Pernambuco possess strong local legitimacy, as this practice is one of the symbols of Per-nambucan identity, and is currently under the process of patrimoni-alization to gain official recognition as intangible cultural heritage.4 The valorization of these maracatu groups needs to be understood as a historical process that articulates different forces. Koslinski (2011) writes that this process includes discourses on the valorization of pop-ular culture by Modernist thinkers and researchers in the 1950s and 1960s,5 the support given to diverse Afro-Brazilian cultural groups by the Movimento Negro (Brazilian Black Power Movement), and the expansion of cultural movements that emphasize the valorization of Pernambucan symbols, in addition to the Multicultural Carnival of Recife in 2001, intended to further consolidate the practice and enhance its visibility throughout Brazil.

Each maracatu-nação has its own characteristics, but the groups have common elements, such as the coronation ceremony of the black kings.6 There are occasional events when the groups demonstrate only some of the elements of their performances, and their presentations do not necessarily take the form of a royal court. The court comprises a number of stock characters, including Afro-Brazilian deities and the royal court itself.7 There is also a group of percussionists, the batuque. In the musical group, instruments used include alfaia drums, two kinds of snare drum, gonguê bells, and ganzá shakers. Some maracatu groups also use abê and atabaque drums. The parade of the Competi-tion of Carnival Guilds during Carnival, held by the prefecture of the city of Recife, is considered the most important presentation of the year by maracatu performers.


Cultural and musical movements emerged in the 1990s to valor-ize elements of Pernambucan culture, including the maracatu nations. In 1989, Maracatu Nação Pernambuco, a percussion group with members from various social classes interested in the percussive and performative elements of maracatu-nação, was formed. Around the same time, Nação Zumbi and the Brazilian band Chico Science began touring Brazil, Europe, and the United States, helping to propagate the maracatu baque virado rhythm from Pernambuco. According to Lima and Guillen (2007), these musical movements were important for the process of accepting, introducing, and appropriating maracatu-nação for people of different religions, ethnicities, and social groups, espe-cially for people who lived in neighbourhoods outside the margins of Recife. In addition, these percussion groups were part of a broader historical moment in which traditional and popular practices and knowledge, previously seen as exotic, were recreated in the context of the culture industry and tourism (Carvalho 2004). Currently in Brazil there are more than 100 percussion groups influenced by maracatu.8 As explained above, these groups also exist in Canada, the United States, and, above all, Europe, where for the past five years there has been an annual maracatu event with presentations and baque virado workshops.9

Despite the inspiration from maracatu-nação traditions, there are differences between the cultural practice and the percussion groups. As a way of distinguishing themselves from the maracatu nations, these groups are popularly known as “percussive maracatus,” “styl-ized maracatus,” or simply “percussion groups.” Among the most notable differences from the maracatu nations are the absence of the coronation ceremony of the black kings in the vast majority of percus-sion groups, the lack of (ubiquitous) affiliation with Afro-Brazilian religions, and the lack of the sacralization of objects and the requests to the deities to protect the group. In addition, the percussion perform-ances do not necessarily follow the model of the court of the coro-nation of black kings, with a few exceptions, but they still occur on stages, streets, and other spaces. It is worth noting other distinctions, including the costumes used, the sound of the drums, the musical variations, the ways of singing and dancing, and the social class and ethnicity of the participants of these musical groups.


“Tu-Maraca Tu-maraca-Tu”: The Dynamics of Maracatu New York Some of the activities of Maracatu New York take place in rooms at their Brooklyn studio. Just past the building’s entrance on the first floor at the time of this study, bulletins hung on the wall advertising courses. In the middle of these notices, a small panel contained vari-ous photos of Maracatu New York. Upon ascending some fairly steep stairs, one arrives at the top floor, where Scott Kettner, the founder of Maracatu New York, keeps his recording studio, with alfaia drums against the walls and abês and ganzás resting on the drums. At the back of the room percussion instruments were placed on a small wooden platform suspended only a few centimetres from the ground, suggesting a kind of stage.

Attached to a wooden door near the main entrance was a large, multicoloured, sparkly jacket worn by the caboclo de lança, the cen-tral figure of rural maracatu in Pernambuco (see Note 1). On the op-posite wall was a leather cap, representing the northeastern Brazilian cowboy (sertanejo). Near it, drinking glasses and empty whiskey bot-tles, as well as a bottle of cachaça—Brazilian sugarcane liquor—from the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, sat on a window sill. A few steps away was a small room that effectively functioned as a recording studio. From within that enclosure, you could see through a glass pane the activities that take place in the main room. In this space are held recording sessions, professional meetings, rehearsals, and some maracatu classes, especially for the most advanced baque virado students; the classes for the general public are held in the room to the side. The activities of Maracatu New York, however, have not always occurred at this location. Initially they were held in Manhat-tan, when maracatu was still an unknown practice in New York City.

Generally speaking, Scott Kettner’s first introduction to maracatu was as a drum student of Billy hart at the New School University in New York City.10 Motivated to learn Brazilian rhythms different from those already popularized in the US, such as samba and bossa nova, Kettner took hart’s suggestion to learn a rhythm called mara-catu. Even though it was hardly known in the United States, it was possible to encounter it (albeit briefly) through a band that played at


Zinc Bar in Manhattan. The musicians, however, had only superficial knowledge of the rhythm.

In 1999, after graduating college and without fluency in Portu-guese, Scott Kettner traveled to Recife where, over a few weeks, he learned some baque virado in classes offered by Jorge Martins to children in the outlying neighbourhoods of Recife.11 In 2001, Kettner returned to Brazil to stay for a year. During that time, the American musician learned Portuguese and a variety of northeastern Brazil-ian rhythms. his deepest knowledge was of baque virado, which he learned through contact with the maracatu nation Estrela Brilhante from Recife and its members D. Marivalda, Mestre Walter, and Jorge Martins. In 2002, Kettner founded Maracatu New York.

At the time of my field research, Maracatu New York had a diverse student body and a range of functions. On Saturday afternoons there were paid classes on maracatu-nação rhythms taught in English by Kettner, as well as by Jeff Duneman and Aaron Shafer-haiss, Ameri-can musicians who regularly participate in the group’s activities. The first session, often held in Kettner’s studio, was for the few advanced students, and the following session was for the general public. In the large room, the students often formed a circle and played various rhythms under the direction of the teacher, and at times exchanged instruments. At the end of the class, some students headed to a bar near the building.

People seem to become interested in Maracatu New York for a number of reasons. According to what I was told by the group’s most senior members and based on what I observed, those interested in classes range in age and nationality, but the majority are Brazilian and American, between 20 and 50 years old. Generally, attendees were individuals who were interested in learning new musical rhythms, were motivated to acquire knowledge about Brazilian cultural prac-tices and music, or were in search of social interaction or professional opportunities as musicians. Some students who attended the courses had close relationships with Brazil, while others had little knowledge of the country. Yet others had an idealized understanding of Brazil based on stereotypes created within the United States. Some students had familiarity with maracatu-nação, but there were others, including Brazilians, with a complete lack of knowledge of the cultural practice. The group also included a small number of students who had attended


Kettner’s classes for 10 years, such as Eli, who was the first student, as well as other students who attended classes sporadically.

The courses offered by the group introduced a variety of topics, but in general students learned the history, the songs, and the rhythms of some maracatu nations from Pernambuco, including the rhythms: baque de martelo, baque de arrasto, baque de parada, and the baque de marcação of the maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante; baque de martelo from the maracatu Nação Porto Rico; baque de Imalé from maracatu Leão Coroado; baque de arrasto from maracatu Encanto da Alegria. There was even a baque de Brooklyn, a musical arrange-ment by Kettner. Among the instruments most used are alfaia and abê drums, caixa snare drum, ganzá shakers, and agogô and gongê bells.

Their performances, free or paid, occur in a range of spaces and occasions, including bars, museums, universities, parks, and the hal-loween parade of New York City, which some group members, both Brazilians and Americans familiar with Brazil, described as a kind of “Brazilian Carnaval.” In 2012, for the first time, Maracatu New York participated in the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans with the Mardi Gras Indians. I traveled with the group to New Orleans where I conducted fieldwork on their participation. Their performances centre on the music, with no coronation ceremony of the black kings or other performative elements from the maracatu-nação tradition of Pernambuco. In some performances, some members of the group, especially the Brazilians Michele Nascimento-Kettner and Liliana Araújo, dance, performing the characteristic body movements of maracatu-nação. The musicians’ clothes and instruments tend to vary from performance to performance. Generally, they wear the group’s official shirt, with some variations in other elements of their clothing. But there are also standardized performances in which the men wear white pants and the women wear white skirts, except for Liliana Araújo, the official singer of the group, who generally wears long, colourful dresses.

In Maracatu New York, musical and cultural exchanges take place with different Brazilian and American musicians, as I observed in the performances in New York and New Orleans. however, the most notable flows of people, ideas, and sounds are established with cul-tural practices from Pernambuco, like the maracatu-nação practices. Cultural exchanges occur by way of the contact with Brazil permitted


by the group’s Brazilian members, as well as by the travels of mem-bers of Maracatu New York to Brazil, and by the travel of members from Recife’s maracatu nation Estrela Brilhante to New York. In both 2005 and 2008, Kettner organized trips to Recife with members of the group. There they came in contact with diverse northeastern Brazil-ian cultural practices, largely with the rhythms of maracatu nations, which they learned in workshops with Jorge Martins.

These flows between Brazil and the United States are also visible in cultural programs. In 2003, the Brooklyn Arts Council partially funded Brazilian maracatu musician Jorge Martins’ travel to New York for the aforementioned workshop, and did so again in 2004, when he returned with members of Estrela Brilhante to perform. In 2012, while I was conducting field research, Jorge Martins again led maracatu workshops with the group in New York. In 2013, Estrela Brilhante will tour the US—performing with Maracatu New York—thanks to a grant obtained by Kettner and other musicians.

In addition to the trips to Brazil led by Kettner, some American members of the group have made personal efforts to travel to the country, motivated by a desire to gain greater familiarity with the Por-tuguese language and with Brazilian musical and cultural practices. In interviews, these American musicians emphasized the importance of these trips, particularly for their perception of the significance of the maracatu nation practice in Brazil, especially of the community ties that the maracatu nations establish with the places in which they reside, generally in the periphery of Recife. They also spoke of the importance of observing the relationship between the body and mu-sic, including, for example, the hand movements of maracatu nation musicians in Pernambuco when they play their instruments, especially the alfaia and abê drums.

Transregional Flows Between the Mississippi and Capibaribe RiversAccording to Scott Kettner, his objective in forming Maracatu New York was not to reproduce the style of the maracatu nations of Per-nambuco, nor was it to create a musical ensemble that rejects Pernam-bucan maracatu traditions. Rather, Kettner’s purpose was “artistic,” with the aim of entering the American music industry. Indeed, the


group has recorded two albums. Although it is not the focus of this article, it is worth highlighting how Kettner’s artistic interest in the group reveals that the flows across borders promote relationships be-tween cultures and markets, which is quite common in music, since the practices and the musical sounds are re-elaborated in new contexts with sound technologies and economic interests related to the record-ing industry, as is explored by Taylor (1997), Feld (1988), and Katz (2004). Additionally, this shows how transnational space, as proposed by Crang et al. (2003), refers to a wide network of circuits and flows, with a range of actors possessing different investments, interests, and experiences. Yet as McIlwaine (2011) explains through a study of transnational migratory processes among Latin Americans in the United Kingdom, these flows affect those who move within the space as much as those who do not. Put differently, the diffusion of Brazil-ian cultural practices in the United States (like maracatu) affects not only those directly involved with the recreation of the cultural practice abroad, but a variety of actors engaged with this transnational circuit.

As Kettner explained, his aim is not to create a percussion group that definitively severs symbolic ties with Brazil. Rather, the group maintains some Brazilian cultural and musical elements. Brazilian cultural elements are apparent through the participation of a Brazilian singer and the use of songs and musical instruments from maracatu-nação, especially alfaia drums. But there are also innovations. One of Maracatu New York’s greatest distinctions is its musical combi-nation of baque virado with music of New Orleans’ “second line” jazz tradition, best exemplified by Kettner’s baque de Brooklyn. According to Kettner, the group’s original objective was to unite the two rhythms, to combine the Mississippi with the Capibaribe. Ket-tner claimed that in conversations with Jorge Martins in Recife, they perceived that “musically there’s a lot in common between the music of northeastern Brazil and the southern United States. There are a lot of cultural connections there.” Although there are many musical and cultural similarities with and differences between New Orleans and Pernambuco,12 for the purpose of this article, the most significant are Maracatu New York’s rhythmic fusions and the related implications.

By mixing Brazilian and American rhythms, Kettner draws from specific regional contexts and deliberately selects similitudes from the two countries, particularly from Brazil’s northeastern region and


the US South. Maracatu New York perpetuates references to symbols of identity that they see as Brazilian in general, despite representing a tradition that, in particular, comes from the northeastern region of Brazil, and from the state of Pernambuco more specifically. They also include American cultural elements, particularly from the US South, like second line jazz.

In tracing musical parallels between New Orleans and Pernam-buco, Kettner refers to similar music patterns in rhythms from these two places, and also to the African origin of the slaves taken to the two regions in the period of their diaspora. Congo Square, the only square in New Orleans where the slaves were allowed to play their music on Sunday, also demonstrates the similarities of these cultural practices, as the royal courts of Pernambucan maracatu-nação during Brazilian slavery were allowed by the church and by the slaveholders to perform the coronation ceremony of the black kings.13

It is worth noting that by mixing musical and cultural elements of the maracatu nations of Pernambuco and second line from New Orleans, Maracatu New York produces something new with the aim of achieving legitimacy in a transnational context while also maintain-ing a symbolic relationship with Brazil. By invoking a common past between Brazil and the United States from specific regional contexts, the group draws on its African ancestry.

Drawing on the work of Sahlins (1990), who understands the resignification of the symbolic structures of individuals as a dialogue between distinct cultural contexts, I suggest that the idea of African ancestry evoked by the group in the transnational context is also resig-nified, since it does not refer to the context of the African diaspora in Brazil or the United States. What matters most for the group is what these common “roots” produce. By doing this, the group reaffirms its symbolic ties to Brazil—and specifically to Pernambuco—in ad-dition to attracting Brazilians and Americans who come from various regions living in New York. It also acts as an important tool for the propagation of an “unknown historical past” to many Americans. This intent became quite evident during the group’s trip to New Orleans, when members of Maracatu New York called my attention to the fact that many local residents of New Orleans lacked knowledge of the cultural and musical specificities of the city, especially regarding the significant heritage of the African diaspora that resides there.


In sum, the fusion of sounds in Maracatu New York suggests the proximity of seemingly distinct musical practices. Through a symbolic arsenal—music, dance, and explanations in shows and workshops about the similarities between Brazil and the United States due to a common African ancestry—Maracatu New York dramatizes a common past between Brazil and the United States by citing regional contexts that privilege the African ancestry present in the formation of these two countries. As Pollack (1989) explains, the multiple evocations of the past explain the plural dimension of memory. In this sense, by calling attention to common historical at-tributes, the group incites a collective memory that reaches its mem-bers and audience.

Maracatu New York: Negotiating BelongingOf course not every individual who attends Maracatu New York’s shows recognizes the symbolic references to African ancestry, es-pecially since the African-derived practice included by the group is specific to the US South. however, the alfaia drums, the sound of the baque-virado rhythm, the presence of Brazilian vocalist Liliana Araújo in her coloured dresses, the dances performed by some of the members, and the brief contextualization of the group given by Ket-tner in which he stresses the group’s intention to mix northeastern Brazilian rhythms with second line jazz from New Orleans all help Maracatu New York in some way incite identification with both na-tionalities.

It is important to note that the group incites belonging among Brazilians and Americans through the mixture of rhythms. In ask-ing group members about similarities between the two nations, they highlighted the mixture of second line with baque virado as the main musical connection between the two nations. Other than the sound itself, some participants also emphasized historical attributes, including the African diaspora. Regarding that, Linda Techell (a percussionist in the group) described Maracatu New York as a space that evokes a feeling of belonging by its fusion of musical rhythms. For her, it is a space for the connection with African ancestors, where songs, especially those of African origin, awaken a feeling of connectedness with her history. however, more complex geogra-


phies of belonging emerged during my fieldwork, linked to the im-mediacy of life in New York and to contemporary emotional ties to Brazil and its northeast.

In interviews with the five Brazilian members of Maracatu New York, they said that although learning the beats of maracatu-nação was an important motivation for students joining the group, other motivations were also at work.14 Brazilian music stood out as a sig-nificant element in their lives, justified as a means for maintaining symbolic ties with Brazil in the context of their displacement, while simultaneously acting as a tool for the construction of networks of friends and professional contacts.

Of the five Brazilian women who regularly participate in the activities of Maracatu New York, three of them felt a bond with this northeastern Brazilian music because of their places of origin. Although maracatu was not a significant cultural practice in their emotional memories, those who were interviewed mentioned having prior knowledge of maracatu from when they lived in Brazil. One of the central issues revealed in my interviews with the group’s Brazilian members was the fact that Maracatu New York was, on the one hand, a tool for connecting with their regional origins and, on the other, a mechanism for entering into the new local social and cultural context. According to Zenilda Tavares, a native of Recife who has lived in New York City since 2005:

I saw [something] on the internet about a show called Beauty in NYC and there was going to be maracatu. I got chills. This was last year [2011]. It took me a long time before I found the Northeast [of Brazil] here. So I arrived there [at the bar Nublu] before it opened. When I saw the maracatu it was the first time I’d felt [I was in] Brazil. It was the first time I felt my heart beat. I met Barri [an American girl] there who told me about the maracatu group, but then I waited to make a new group of friends. So I started and now I’m there.

Zenilda Tavares ceased all personal contact with her children and Brazilian relatives after arriving in the United States. Although she has no intention of returning to Brazil to live indefinitely, Zenilda claims she is homesick and misses her family. her attachment to


Brazil, or more specifically to Pernambuco, is demonstrated through the way she dresses, her activities, social media, and the places she goes in New York, generally bars frequented by Brazilians, with bands fronted by Brazilian singers, generally forró groups. When she is asked about her nationality, she says, “I am not Brazilian; I am Pernambucan.” For her, contact with Maracatu New York, with its dance and music, allowed her a more direct connection with her home state of Pernambuco whilst giving her a symbolic space to re-live and share general elements of Brazilian culture, like the language and news from Brazil. Additionally, contact with Maracatu New York functioned in Zenilda’s life like a rite of passage (Van Gennep 1978). In other words, it signified her entry into a new local context, allowing her to construct a network of friends, including Americans. As a tran-snational space, encompassing both Brazilians and non-Brazilians, Maracatu New York provided a space for her to negotiate integration from her own cultural standpoint, not necessarily as a Brazilian, but as a northeastern Brazilian.

Another Pernambucan, Michele Nascimento-Kettner, Scott Ket-tner’s wife, lives permanently in the United States, but spends her vacations in Pernambuco each year and claims that her longing (sau-dade) for Brazil is an issue she can deal with in her life, as “Brazil is inside of me.” however, she also seeks out spaces to connect with Brazil, especially with Pernambuco; she highlights the importance of Maracatu New York as a “bridge” that connects Brazil and the United States:

here, music is what connects me directly to Brazil. Obviously there’s the language, the food … What kind of music connects me? Well, it’s the rhythms from Pernambuco that connect me the quickest to Brazil, right? (Laughs) Like the maracatu, the frevo, the coco, the ciranda, the caboclinho, the forró. Maracatu is very Pernambucan . . . With music you begin to feel like you’re part of something. This is what’s cool about maracatu. An alfaia drum alone won’t make a party. The really cool thing about Maracatu New York, about making music, is being together … Would I consider quitting Maracatu New York one day? No way, girl. Why would I distance myself from something that takes me back to my country? You don’t


distance yourself. If you love your country, you’re going to want to stay connected through quality things, things that represent your culture. The strong point of Maracatu [New York] is this bridge: to bring people from there, to take people from here.

For Michele, music’s sensory elements evoke an experience of place, something noted also by the ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino (1999, 224), who says that “music involves signs of feeling and experience.” Thus, for Michele the sounds of Maracatu New York generate con-nections to Pernambuco, reminding her of home and permitting a shrinking of time and space that separate her from Pernambuco.

For Liliana Araújo, Maracatu New York’s official vocalist and a recognized musician in the Brazilian music scene in New York City (in large part due to her involvement with forró), the group is also experienced as a space for connecting with Brazil through its music. Liliana has lived in New York City since 2007 and has annual contact with her family in Brazil, but she also describes her strong longing (saudade) for her “little land,” her affectionate way of referring to Fortaleza, her native city in Brazil. When speaking about Maracatu New York, she also describes the group as a way to form a community in New York:

Music is everything in my life. Everything. So the significance of this maracatu for me is the significance of Brazil, the sig-nificance of community, of the contact with the music. Right? Even though they’re not my official Brazilian community, there’s a sense of community because they are a community, you know? And I’m part of it! It’s also the significance of Brazil, a connection with Brazil.

In informal conversations and interviews with the Brazilian wom-en who attend the classes and rehearsals most frequently, I observed that they also attributed a sense of “Brazilian community” to Mara-catu New York. It is worth noting that the participation of Michele Nascimento-Kettner in the group plays an important role in this sense of “Brazilian community.” Although she does not make the group’s most important decisions, her presence, as well as the fact that she is


the wife of Scott Kettner, creates an idea of a group with strong ties to Brazil, particularly with Pernambuco, her home state.

It is important to note that the phrase “Brazilian community” is utilized despite the small number of Brazilians in the group, and it also refers to some of the American participants of Maracatu New York, especially those with strong ties to Brazil. American members Scott Kettner, Jeff Duneman, and Aaron Shafer-haiss all lived for a period in Recife where they learned the baque virado rhythm and the Portuguese language; Duneman also conducted fieldwork for his master’s thesis in Recife. Barrianne Brown is also fluent in Portuguese and has family connections to Brazil.

Many Americans who attend the group also attribute feelings of affective belonging to Maracatu New York. I perceived that music occupies an important role in their lives, and Brazilian music is a genre of great interest for some of the members. There is variability in the form of their participation in the group, attendance in courses, and knowledge about maracatu-nação. The contact some of these stu-dents have with Brazilian music is not limited to the baque virado, as in the case of Linda Techell, Barrianne Brown, Vivan Warfield, Stan Rifken, and others, who participate in “samba schools” and perform Brazilian music in bars and events around New York City.

Kettner says, “Maracatu New York is a family, a community as well.” Although the concept of community appears in his discourse and that of other Americans I interviewed, the description of the group as a “family” was emphasized more strongly. Just as the Brazilians understand the group as a “Brazilian community” that also includes some American members, the American members do not restrict the familial character of the group to only themselves, and they include the active Brazilian members of the group in their understanding of the “family of Maracatu New York.”

Although the American members have lived in New York City for many years and had established networks of friends in the city, in my interviews with them, New York City was described as a city where people are focused on their professional endeavours, without much free time for contacts motivated by personal interest. Thus, in addition to an interest in baque virado, the motivation to join Maracatu New York for some Americans is to partake in the familial nature of the group. Another important aspect is the significant number of American


members who reside in Brooklyn, a fact that also contributes to their feelings of belonging, since this borough of New York has a meaning-ful social and cultural character for the group’s members who live there. Indeed, I was surprised upon hearing from the Americans I in-terviewed that they greatly identified Maracatu New York with Brook-lyn, having no strong ties to the other boroughs of the city, including the island of Manhattan, where the most important financial centres, the main tourist attractions, and one of the primary centres of the na-tion’s recording industry are located, along with expensive real estate. The identification with Brookyln is reinforced during the group’s presentations when Scott Kettner reaffirms that Maracatu New York is a percussion group from Brooklyn. In that sense, the group is situated as a space of identity, or rather, a space for sharing of common un-derstandings, including personal interactions, conversations between friends, and restorations of broken hearts, according to Barrianne Brown. In addition, it offers a moment to take a break, “dar um relax,” a Brazilian expression often used by Jeff Duneman. The musician refers particularly to the moment following the classes on Saturday afternoons, when some students meet at a bar near the school.

When the participants of Maracatu New York describe the group as a “Brazilian community” or a “family,” they are ascribing qualities of communion and cohesion to it, naturalizing the ethnic, regional, and cultural distinctions among its members. They construct a rep-resentation of their union and solidarity, affirming it as a cohesive group. From what I observed, Brazilian and American members of the group held regular social gatherings outside of the weekly rehearsals in Brooklyn, meaning that that some of the American members had strong friendships. During my research, I saw individuals of both nationalities attending parties organized by the group’s American members. I was also told of personal relationships among the Brazil-ian women in the group.

Understanding that feelings of identity are neither fixed nor ho-mogeneous (Marcus 1991; Carneiro da Cunha 1986), we can observe how participants only ascribe qualities of “Brazilian community” and “family” in specific contexts. In sum, when the group’s Brazilian members describe it as a “Brazilian community,” they seek to empha-size their situation as Brazilians living in New York City. This sense of “community” is especially relevant when we consider that “family”


for them remains in Brazil. Instead, Maracatu New York becomes part of a broad network of individuals living in New York who are united by symbolic ties due to a common context. That is, the com-mon sense of “community” attributed by the Brazilians refers to the common feeling of living in “diaspora.” The term “community” takes on the political, social, and cultural connotations of immigration, and contributes to feelings of belonging—to a group of friends and the idea of a nation—albeit through idealized, mythical, and resignified representations of Brazil.

It is important to note that through the concepts of “community” and “family” Maracatu New York becomes a place of refuge for the Brazilian and American members; as Bachelard says, “every truly inhabited space brings the essence of the notion of home” (2008, 25). however, although the Brazilians and Americans maintain friend-ships in their daily lives, it is only in rehearsals, shows, and gather-ings at a bar after Saturday classes and periodic house parties that Maracatu New York effectively fulfills its role as a “Brazilian com-munity” or a “family.” From the perspective of the Brazilians, these meetings emphasize their feelings related to the diaspora through the images and sounds from their home country. For the Americans, these ritual moments affirmed social networks grounded in shared social realities and similar cultures. Additionally, in public presenta-tions Maracatu New York gains legitimacy as a percussion group based on a Brazilian cultural practice but made up of predominantly American musicians.

In sum, for Brazilians, participating in a group with Americans allows them to attend parties, understand American social norms and etiquette, and other elements that allow them to incorporate them-selves into their new national and cultural context. For the Americans, who are also situated in a transitory context—as they participate in a group that belongs to two nationalities at once—the participation of Brazilians in the group is fundamental, as it offers legitimacy for the ensemble.

ConclusionThe flows of people, ideas, and sounds between Brazil and the United States suggest that Maracatu New York represents a transnational


space. however, the most prevalent flows in the group are trans-regional, specifically between the state of Pernambuco in Brazil’s northeast region and New Orleans in the US South. By mixing rhythms like the baque virado of Pernambuco’s maracatu nations with second line, performed during the Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans, Maracatu New York produces something new with sym-bolic values that emerge from this fusion, thereby inciting feelings of belonging among the group’s members. From the combination of these rhythms, the group dramatizes the common past between Pernambuco and New Orleans, putting into play African ancestry, an idea resignified by transregional flows. Even though it is idealized, this idea promotes a feeling of proximity in Brazilians and Americans who live in New York.

In sum, Maracatu New York is more than merely a space for shar-ing feelings associated with the diaspora for its Brazilian members or an affective space for its American members. Rather, it is primarily a space that generates feelings of belonging as a result of flows. For the Brazilians, the presence of Americans in the group is crucial, as this allows them to feel as if they are actively participating in their new cultural and national context. The flows also activate feelings of identification among the Americans, and it is important for them to have Brazilian members in the group, as this reaffirms the group’s symbolic relationship with Brazil, and, at the same time, legitimizes it in the United States as a percussion group based on a Brazilian cultural practice. Thus Maracatu New York incites different feelings of belonging by articulating distinct levels of local, regional, and transnational interconnection.

AcknowledgementsThis research was conducted from February through July 2012 through a “sandwich” grant at New York University, financed with a research fellowship from the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). Thank you so much to Michael Silvers for reading and translating this article. I am also grateful to Lea Carvalho Rodrigues for her guidance in my doctoral “sandwich” research proposal. Thanks to Anna Beatriz Zanine Koslinski for sharing her reflections on the dynamic of the maracatu nations, and


Natalia Coimbra de Sá for her assistance with the bibliography on the Brazilian diaspora in the United States. I am also thankful for the valuable suggestions given to me by the anonymous reviewers and editors of this article.

Notes1 The coronation of black kings occurred as a cultural practice on the African

continent before the diaspora. In the period of slavery, Africans continued practicing the coronations in Brazil, but with new significance (Souza 2002). The forms of maracatu in Ceará and maracatu-nação in Pernambuco recall that particular celebration. Rural maracatu performances include a royal court, with kings, queens, and ladies of the palace. however, this style of maracatu does not entirely resemble maracatu-nação. In addition to the musical differences, its central theme is the allusion to the quotidian reality of the sugarcane workers of Pernambuco, portrayed through the caboclo de lança, identifiable by his sequined, shiny costume; its choreographies are characterized by propelled leaps; and the music is played by a brass band directed by the “maracatu master.”

2 The research for my master’s thesis, which I conducted between 2006 and 2008, led to the publication of my book Maracatus no Ceará: Sentidos e Significados (Fortaleza: Edições UFC, 2011).

3 Crang et al. (2003) suggest a number of authors who work on transnational-ism in a variety of contexts. See Brah (1996) on diasporic social formations and senses of identity, Tomlinson (1999) on cultural globalization, Mitchell (1997) on hybridization, and Scheffer (1995) on experiences and political economics of migrations.

4 The patrimonialization process of Pernambuco’s maracatu nations was requested by the state government, but the ultimate aim is to register this cultural practice as national intangible heritage.

5 Primary examples include Mário de Andrade (1982), American anthro-pologist Katarina Real (1966), and conductor Guerra Peixe, whose work Maracatus no Recife (1980) resulted in the categorization of Pernambuco’s maracatus into baque virado and baque solto.

6 Some percussion groups in Brazil perform the coronation ceremony of black kings, such as the groups Rio Maracatu, maracatu Nação Pernam-buco, and Maracatudo Nação Camaleão.

7 Not all maracatu nations include Afro-Brazilian deities (orixás) in their per-formances, as it is not an obligatory criterion in the judging of the Carnival Competition.

8 For more on percussion groups in Brazil, see <www.maracatu.org.br>.


9 In Europe there are maracatu groups in Germany, France, Italy, England, Ireland, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland. In 2012 a gathering of maracatu groups was held in Cologne, Germany. It was organized by Maracatu Colô-nia and brought together more than 300 people from different maracatu groups around the world.

10 Billy hart is a well-known jazz drummer who has played with Miles Davis, Tom Jobim, Stan Getz, and herbie hancock, among others.

11 A percussionist, Martins has participated in maracatu nation Estrela Bril-hante from Recife, and is currently developing activities for children from the periphery of Recife through his project Corpos Percussivos.

12 Dunn (2008) wrote an important comparison of the Brazilian city of Salva-dor with New Orleans, focusing on the differences and similarities between the two cities.

13 Souza (2002) writes that the coronation ceremonies of black kings have occurred in different parts of the world in the African diaspora between the 16th and 18th centuries. See Gilroy (2001) on the African diaspora in the western hemisphere.

14 Over the course of my field research, six Brazilians participated regularly in the group. They ranged in age from 30 to 40 years old; two were from Pernambuco, one was from Ceará, one was from São Paulo, and two were from Rio de Janeiro. Their professions and time spent in NYC also varied. Only one had no fixed address in the city; at the time she was taking an English course and intending to return to Rio de Janeiro in a few months. Additional Brazilians have been contracted by Kettner to participate in specific shows and for the recording of his second album, for which I was able to observe an important part of the production process. My inclusion of real names in this article was authorized by those I interviewed and cite here.

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BRAZiLiAN DAY FEsTiVAL AND THE CLEANsiNG OF 46TH sTREET: REPREsENTiNG BRAZiLiAN iDENTiTiEs iN NEW YORK CiTY

NATALiA COiMBRA DE sáDepartment of human Sciences, Universidade do Estado da Bahia

Abstract: This article addresses the historical transformations that have taken place in the Brazilian Day Festival—held annually in Manhattan, New York—over the past decades. Since the mid-1980s, when it was first promoted, this event has accompanied the changes of the city’s Brazilian immigrant com-munity. Currently it is a large-scale event that represents a civic celebration, a block party, an ethnic street fair, and/or a musical concert. It is also a festival that encompasses other cultural activities during the same weekend, such as the Cleansing of 46th Street. The fieldwork for this study was carried out between 2009 and 2010, and the data were collected through historical and ethnographic research, including 2,560 different newspaper sections (articles, editorials, in-terviews, advertising, etc.), 18 in-depth interviews, and participant observation at Brazilian cultural centres, events, clubs, bars, and restaurants. In this article, I argue that mega-events are key elements for constructing powerful images and symbols associated with national identities.Resumo: O presente artigo registra as transformações históricas pelas quais vem passando a festa do Brazilian Day, realizada anualmente em Manhattan, Nova York. Este evento tem se transformado desde a década de 1980, quando surgiu, à medida que acompanha as mudanças na comunidade brasileira imi-grante residente na cidade. Trata-se de um evento de grande porte que apresenta elementos de festa comunitária, celebração cívica, feira de rua étnica, espetá-


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culo musical e engloba ainda outras manifestações culturais que acontecem de forma simultânea no mesmo fim de semana, como é o caso da Lavagem da Rua 46. A pesquisa de campo para este estudo foi realizada entre 2009-2010 e os dados foram coletados através de levantamento histórico e etnográfico, incluindo 2560 seções de jornais (artigos, editoriais, entrevistas, propagandas etc.), dezoito entrevistas em profundidade e observação participante em centros culturais, eventos, clubes, bares e restaurantes brasileiros. Neste artigo, discuto que os megaeventos são elementos-chave para a construção de poderosas ima-gens e símbolos associados às identidades nacionais.

introduction1

The Brazilian Day Festival in New York is the longest running Brazilian event outside of Brazil—as much in terms of individual participation as of spatial and media presence—and is the pioneer of the “Brazilian Day” brand, which has been replicated in other major cities worldwide. The festivities began in 1985 on New York City’s West 46th Street, in an area subsequently known as “Little Brazil,” a central geographical symbol of the Brazilian presence in Manhattan. It was originally a civic and community celebration designed to pay tribute to Brazilian Independence Day but, since its foundation, it has been recognized as an “ethnic event” in the official cultural program of the city, organized by Brazilians who resettled in New York.2 Since its inception the event has gone through many different phases: for example, being co-opted by the Brazilian TV network Globo and in 2008 introducing the Cleansing of 46th Street, which draws inspira-tion from the Cleansing of Bonfim Church in Salvador, Bahia, and serves as a community-based counterpoint to the main event.3

While completing my doctoral research, I became increasingly cognizant of the scarcity of published work documenting Brazilian festivities that occur outside of Brazil. Margolis (1994, 293) notes the existence of the Brazilian Day Festival as the main ethnic Brazilian event in New York City during the 1990s. And Meihy (2004, 115) points out that the event’s has been important for the community since its inception, primarily because it is conducted in Midtown Manhat-tan, an area considered wealthy and of great commercial and touristic visibility in the city. Beserra (2005a, 2005b) and Ribeiro (1999) are

Natalia Coimbra de Sá / Representing Brazilian Identities in New York City 111

among the few authors who have analyzed the relationship between US-bound Brazilian immigration and popular festivities in Los An-geles and San Francisco, respectively, successfully demonstrating the value of such research on festivities and Brazilian identities in interna-tional contexts. More broadly, studies regarding other Latin American festivities have demonstrated successfully the value of such events in understanding diasporic phenomena—such as the celebration of El Cinco de Mayo in the US, especially in California (hayes-Bautista 2012)—and the use of transnational commemorations in the creation of local immigrant identities.

This article seeks to address the gap in research by presenting a detailed analysis of the historical transformations that have taken place in the Brazilian Day Festival in New York over the last few decades. By doing so, I unpack the negotiations and alliances behind these transnational commemorations between large media (repre-sented by the Globo network and Globo Internacional), community media (represented by The Brasilians and other local agents, such as

Figure 1. Cleansing of 46th Street: Cortejo pelas ruas de Manhattan, 2009. Source: Natalia Coimbra de Sá.


the online VejaTV channel), and the Brazilian community, paying attention to how the organizers of the celebration act as “translators” (Bhabha 1998) of Brazilian culture to wider audiences. I also discuss the significance of the Cleansing of 46th Street as a counter-event. I show how the “Cleansing” gets re-signified in New York City as a transnational cultural practice, removing its religious background while retaining some important performative elements to convey a positive multicultural message to both Brazilians and non-Brazilians. Brazilian identities are here understood in the terms elaborated by Sovik (2003, 15), as “a space that is embraced, a weaving together of position and context, and not an essence or substance to be ana-lyzed.” Moreover, these celebrations must be described and under-stood within their social, cultural, and economic contexts, comprising transformative processes and particular motivations (Amaral 1998).

The observations reported here are the result of fieldwork con-ducted in New York City (NYC) during 2009 and 2010. Throughout this period, I conducted interviews with the organizers of both the Brazilian Day Festival and the Cleansing of 46th Street (Lavagem da Rua 46). I also analyzed the information published in the monthly Brazilian community newspaper in New York City, The Brasilians, between January 1985 and December 2009.4 This 25-year timeframe coincides with the first two and a half decades of the event’s annual September realization. The pages of this publication document the history of the festival, including information on all of its transforma-tions. Indeed, this is the oldest Brazilian newspaper in circulation outside of Brazil (Vieira 2008; Borges, Mendes, and Lima 2009), and the newspaper’s staff has participated in the organization of Brazil-ian Day ever since its inauguration. It bears mentioning, however, that this newspaper does not represent a single perspective. Rather, it comprises the opinions and views of many of the collaborators, columnists, photographers, sponsors, and readers who interacted with and in the newspaper’s pages. Part of my fieldwork also included in-terviews with Brazilian immigrants and, in particular, those involved in the field of cultural promotion.5

New York’s Brazilian Day is unique each year. Yet, as revealed in my diachronic analysis of the newspaper The Brasilians during the event’s first 25 years, the event has gone through important changes that I organize into four historical moments. I also show how the


Brazilian community has contested the development of the com-memoration into a large-scale event. The Lavagem da Rua 46 has therefore been created as a counter-event, drawing inspiration from the Cleansing of Bonfim Church in Salvador, Bahia. however, as the section on the historical origins of this religious and profane event from Bahia shows, the various elements of the Lavagem needed to be mediated and translated for a new context so it could be shared with members of New York City’s Brazilian immigrant community and with wider audiences.

The First Years: Celebrating the Democracy (1985–86) Jota Alves was the main force behind Brazilian Day. The creator and then president of The Brasilians, he had already been involved in the organization of popular and successful Brazilian Carnival festivities in Manhattan for many years. In 1985, with the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil, Alves decided to bring the community together to commemorate this landmark with a public event, which would take place on Brazilian Independence Day (7 September) in a central loca-tion of the city: West 46th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Since the 1960s, this address had been a hub for various Brazilian shops and offices, as well as for the headquarters of numerous public and private Brazilian institutions (Meihy 2004).

This first celebration, a “block party” held in 1985 in commemo-ration of 7 September, was considered the first “Brazilian Independ-ence Day Street Festival” in NYC. In February 1986, Jota Alves organized his last Brazilian Carnival in the city, Baile da Democracia (Democracy Dance). In July of the same year, the calls for the Brazil-ian Day Festival, published in The Brasilians, stated that the festivi-ties would be dedicated to the “centennial celebration of the Statue of Liberty.” Published in the same edition was a proclamation from Ed Koch, mayor of New York City, declaring that 7 September was officially “Brazilian Day.” In 1986, the mayor made an appearance at the event and took the stage to thank Brazilians for the celebra-tion: “Thank you, Brazil, for such a beautiful celebration, in my city” (The Brasilians September 1986). The newspaper covered the party, underscoring the community’s involvement, publishing many photos, and calling attention to the participation of local musicians and bands.


At this time, the celebration was characterized primarily as a tribute to Independence Day. The discourses and practices celebrated were those that linked the festivities to the return of democracy, to patriotism, and to a sentiment of community integration, an oppor-tunity to bring friends together and experience a nostalgic sense of “Brazilianness.” The primary motivation of the party was to create a space for the community to celebrate publicly. Of particular value were spontaneity, improvisation, and the meeting of the Brazilian residents of the city, as well as foods, drinks, popular dances, and crafts, among other things that were regarded as typical aspects of Brazilian culture.

Ethnic street Fair: The Transition Years (1987–91)In 1987, Brazilian Day’s new president, João de Matos, began to organize the event together with the staff of The Brasilians, which was run by Edilberto Mendes, editor of the newspaper and general coordinator of the Brazilian Day Festival. This change was moti-vated by Jota Alves’ return to Brazil, after which he sold the news-paper and entrusted Matos, an established NYC-based Brazilian en-trepreneur, with organizing the annual street party. The newspaper published the official attendance numbers released by the New York police department, indicating an estimated 100,000 attendees in 1987 and 250,000 in 1988. During these years, the celebration dem-onstrated the same characteristics as its first two years: it continued without the participation of big name artists or media personalities. however, as noted in The Brasilians, there was a stage on which lo-cal musicians played for the Brazilian expatriates who lived in the city and in nearby areas.

Some important factors contributed to the significant increase in the number of participants. The presence of the mayor in 1986 received widespread community press coverage and was recalled repeatedly in the pages of The Brasilians throughout the year. This worked as an important factor in legitimizing the celebration. Fur-thermore, the event’s date changed; rather than always occurring on 7 September, the celebration was transferred to the weekend that precedes Labor Day in the US, which continues to be the case today. The chief Brazilian Day activities always occur on the Sunday of


the holiday weekend, which marks the end of summer in the United States. This change was an important strategic decision for the event’s growth, as it gave Brazilian expatriates living in other parts of the country (even those in relatively distant places) the chance to come to New York City and participate in the party. At the same time, NYC receives a dense flow of tourists on this holiday weekend. The years 1987 and 1988 also mark the first spatial expansion of the celebration, when it extended its presence to Madison Avenue, thus becoming one of the largest street festivals in the city.

At this transitional moment, while Brazilian Day was already un-der the direction of João de Matos and the staff of The Brasilians, its structure, organization, and objectives reflected a small- to medium-sized community party, just as it had originally been conceived. All of the event’s promotion and advertising were guided by a focus on the maintenance and value of community spirit. Indeed, a large part of its goal was to encourage the recognition of the city’s Brazilian presence—as is revealed in an analysis of the discourse in local me-dia—and the event acted as a symbol of the search for a collective Brazilian social and political agency. The street party, with its ven-dors’ stands and, later, artistic presentations, aimed to call attention to the immigrants, local artists, community leaders, and Brazilian commercial establishments.

During this period, a problem occurred vis-à-vis city deadlines and permits, and the event had to be cancelled. The situation was later resolved and The Brasilians spearheaded a campaign, together with the city’s Brazilian community, to officially promote West 46th Street as the Brazilian street in Manhattan, a locale where anyone could find a piece of Brazil in New York City. An intensive effort was made during the following years to mobilize the community around this objective. The cover of the newspaper’s April 1990 edition stated: “Our street, our people, our activities. In New York, West 46th Street is the place to find Brazilians and all things Brazil” (The Brasilians April 1990).6

The Renewal: Bringing Big Name stars (1992–2002) In its May 1992 edition, The Brasilians announced that the Inde-pendence celebration would return that year bigger and better than


ever, and João de Matos explained why there was indeed cause for excitement. For the first time, the celebration would bring in people from outside the local Brazilian community. Whilst locally based and itinerant Brazilian artists had always been well repre-sented at the celebration, this marked the first year the stage would welcome a big name Brazilian act: Lulu Santos, a major Brazilian pop star.

From that moment on, the celebration grew significantly. Not only did the number of participants and sponsors increase, but also it drew much more attention from Brazilians and the media. In 1993, the event’s main attraction was Elba Ramalho. In attendance were other stars, such as actors Maitê Proença and Sonia Braga, as well as singer Gal Costa. Many of the invited performers were popular stars from Bahia, and particularly those who were integral to Bahia’s Car-nival. This predilection for Bahian artists was not a coincidence, as was stressed in interviews with João de Matos and Edilberto Mendes. The organizers of the event explained that, according to the attendee feedback they received annually, the Bahian attractions, as well as the country music (música sertaneja) singers, were crowd favourites. These artists were very popular attractions for similar events held in Brazil, especially Carnival and summer festivals.

Between 1992 and 2002, the period in which João de Matos and The Brasilians organized Brazilian Day, the party attained great popu-larity in Brazilian communities outside New York City, particularly those along the East Coast. During this period the festivities attracted hundreds of thousands of participants to NYC, who enthusiastically dressed in the symbolically Brazilian colors of green and yellow. The event, which Brazilian expatriates began to view as a tradition, had by this time acquired a significant number of sponsors—both Brazilian and American companies—and had also become a regular performance venue for well-known Brazilian stars, with an increas-ing celebrity presence. Additionally, caravans came from all over the United States for the event.

During this 10-year period, although the event had yet to receive attention from large Brazilian media outlets such as the Globo net-work, the Brazilian Day Festival grew to be much more than a make-shift immigrant community street fair. It had become a celebration with a strong presence and an impressive logistical and structural


organization. It was indeed these aspects that captured the attention of Globo, the television network that had gone international in 1999 (Globo Internacional), prompting the network to initiate talks with the event’s local organizers.

The internationalization Years: Globo’s involvement (2003–present) In 2003 Globo Internacional began to participate in the organization of the event. That year’s shows included well-known singers Daniel, David Moraes, and Ivete Sangalo. For 2004 it was the bands Skank and Timbalada, and in 2005 the musical attractions were Chitãozinho & Xororó and Araketu. The following year marked the first broadcast of the event, for which Banda Calypso, Babado Novo, Leonardo, and Sandy and Júnior performed. With a continued tendency to include Bahian artists, the 2007 event included Asa de Águia, Jota Quest, and Bruno and Marrone. Jorge Benjor, Lulu Santos, and Banda Eva performed in 2008. And finally, in 2009, Brazilian Day featured Vic-tor and Leo, Elba Ramalho, Marcelo D2, Arlindo Cruz, and Alcione, with a guest appearance by Carlinhos Brown.

That these are currently among Brazil’s most popular performers demonstrates the interest of the Globo network in defining lineups for the musical show that appeal to broad audiences. Indeed, the focus is placed on elements of spectacle rather than on local artists (as was the case during the event’s initial years) who primarily appeal to the NYC-based Brazilians. Furthermore, the local promoters, associated with The Brasilians, contend that these are the artists whom immi-grants want to see, and, given that most expatriates cannot afford to go to Brazil annually for Carnival or other similar events, the Bra-zilian Day Festival may be their only chance to see these big name Brazilian stars.

It is important to note that until 2002, the name “Brazilian Day,” so well recognized by the public today, did not appear as the event’s official title. Indeed, this expression was primarily used by the event’s organizers in English-language editions of The Brasilians. In the Por-tuguese-language editions, the name of the celebration was commonly written as Dia do Brasil (Day of Brazil) or Festa da Independência (Independence Day Festival). Moreover, the event’s press coverage


appeared less interested in the number of attendees each year than with the attention the event garnered in the city’s streets and the im-pact the event was having in the community.

João de Matos made clear that the partnership he formed with the Globo network was decidedly pragmatic: “I gave Globo the rights to broadcast worldwide. In exchange, they send me performers. In other words, our partnership is nothing more [than] that. The event is mine and Globo is my partner” (interview, 1 December 2009). Pres-ently, Globo participates not only in NYC’s Brazilian Day, but also in “Brazilian Days” held in many other places around the world, and it holds the broadcast rights both in Brazil and worldwide.7 This cover-age includes reports and headlines about the event in news sources such as the Jornal Nacional (National News), Jornal Hoje (Today’s News), and Fantástico. But special segments are also produced for popular entertainment programs such as Caldeirão do Huck (huck’s Melting Pot), Video Show, and Altas Horas (Late Night). The net-work’s presenters are often invited to host the festivities, including, most recently, André Marques, Luciano huck, Serginho Groisman, Xuxa, and Regina Casé. Furthermore, some of Globo Internacional’s programs, such as Planeta Brasil (Planet Brazil), produce specials on Brazilian Day, in which they focus on Brazilian communities in the United States.

While expatriates commemorate Brazilian independence in any number of ways, The Brasilians has always publicized Brazilian Day in New York City as the grandest of these events, as is clear in the publication’s pages since the late 1980s. however, since the Globo network’s involvement in the promotion of the party starting in 2003 and, later, when it began broadcasting the event in 2006, the name “Brazilian Day” has become internationally recognized. The way in which the television network publicizes the event gives the larger au-dience the impression that all of the world’s “Brazilian Days” are part of the same grand project. This direction is defined by the network’s marketing, which, using Globo Internacional’s advertising machine, publicizes the events taking place around the world as though they were in fact associated with each other. Indeed, this development is shown in the abundance of news, reports, press releases, TV com-mercials, interviews, and special shows promoting any given overseas Brazilian Day.


In recent years, the Globo network began to expand its internation-alization model not only through its international channel but also in part by creating similar Brazilian Day-like events in other cities around the world, with an eye toward locations in which large numbers of Brazilian immigrants reside. This decision has successfully expanded the network’s foreign markets. By associating its brand with popular street festivals—cultural events that are considered key elements of Brazilianness (Amaral 1998)—Globo aims to connect with Brazilian immigrants around the world in order to promote its cable television channel. After all, providing information about Brazil to Brazilians as well as to foreigners interested in Brazil (by way of a paid subscription TV channel) is an efficient means of opening new consumer markets for Brazilian culture in countries with a Globo presence.

The strategic and commercial vision for the event was not a Globo innovation. Still, João de Matos worries about the expansion of the “Brazilian Day model” that the network is employing. Indeed, his preoccupations are fomented by the commercial aspects of a cel-ebration that has, for over two decades, exclusively represented New York City’s Brazilian community, in a one-of-a-kind event to both the US and the world. Matos believes that from the moment the Globo network began to work with businessmen and cultural producers in other cities, any problems that develop in relation to these other events could have positive or negative repercussions for the pioneering New York City event, which was initially created through the innovative entrepreneurial efforts developed by his team together with the NYC-based Brazilian community.

What began as an entirely free event is now cordoned off into reserved areas for paying audience members. By buying and wearing special shirts, people receive access to the boxed seats (camarotes) and the VIP section; space is also reserved for those who participate in the caravans. This model of commercialization is no doubt observ-able in public street parties in Brazil, particularly during Carnival and Carnival-like festivities. In addition, the renting of space and the obtaining of permits for vendors of food, drink, and crafts are negoti-ated by a festival productions company that specializes in street fairs and is not reserved solely for Brazilian merchants and products, but are instead open for people and merchandize of any national origin.

With Globo’s participation, the promotion and publicity of the event has been decentralized—no longer being handled exclusively


by members of the Brazilian immigrant community—and the event’s direction follows the network’s model for the representation of Brazil-ian culture during the festival. The musical attractions that make up the show are now the primary focus of Brazilian Day’s publicity, and are widely recognized around the world, not just within the expatri-ate community. The show’s duration increases in accordance with the duration of the festival, and although the event still has its street fair, merchants now must compete with the numerous performances that take place all day on the main stage.

Currently, two distinct moments of the celebration occur simul-taneously in adjacent spaces. On one side is the “ethnic” aspect, characterized by the street fair—with its usual merchant stands—that continues to take place on 46th Street (Little Brazil), and which was predominant during the event’s initial years. On the other side is the “media” aspect, which has gradually gained a stronger presence in recent years, and which presently is characterized by the musical show that takes place on the enormous stage erected on 43rd Street and that is broadcast on television by the Globo network.

In addition to the Globo network’s broadcast, US networks have begun covering Brazilian Day as part of their local programming, including it among their cultural news stories.8 With this rise in in-terest on the part of North American media outlets, chiefly among those serving a Latino audience—which also represents a signifi-cant presence at the celebration—the event was (re)discovered from the “ethnic” viewpoint, given its association with a broader cultural context of the city, that of multiculturalism. Brazilian Day is no longer seen from the viewpoint of the media and potential sponsors as a solely Brazilian celebration, but rather as a multi-ethnic show, and thus creating new commercialization and contextualization per-spectives, from the social and cultural to the economic and politi-cal. The focus for both the media and business owners is the Latino population that is targeted in the United States as a burgeoning con-sumer market (Dávila 2001).

ContestationsThere are also other preoccupations that extend beyond these eco-nomic or commercial concerns. For Edilberto Mendes, as well as


for other members of the local organizing staff, Brazilian Day has one essential purpose: to be a community party. Besides acting as a commercial model, the event has the symbolic function of calling attention—by way of the festivities, arts, and shows—to the issue of immigration and the representations of Brazilian cultural identities outside of Brazil.

While these goals are no doubt complementary, they do not always work harmoniously. That is, despite the critiques levelled against it, no one seemed indifferent to the event. Indeed, the contra-dictory discourses of my interviewees regarding Brazilian Day only reinforce the significance of the festival. After analyzing the opinions collected through interviews, and also the material published in The Brasilians, I perceived remarkable changes in the sentiments im-migrants expressed regarding Brazilian Day since it became a mega event. Below I present some of the comments given to me during interviews conducted in New York City between November 2009 and March 2010. These comments encapsulate the issues concerning Brazilian identity in connection to the festival, its history, and the way it is currently practiced:

The festival started small. It was growing gradually. Nowa-days it’s business. It’s not a party. It’s an event. People come from all of the United States. It’s on Globo. (h.S., musician)

It’s much bigger now with Globo [involved]. It was big. But it’s much bigger now. I remember when it started it was only one street. They had some balloons and some food. That was it. Just like all the other [street parties]. And I think that was cool. They had no partnership, not this whole thing. Nowa-days, they have these shows and they close from 6th Avenue up to 57th Street. Between 5th Avenue and Broadway. I mean, it’s a big deal. huge. But is it good? Well, I don’t know if this is good. I don’t know if it’s good for Brazil’s image. (S.S., designer)

I have never been to Brazilian Day. I think that is totally fo-cused on Globo. I think that it’s a TV Globo event, and not a Brazilian event. (T.M., journalist)


I’m aware of Brazilian Day, and it’s important it exists because it promotes Brazil somehow. And it is, if I am not mistaken, the greatest street festival in NYC. But I get worried when you establish [cultural] patterns for the country and bring these standards here as if they were the only representation of the country. Our country is very diverse. (D.T., journalist)

Brazilian Day used to be [held] only on 46th Street, between 5th and 6th [Avenues]. That was it. Few people attended, you know? Then it started expanding, it became bigger. Nowadays you have about one and a half million people [on the streets]. I don’t think we have any other event in New York City like that. I believe its importance is huge. It brings the community together. It raises our self-esteem. It promotes Brazil inter-nationally. It makes Brazil become part of the world culture. (M.E., actress and singer)

I argue that the Globo network’s involvement in the event may be the main reason behind such conflicting opinions. Johnson (2006) also observed strong contradictory opinions about Globo Internacional among Brazilian immigrants living in Miami and Toronto, further noting that the same is true for Brazil: people love to hate Globo. There is a cultural reason for this: despite its position as the main television channel in the country, Globo has also been involved with polemical historical and political issues, such as being linked to the military dictatorship (1964–85), among other more recent episodes.

introducing New Cultural Elements: From Bahia to New YorkIn 2008, concerned with representing Brazilian identities in a more diverse way than that of the festival and interested in introducing new cultural aspects, Silvana Magda, Brazilian Day coordinator, suggested to local Brazilian Day organizers the idea of the Cleansing of 46th Street (Lavagem da Rua 46). Entrepreneur João de Matos, Brazilian Day executive director, together with the newspaper The Brasilians, supported the idea, and thus the event “became part of the official calendar of the largest Brazilian party outside of Brazil. The purpose


of the Cleansing is to create a unique cultural celebration experience in the Big Apple” (Lavagem da Rua 46 2008).

This event comprises a parade, followed by smaller shows, all occurring the day preceding the main Globo-partnered event. This activity has a distinct backstory and aims to reclaim the spirit of the celebration’s initial years. Silvana Magda explained in an interview (20 November 2009) that when she first conceived of the Cleansing, she had in mind something that would serve as a community-based counterpoint to the main event. The Cleansing of 46th Street, in addi-tion to other cultural activities promoted by local cultural artists and producers (film showings, photography and art exhibits, lectures and debates, among other things) occurring during the week prior to the Brazilian Day Festival, operates as an important strategy by which the local Brazilian Day in New York organizers maintain their active and dynamic roles in supporting Brazilian culture in New York City.

The Cleansing of 46th Street is inspired by and refers explicitly to the ritual cleansing of the Bonfim Church (Lavagem do Bonfim), which is held annually in Salvador, Bahia, and, characterized by its blending of profane and sacred Catholic and Candomblé elements, is one of the most traditional and popular religious events in Brazil.9 This cleansing was subsequently re-signified in New York as a tran-scultural practice, removing its religious background while retaining some important performative elements.

The organizers strove to maintain the positive multicultural mes-sage of bringing the community together by way of

diverse voices and rhythms to genuinely represent the en-chantment, the tradition of not only Bahia but of all the people. This glorious event will celebrate the purification, the energy, the nature, the unification of the people and the perpetuation of peace. The traditional Baianas [women in colonial garb], dressed in white, bejeweled with cordons and rosaries in honor of every saint, will bring their vessels of perfumed wa-ter, energizing the whole route of the parade in Little Brazil. (Lavagem da Rua 46 2008)

To understand the origins of the New York-based celebration, it is im-portant to review some historical aspects of the Cleansing of Bonfim and recount briefly its own transformational developments.


The Origins: The Cleansing of the Bonfim Church in salvadorThe devotion to Senhor Bom Jesus (Good Lord Jesus) derives from the Middle Ages. The cult dedicated to Senhor do Bonfim (the Lord of the Good End)—a colonial designation assigned to the Crucified Christ that represented the death of Jesus on Calvary—is one of the best known and widespread in Bahia. In Brazil, the largest and best-known locus of devotion to this saint is located in the city of Salvador, where the iconic representation, or imagem (image), arrived in the mid-18th century, brought from Portugal by Captain Theodózio Rod-rigues de Faria (Santana 2009). This image was said to be miraculous and was very well received by the local community. Consequently, by 1754 a church had been constructed on the apex of the hill situated on the Itapagipe peninsula in order to house the image (Serra 1995).

Initially, the celebrations in honor of Senhor do Bonfim were carried out on moveable dates. Documentation shows, however, that beginning in 1773, the celebration occurred periodically in January, on the second Sunday after Epiphany.10 The festivities included nine days of Mass and prayers, but did not yet have its eventual proces-sion. Some scholars suggest that the act of washing churches on the Thursday prior to religious festivities is a Portuguese tradition and was a practice typically carried out by people who lived in the church vicinity or by brotherhood members who completed this task while also having fun (Santana 2009; Sansi 2003; Serra 1995). Basing their information on data from Verger (1999) and Bastide (1978), these three authors emphasize that the practice has its roots in the payment for divine graces received by devotees, which would become a tradi-tion by the mid-nineteenth century. As Sansi (2003) notes, historical documents from the period demonstrate that as early as 1881, nearly 500,000 people were already participating in the celebration of the Cleansing of Bonfim, which also included food and drink stands as well as music and dance in the church square.

During this period, the Catholic Church in Brazil, in an effort to separate “folklore” and “superstition” from “religion,” sought to re-place popular religious practices with more orthodox ones. In 1888, the year slavery was officially abolished in Brazil, a bishop pushed for the elimination of the Cleansing of Bonfim. In 1889, the Bahian


government banned it and other popular festivities. however, due to pressure from the populace, the Cleansing returned in later years, taking the form of a “profane” celebration in the church square, thus quite distinct from the “sacred” activities that took place inside the church (Sansi 2003).

Serra (1999) notes that one can observe contradictions in these two celebratory spaces in many Bahian popular religious celebrations: on one side, what happens in the church—order, solemnity, circumspec-tion, self-communion, decorum, discretion, a peaceful and reverent public attitude, contemplation of the eternal—and on the other, what happens in the square—informal and spontaneous conduct, sensuality, irreverence, promiscuous and permissive dispositions, provocative attitudes with erotic or aggressive intentions, drunkenness, conflicts and tumults, with interest only in the ephemeral. The author explains that this ritual opposition between the spaces of the church and those of the square has, in Bahian culture, effectively become stigmatized by way of expressive symbolic procedures that specifically involve the interplay between the sacred and the profane. Some are still op-erative, while others have fallen—or are falling—into disuse. Serra attributes a historical significance to the progressive abandonment of these procedures, noting that they either lose their impact or their vestiges weaken and in this way the religious sentiment wanes for the celebrations in the square.

This background is particularly important when considering the significant roles the new protagonists played at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Cleansing of Bonfim itself became more popular in the city than the explicitly religious aspects of the celebra-tion. Recognizing that eliminating the profane practices would be impossible, the Catholic Church decided to encourage middle class participation in the festivities by organizing a procession in which people could participate with their decorated carroças (carriages; Guimarães 1994).

The present-day route of the Bonfim procession, which goes from the Conceição da Praia Church to the Bonfim Church, has been in place since 1940. During the mid-20th century, Baianas (usually black and mixed-race women), dressed in traditional and sumptuous white garb and carrying vessels of perfumed water and flowers for washing the steps in front of the church, commanded a strong pres-


ence at the celebration. Political authorities and the local media even-tually recognized these women as an indispensable part of the celebra-tion. Participants began to integrate visual, musical, and performative symbols of both Catholicism and Candomblé into the procession, thus making these identifiers of the cleansing. This fact became part of a large process of political transformation in Bahia, during which the elite population began to show interest in local popular culture and encouraged the arrival in Bahia of intellectuals and artists who expressed curiosity about Afro-Brazilian culture (Sansi 2003).

Still fearful it would lose control over the Bonfim celebration, the Catholic Church once more attempted to ban the Cleansing in the 1950s. This time, however, the authorities did not support the decision, for they had already recognized the political and symbolic importance of the celebration for the city, particularly in light of its popularity both locally and as a tourist attraction. The year 1953 marks the establishment of a commission that, rather than being involved in the religious celebration, would coordinate only the Cleansing of Bonfim. And from the 1970s onward, Emtursa (the Municipal Company of Salvador Tourism), together with Febacab (the Bahian Federation of Afro-Brazilian Religions), became re-sponsible for the organization of the procession, which had by then been recognized as an important cultural activity for Bahia’s official calendar of events.

Beginning in the 1980s, the Cleansing of Bonfim entered a phase of “carnivalization,” marked by the growing presence of blocos car-navalescos (carnival groups) and trios elétricos (live music floats). This time, the conflict did not involve the Church. Rather the discord was between the organizers of the procession of Baianas and the trio elétrico groups. By this time, the local population no doubt already considered the Baianas to be the chief traditional and “sacred” as-pect of the celebration, while the blocos carnavalescos represented the “profane” part. By the late 1990s, the trios elétricos had been prohibited from participating in the celebration and the impresarios linked to Salvador’s carnival mounted new strategies, creating, for example, the “Bonfim Light” party—marketed to middle- and upper-class youth and including big name musical attractions as well as the sale of shirts/tickets—in another part of the city, where private events were often held.


The transformations that took place in the Cleansing of Bonfim in Salvador demonstrate that celebrations cannot be understood in isolation from their sociocultural, religious, economic, territorial, and political contexts. This is because they are executed, interpreted, and lived according to different perspectives, and follow beliefs, values, doctrines, and symbols of diverse provenance that, to the general population, all work together.

For Serra (1999, 80), the popular celebration presupposes the “existence of significant consensuses, but it also involves multiple meanings and diverse interests, creating the conditions by which par-ticipants can interpret it according to differing and varying modes.” No doubt the Cleansing of Bonfim attracts devout people as well as those who, interested only in revelry, have no religious motivations. Moreover, there are people who feel the festivities pertain solely to the domain of Catholicism, while others use the celebration to worship their Candomblé orixás (deities). Of course there are also those who have no connection to either religious tradition, but are nonetheless acquainted with and respect them both. Leaders of both religions even question the legitimacy of the popular Catholic or Candomblé aspects of the procession and cleansing. Because Salvador’s celebration is a locale of social, economic, cultural, ethnic, and political disputes, it is in constant transformation, becoming, for the community, a multi-cultural celebratory space that nevertheless incorporates all of these complexities.

A New Tradition on the streets of ManhattanBy way of Silvana Magda, a Bahian artist and cultural producer, these experiences were subsequently mediated and translated for a new context so they could be shared with members of New York’s Brazilian immigrant community and with wider audiences. An idea was conceived to conduct a “cleansing” or a “public square party” like a lavagem, with elements considered traditional—the procession of Baianas dressed in white, with beaded necklaces and vessels of perfumed water; the food and handcrafts stands; the music and dance shows—and adaptations to accommodate the specificities of Little Brazil in Manhattan. As such, the organizers of the Cleansing of 46th Street began working on constructing a middle ground, where cul-


tural references to Baianidade (“Bahianness”) from Salvador could converse with New York’s cosmopolitanism (Santiago 1978, 2004).

As mentioned above, a great number of the performers who have been invited to participate in Brazilian Day over the years have been popular artists from Bahia, primarily carnival stars. This is no coinci-dence. João de Matos (interview, 1 December 2009) explained: “We have to have Bahia [at Brazilian Day]. So we began to bring Bahian groups. I think it’s Bahia that gives the end its energy.” Edilberto Mendes (interview, 1 December 2009) commented that “over the past 25 years, we’ve learned that Brazilian Day looks like Bahia. Ba-hia is the grand finale of Brazilian Day. It has to be Bahia … There is already an aspect of Brazilian Day, the Cleansing of 46th Street, which opens this Brazilian festival … Bahia—Bahia’s presence—is the hallmark of Brazilian Day.”

Silvana Magda (interview, 20 November 2009) recalls that she presented the idea of the Cleansing of 46th Street to the staff of The Brasilians after having collaborated with them for a few years in organizing Brazilian Day. her involvement in the celebration began when Edilberto Mendes invited her to help publicize Brazilian Day by representing the event during a live appearance on an American televi-sion show. Following her appearance, Mendes invited Magda to help with the event’s organization. She remembers that she was initially reluctant, for she felt the event had changed since its involvement with the Globo network, which had begun to direct some of the artistic decisions. But with help from the staff of The Brasilians, she began to brainstorm innovative alternatives for ways in which the Brazilian Day festival could incorporate new aspects of Brazilian identity:

It is an event that, right after the inclusion of the Globo net-work, [became] more directed. So the community itself is not active in the event … I really wanted to bring … to Brazilian Day an element that … would let people understand a little about what the community is, what the culture is. So I said: “Let’s do this: I want to bring an idea from the 18th century. It’s not the event that’s done in Bahia. The idea is from the 18th century. And make it over with New York’s character … I want to do a cleansing … but what I want to do is change it a little … I don’t want any religious connotations, I want it to be a communion of people. (Interview, 20 November 2009)


The debut of the Cleansing of 46th Street in 2008 received local press coverage, including attention from The New York Times. The media presence legitimized the initiative, and the local community’s interest in participating encouraged the organizers to make it an an-nual celebration. The procession through the streets of Manhattan that culminates with an arrival in Little Brazil was directly inspired by the procession of the Baianas in Salvador. The procession is fol-lowed by a show put on by Brazilian performers, which take place on the 46th Street stage. The show includes not only invited guests who come directly from Brazil to participate, but also local Brazil-ian expatriate performers and groups that reside in New York and/or other US cities. One also finds stands—operated exclusively by Brazilian vendors from the community—that sell traditional Brazil-ian foodstuffs and handcrafts. The Cleansing occurs on the Saturday before the main Globo-partnered event, and goes from the morning until the afternoon.

I have no intention to discuss here the notion of “Bahianness” (Baianidade, the idea of a typical Bahian identity) (Mariano 2009; Coimbra de Sá 2007; Pinho 1998; Zanlorenzi 1998) or its relation-ship to “Brazilianness” (Brasilidade, the idea of a typical Brazilian identity), for this would extend beyond the scope of this article. Still, this issue is present in the collective imaginary of many Brazilians. Indeed, this identity appears in the words of Ives Goulart, a filmmaker responsible for a documentary about the Cleansing of 46th Street in New York:11

I was looking to express something that had to do with both Brazil and New York. With the United States and with Brazil. I was looking for this identity. Common and universal. And the Cleansing also came to me as an opportunity for me to express myself … The Baianas’ presence in the life of every Brazilian is very powerful … During Carnival [parades] you see the row of Baianas [in Samba Schools], which is an obligatory row, this is really powerful. So this Bahia thing is to us Southern Brazilians really powerful. For us the things from Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo are really strong. So all of this is part of my unconscious. The desire to express it; because this is also all inside me. It’s part of my culture. It’s part of my


childhood. It’s part of everything of that makes you Brazilian. And this is all inside you. A kid from Acre is going to have a Baiana inside him. And a person from Rio Grande do Sul is going to have Bahia inside him. It’s inside each and every person. (Interview, 24 November 2009)

In 2010, Ives Goulart went to Salvador to document the Cleans-ing of Bonfim. he later went to Benin in hope of capturing on film the African roots present in Afro-Bahian culture, as he intends to contemplate both the Catholic and Candomblé aspects in a full-length documentary. It is important to emphasize that this documentary is a new project and will look at the origins of the Bahian celebration, thus offering discussions about religion and syncretism that are not necessarily pertinent to the conception of the Cleansing of 46th Street.

The celebration that occurs in Manhattan does not attempt to re-produce, in US territory, that which happens in Bahia. Instead it is a cultural practice that has been transnationalized, a process in which international migrants maintain ties to their home country while liv-ing in the country of settlement (Margolis 1995) and creating new forms of belonging to two or more different cultures. In this context, the practice was (re)invented as a tradition (hobsbawm and Ranger 1997) in a new place and in a specific new context, both of which are shaped by the cultural dynamics of the New York-based Brazilian im-migrants. A similar process was analyzed by hayes-Bautista (2012) vis-à-vis El Cinco de Mayo, a holiday that is scarcely observed in Mexico while enthusiastically celebrated in the United States. The author argues that Mexican immigrants in fact (re)created this tradi-tion in California during the American Civil War as a form of com-bining elements of nostalgia, patriotism, and empowerment within the community.

In the Brazilian expatriate case, we can relate this process to what Ramos-Zayas (2008) notes as a tactic of cultural commodification, linked to an idea of multiculturalism, which is conducted by way of a negotiation between “cultural excess” and “racial invisibility.” Only some aspects were selected to cross the national boundaries, chiefly those concerning spectacle—images, rhythms, and performances—which can be more easily resignified in a context that is detached from Salvador and its surrounding region of the Recôncavo Baiano,


where these aspects are strongly linked to issues of race, ethnicity, and religion.

This decision was made to represent a Bahian identity, which can be understood in the context of the representation of transnational Brazilianness in New York, a city viewed as a global and cosmopoli-tan symbol. As such, people from all over the world, including those who are not necessarily familiar with the celebration in Salvador, are afforded the opportunity to be interested and feel a connection. In this way, the Cleansing can be shared among people with life experiences that may differ from those of Bahians. Over the course of this process, adaptations, innovations, mixtures, or “translations” are necessary so that affective ties and empathy can be fostered in the place of shared experiences. And, at the same time, the choice of key elements com-ing from the Cleansing of Bonfim confer a level of “authenticity” that is capable of pleasing those in search of a connection with their roots and origins.

Consequently, the Cleansing of 46th Street as well as the other associated activities, such as Bahia Week—which includes photo-graphic expositions of art and fashion, focusing on Bahia as a theme; lectures and workshops on issues related to religion, dance, and music; and artistic and cultural shows—function as an important strategy by which local agents/producers can maintain an active and reinvigorated role as organizers of the celebration and “translators” (Bhabha 1998) of Brazilian and Bahian cultural references, negotiat-ing between the immigrant community and local society.

Final Thoughts In contemporary society, the making of festivals and international cul-tural performances is inserted in a model of production that includes large media corporations, marketing, and sponsorship. Moreover, as Ludes (2007) notes, symbolic worlds are often professionally produced. As well as being important moments for social and politi-cal participation, mega-events also play a key role in constructing powerful images and symbols that are associated with national identi-ties. This is the case not only with Brazilian Day, but also with large cultural and sporting events worldwide. The Olympics serve as one such example:


Olympic ceremonies are mega-media productions that reach television audiences around the world. The messages com-municated combine the local and global, the culturally specific and universal, spectacle and festival, in a complex produc-tion that aims to challenge, educate, and entertain audiences. (Qing, Boccia, Chunmiao, Xing, Fu, and Kennett 2010, 1591)

The aggregation of protocol, national representation, and commu-nication of local identity is further mixed with elements of entertain-ment. These events are broadcast around the world by various media outlets, using exclusive footage generated by the host country. They rely on a type of media coverage that includes specialized journalists who “translate” (Bhabha 1998) what is happening during the event as well as the historical, cultural, social, and political meanings of each image, song, and speech.

In the case of Brazilian Day, the event is intended to reach differ-ent audiences and serve different purposes simultaneously. First, both the street fair and the musical performances aim to entertain nostalgic Brazilians living in the United States who want to celebrate their country’s Independence Day. But they also reach New Yorkers and tourists in general, particularly given that the festival happens during the Labor Day weekend. These are the main objectives for the local organizers of the event, The Brasilians newspaper. Additionally, the concert, with its extensive media coverage and promotion of Brazil-ian celebrities, is produced for marketing purposes and the Globo network’s television broadcast.

Brazilian Day has grown larger than The Brasilians, and it is therefore important that the newspaper continues to exercise its voice in organizing the event. This is no doubt a complex relationship, for it serves as a dialogic space for large media (represented by the Globo network and Globo Internacional), community media (represented by The Brasilians and other local agents, such as the online VejaTV chan-nel), and the Brazilian community. This is indeed a fundamental part of legitimizing the event. And, aware of the mechanism responsible for the negotiation of representational power, local agents seek, by way of their work in local media, to return the focus to the value of community participation, and not merely to echo the publicity given by Globo to the celebrities and spectacularization. Moreover, they


continue to act, creating alternative spaces of representation by or-ganizing new cultural events associated with the already consolidated Brazilian Day image, as we have seen in the case of the Cleansing of 46th Street, which has increasingly become a new tradition, “in-vented” for the local community.

Notes1 A preliminary version of this farticle was presented in Portuguese during

the panel session “Economies of Performance: Brazilian Subjectivity and Cultural Production in the United States” at the 2012 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association in San Francisco, California (23–26 May 2012). It has been translated by Michael Iyanaga.

2 During fieldwork, most of the interviewees and publications referred to events that would celebrate minorities’ national identities in the US and immigrants’ festivities in general as “ethnic events.” Although I discuss the complexity of defining the term “ethnic” in my dissertation (Coimbra de Sá 2011), that is not the focus of this article.

3 Some authors (notably Cid Teixeira and Thales de Azevedo), especially the ones dealing with historical documents, note that there are different spell-ings for “Bonfim.” When referring to the church, the sanctuary, or the saint it should be written “Bomfim” and when referring to the neighbourhood it should be “Bonfim” (José Cláudio de Oliveira, personal communication, 10 December 2012). I use the spelling “Bonfim” throughout the article, as it is currently the most popular form used in publications and the media.

4 The newspaper, whose first edition was published in December 1972, was initially called The Brazilians. The change in spelling to The Brasilians (using the letter “s,” as the country’s name is written in Portuguese) took place in 1975.

5 It is important to note that there are relatively few studies on Brazilians living in New York City. however, this was the first city where Brazilian immigrants in the US have been studied systematically for the past two decades by Margolis (1994, 2003, 2009). In addition, another relevant work is an ethnography published by Meihy (2004). According to these scholars, there is no specific profile of Brazilian immigrants in NYC, and even statistical data from both Brazilian and American governments are not precise. I discuss the similarities and differences of Brazilian immigrants in NYC and other US cities in my doctoral dissertation (Coimbra de Sá 2011).

6 New York City later officially named the street “Little Brazil,” as reported in the July 1995 edition of The Brasilians. In the Rio de Janeiro Carnival


parade of 1999, the Império Serrano Samba School dedicated its samba-enredo to “Uma Rua Chamada Brasil” (A Street Called Brazil).

7 For example, Brazilian Day Tokyo, Brazilian Day London, Brazilian Day Canada, Brazilian Day Miami, Brazilian Day Portugal, and the Friendship Day Angola/Brasil.

8 The staff of The Brasilians note, among other stations, American Latino TV, LatiNation, My9 TV, and Fox 5.

9 Candomblé is an African-Brazilian religion whose followers worship orixás, deities related to elements of nature.

10 A religious celebration that commemorates the recognition of Jesus by the Magi, and occurs, according to the Christian calendar, on 6 January (Santana 2009).

11 The short film by filmmaker Ives Goulart (formerly Ivy Goulart), titled Lavagem do Bonfim da Bahia a Nova York (The Cleansing of Bonfim: From Bahia to New York, 2009), recounts the history of the celebration’s genesis in 2008. It won in a number of categories at the Focus Brazil Video Fest (2009), including Best Video, Best Script, and Best Photography, and was the Official Selection of the 7th Cine Fest Petrobras New York, realized in August 2009. Credits—Direction and script: Ives Goulart. Production: Marcelo Nigri and Ives Goulart. Distribution: Goulart Filmes. Place of Production: New York. Date: 2009. Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cshW3ZanlV8>. Accessed on 14 October 2009.

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“CAN YOu TAKE A PiCTuRE OF THE WiND?”: CANDOmbLé’s ABsENT PREsENCE FRAMED THROuGH REGiONAL FOODWAYs AND BRAZiLiAN POPuLAR MusiC

sCOTT ALVEs BARTONFood Studies, New York University

Abstract. This essay investigates the effect of media and mediatization on the presentation of Afro-Brazilian identity and Candomblé. This diffused mono-theistic religion centred upon cults honouring a diverse community of divini-ties is dominated by ideologies of the Yoruba ethnic group, the last and largest group of enslaved Africans imported to Brazil. Attention will be drawn to the manner and form in which media circulates in the public sphere, analyzing the insertion of food, consumption, and identity themes in 20th-century Brazilian media circuits. Texts, lyrics, and moving images contribute to the imaginary of Baianidade (the state of Bahian-ness) and Afro-Brazilian identity. The conflu-ence of race, gender, politics, and religion all fall within the lens of production and consumption of food. These themes have been utilized as an interlocutor in engaging with racial, gendered, and religious discourses. Literary analysis employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on the carnivalesque will be used as a primary tool to analyze empirical data derived from musical lyrics and ethno-graphic field texts. Resumo. Este artigo investiga o efeito dos meios de comunicação e midiati-zação na apresentação de identidades Afro-brasileiras e do Candomblé. Essa religião monoteísta e difusa, centrada em cultos de diversas comunidade de divindades é dominada pelas ideologias da etnia iorubá, o último e maior


137


grupo de escravos africanos importados para o Brasil. O artigo analisa a in-serção de alimentos, consumo e temas de identidade nos circuitos midiáticos brasileiros do século XX a partir de textos, letras de música e imagens em movimento que circulam na esfera pública. Argumenta-se que estes contri-buem para o imaginário da baianidade, o estado de ser baiano e a identidade afro-brasileira. Além disso, o enfoque na produção e consumo de alimentos permitem um engajamento com discursos políticos, religiosos, raciais e de gênero. As teorias de Mikhail Bakhtin sobre o carnavalesco, será utilizada como uma ferramenta de análise literária fundamental para analisar os da-dos empíricos derivados de letras musicais e textos etnográficos obtidos no campo.

Discovering BrazilPrior to beginning the PhD program in Food Studies at New York University I had spent the last 30 years as a cook, executive chef, and culinary consultant. My research work began with a harlem jazz club/restaurant restoration project, Minton’s, that never fully came to fruition. Minton’s Playhouse had been the birthplace of Bebop. Researching the roots of harlem Renaissance cuisine and dining caused me to investigate the confluence of African, European, and Indigenous foodways that spawned American Southern cookery. My research flourished where the project sputtered. An Instituto Sacatar grant to travel to Bahia in 2008 helped to frame a missing link in my research of West African Diaspora cookery: the role and influence of the sacred in quotidian culinary practice.

Outside of my fieldwork, it was easy to fall in love with Brazil. When I got back to New York, books and music were the souvenirs that staved off my saudade (longing) to return to Brazil. To bet-ter tune my ear for Portuguese, I listened to much of the Brazilian popular music songbook I had collected on CDs. Upon my return to Brazil I discovered something that used to occur back home: intergenerational knowledge of popular songs and rhythms. In my youth the music written or performed by harold Arlen, Fats Waller, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Woodie Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Billie holiday, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and many others could be shared the way

Barton / “Can You Take a Picture of the Wind?” 139

the work of Dorival Caymmi, Vinicius de Moraes, Tom Jobim, Elis Regina, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Pixinguinha, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania, Cartola, and Carmen Miranda are shared in Brazil. I found the rhyme schemes of the lyrics to be quite poetic, thematically complex, riddled with double entendre and oblique messaging. This was epitomized by Buarque’s song “Calicé.”1 This can be partially attributed to the repression of the Ditadura (military dictatorship) from 1964 to 1985, and the populism following the regime’s fall. I observed how themes of food, cooking, and consumption were often inserted into the music.

While it is easy to use food as metaphor, much of what I heard was less predictable or as randy as Bessie Smith’s “I Need a Lil’ Sugar in My Bowl.” I am referring to songs such as “A Preta do Acarajé” (The Black-Eyed Pea Fritter Vendor), “Cotidiano” (Everyday), or “O Que é Que A Baiana Tem?” (What Is It That a Bahian Woman has?). My studies in anthropology, cultural studies, and documentary film/media brought a critical eye to my hobby for language improve-ment. I noticed that in several major hits, cooking and consumption themes functioned as an identity politics of race, Baianidade, and West African heritage, and also contained allusions to the practice of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion.

I was aware that the presence of Afro-Brazilian cultural identity in popular media arose with the formation of a black press, the first Afro-Brazilian organized political movement, Frente Negra Brasileira (Brazilian Black Front), challenging government efforts to suppress black self-determination. Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship advanced a centralizing nationalist agenda that included outlawing social organizations and political groups, such as Frente Negra.2 Estado Novo’s industrialization and urbanization projects de-veloped the large southwestern cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo while the former national economic engine in the northeast, founded on plantation agriculture, became impoverished. I was intrigued by the dichotomy between identity, politics, and mediatization that pre-sented Afro-Brazilian identity via themes of food/consumption and religion in media circuits and the evolution of cultural identity brand-ing to stimulate the northeastern economy (Marchant and Conceição 2002; Jones-de-Oliveira 2003; Seigel 2009, 47–51; Weinstein 2003, 10 and 237–239; Outtes 2003).


Candomblé, a diffused monotheistic religion centred upon cults honouring a diverse community of divinities, is dominated by ideolo-gies of the Yoruba ethnic group, the last and largest group of enslaved Africans imported to Brazil. Its ceremonies are highly performative practices consisting of both experiential and discursive elements. The components of the ceremony—food offerings, prayers and praise songs, dance, elaborate dress and costume, and embodiment of specific deities in trance—foster a dynamic dialogism between the supplicants, congregants, adepts, and orixá. These instruments are the tools of mediation, constituting Candomblé as a spiritually oriented media practice.

Media circuits are flooded with explicit images that are presented out of context, such as supplicants in trance embodying their deities or in elaborate costumes representing specific deities. Concurrently images that implicitly refer to Candomblé practice through subtle metaphors in online videos and Brazilian popular music depicting Afro-Brazilian culture can also be freighted with misunderstandings based upon the implications of lyric or visual content and the absence of context. Yet do all of these images further the idea of Candomblé as a tool of macumba and fetichismo (witchcraft and fetishism)? Or do they open a larger dialogue that valorizes Candomblé, in part via presentation and reception in the public sphere and diminution of some the hidden secrets associated with the practice (Lövheim and Lynch 2011; Ginsburg 2006)?

The argument that I would like to develop here is that the evolution of a mediated image created in a Candomblé terreiro, in a kitchen, or through allusion in a song to food, consumption, or spiritual practice transforms the original mediated image to a second generation through the process of remediation.3 The first-generation mediated images were created from practices strongly rooted in the “pre-discursive” experiential body, in this case via food and cooking, embodiment of Candomblé deities, song, dance, and so on. I am interested in the transformations that occur when these media migrate to media prac-tices that are more discursive (texts, images)—thus producing “Can-domblé’s absent presence in media circuits” (Connerton 1989, 48–50; Fraser 1990; McCallum 2011; Stam 1989, 41; Mazzarella 2004).

This article will examine the use and role of early-to-late 20th-century media practices in popular music as a productive or disruptive


tool for the dissemination of Afro-Brazilian identity and Candomblé practice predominantly via the lens of consumption and foodways. Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and his interpretation of the carnivalesque as a platform for discourse across classes and social groups will be used as a primary means of inquiry.4 Media theory, textual analysis, and observations drawn from field research con-ducted in the last four years will provide supplemental information. My ethnographic qualitative fieldwork has consisted of participatory observation, including enrollment in regional culinary classes, at-tending sacred and profane ceremonies and festivals where food is a central focus, and personal reception/consumption of rituals and foods associated with Candomblé.5 I have also interviewed a diverse cadre of local respondents including Candomblé adepts and congregants, artists, intellectuals, local cooks, culinary professionals, street food vendors, and academic scholars.

This article has been divided into six sections to best address the themes and discourses raised by an inquiry of media circuits, Afro-Brazilian identity politics, Candomblé religious practices, and enskilment as an exponent of indigenous knowledge. To establish a theoretical framework, I will begin with definitions of media, the carnivalesque, and enskilment, and introduce Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque and dialogism. The subsequent sections address the concept of Baianidade, situating the practice of Candomblé, food and Baianidade, food and as a language or subtext in media discourses, and analysis of particularly appropriate song texts from the Brazilian popular music songbook, and are followed by a conclusion.

Media, the Carnivalesque and EnskilmentMedia as a form of mass communication is a consumable presence in all of our lives. The consumption of mediated messages often occurs subtly or subconsciously. The application and performance of media as a practice circulates information, presenting an image of a mediated idea, group, or activity. Media practices are the methodologies for us-ing media as an instrument of communication and the management of technology to disseminate mass communication. A medium, the sin-gular of media, can be defined as an intermediate state/agent through which interventions can be made (Mazzarella 2004). Mazzarella also


defines media as an ambiguous concept, concurrently existing as a material framework and a reflexive and reifying technology. The material product, radio broadcast/video transmission, could create an inter-media relationship that is reflexive, reifying, or derogative to the respective communities implicitly and explicitly identified in the broadcasts/transmissions (Coudry 2004).

The primary media under observation are early 20th-century popular musical recordings broadcast on radio, consumed as record-ings, or viewed as live concerts and early promotional films. I argue that media, its circulation, and its remediation as an inter-medium have created awareness, mis/perceptions, myths, and commerce of Bahia, Baianas, and Candomblé. The ability for musical recordings and videos to communicate across media platforms, creating an inter-medium engaging Candomblé practice and foodways, affects the production and reception of each medium. In many cases carica-tures and stereotypes have been developed from those early media circuits. Both Candomblé practice and Afro-Brazilian identity have to confront reification of the imaginary existent in media circuits. Issues of personal, gendered, and collective power and racial and sexual stereotypes are rampant. Food and consumption themes pro-vide simple equations for reductive constructions of black, female, and spiritual identity. Concurrently, the remediation has exposed lo-cal, national, and international audiences to this region and its culture. Since the dictatorship had suppressed black identity projects during Estado Novo, there are significant merits to the effects of remedia-tion. Remediation has brought the absent presence of blacks, women, and Candomblé culture to the public sphere. The responsibility of the producer and the viewer to interpret and reframe these negative char-acterizations, contextualizing the artisanship associated with cookery and Afro-Brazilian religions as products of indigenous knowledge and enskilment, is therefore a central theme of this text (Connerton 1989; Telles 2004; Van de Port 2007; McCann 2004, 9–22; Reily 2000).

Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism and the carnivalesque as a platform for discourse across classes and social groups will be used as a primary means of inquiry. The carnivalesque, particularly the lower bodily stratum, which refers to union of the genitalia, the digestive, and the excretory systems as the intersection of life-giving, consump-tion, and elimination processes, provides an intersection for Mikhail


Bakhtin’s work to speak to gender, power, food, and foodways, and illustrates an alternative means of knowledge production. Carnival, with its parodic testaments that mock prevailing orthodoxy, amplifies the dialogism between the mass or subaltern populace and the elite to provoke change and interrogate the existing norms (Bakhtin 1968, 85–86; Bakhtin 1981, 324–325 and 342).

The employment of the carnivalesque (particularly the lower bodily stratum) to construct a location where the masses can speak directly to the upper classes is often undertaken for strategic reasons. The site of carnival as a geography of reckless abandon and surreal reinvention of life conveniently produces an environment where the double meanings expressed from the mass can be understood and embodied as a new way of being, laughed at, laughed with, and/or ignored. These improprieties of public dialogue melded with the transformative bodily practice of ingestion through elimination reveal a unique knowledge production in the public sphere. The act of consumption, with food as an actor on and in the body, alters the body physically, psychically, and metaphorically. Looking beyond the vulgarity associated with the lower bodily stratum to identify and interrogate social and cultural practices is a productive means of harnessing the carnivalesque in the illumination of indigenous knowl-edge. The carnivalesque allows for the dissemination of discrete discourses that often are left unspoken or suppressed, whether due to issues of propriety or hierarchal social relationships (Bakhtin 1968, 18–23, 71, and 192–194; Bakhtin 1981, 11, 67, and 121). Dialogism argues that all meaning is relative, in the sense that it comes about only as a result of the relation between two or more bodies occupying simultaneous but different space, where “bodies” can be thought of as ranging from our physical bodies, to political bodies, to the bodies of ideas, to ideologies. Looking for and listening to the discourses and resultant dialogism evidenced through the engagement with the carnivalesque allows for the voice of what Nancy Fraser has termed the “subaltern public” to be heard (Fraser 1990; holquist 2002, 19).

Finally, to engage with the idea of enskilment we need to con-sider its root: skill. harry Collins’ definition (1997) locates skill as the site at which technology, history, social relations, and political economy converge. This concept further problematizes the idea and perception of globalization as a predetermined discourse, implying


the demise of traditional skills and handmade products in deference to the power and efficiency of modern technology. The notion of enskilment, a term coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), encompasses the harnessing of specific information, bodily prac-tices, and dexterity associated with labour and physical production. Enskilment is seen as the critical moment of socialization of new actors through apprenticeship, in specific “communities of practice,” and as a fundamental mechanism of situated learning. The expan-sion of the concept of enskilment evidenced through Gísili Pálsson’s (1994) work with Icelandic fishermen and heather Paxson’s (2010) work on cheesemaking and terroir will help to better contextualize enskilment within the confines of food production and commensal-ity. These texts analyze the dialectics raised through the modalities of learning and performance, defined as cognitive and operational learning or the socializing and relational dynamics of the trainee en route to becoming enskilled (Grasseni 2007, 10 and 17; Pálsson 1994; Paxson 2010).

Defining BaianidadeAfro-Brazilian culinary practice is largely associated with the cuisine of Bahia. The state of Bahia is marked by two particular definitions of cultural identity. First, Baianidade is an inclusive term defining the Bahian-ness of something or someone. Bahia is secondarily de-fined by the aforementioned spiritual traditions of Candomblé and other West African inspired religious practices, including Caboclo, Egunguns, Espiritismo, and Umbanda. The integration of Baianidade and Afro-Brazilian religions into food practices are primary elements in defining the syntax of this regional food as language, a means of discourse that defines community in much the same way as Benedict Anderson’s metaphor that newspapers and print media create a loca-tion of shared identity (Anderson 1983, 4–5 and 18–19; Fry 1977).

Baianidade ultimately is an enigmatic expression established to frame Bahian regional identity as a collective consciousness. The characters drawn in the writings of Jorge Amado and the musical com-positions of Dorival Caymmi typify the persona of Baianidade. The opening scene of Amado’s novel, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, introduces Vadinho, a lazy, libidinous, self-absorbed bon vivant:


Vadinho, Dona Flor’s first husband, died on Sunday of Carni-val, in the morning, when, dressed up like a Bahian woman, he was dancing the samba, with the greatest enthusiasm … the whiskey flowed like water at the expense of one Moysés, a cacao planter, rich and open-handed … he whirled in the middle of the group … then suddenly gave a kind of hoarse moan, wobbled, listed to one side, and fell to the ground, a yellow slobber drooling from his mouth on which the grimace of death should not wholly extinguish the fatuous smile of the complete faker he had always been. (Amado 1969, 5–6)

Defining Baianidade has been achieved in distinct ways that include collapsing racial, ethnic, and economic distinctions with sat-ire, humor, roguish carnal behaviour, folktales, and mediated tourist marketing pitches. Baianidade is derived from literature and the arts and creates a fictional portrait of identity that is romantic, nostalgic, and elastic. The term Baianidade is commonly used to define the unique Bahian way of feeling contextualized with protocols for pub-lic and private behaviours that reflect local means of self-expression. There is an implicit correlation to Carnival’s tradition of reflecting the tension of the periphery, identified as the general public, in their relation to the core or elite classes. This relationship manifests as a stress between behaviours of transgression and obedience. Carnival provides a platform where alleged truth rises up from the masses as a resistive behaviour or rebuttal of authority. Carnival was, and often still is, considered as a transitional state between the everyday and the fantastic or imaginary (Bakhtin 1968).

Commercialized Baianidade has been used as a media tool for the spread of ethnic tourism promoting Bahia as a space of marketing an imaginary of black and African identity. Initiatives to industrialize Brazil begun during Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo regime (1937–45) included promoting cultural tourism in the recently impoverished post-colonial agrarian northeast. Industrialization and urban devel-opment had strengthened southern Brazilian economics. The loss of mono-crop agriculture dominance forced the northeast to seek alternatives for the purpose of solvency. The imaginary of Bahia as “Black Rome,” the centre of Afro-Brazilian culture, Carnival, pristine beaches, regional cuisine, and exotic black and creole women fostered


a hedonistic travel experience that was interrogated and promoted by local and national elites.6 Early 20th-century Bahian elites had ambivalence toward how they wished to portray themselves and their regional identity. An initial push to reference modernity over history, excising cultural references of slaves, Afro-Brazilians, and the indig-enous by the Bahian state Office of Culture, ultimately produced a disjunctive hybrid portrait. The first issue of the 1939 cultural jour-nal, Bahia tradicional e moderna (Bahia Traditional and Modern), featured a disproportionately large Baiana with a prominently ample bosom carrying a basket of food on her head. She is standing in front of a modern port with the newly renovated, renowned multi-story Lacerda elevator in the background. The plump, fecund, labourer Baiana is objectified and marketed as a visual brand (Romo 2010, 88–92; Martínez-Echazábal 1998).

Concurrently cultural radio programs emanating from Rio de Janeiro used the nascent samba music to promote Brazilian cultural identity. The larger, financially secure stations introduced live Eu-ropean orchestral music to their listeners, which came off as elitist and propagandistic. The economics of hosting small combos playing folkloric and ethnic music was accessible, popular, and economically cheaper to produce. This movement catapulted the local and national careers of Dorival Caymmi, Luis Gonzaga, Ary Barroso, and many other musicians and composers promoting regional music. Cultural and heritage tourism as an economic engine and mythic imaginary continued in the 1960s during the administration of Bahia governor Luis Viana Filho, with the creation of the Instituto do Patrimônio Artístico e Cultural (IPAC; Institute of Cultural and Artistic Patrimo-ny) and Bahiatursa (the Bahia department of tourism), following the UNESCO world heritage designation of Salvador in 1968. “Finally today we have a department that has the purpose of coordinating and implementing the policy of promotion and development of tourism in the State of Bahia according to government guidelines” (Bahiatursa 1998, 19).

The government was used as the marketing arm of the Bahia brand. The continued efforts of three-time Bahian governor Antônío Carlos Magalhães to promote public works, urban renewal, and tour-ism have all contributed to the mythologization of Baianidade. In 1995 Magalhães created the office of Secretaria de Cultura e Turismo


de Estado (State Secretary of Tourism and Culture) and enacted a pro-gram, Bahia Reconstrução e Integração Dinâmica (Reconstruction and Dynamic Integration of Bahia), with the following proclamation: “I am sure that, despite the mistakes of recent years, Bahia will con-tinue to be increasingly more prosperous and contribute its dynamic industry, agricultural modernizations, its tourist potential, and the strength of the culture of its people to enable the nation to resume its path to progress” (Olivera 2006).

Corruption scandals revealed later in the Magalhães regime re-vealed how he used the office of tourism to appropriate funds and further his family’s media empire. Yet the collusive collaboration of the Bahiatursa department, that implements branded marketing of cultural identity tourism, and the media conglomerate Rede Bahia is precisely what fosters and maintains a mythic imaginary of Bahia and Baianidade (Nova and Miguez 2008; McCann 2004, 9–20 and 96–120; Pinho 2010, 81–83 and 114, Ribeiro 2010; Zanirato 2004; Dias 2009; Pitombo 2007; Fernandes 2008).7

Contextualizing Candomblé, Food and BaianidadeAnthropologist Paul C. Johnson defines Candomblé as a world “where everything and everyone eats, not only people but also drums, natural phenomena like trees, rivers, stones and significant places like terreiros (temples), in addition to the orixá (deities)” (2002, 14). Within Candomblé cosmology, the orixá are manifest as the spiritual and energetic embodiment of rivers, trees, winds, earth, plants, and oceans. Candomblé is indelibly tied to food production, since deities are first entreated to engage with a terreiro community through the virtual consumption of a sacred banquet, A Comida de Santo (the food for the divinities). In this cosmology, the sacred culinary practice dictates that a multi-course meal, A Banquete Sagrado da Comida de Santo (a banquet for the deities), must be prepared for, presented to, and virtually consumed by the primary deities of the Yoruba pan-theon before any ritual begins. Preparing the favourite foods of these divinities entreats them to be present in the physical temple space. Their presence is demonstrated by the ability of certain supplicants to “be mounted” and spiritually embodied by these deities. As mães e os pais de santo (the holy mothers and fathers/the priestesses and


priests) and the temple are all imbued with axé (power), reflected by this demonstration of faith initiated by consumption. Later in the cer-emony, the food is served to all in attendance. Ingestion of this meal brings the sacred into the bodies of the congregants, paralleling the Christian reception of the sacrament. Prayer and ritual practices are the primary mediations between mundane, quotidian life processes and spiritual ascendance, via dialogism with the sacred. The follow-ing interview excerpt indicates how one woman’s work has become enskilled through Candomblé practice. We also see that feeding the deities occurs as a regular, internal, non-public religious ritual, satiat-ing and sustaining the orixá:

Maiana, a middle-aged respondent who is assentado (partially initiated) in a local Salvadoran terreiro, told me of her duties to clean the assentamentos (shrine rooms) for certain orixá:

First I have to clean the room and then I bring the prepared food offerings to feed each deity. I had to be taught how to do it, where to place the offerings on the pejé (altar) and respect the otá (sacred stones). Everything has to follow a certain order. Such as wrapping the three-atabaque (sacred conga) drums with a piece of cotton fabric, the colour[s] of which relate to each of their respective divinities after they have been fed. (Interview with Maiana, age unknown [over 50], Salvador, 2010)

The spiritual consumption associated with Candomblé stems from the production of axé and is one of the primary precepts of the prac-tice. Axé is seen as a change agent, the transcendent spiritual force with material effects that are analogous to an electrical charge. Adher-ents to Candomblé commune with these various deities and consume axé from them as a product of their worship.8 Within the various cults the primary role of animal sacrifice and the consumption of specific prepared foods and sacred herbs, aside from their nutritive function, is to provide axé and place the initiate in dialogue with the deities. Virtual or actual consumption thus becomes endemic to Candomblé and related Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices (Dantas 2009, 22–23; Thompson 1978, 5; Bakhtin 1981, 270–271; Johnson 2002, 36; BBC 2012; de Sousa Jr. 2009).


Carlos, a resident of São Paulo and a recent initiate, his friend Marinaldo, and I were the only outside guests at an Egungun cer-emony at Terreiro Bela Vista on Itaparica Island.9 At an impromptu breakfast following the all-night ceremony, Carlos shared a personal experience of receiving his deities that suggests the potential for axé to also have a deleterious effect:

Ever since I became initiated, whenever I eat pineapple my lips and mouth sting. It’s a quizila (dietary prohibition specific to each orixá) for Omulu; he has my head. I was instructed to remove it from my diet, but I love it. Unfortunately, I have learned from the discomfort that it is off limits to me. (Interview with Carlos, approximately 40 years old, 2011, Itaparica)10

Marinha, iaô (“wife of the orixá,” or a Candomblé initiate of less than seven years) in different terreiro in Itaparica, said she learned about other things besides Candomblé in the terreiro: “We never had guests at our house. Family? Yes, grandma and grandpa, uncles and aunts. But these people, our family, are not the same. I learned how to calculate how much rice or beans to cook in the terreiro. I learned how to prepare the table and serve guests there” (interview with Marinha, age in her early 20s, 2009, Itaparica).

A dialogic relationship evolved between Marinha and her tasks in the kitchen. Repositioning the role of food and cooking as a means of disseminating cultural and sacred knowledge within a social group engenders greater significance to this quotidian practice. Foodstuffs and food production as a discursive practice can be framed in terms of power dynamics based upon access to resources, skill and knowledge, and control of labour and product resources (Fischler 1988; Stam 1997, 78 and 205; Bakhtin 1981).

On a visit to a terreiro in Salvador, Dona Alva, an octogenarian Mãe Pequena (junior priestess), told me her story of learning how to cook as a young girl. Following this exchange I asked other women who were 60 or older the same question, and they all told a similar tale of making galinha à cabidela (a chicken dish made with its own blood as a sauce):


It was a game … They had made it up. My mother and my grandmother; they brought us into the kitchen as if it was a kind of game when I was a girl. Me and my sister. [how old were you? I asked her] Me? I was eight or ten. A game with viscera, Cabidela [she pronounced it slowly].11 We had to clean and prepare the hen’s guts. Yes, the guts. We saved all of the blood. We washed the intestines several times. Then we add seasonings, spices, flour, salt; everything we were told to do. We cooked and ate it. Well, if it was poorly done we still had to eat it. We did this while either our mother or grandmother was preparing the hen. If we didn’t do a good job in the end only the intestines were wasted. The viscera had little to no value, it came with every chicken. The meat was what was expensive. Yes, I taught my daughter the same way that I learned. It was made into a game, but in the end a girl had to be learn how to cook before she got married. But now, my granddaughter, she doesn’t know how to make this dish. No, she has no interest. And also, we do not have confidence in the chickens sold in the market today. Before we had farm/country chickens. Today all we have are the industrial chick-ens, full of bacteria. (Interview with Dona Alva, admitted to being over 80 years old, Salvador, 2011)

Identifying “enskilment” as an exponent of knowledge production reflects a particular engagement with expertise in labour/craft activi-ties. Paxson (2010) illustrates how the cultivation and production of food provide key sites of enskilment. Therefore the kitchen can be viewed as laboratory and classroom. Learning to cook is generally acquired through modelling and association, much like learning to speak or read. Mastery of the craft—technique—is a fundamental aspect for enskilling the novice cook. The finished dish or meal—the product of the cook’s labour—requires an understanding of the cultural context that organizes and prioritizes the choices made in the creation of flavour combinations and tastes for the social group. Technical proficiency is required for accuracy in the transmission of culturally specific information embedded in the dish or meal. The result is a mixture of individual craft and knowledge of the lexicon of flavours that best expresses collective identity. Performances and


critiques of gender, power, religion, etiquette, hygiene, economics, and the scope of the cook’s knowledge are inherent to the act of cooking. Overtly, many songs, particularly “Bahiana do Taboleiro” (Bahian Woman Vendor’s Table), “No Tabuleiro da Baiana” (The Display Table of the Bahian Woman), and “O Que é Que A Baiana Tem?” (Caymmi and Miranda 1939), teach cooking method and at-titudes of comportment. The indigenous knowledge of the Bahiana is broadcast through the medium of song (Pàlsson 1994; Walls 2012; Paxson 2010; Stam 1989, 113).

“Um pé”: Who initiates and Maintains These Discourses?Eu tenho um pé na cozinha means “I have a foot in the kitchen,” a Brazilian colloquialism that subtly identifies race, West African an-cestry, and a possible self-reflexive interpretation of personal shame. Any speakers of this phrase are acknowledging their links to West Af-rican ancestry since black West Africans were presumed to be the best cooks. “Eu tenho um pé na cozinha—I have a foot in the kitchen—I have black blood inside me, we are all or partially [West] African” supports the theoretical construction of Brazil’s racial democracy, validating an imagined Afro-Brazilian nation-state. A few of my older respondents have used it in reference to themselves; although visually they appear black, apparently they want to link their racial identity to Africa and acknowledge their culinary proficiency. I asked Nele, an ebômi (senior Candomblé initiate) who admitted to being over 60, what she thought of some of the music she heard in her youth: “Surely, I liked him. his music was good. Dorival was singing about us and about Bahia [our culture]. his songs were so good … as tasty as my cooking” (Interview, Cachoeira, 2011).12

Edson, a Pai de Santo13 who was fortyish and self-described as cor de leite (the [skin] color of milk), spoke to me about food and eating outside of the Comida de Santo he consumed in his terreiro: “I love feijoada. I was born loving it [pauses] I come from several Ogums. Loving it, the one the blacks make, I mean. It is the only one truly worth eating. It is not a light dish, so you have to eat it sparingly” (interview, Lauro de Freitas, 2013) (see also Fry 1977). This type of racial identity politics revels in the culinary skill of black cooks as savants de la cuisine, yet delimits the agency and cultural access that


West African descendants—blacks—have in Brazil (Matory 1999, 2003).

Colleagues suggested that I interview Paulo, a Candomblé scholar at a local university, to develop a collegial/mentor relationship and suggest additional respondents for my research. Paulo’s comment belied the realities of power and access and race, echoing the 19th-century citation that follows it:

Yes, I have knowledge of Candomblé. I have researched it and attended ceremonies for years. Regarding food and A Comida de Santo, I know very little. I can tell you about the songs and dances, the costume, the religious tenets, etc. I know what constitutes Comida de Santo, but I don’t cook. here in my own house [he points to the open doorway], I cannot do anything in the kitchen. Our maid does all the cooking. (Interview with Paulo, admitted to being near 70 years old, Salvador, 2013)

And we do not know if cultural life can survive the disappear-ance of domestic servants. (Alain Besançon, Etre Russe au XIXe siècle, cited by Bourdieu and Nice 1984, 9)

The person who prepares the meal explicitly affects its consumers. The performance of cooking is another mediated dialogic practice. It involves a personal or anonymous relationship between producer and receiver depending upon the scale and orientation of the distribution of food. Food and cooking become another component in the inter-medium expressed in these Brazilian songs (Bourdieu and Nice 1984, 183–184; Graham 1992, 13–19 and 49).

From Edible Food to Food as MediaTransitioning the consumed meal to a virtual consumable in the mediatized world necessitates the explication of ingredients and pro-cedures. A few cornerstones of the Bahian larder are acarajé, black-eyed-pea fritters cooked in palm oil, and its steamed counterpart, abará, which has a bready, dumpling-like texture. It is made from the same batter, then cooked and wrapped in a banana leaf. Vatapá


(a viscous puree of cashews, peanuts, stale bread/flour, palm oil, and spices), pamonha (white corn mush steamed and served in a banana leaf), caruru (a gumbo-like stew of okra, smoked and dried shrimp, cashews, peanuts, and palm oil), and mungunzá (a sweetened and spiced porridge of white hominy corn, coconut and/or condensed milk, and butter) all co-exist as street food and with variations as components of A Comida de Santo. Although there are actual distinc-tions between these culinary iterations, the liminal status these dishes share widens the implicit and explicit conversation of cultural identity and purposefulness. Therefore the use of similar foods and recipes in Candomblé ritual practice and in street or home food production informs the quotidian, the sacred, and the enskilment inherent in both. Ebó (offerings) made via sacred culinary practice are catalysts for discourse with Candomblé deities. They help initiate trance as a ve-hicle for spirit possession. Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice increases the agentive nature of food production and consumption and anchors the implicit power of enskilment, informing both the presentation and subjugation of this practice in the public sphere and the media.

As previously mentioned, in Candomblé cosmology all living things and deities are seen to hold axé. The energy of life revitalizes all who come in contact with it. Axé functions as a mediator between the orixá and mankind. Ascribing value to axé as a vital force con-tributes to the bleeding of boundaries between sacred and profane worlds. Therefore the mimesis between secular comestibles and sacred ones such as the aforementioned acarajé and feijões (beans), vatapá, or caruru fosters a tacit understanding that the words struc-ture the conversational theme when they are apparently innocently inserted in a common discourse or song lyric. Therefore the beans in Chico Buarque’s song “Cotidiano” speak to consumption: daily, sub-sistence level, or lack thereof (mouths full of beans, coffee, passion, mint; homeopathy/folk medicine or Candomblé as a curing herb; and dread).14 Finally there is an implication to the inclusion of Ogum, an orixá who opens doorways, Xangô, an orixá of passion and justice—or other deities who are celebrated with an offering of beans (Moura 2004, 43–52; de Souza 2009).

African and Creole women employed as street food vendors con-stitute a Bahian tradition more than 300 years old, institutionalized by the ganhador system in colonial Brazil. Women and men could


create income-generating businesses with inequitable division of profits between their masters and themselves. This practice introduced and sustained West African foodstuffs in the daily lives of Bahians. Traditionally these vendors were all Candomblé initiates, and the foods prepared and sold were foods favoured by specific deities. Ritual practices before the start of business included prayer, lavagem (ceremonial cleansing), and the offering of specific foods to each de-ity. Europeans became acquainted with West African foods at these stalls, and free people of colour and male slave ganhadeiros (day labourers or pieceworkers) renewed their taste of home, waiting for itinerant day labour (Graham 2010, 99). One of my respondents (39 years old, interviewed in Itaparica, 2009) characterized the ubiquity of the acarajé vendors when he said, “O cheiro da Bahia é dendê; dendê quente (Salvador’s perfume is boiling palm oil).”

Dorival Caymmi’s “A Preta do Acarajé” names, locates, and laments for the lonely Bahian creole priestess/street vendor, and is arguably the most famous song within this genre. I will analyze it along with two songs popularized by Carmen Miranda. First I offer an excerpt from Antônio André de Sá Filho’s “Bahiana do Tabuleiro,” followed by Ari Barroso’s hit, “No Tabuleiro da Baiana.” Carmen Miranda (CM) and Luiz Rui Barbosa (LB) sing this song in a call-and-response style:

“Bahian Woman Vendor’s Table”

I am the Bahian woman [street vendor] with a wooden display table for my wares.

With my hands on my hips, I’m swaying my body to see [to flirt with] Massa.

Oh! I place on my board ‘illusory’ snacks.[I am] A delicacy made of heart-shaped kisses.And I have stopped selling coconut candies, vatapá and peanuts.Today I only sell caresses, that you [Massa] will like.For any one who would like to buy love, I will sell love that

once was mine,Beautiful, beautiful like pretty flowers and as false as a Jew. (Filho 1937)15


“The Display Table of the Bahian Woman”

LB: On her display table the Bahian woman street vendor has …

CM: Vatapá, hey caruru, munguzá, she has umbú for Massa.LB: If I ask, will you give me?CM: I will give you …LB: Your love, for your plantation mistress?CM: The heart of a Bahian woman has:LB: Seduction, magic/macumba, illusion, Candomblé.CM: For you.LB: I swear by Jesus, the Master/Lord of Bonfim.16 I want

you, little Bahian woman, all of you for me.CM: Yes, but afterwards, what will become of us? Your love

is quite fleeting, misleading/deceitful. LB: All that I have done, was done after a spell was cast [on

me] … To be happy. I coupled my rags [paltry posses-sions] with yours [set up housekeeping].

CM: Yes, but afterwards you will create more illusions. It is the heart who governs love [not illusions].

(Barroso, Barbosa, and Miranda 1935–1941; see also Sansi-Roca 2005)

Traditionally the Bahian vendors were Candomblé priestesses in training. Beyond the literal translation that sensualizes and Afri-canizes this street vendor, reference is made to her clairvoyant capa-bilities. One skill of a Candomblé priestess is her ability to divine the future. She communicates with her deities by throwing 16 cowries. Divination and communication with deities or the deceased inherent to Candomblé practice is often construed as conjure magic, idolatry, and communion with the devil (Moura 2004).

Miranda’s character, a black, implied-creole Baiana street ven-dor, turns her food cart into a mobile outlet for sexual procurement. her body undulates and sways to entreat her customers to consume her wares and her body. Encouraging flirtation, she offers bolinhos da ilusão (illusory cookies) that concurrently imply her engagement with macumba, the legendary magic of Brazil’s Afro religious cults. She lists her wares: cocada (coconut candies), amendoim (peanuts),


and vatapá (real food with gustatory appeal). Yet she has stopped selling foodstuffs in order to sell her actual body as a consumable object of desire. The bawdy humour expresses the Baiana’s parodic victory over her fear of reducing her flesh to a commodity akin to her cocoada, amendoim, and vatapá. Ultimately everything is subject to double entendre: pretty and false. her culinary skill, a binary for her carnal abilities, is presented as a site of consensual pleasure. her pleasure is in the performance, not in the act. In the second song, No Tabuleiro da Baiana, Miranda as Baiana attempts to counter Bar-bosa’s taunts. She questions his fidelity and honesty. he finishes her sentences delimiting the Baiana’s potential to have a genuine heart, by asserting qualities of sedução, canjerê, ilusão, and candomblé (seduc-tion, magic, illusion, and Candomblé) and implications of heathenism (hoge 1983; Bakhtin 1981, 369).

Another hit song by Caymmi, “O Que é Que A Baiana Tem?”, was also popularized by Miranda on disc and in film. It defined a typology of the ubiquitous, indefinable Bahian woman, of African descent—creolized via miscegenation, sensuous yet pious, consti-tuted of a fluid identity that vacillates between vamp and religious adept. By her own description she possesses all of the adornments of seduction and access to the Church of Bonfim in Salvador. Bonfim, an iconic location of Afro-Catholic practice, is syncretized with the supreme Candomblé deity, Oxalá, a trope for the Judeo-Christian God. The Lavagem of Bonfim, the washing of the church steps by Baianas, introduced a West African Candomblé ritual to the church. The song alludes to the fact that a Igreja de Bonfim (the church of Bonfim) locked its doors, barring entry by the Baianas and citizens participating in this carnivalesque rite (Bakhtin 1968, 81–96; Bakhtin 1984, 79; Sansi-Roca 2005).

“What Is It That a Bahian Woman has?”

Does she have a silken torso? She’s got it.Does she have a golden earring? She’s got it.Does she have a starched skirt? She’s got it.Does she have African robes? She’s got them.Look at how well she shakes it! …


Only those who go to Bonfim have it …What is it that a Bahian woman has? (repeat twice)Only those who go to Bonfim have it ...A golden rosary, and the proper pendantAy-i, who has no festival jewelry, cannot go to BonfimWhat is it that a Bahian woman has? (repeat twice)hey, whoever has no festival jewelry, cannot go to Bonfim

(repeat 6 times)(Caymmi and Miranda 1939)

Dorival Caymmi, one of the fathers of the Brazilian songbook, reframes Appadurai’s thesis (1988) that cookbooks contributed to the development of a national cuisine, since cookbooks possess the ability to frame and forecast national identity by inscribing knowledge and cultural practice in a discursive text not as cookbook but in a song text, such as “Vatapá.” Vatapá is commonly used as a condiment in the ubiquitous street food of Bahia. Acarajé (fritters made from black-eyed peas) are considered a West African retention food consumed wherever West Africans have lived. Vatapá and acarajé are also funda-mental preparations of the aforementioned Comida de Santo (Carney 2011, 33, 67–69, 124–125; Bascom 1951).

An ad hoc recipe is embedded in the song. The nêga Baiana (black Baiana woman) functions as a marker of regional cultural iden-tity as equally as Caymmi’s musical rhythms do. The lyrics include the line “Procure uma nêga, ô que saiba mexer” (Find a black Baiana woman, one who knows how to mix it). To mix or stir is a standard culinary procedure. By choosing the verb mexer (to mix), instead of cozinhar (to cook), her culinary ability can be seen as intuitive as op-posed to being formally trained. The nêga Baiana can be viewed as an inspired naif. In this instance, finding or “procuring” the black woman and “mixing”—integrating/conjoining—has an implicit sexual tone. Intimacy and sex are reiterated via the instruction to add incremental mouthfuls of ingredients: “Bota castanha de caju, um bocadinho mais” (add cashews, add a little mouthful more). Cooking involves tasting to adjust the flavours of a dish. The addition of cashews reads as a standard recipe direction, but adding ingredients by the mouthful does not. The accompanying video displays two people dancing inti-mately. To know your partner is to understand how their body moves


and responds to yours. This level of intimacy is not inherent to the relationship of cooks navigating the space of a kitchen workplace. The song and video’s dialogistic mediation is inherently contradictory.

The process of mixing as a symbol for a sexual act and the com-bining of disparate products into a homogeneous mixture, creating the vatapá puree, both connote mestiçagem (the mixing of races) and the creolization of cultures. By virtue of its ingredients, vatapá the dish, and thus the song, acknowledges and condones the theory associated with Gilberto Freyre, of a creolized racial democracy constituted by successive generations of African, Indigenous, and Portuguese couplings.17 Reflecting the Columbian Exchange, vatapá’s ingredi-ents include stale European wheat bread, Indigenous peanuts and cashews, West African dendê (palm oil), coconuts, pimenta da costa (hot peppers from the Mina coast of the Gulf of Guinea), smoked and dried shrimp (a derivation of the traditional dried or smoked fish condiments inherent in West African cookery), ginger (a legacy of colonial trading) and onion (Carney 2011, 24, 55, 97–98, 144, 193; Palmíe 2006; Martínez-Echazábal 1998).

The song “Vatapá” illustrates how a simple nutty puree positions Afro-Brazilian food in the structure and syntax of the language of popular culture and music.

“Vatapá”

Who would like vatapá, ô? What do you look for to make it?First the flourThen the palm oil Find a nêga Bahia [black Bahian woman] ôWho’ll know how to mix it [cook, stir, sex; she will transform

you] Who’ll know how to mix it Who’ll know how to mix it Add some cashew A [little mouthful] little bit more Malagueta chiliesA [little mouthful] little bit morePeanuts, shrimp, grate coconut


It’s time to bruise it [pound it in a mortar & pestle][Now] salt, ginger and onion, yayaIt’s time to add seasoning

Don’t stop stirring it, o!It’s time to get it rightPut the pot on the fireDon’t let it burnIf you’ve got 10,000 reis, or a black woman, o!You can make vatapáYou can make vatapáWhat a great vatapá [you will make](Caymmi and Anjos do Inferno 1942; translation by author)

The gustatory aspect of food, here vatapá, has an inherent sen-suality linked to ingestion and the pleasures of consumption. The heteroglossia produced by the multi-layered meanings and the global circuits of connectivity generated by vatapá create an inability to finalize the dish and anchor West African identity within Brazilian popular discourse.18 Implicitly the unctuous puree, vatapá, links diaspora cultures by creolizing cuisines and systems of knowledge, marking Afro-Brazilian identity. Yet explicitly it becomes sensuous, albeit salacious, thus mythologizing Afro-Brazilian identity. Superfi-cially vatapá and Afro-Brazilian identity resonate as a sexual binary. Reinforcing sex through cooking suggests that the cook has power not simply to stimulate but also to seduce the diner. As cuisine reinforces sex it obscures the implicit skill associated with culinary adepts, here nêga Baianas. The function of these dishes as emblems of sacred Bahian cuisine is wholly obscured. The bawdy characterization also unintentionally opens a door for regressive interpretations of gender and West African/Afro-Brazilian identity (Bakhtin 1968; Telles 2004).

The video and film productions of “A Preta do Acarajé” (The Black Bean Fritter Vendor), featuring Carmen Miranda, 1939, and Gal Costa, 1979, reference different aspects of Afro-Brazilian identity. In each version the song begins as a dirge, introducing an upbeat samba rhythm by the second chorus. Where Miranda straddles West Africa and Brazil, Costa firmly represents the branded imaginary marketed by Bahiatursa (Caymmi and Miranda 1940; Costa 2005):


Ten o’clock at nightOn a deserted street The black [woman] street vendorSounds a lamentThere is abará!In her wooden bowlShe has an aromatic sauceWith spicy peppers from the coastThe acarajé is colouredhey you there, come look.Come and bless themThey are hot (freshly fried)The whole world loves acarajé.(Translation by author)

Caymmi’s composition also delineates the racial identity, working class position, culinary expertise, entrepreneurship and patrimony of the song’s protagonist. The Black Bean Fritter Vendor simultaneously inhabits Brazil and West Africa. her culinary ingredients—pimenta da costa—and prepared dishes—abará and acarajé—are the embodi-ment of her West African heritage and allude to her relationship to Candomblé.19 She works tirelessly late into the night, comforted by the fact that everyone—the whole world—loves acarajé. She tells her prospective clientele that the fritters are coloured, reddened from frying in dendê, palm oil. Dendê, a ubiquitous ingredient in Bahian cuisine, is an essential ingredient of Comida de Santo. her gamela (carved wooden bowl) is made from the tropical gameleira or Iroko tree of the Ficus genus, common to West Africa and Brazil. Iroko, a giant ficus, is a sacred tree and an orixá in Candomblé cosmology.20 Arjun Appadurai defined interconnected transnational circuits and networks of community as ethnoscapes (1996). These distinct lo-calities are constituted as a unity by the initiation of a deliberate set of actions manifest by a social group. Therefore the Afro-Brazilian-Candomblé ethnoscape has the ability to create a synergistic West African diaspora global spiritual network as a mediated virtual entity.

The subtle reference to Iroko via the gamela implicitly integrates the sacred into the text. her molho cheiroso (aromatic hot sauce) fore-casts the profane aspect of her commercial enterprise. Sacred acarajé


and abará served in ceremony are served without any sauce. Serving the sauce on the side allows her to potentially serve both communi-ties. These references in “A Preta do Acarajé” affirm the ethnoscape and the absent presence of Candomblé practice and West African identity. Oblique attributions to deities, praise poetry, Afro-Brazilian commensal behaviours, and class and racial positions implicitly signal identity not by what is said, but by what is left out.

Food and consumption are thus inherently agentive. The ques-tion “What’s for dinner?” addresses interventions of choice, access, ability, time, status, and pleasure. Foodways as a lingua franca of this ethnoscape has the potential to concurrently speak overtly as a dis-seminating tool of identity and exist as a simple nutritive act. Food and foodways’ evolution from a mundane position, á table, into an inter-medium for racial, gender, and political positionality in musi-cal compositions is dynamic, provocative, and potentially dangerous (Appadurai 1996, 48; Boyer 2007, 73; MacDougall 1987, 54; Maz-zarella 2004).

If food is ascribed agency, a capacity to produce an effect or result beyond its nutritive capacity to sustain life, and ideas of food move from the table to the text and tune, then food can be seen to be dialogic. The song lyrics reflect layers of meaning within the local and national consciousness of Brazilian identity. Circulation of the ideas and the images via public consumption—on radio, on CDs, at concerts, or, when adopted by a populace and sung publicly as re-gional/national explicit anthem-text and implicit subtext—amplifies its narrative and metaphors. The ubiquitous presence of spirituality in Bahian culture is marked by its history of suppression by the state and sensational presentation by the media. here typically innocent feijões (beans) become a clarion for power or its lack and an inference of spirituality to the cognoscenti or the curious. These inter-medium texts assert a specific identity politics to local and regional reception networks that are always already conversant in the norms of Bahian and/or Candomblé cultural practice. The texts provide an empower-ment tool for a black majority population that wields minor political power. Mediatization and inter-medium communication can thus cre-ate or open boundaries and establish different dialogic communication to the hierarchies of power (Boyer 2007; Fraser 1990; MacDougall 1987; Tomaselli 2002; MercoPress 2009).


ConclusionThis article’s title, “Can you take a picture of the wind?”—a con-versational excerpt between Candomblé initiate Luciano and Can-domblé scholar Lisa Earl Castillo—outlines the orthodoxy directing congregants and visitors to refrain from photographing or recording Candomblé initiates in trance during their religious ceremonies.

An orixá is a state, a moment, a sublimation. What you should take away [from the experience of seeing it] is its essence, what it transmitted to you … And what is the orixá? The orixá is wind, a spirit, an essence. It can’t be photographed! And I think that to try to take that kind of photograph is invasive. (Castillo 2009, 18–19)

Audience reception of an unrecorded event involves the percep-tion of the moment and the development of a context for cognitive understanding of what has transpired. Contextualizing an unfamiliar event/experience via association and comparison to the familiar attempts to construct a coherent understanding of the experience. If this dialogism is freighted with ambiguities, the consumption of the experience is qualified by uncertainty. Establishing a common language through which media can be consumed, understood, and shared presumes a means of comprehension across different socio-cultural orientations. A strength of the inter-medium is the joining of the unfamiliar with the familiar for a more nuanced reception of the experience (halbwachs and Coser 1992, 168–170; Strecker 1997).

Candomblé reflects a state of being and a relationship to place. The place is geographic, representing the locale for worship, a rela-tionship to land and the spirits embodied therein. Place is also a site of identity production for the Afro-Brazilian diasporic community and their adherents. Candomblé ceremonies engage a liminal state of consciousness experienced and perceived by the practitioner/sup-plicant and audience/congregants. Ideally the context for the experi-ence and the implication of the state of being while in trance and in communication with given deities is inherent in the observation of the ceremony by the congregants and guests. Transposing that experience into the “poetry” of song lyrics, the subjectivities of video produc-


tion or other forms of media open the reception, distribution, and consumption of the experience that is inherently personal, intimate, and concurrently internalized and externalized for the supplicant. Thus photographing the wind—if at all possible—is circumspect and inherently a question of subjective perception.

Within the mediated Afro-Brazilian-Candomblé ethnoscape, several of the aforementioned songs objectify women and reflexively broadcast coded messages about Candomblé ritual practice and sali-ent aspects of Afro-Brazilian identity. The production and reception of Afro-Brazilian identity as an expression of media and inter-medium communication across platforms and communities produced by local/regional actors of that social group as well as national/international/tourist projects complicate the conundrum of identity. Candomblé is affirmed as an absent presence in local and transnational media circuits by references to the components of the ceremonies, the cos-mology of the practice, and the blunt inference of Baianas as adepts of macumba (magic or witchcraft). While a narrow image of women and Candomblé is developed in the musical compositions, a dialogue that includes Candomblé practice and women also surfaced through this music. The role of women, their enskilment, and their contribu-tions to Bahian culture are broadcast across local, regional, national, and international networks. Arguments exist for and against the myth-making associated with Candomblé initiates and their ritual practice referenced in the songs.

Consumption of media inherently carries a mandate to the con-sumer to be conscious and critically read the visual and narrative texts that they are consuming. The resonance of the mediated messages illustrates the hazards and ramifications of mythologizing identity. Intermediary entities that work between the cultural producers and media consumers possess the power to alter the depiction, promotion, and dissemination of media content. The mediatized public sphere grows exponentially, increasingly exposing more and more diverse globalized publics to productions of new cultural media. The devel-opment of Bahian branded identity, typified by the relationship be-tween Antonio Carlos Magalhães’ statehouse and his family’s media oligarchy, illustrates the power and danger of media circuits on the evolution, mis/interpretation, and/or preservation of cultural identity (hjarvard 2008, 2011; MacDougall 1987, 2006).


Food has been shown to be a useful, apparently harmless meta-phor and dynamic tool that can have offensive repercussions for communicating identity. Marketed images of food and eating il-lustrate how ordinary consumer goods stand in for family, love, and domestic bliss. Issues of personal, gendered, and collective power, racial and sexual stereotypes are rampant. Food and consumption themes provide simple equations for reductive constructions of black, female, and spiritual identity. The production and consump-tion of food always occupies the confluence of race, gender, politics, and religion. Reducing Carmen Miranda to A Nêga Baiana, A Preta de Acarajé, or “the lady with the Tutti-Frutti hat” denies her and them—the Baianas—their personhood. We consume the image and caricature without fore- or afterthought. Successive reductivist pos-tures towards Baianas, Afro-Brazilians, Latinas, Candomblé adepts, and so forth are initiated and fed. Little to no regard is made for the true gifts, skills, and knowledge that they possess. The cumulative effect of inter-medium outputs can be simultaneously productive and derivative. We cannot photograph nor capture the wind, although we can see the path it has wrought, respect it, and accept our inability to contain it.

Notes1 The song “Calicé,” launched at the height of the ditadura, is a homophone

for calicé (chalice) and cala-se (shut up). Sung in duet to mask the dialogis-tic double entrendre alluding to the denunciation of Christ and the silencing of the nation by the dictatorship—Pai afasta de mim esse calicé (Father, take this chalice away from me), Pai afasta de mim e se cala-se (Father, go away and shut up)—it was immediately banned.

2 The Brazilian Revolution ended the Old Republic in 1930, deposing the president and abrogating the former constitution, thus establishing a pro-visional government. Getulio Vargas took part in organizing the coup that installed a new congress and constitutional reforms. In 1937 he initiated a dictatorship called Estado Novo, shutting down Congress and assuming authoritarian rule. The corporate-based authoritarian regime lasted until 1945. A re-democratization movement began in 1946 and deposed Vargas, initiating the Republic of 1946 and the end of the Vargas era.

3 Terreiro, literally defined as a yard, generally refers to the physical tem-ple space of worship. In actuality a Candomblé terreiro requires access to forest, free-running fresh water, and a water source such as a spring. Thus


the structure sits as a “terrace” on the land where the deities, seen as ele-ments of nature, wind, sweet and salt water, forest, leaves, sacred trees, etc., dwell.

4 Carnivalesque is the ability for the masses—configured as the subaltern, working, and/or underclasses—to speak to the upper classes, the elites, the clergy, and governing authorities through the subterfuge, costuming, masking and absurd/surreal behaviours associated with Carnival.

5 These ceremonies and festivals have occurred in homes, street proces-sions, school presentations, cultural events, Catholic churches, Candomblé temples, and on the property of the Catholic Church, both with and without the sanction of the religious authorities.

6 Salvador was cited by anthropologist Ruth Landes as “Negro Rome” in 1940, and in the Salvador daily newspaper, A Tarde, on 11 November 2005.

7 Rede Bahia/Rede Globo owns and operates media businesses throughout northeastern Brazil. The corporate conglomerate has six companies who run divisions in electronic and print media, media content development, six television stations, three radio stations, Internet portals, video production, and a construction company (RedeBahia 2012).

8 “Prayers said over Christian-consecrated stone and written in sacrificial blood suggest a combination of efficacies arising out of the colonial en-counter. Blood is an important element in many traditional African cultures for the imbuing and revitalization of the life force [axé] or ‘the power-to-make things happen’” (harding 2000, 31).

9 Egungun cults honour and worship orixá through their departed ancestors. They believe that the dead can come back and communicate with the temple community. Their 10- to 12-hour-long ceremonies are few and far between. Itaparica Island is the home to most Egungun cults in Bahia.

10 Candomblé cosmology defines each individual as having three deities assigned to them at birth that control their head, lead them forward, or protect them from behind. Omulu is the orixá associated with illness and communicable diseases. Consequently he instills charity and humility, and protects the helpless.

11 The deity Exu is the guardian of the crossroads. he is the first deity who has to be fed in Candomblé ceremonies, thus allowing pathways to open. Two of the main offerings for Exu are muídos (chicken giblets: heart, liver, and gizzards) and beef liver. The preparation process echoes the jogo de cabidela that Alva was raised on, initiating dialogism between the sacred and profane cuisines of Bahia.

12 Ebômi or Egbômis have been initiated and served a minimum of seven years in a terreiro. They work as caregivers to those supplicants who em-body the orixás and do not become embodied themselves.

13 “Pai de Santo” is a title for a male priest of Candomblé.


14 The lyrics say “Todo dia eu só penso em poder parar/Meio dia eu só penso em dizer não. Depois penso na vida pra levar/E me calo com a boca de feijão” (All day I only think about when will I be able to stop/Noon I only think of saying no. Then I think in life is for the taking/And then I shut up with my mouth full of beans) (Buarque 1988).

15 A reference to Ibero-Catholic historic anti-Semitism that led to expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula and forced emigration to Goa, India, northeastern Brazil, and other foreign ports to establish Portuguese strongholds. The noun judeu relates to the verb judear/judiar: não judea a mim, não me faça sofrer (don’t be a Judas/Jew to me, don’t make me suffer). “To be a Judas/Jewish” mean to mistreat, to inflict cruel or false behaviour, such as Jews were alleged to have inflicted on Catholic populace (Birnbaum 1971; Canny and Pagden 1989, 19 and 84; Sheinin and Barr 1996, 128–129).

16 Lord of Bonfim, the saint of the church of the good end (spelled as Bom-fim or Bonfim), is a metaphor for God. Concurrently Bonfim is a syncretic reference to the supreme Candomblé orixá: Oxalá.

17 This theory that flattens and democratizes Brazilian racial divisions is as-sociated with Gilberto Freyre, but was coined by Arthur Ramos in 1941 and later included in an article written by Roger Bastide in 1944. Both men seem to have adopted and adapted Freyre’s earlier phrase, “social democracy.” In a 1937 lecture Freyre identified the mixing of Portuguese and Luso-descendant cultures, races, and social classes as the greatest contribution that Luso-Brazilian civilization could make to humanity. In comparison to the United States’ “one drop rule,” Brazil had long appeared to be progressive in its racial policies. Frederick Douglass cited Brazil as a model for the US to emulate. Unfortunately, as well-meaning as Freyre was in this theorization, the actual premise is fraught with subtle and overt distinctions and disjunctures regarding racial divisions, representation, and agency (Freyre, cited in Guimarães 2006).

18 This Bakhtinian concept argues that the individual self is not finalized, completely understood, known, or able to be labelled. Actual and potential change as a fundamental aspect of the life experience precludes society’s ability to concretize the individual self. Therefore a person’s essence is never fully revealed to the world. The idea of the human soul is inherently implicated as a possible change agent (Bakhtin 1984).

19 Pimenta da costa are hot peppers imported from A Costa da Mina (the Coast of the Mine), which corresponds to that portion of the Gulf of Guinea coastline extending east from Elmina, or Ghana’s Castelo de São Jorge da Mina (St. George’s Castle of the Mine), the first European trading post and oldest building in Africa south of the Sahara, through the Gold and Slave Coasts to Benin, Nigeria, and Togo.


20 Iroko, also known as Tempo by some Candomblé cults, is a male deity that symbolizes ancestry. One of Iroko’s oríkì (praise poetry) states that a woodcarver had to provide food offerings to secure the return of his son who had been turned into a bird when the divinity was not appeased. Iroko provides to the community that brings food offerings to him.

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WE ARE WHAT WE NOW EAT: FOOD AND iDENTiTY iN THE CuBAN DiAsPORA

iVáN DARiAs ALFONsOBirkbeck, University of London

Abstract. Based on a series of qualitative interviews, this article discusses the impact of food and food practices on the Cuban diaspora in London by com-menting on the ways in which food is used to construct notions of identity and nation. It is argued that food customs and traditions are revised and contextual-ized after a migratory experience. In diaspora, food practices are reconfigured; Cuban emigrants dismiss previously learned notions of Cuban food deemed essentialist and exclusive. This reconfiguration, along with their re-creation of food practices, helps them challenge previously learned personal accounts of cultural identity.Résumé. Cet article trait de l’impact de la nourriture et des pratiques des nourritures de la diaspora Cubaine à Londres en commentant sur les maniè-res dont la nourriture est utilisée pour construire des notions d’identité et de nation. On y soutient que les habitudes et traditions alimentaires sont révisées et contextualisées après une expérience migratoire. Dans la diaspora, les habi-tudes alimentaires sont reconfigurées, les émigrants cubains abandonnent tout d’abord les notions apprises de nourriture Cubaine considérée existentialiste et exclusive. Ceci, tout au long de leur recréation des pratiques alimentaires, les aide à défier comptes auparavant appris d’identité nationale. Cet article est tiré d’une série d’entretiens qualitatifs avec des membres de la diaspora Cubaine à Londres.


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introductionAmong the definitions of national culture given by Fernando Ortiz (1939) was the word ajiaco, a traditional stew found in Cuban cuisine. his metaphor alludes to the history of the country, acknowledging the role that the Spanish, African, and Chinese cultures had played in developing national identity. It also allows for a vivid understand-ing of Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, in the sense that ajiaco was originally a native dish, which was adopted by Spanish settlers and later by slaves, who also contributed with their own ingredients. Ajiaco is thus uniquely Cuban.

Until 1959 there was an accepted notion of what Cuban food meant, although this food showcased differences along racist and se-lective lines.1 As with most other facets of everyday life, food felt the impact of the Revolution. In the early years of the new government, food became scarce due to increasing demand as a consequence of both the higher purchasing power of the population and low productivity resulting from changes in the country’s agriculture, land ownership, and livestock (Alvarez 2004). This led to the rationing of food and the distribution of a quotas booklet (libreta) in 1962 (Benjamin et al. 1986). The booklet was supposed to guarantee the caloric and protein intake of the population, but it was conceived rather optimistically. For example, Prime Minister Fidel Castro predicted in 1965 that food rationing would end the following year; however, the system contin-ues today (Benjamin et al. 1986). When socialism was established in the country, issues of food scarcity and food security became avenues to express either support for or criticism of the Revolution (Alvarez 2004). While opponents criticized a system incapable of maintaining a constant level of food production and provision, supporters backed the booklet as a way to provide regular supplies to households. In any case, the distribution system has remained centralized and guided by state-defined nutritional needs. Over the years, food production has been valued more in terms of calories and levels of nutrition than in satisfying taste and local preferences (Wilson 2009).

Within the bounds of the family, the lack of food and cooking in-gredients not only influenced the ability to prepare traditional Cuban recipes but also affected the way Cubans perceived food as a marker of identity. In contrast, Cuban-Americans, for whom food scarcity

Alfonso / Food and Identity in the Cuban Diaspora 175

did not become an issue, were in a better position to cook traditional food. however, diasporic food practices did not overcome the racial prejudices of 1950s Cuba. In both Cuba and abroad, Cubans could not remain immune to different stimuli that influenced the prepara-tion of traditional meals. Within Cuba, cooking became a forum of improvisation based on the availability of ingredients; in the United States, traditional recipes also depended on the ingredients available, but gradually became a mixture of Cuban elements and other ingredi-ents from US, Latin American, or Caribbean cuisine. As a result, cities such as Miami experienced the emergence of a New Cuban Cuisine, characterized by refined and stylish dishes that illustrated the notion of what was Cuban in the United States, as seen through the eyes of a visitor from the island (Fowler 2002, 107).

The emergence of the Cuban diaspora in London can be traced back to the mid-1990s.2 The Cuban authorities had relaxed some of their travel restrictions, and Cuban nationals were allowed to visit other countries. Those who came to the UK fit into a more “selective” emigration plan (Ajá Díaz 2002; 2010): they chose not to reside in the United States. Recent studies on Cuban émigrés outside the United States (Wimmer 2001; Charon Cardona 2004; Berg 2007, 2009, 2011; Ackerman 2007; Duque 2007; Sánchez Fuarros 2008) coincide in portraying an “invisible” émigré community still very much influ-enced by the relationship with the homeland and the possibilities of travelling back and forth. According to this research, the decision to emigrate responds to a selective way of thinking that prioritizes the choice of migrating to other destinations over the United States.

Other research examines Cubans abroad by focusing on specific elements that highlight differences with the Cuban-American com-munity. For example, Eurídice Charon Cardona (2004) observed the food practices of Cubans in Australia to conclude that food is used to re-create the national taste, which also influences the emigrants’ sense of identity. The experience of being Cuban is generally achieved in Australia in domestic settings rather than in more public spaces, which is more a feature of Cubans in Miami. Mette Berg (2011) has expanded upon the reasons many migrants put forward when choosing Spain as their final destination. She uses the concept of diasporic generations and divides them into the Exiles, the Children of the Revolution, and the Migrants, with the last two sharing many


similarities in the sense that they migrated in the 1990s, having lived most of their lives in revolutionary Cuba. According to Berg (2011), the decision to settle in Spain implied taking distance from territo-rially-based nationalism that existed both on the island and among Cuban-American exiles (2011, 98). however, given the complicated nature of Cuba’s migratory laws, settling in a country other than the USA appears to be easier. In Ex-Generación (Vidal Alejandro 2008), a recent documentary about Cubans in Mexico, for instance, many interviewees admit they just planned to leave Cuba without paying much attention to the country of destination. however, unlike some of their compatriots who settle on American soil, Cuban-Londoners had to emigrate through legal channels. Most of them (including the participants recruited for this study) arrived after marrying British or Western European citizens. Others came for academic purposes, cultural exchange trips, or sport-related events.

Unlike other emigrants from the territories historically connected to the British Empire, Cubans who moved to Britain chose a country that had no important or historical links with their homeland. While the choice of the UK may have been circumstantial, it is difficult to escape London’s importance as one of the most multicultural cities of the world. The United Kingdom represents a more challenging setting for Cubans than,say, the United States, where a sustained welcom-ing policy has benefited the Cuban diaspora over any other ethnic group. In London, being Cuban is not an important distinction. The geographical distance between the two countries also differentiates the migratory experience, especially in terms of class, and educational or professional backgrounds. Those Cubans choosing the United Kingdom as a final destination might fit into the generalizations sug-gested by Castles and Miller (1993), who argue that during the 1990s migrants were more frequently people of intermediate social status.

Food, identity, and DiasporaDiaspora is a space where food practices can acquire power to help migrants reinforce their notions of identity and to contest previously learned notions about themselves. It is true, however, that much of the research conducted in the field shows that immigrant and ethnic minorities try to maintain their own cooking and eating habits as long


as possible, even against strong pressure to change them (Mennell, Murcott, and Van Otterloo 1992). In their study of Bangladeshis in East London, Nasima Mannan and Barbara Boucher (2002) have demonstrated that ethnic food is maintained in the diaspora com-munity, even when eating patterns and foodstuffs are found to be the cause of specific health conditions such as diabetes and bowel cancer.

The impact of diaspora on food habits and traditions can be ex-amined as part of the transnational flows that link homelands and host countries. Influences are diverse and do not always follow a particular trajectory. Richard Wilk (1999) uses the example of Be-lizean food as a cultural construction that was transnational in its origin. he claims that Belizean cuisine is a concept almost entirely invented outside Belize (Wilk 1999, 253). Diasporic individuals had opened ethnic Belizean restaurants in the United States long before the Central American nation achieved independence in 1981. These entrepreneurs returned to Belize in the early 1990s to operate the first self-proclaimed Belizean restaurants. In this case, notions of an authentic national food were forged outside the homeland, but were later incorporated as part of the “local” tradition. As Wilk points out, the concept of Belizean culture lost its associations with political rhetoric and was appropriated by the majority of the country’s popu-lation (246).

Food in diaspora is one of the main elements that influence the construction of space. Sally Chang (2002) examines Chinese restau-rants to illustrate how ethnic groups decorate social places, such as restaurants, with homeland artifacts and decorations to attract other co-ethnic migrants. Chinese restaurateurs, according to Chang, exploit the ethnic differences of the community by offering catering in typi-cal Chinese surroundings where Chinese music, décor, and staff are supported with cultural elements such as lion dances and martial arts demonstrations (175). Patria Roman-Velazquez (1999) has described how Latin Americans in London (mainly Colombians) utilize spaces and “ethnicize” them for a public display of ethnic identity. Similar processes are also acknowledged by Jessica Meyers (2006) when she explores the way the Eden Centre shopping complex in Washing-ton, DC, promotes a public representation of Vietnamese-American identity. She claims that the place appeals mainly to a Vietnamese diaspora that desires a connection to their homeland, which supports


their subject construction. however, the public consumption of ethnic food cannot overshadow the private space, the domestic setting. Anne Kershen (2002) claims that migrants reserve their dietary culture for their private space. According to her, “it is in the private sphere that the eating and ceremony of ethnic diet enables the retention of links with, and memories of, kith, kin and homelands left behind” (7). In other words, the private sphere provides the space for a comfortable display of the cultural identity.

In this article, I use the notion of cultural/national identity that, according to Stuart hall, are those aspects of our identities that arise from our “belonging” to distinctive ethnic, racial, linguistic, and, above all, national cultures (1992, 274). I aim to show how identity construction develops in diaspora, indicating the role national culture plays as one of the principal sources of cultural identity. The term “cultural/national identity” facilitates an understanding of identity formation outside the homeland and a characterization of diaspora as a lived experience. Diasporic humans are likely to be understood as nationals of a distant homeland but also as social actors of a present and experienced host society. They are defined by the interactions pro-duced in diasporic spaces and, particularly, in a hyper-diverse setting such as London. however, the participants in this study are analyzed as ethnic nationals, as well as individuals; therefore, my emphasis is on their identity with regard to national culture.

I use hall’s conceptualization of a post-modern identity because of its parallels with the phenomenon of human dispersal. hall postu-lates the decentring of national cultures as a consequence of globaliza-tion and hints at global particularities to define identity (1992, 277). Diasporas exemplify the presumed dislocation that migrants undergo when they realize that the ancestral homeland has lost its dominance in influencing their notions of belonging. Diaspora also becomes the perfect setting for the interplay of identities, where migrants are presented with a variety of possible identities, any of which they can identify with.

Cuban Food identityAlthough periods of food scarcity have been common since 1959, Cubans did not radically change their food habits with the Revolution.


Research conducted by the Centre of Anthropology of the University of havana shows that, when comparing data obtained in 1958 and in 1988, Cubans in both periods considered rice, beans, viandas (tu-bers such as potatoes, taros, yams, and sweet potatoes), and meat as the essentials in the national diet (Núñez González 1999). What did change were certain social practices related to food. For example, dinner emerged as the most important occasion in the family milieu for gathering around the table and sharing the best dishes. As Cuban scholar Mayda Álvarez Suárez notes, in the 1990s the family kept its importance as one of the main areas of daily life (1997, 112). It was in the family domain where the daily consumption of food would be valued and rewarded, but little research has been carried out in this field to support conclusive arguments.

Food practices also help to illustrate Cuban society in terms of the gendered division of labour. Kitchens have remained a woman’s domain. Before the Revolution, kitchens could tell stories of class and power, since middle-class women generally employed domestic workers who were overwhelmingly non-white (Vera, Rosendahl, and Pereira 1998; Folch 2008). After 1959 women were encour-aged to leave the house and look for paid jobs. Working women were given social benefits such as child-care facilities; however, attitudes toward domestic work followed the same pattern of ear-lier decades (Rosendahl 1997). Conducting ethnographic research in Cuba, Isabel holgado Fernández (2001) concludes that working women weakened the hegemonic role of Cuban men as providers of the family income. While this contributed to a redefinition of social roles, it did little to change the traditional division of labour within the domestic setting (2001, 178). During and after the Special Pe-riod (Período Especial) of deprivation in the 1990s—caused by the collapse of the socialist bloc, which provided 80% of Cuban foreign trade and imports—women “returned” to their kitchens (Pertierra 2008). Food preparation became a key issue in asserting a gender identity, since Cuban women were forced to inventar (invent) and resolver (solve), especially after the tenth day of each month when the subsidized quota disappeared from the family cupboard (hol-gado Fernández 2001).

Much has been written about the representation of the reality of Cuban food in literature during the economic crisis. In his study of


the works of Cuban writers Leonardo Padura and Senel Paz, Stephen Wilkinson has shown how passages referring to food and drink in the texts are not only imbued with notions of guilt and illegality but also with ideas of Cubanness (1998, 2). In the early 1990s the selling of food at the retail level dwindled noticeably, as the agricultural system and its infrastructure proved ineffective in bringing minimal supplies to the Cuban table. Therefore, the only way of providing sufficient food was through the underground market or other illegal sources. The act of preparing, consuming, and enjoying food was limited to behind the closed doors of the family kitchen, creating a kind of se-cret place not related to the outside world because it did not operate according to legal norms.

The most acute years of the Special Period (1992–94), defined by Cuban economists as “the survival stage,” came as a shock because of its visible effects in human suffering and the destruction of social capital (Valdés Paz 2005, 104). A weakened state could not provide for many of the social programs hailed as revolutionary achieve-ments in the past. Food production and distribution suffered to the point of scarcity of traditional staples of the Cuban diet such as rice and beans. In the popular imaginary, food associations overtook the most dramatic narratives of the period, a story that up until recently had not been told.3 This situation changed slightly when the Cuban government introduced a package of economic reforms that included the legalization of the US dollar. Cubans who owned hard currency could now access the special markets and stores that were created to sell many sought-after items and food. The same package included the creation of small private enterprises, many of which were restau-rants and food-preparation facilities. The privately owned restaurants, popularly known as paladares, made it possible to rediscover many traditional dishes of Cuban cuisine. The boom in paladares features distinctively amongst Raúl Castro’s recent economic reforms, since they have sprung up in the majority of Cuban cities and towns; in many cases, they rivalled state-owned establishments, even many that catered only to international tourists.

In studying the Cuban diaspora it is worth considering the way food and its praxis contribute to the creation of notions of identity. The core of traditional Cuban food has been kept to very precise in-


gredients that are essential to the notion of the national dishes. Cubans have maintained their traditional food habits rather than adopting new and drastically different ones. Food practices account for a reassertion of migrants’ ethnicity and for the promotion of what Ghassan hage (1997) calls “positive nostalgia,” in this case the desire of being in the homeland while living in diaspora.

Using in-depth interviews with 40 Cuban-Londoners (20 men and 20 women) conducted in London during 2006–07, this article contends that despite its associations with poverty, food is a valuable subject to theorize cultural identity in the Cuban context. First, the article will explore how food cannot be considered a push factor for the emergence of the diasporic community, although it was one of the factors responsible for people’s decision to leave their country. The impact of the Revolution with its egalitarian food policies is acknowledged as one of the reasons for the deterioration of food and food practices. Interviewees seem to believe there was a core sense of Cuban cuisine that was transformed after 1959. Despite government policies and issues of food scarcity, participants perceived that some-times the availability of food or typical Cuban food was dependent on the family cook’s creativity. Cuban food also denotes a particular division of domestic labour because in the homeland the preparation of food remains the work of women.

The article then discusses how the insistence on presenting cer-tain food and dishes as the only exemplars of national food supports essentialist views of national culture that participants dismissed. Be-cause there is not only one way to be Cuban, they reject the notion that there is only one way to prepare and present Cuban food. Na-tional food is also conceptualized as social practices, such as gather-ings to share meals in everyday settings and on specific celebratory dates and holidays. The study of these practices provides evidence about changes in Cuban society throughout the years. Finally, the article argues about the particularities of a gender identity in the Cu-ban context. In diaspora, kitchens tend to remain a women’s space, but men are increasingly occupying them, especially when it comes to re-creating Cuban food practices. Food preparation in the case of male participants with British partners does not become a threat to masculinity.


Food, Memory and DiasporaI approached the interviews about food with apprehension, as I thought that food was going to be a difficult topic to address. Due to my own experience of having lived in Cuba during the Special Period, I was aware of how secretive conversations about food had been during those years. There was a combination of discretion and pride at household levels. People needed to be discreet because many food items came from the black market or were the result of illegal activities. At the same time, and perhaps influenced by the official discourse denying the lack of provisions, people were too proud to ad-mit anything suggesting the loss of their social status. however, some respondents talked openly about their painful experiences, including that of being hungry during the early 1990s. As Alicia4 noted, “ Of course [laughs], everything [was scarce], almost everything, even rice and beans.… Let’s see, I had very painful memories … I mean, it was horrible … imagine a glutton without food, horrible.… Once I had rice with … garden flowers because there was nothing else.”

I asked my participants if food scarcity was a “push” factor that prompted the desire to emigrate (Castles and Miller 1993). however, the vast majority of respondents said “no,” and some even dismissed the idea as “too shallow.” Others, though, agreed:

Yes, it could be the lack of variety, the lack of food. In the Special Period I was hungry and I had like plain sugar, or omelettes with sugar, to get some energy, and I think that I didn’t grow taller—all my relatives are very tall—because I didn’t eat enough during my growing years.… But yes [food was a factor that prompted emigration]. (Vivian)

Vivian’s comments show that even though food scarcity became a distinctive feature of the Special Period, it still fails to encapsulate the reasons Cubans had for abandoning their country. After interview-ing many balseros,5 Silvia Pedraza (2007) notes, for example, that although the economic impact of the crisis could be seen, the political motivations were inseparable from the economic reasons (185). Im-ages of malnourished people arriving in rafts were a visual reminder of how the economy had collapsed on the island, but balseros still


justified their journey as a pursuit of freedom. My participants chose to emigrate long after the Período Especial, when food provisions were better than in the most critical years (1992–94). Very few cited food as the main motivation to leave Cuba, and those who did later disregarded it as a sort of joke. Perhaps associations with food per-vade the national imaginary in ways that overshadow other critical features of Cuban society. So, for example, food inequalities confirm that state distribution is not perfect, but this does not seem a good enough motive for those wanting to emigrate.

Vivian uses the example of food to explain past events in the homeland. It was a distinctive feature of her life in Cuba and, conse-quently, a key point of reference to her construction of nation. This endorses the ideas of Jose Alvarez (2004), who argues that issues of food scarcity, food security, and food crisis have shaped Cuban his-tory since 1962. Vivian felt that her own life had been influenced by these issues, hence her “strange” relationship with food.

Despite associating food with critical years, my interviewees showed an unexpected enthusiasm about the topic. They were able to examine past experiences, even painful memories, and reflect on their outcomes. They also came up with conceptualizations of food that went beyond the Cuban context:

I have never followed a food recipe, never. Food to me is like sitting in front of a blank canvas and painting a masterpiece because food to me is my personality. The taste I get from my food, and the love I put into cooking, is like a creation; it’s like writing; it’s a metaphor with taste. I have been told, since I was seven, my father tells me he had to make me a small bench so I could stand next to my mother, and I would cut the spices, prepare the sofritos, and learn how to cook. (Marilis)

This excerpt implies the use of food as a source of personal identifica-tion (Caplan 1997). In Vivian’s case, food has a formative value be-cause it contributed to her understanding of herself, and she regarded cooking as a creative activity. Marilis came from a rural area in the Sancti Spíritus province, where she spent her formative years. She exemplified the feeling of being closely linked to the countryside, and this is something she has not lost despite having subsequently lived


in big cities such as havana and London. her words also show the gender division and labour within her home and how, since an early age, traditional roles were defined. Food preparation was a significant resource that supported Marilis’s subject construction.

Not all my interviewees had Marilis’s life experience. The ma-jority came from urban areas with different food practices. These respondents valued food for its nutritional value, though they also acknowledged its importance as a way of understanding other cultures (Douglas 1984, cited in Meigs 1997, 100). As Roberto noted:

I have never thought about it, but [food] has a sense of know-ing cultures. I like to learn what is eaten around the world, so I like it. I am very open about flavours, ways of eating…. For example, to these kinds of things, I like to give them a try. I like to eat [Chinese food] with chopsticks; I like to eat Indian food with my hands, have that kind of experience … very attractive.

The above quotes show two of the basic ways food has been used by my interviewees. Marilis considered food in reference to herself; it related to her past and family life and, of course, to the homeland. Roberto understood food practices as a way to attain knowledge about the different cultures they represent. In both cases food became a learning resource; it told them what they were individually but also helped them understand “the other.” While the experience of diaspora has benefited the emigrants in contextualizing the issue of food in Cuba, it has also developed their potential to examine the role of food to make sense of the world. In Roland Barthes’s (1961) words, food has become a system of communication, illustrating one way that diaspora is experienced as a learning process. The participants react to the diverse stimuli they are exposed to in London and incor-porate those reactions to their sense of self and to their construction of identity.

Cuban FoodWhen I asked my respondents what Cuban food meant to them, I expected personal characterizations of national cuisine, but from


the first conversations they always came up with a list of traditional dishes. I kept the question and added another one targeting the idea of a possible menu. Although they regarded national food as varied, there were certain elements that were always listed on the traditional Cuban menu (Núñez González 1999). They talked about rice, black beans (soup), pork, yuca con mojo (boiled cassava with a garlic dress-ing), tostones or tachinos (fried mashed plantain chunks). These were the most popular dishes, although some participants also listed con-grí (rice and beans), tomato and lettuce salad, chicken, fish, lobster, bananas, avocado, pork cracklings, and variants of rice like arroz amarillo (yellow rice) and arroz moro (with red beans).

Some of my respondents had a particular way of defining home-land food, which included its good and bad characteristics. So it could be “delicious” but “monotonous” (Angela), “healthy” but “repetitive” (Celia), or a “tasty dish” that “has lost its variety” (César). These statements suggest not only a sense of pride but also a desire to be objective. The first words of the responses highlighted the goodness of Cuban food. The emigrants praised all the positive associations that homeland food brings but also compared them with the huge variety of food available in London. In this respect, the Cuban culinary tradi-tion appeared less varied. At times, the causes of this lack of variety in the national cuisine seemed to be taken for granted, or simply not discussed. Other interviewees, however, were more precise and lo-cated this change to 1959, even though they were born more than a decade before that date.

Yes, I like Cuban food a lot, but not the Cuban food as we got to know it during socialism, but the diversity of food that was available before everybody standardized, as part of the Revo-lution. So yes, I have discovered hundreds of things. My father loved to cook too, so he taught me. We always ate traditional Cuban food, but traditional as it was made originally [before the Revolution] with all the things it required. (Camilo)

The date they chose is not arbitrary, since it points out the time when the whole nation underwent a radical transformation because of the Revolution. They grew up during the revolutionary years, when food was already rationed. Their food memories and practices were influ-


enced by the particularities that characterized nourishment after 1959; to use Barthes’s words, food is charged with signifying the situations in which it is used (1961, 26). however, in diaspora, they have come across other recipes and dishes that also represent Cuba.

The main difficulty Cubans faced when they tried to replicate pre-1959 cuisine in their country was the lack of ingredients. Because of the government’s agricultural policy aimed at guaranteeing an equal monthly staple diet of grains and the occasional protein, Cuban food became standardized. Private farmers could not sell their products outside state structures, which also conspired against crop diversity. Although the big foreign and local companies were nationalized at the beginning of the Revolution, small private entrepreneurs survived until 1968. At that point, a sizeable émigré population was already in the United States. This growing community carried with them the is-land’s food and culinary practices. Whereas in Cuba “the old cuisine” was becoming almost exotic, in the Cuban-American households it was still made and even presented as the “New Cuban Cuisine” (Fowler, 2002). This process was a way in which the exiles became obsessed with reinforcing Cubanidad (García 2007), an obsession that has permeated the whole diasporic existence for Cuban-Americans.

To paraphrase William Saffran (1991), Cuban food in the United States has contributed greatly to the restoration of the “original Cuba” left behind. One of my respondents, Pablo, who was born a decade before the Revolution, always remembered how he re-encountered “the Cuban taste” during his first trip to Miami long after settling in London: “Of course, food habits were lost in Cuba. I remember when … we were one year in Miami, precisely, and we used to go to Cuban restaurants and for someone like me who lived in Cuba before 1959, it was mind-blowing to see buñuelos, churros, to see something that Cubans now don’t know.” here Pablo implies a claim to authenticity that is always problematic in the context of diaspora (Radhakrishnan 2003). In this case, he argued that “authentic” Cuban food is that of the Cuban-Americans because they exported the country’s culinary tradition and kept it with the help of similar ingredients found in the host country. But what about those who were born after the migratory waves, whose notion of national food was always conditioned by the country’s agricultural and economic strength? Can they relate to an unknown version of Cuban food? In my opinion, Pablo’s comment


supports the argument that changes in crops and national diet brought about by the Revolution affected Cubans’ national cuisine.

Again, the idea of a Cuban kitchen as a gendered space is defined by the presence and actions of women delimiting the space. Food memories are embedded with images of grandmothers, aunts, and mothers, which in Pablo’s case date from before the Revolution. This echoes the findings of Rosendahl (1997) and Vera, Rosendahl, and Pereira (1998), which show how kitchens and domestic chores such as cleaning, ironing, and laundering were women’s activities in the 1950s.

Studies of Cuban food habits (Núñez González and Buscarón Ochoa 1995; Izquierdo hernández, Armenteros Borrell, Lancés Cotilla, and Martín González 2004) have revealed changes in both cultural and nutritional patterns among Cubans on the island. This change alongside the prevalence of food in the popular imaginary after the Special Period have resulted in the adoption of an “eating for survival” model by most Cuban households. The phrase “eats what one could,” which many of my interviewees used, exemplifies this model. It refers mostly to the simple availability of food rather than to the preferences of a national diet, which many of my participants pointed out.

I have mentioned ingredients because they kept appearing in the interviews as what limited my participants or their families in Cuba from preparing certain specialties of the national cuisine. Paradoxi-cally, most of them claimed they always ate “Cuban food” while they were in Cuba. What, then, is Cuban food? Can it be considered a marker of identity or a reference point to the homeland when offer-ing a Cuban menu seemed to be an impossible task in their everyday life? Can Cuban food remain as an unchangeable entity? Or is it that Cubans born after 1959 can show their loyalty only to those food prac-tices to which they were exposed to when they lived in the homeland? As Camilo put it:

I knew that in the majority of the houses next to mine there weren’t so many ingredients as in mine. No, it is just that because everybody received exactly the same ingredients at the same time in the year, everybody ended up cooking the same. [For example] llegó el pollo [chicken was allocated


for consumers in the grocery store] and maybe, I don’t know, that coincided with onions [onions were also allocated in the grocery store] so there you go, chicken with onions. That’s not a recipe … it was more like eating to survive.

This quote summarizes the impact the Cuban economy had on food at household levels. Food choices were dependent on govern-ment policies of distribution. The availability of certain provisions determined the possibility of keeping the traditional diet associated with the national cuisine. Camilo acknowledges that his personal un-derstanding of national food was based on the availability of certain ingredients, which enabled food preparation. he could have “Cuban food” whenever the required ingredients were available. Although he blames the state distribution system, it is worth mentioning that, even before the 1990s, Cubans used to look for alternatives, either in the short-lived Mercados Libres Campesinos (farmers’ markets) in the 1980s or in the booming black market. While conducting ethnographic research in Cuba, Wilson (2009) noted how obtaining foodstuff sold illegally was vital for preparing everyday meals and even treats such as beef and lobster.

One could argue that eating might have changed from a cultural practice to a mere process of nourishment. however, this was not always the case in some families, as this participant explained:

No, now that I know the recipes, I look back and I realize that Cubans don’t do them because … I don’t know; they didn’t do it at that time … now [they can’t do it] because there is no flour, because they don’t have eggs … but in those times [1980s] … they didn’t do it because of their lack of initiative, because there was mince meat. I’m talking of when I was in the secondary school [mid-1980s], there were tomatoes, pasta … Well, perhaps there was no pasta, but you can make pasta at home, and now I know how to make it [after having lived in Italy], now I look back and I say how come? (Julia)

These comments challenge the prominence of factors like distri-bution and the availability of provisions to explain the absence of traditional food on Cuban tables, by focusing on the issue of food


habits. Interviewees portrayed the emergence of a national diet based on nutritional and physiological values as “lack of initiative” and “implied laziness” and “food prejudices.” But these comments also contradict the common myths associated with Cuban kitchens as “laboratories” or places of “inventions.” Cuban housewives—as many of the respondents confirmed—are popularly praised as inven-tors who juggle every day to provide their families with a decent meal, let alone a traditional dish (Pearson 1997; holgado Fernández 2001; Pertierra 2008).

Once again the word “traditional” has an ambiguous connotation in this context. If it is assumed to mean “national,” then it clearly re-fers to those dishes representative of the Cuban diet and identifiable as “culturally” Cuban. however, “traditional” may also imply everyday meals prepared with the family provisions to fill the need for nutrition. For example, when I asked my participants if they always had Cuban food at home, many replied that they ate whatever was available. I was more interested in examining their relations with food at family levels: whether they belonged to those households where the staple diet of rice and beans was “mandatory” or to other “more innovative” ones, more likely to include other dishes of international cuisine, or even more vegetables on their daily menus. Take this exchange:

I don’t know if you saw the article from maybe three or four months ago, which appeared in the travel supplement of The Guardian,6 about Cuban food, and the journalist said: “Well, Cubans do not have a culinary tradition.” I wrote [back] in fact, they never published the letter, but I don’t know; people have a very strange idea of what Cuban food is and I think that we are to blame too, because we are constantly reinforcing the idea that [Cuban food] is congrí [rice and black beans], pork, tostones, salads, and it is varied.

[Author: Did you always have Cuban food in Cuba?]

We ate what we could. Oh, we ate whatever was available, as simple as that: in the good times, we had good meals, do you understand? But the variety of a cuisine depends on the sense of adventure of the person who cooks. (Armando)


This interviewee found the definition of Cuban food problematic because, as he explained, certain elements have been overrepresented as national cuisine. he argued for a broader notion of homeland food that would also include dishes that emerged in the revolutionary years. Armando also mentioned “la caldosa de Kike y Marina” among the Cuban recipes he often prepares. Caldosa, a kind of broth with yams and tubers, became hugely popular in the early 1980s thanks to a song by El Jilgero de Cienfuegos, a Cuban country singer. Originally, caldosa marked the time in the year when neighbours gathered and contributed to the collective pot where the broth was cooked, but there has been a lot of debate about whether caldosa was simply a different name given to ajiaco. In the critical years of the early 1990s, caldosa lost its regional associations and acquired political connotations; it was made the “official” recipe to commemorate each anniversary of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution.7 It has remained a “tradition,” although a very questionable one because it became institutionalized and labelled as political to celebrate the continuity of the Revolution. In Armando’s case, the recipe still retained a close association with Cuba, but lost the political charge when he prepared it in London.

Repeating food options, either because of economic constraints or the lack of initiative of the family cook, contributes to the creation of essentialist views about national food. The persistence of representa-tions of Cuban food based on a reduced list of ingredients and dishes enables a limited notion of food as a cultural practice and as a system of communication. This factor implies essentialist and reductive ideas of what is and what is not Cuban food, which, in the long run, influ-ence Cubans’ perception of their own culture.

National food was also conceptualized by respondents as food practices. For example, to some of my interviewees Cuban food meant family, a metaphor for coming together and enjoying family life.

[Cuban food] also has the value of unifying families; no mat-ter how busy my life was in Cuba, dinnertime was sacred. Lunch time … well you normally have lunch at work, but at dinner time, we were all at the table. We always set the table with my children; that was our place to gather, and you eat


in peace, and after that we all would leave the table to do our own stuff, but dinner was to unify. (Marta)

[Cuban food] is a Sunday meal, is to have all the family gath-ered on a Sunday afternoon, and everybody eating. It’s like a holiday, and everybody dancing and enjoying, and they stand up and they sit down again, and if the table was too small, they would have to eat standing, and like that, that is Cuban food for me. (Armando)

Both quotes refer to a specific practice in the realm of everyday life in Cuba, the one of eating at the table. Traditionally it is not associated with the lifestyle of those from havana, such as Marta and Armando, because they tend to engage in daily schedules busier than those in the provinces. In addition, a sizeable part of the main city’s popula-tion live in very cramped conditions, where a large family might find eating together at the table almost impossible. This turned the prac-tice of eating together into a memorable event, especially when all the family members could attend. In the critical years of the 1990s, the tradition waned (Núñez González and González Noriega 2001). Cubans had to struggle to eat their food at the table on a day-to-day basis, and only those with considerable resources could afford to maintain family dinners.

Cuban food is also served during special occasions that cor-respond to traditional festivities on the island, for example, New Year’s dinner. When Christmas celebrations were banned (1969–97), the advent of a new year turned into the main opportunity for a Cuban family to gather and celebrate. New Year’s Day coincides with the anniversary of the Revolution in 1959, so the celebra-tion has always been characterized as a political event. The ban on Christmas was lifted a year before Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba, but New Year’s Eve dinner still prevails as the most popular festivity. Some of my participants celebrate it in London. Dania, for example, told me that every December she has friends (mostly Cu-bans) over for a traditional Cuban feast: roasted pork, congrí, and yuca con mojo. Felipe and César also confirmed they traditionally celebrate New Year’s Eve Cuban style, with a Cuban menu that is similar to Dania’s own. When Angela got married, she also cooked


Cuban food for the celebration; as she remarked, “everybody [in-cluding non-Cubans] ate everything.”

Living in diaspora, my participants did not rely on just one home-land reference, such as a cookbook. The advent of globalization and the marketing of ethnic food have also brought about a vast printed collection of recipes from all over the world, including Cuba. Many respondents have come across “unfamiliar” recipes for national food in so-called Cuban cookbooks. My participants were not familiar with these Cuban dishes because they did not know many of the ingredients needed for the preparation. I asked them about these “rare” Cuban food examples. Some respondents were particularly cautious about incorporating these recipes into their everyday cooking repertoire, but others welcomed the idea of experimenting with new versions of national food. This idea represents a key point in the process lead-ing to a new identity construction. The case of food is particularly important because it is closely related to the domestic setting. Certain food practices that practically disappeared in more public and shared locations were kept in smaller places, at household levels (Núñez González, 1999).

This section has demonstrated how Cuban food is contextual-ized. Emigrants are able to examine their previous ideas of “na-tional diet” or of “typical meals,” depending on the knowledge they have gained regarding the social constraints of food on the island. I argue that this examination affects their sense of identity because Cubans in London tended to accept that their everyday meals in Cuba were far from “authentic” national food. Lunches and dinners in the homeland were the result of often-chaotic attempts to provide basic nourishment at family levels rather than more elaborate cul-tural strategies of nutrition. They had more to do with feeding than with gastronomy. In diaspora, the availability of food allows my participants to use it as a collateral resource in their display of Cu-banness. Food habits are rooted in their past; therefore any possible revision of that past reconsiders the impact of food. In addition, the emigrants discovered unfamiliar recipes of the homeland culinary heritage, which inevitably led them to recognize and adopt unfamil-iar representations of Cuba.

I would add that the term “authentic” has been used in this sec-tion as a synonym for a social construction, because I reject any


essentialist claim about what Cuban food is. I argue that the de-parture from those reduced versions of national food enables my participants to sustain a different strategy of subject construction. If what constitutes Cuban in Cuban food is expanded in diaspora, so is the power this modifier (Cuban) acquires to construct notions of cultural identities.

Re-creation of Food Practiceshaving explained the examples of Cuban food that participants have found in diaspora and how their idea of homeland food has been af-fected by their diasporic experience, I now discuss the way food is used to promote gatherings with other Cubans. I argue here that food is used to re-create traditional homeland celebrations as a means of evoking pleasant memories.

In the interviews, many respondents acknowledged the role of Cuban food in the manifestation of their own identity. Cooking homeland food and having friends over for a meal were perceived as a way to present guests with the traditions, dishes, and flavours of Cuba. The majority of the interviewees agreed that they prepared Cuban food when they had compatriots as guests, generally in small groups. Previous studies (Roman-Velazquez 1999; Wilk 1999; Chang 2002; Meyers 2006) have characterized ethnic restaurants and gro-cery shops as the perfect locations not only for a public display of emigrants’ identities but also for socializing and community building. In the Cuban-American community, restaurants such as Versalles in Miami are generally portrayed in the local and international media as representative of the island. This restaurant is often used as a venue for press conferences or other events related to the expatriates. There are a dozen self-proclaimed “Cuban” restaurants in London, but my participants regarded them as “inauthentic.” In general, these places have failed as gathering points for the Cuban émigré community, with their menus reflecting a clear reinterpretation of Cuban dishes, adapted to more cosmopolitan palates. While the proverbial rice and beans may be available, customers may be surprised to find Cuban recipes with Basmati rice, virtually unknown on the island. One interviewee narrated his shock when he found listed in one of these menus, champiñones a la villaclareña (mushrooms Villa Clara-style).


The combination looked odd not only because champiñones are al-most impossible to find in Cuba, but also because he himself came from Villa Clara province and had never come across such a delicacy. Therefore, if Cuban emigrants want to eat “authentic” Cuban food, they do it at home.

The preference for domestic settings can be also used to char-acterize Cuban-Londoners as a diaspora instead of a transnational community. The literature on transnationalism (Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999; Guarnizo 2008; Vertovec 2009) notes examples of food becoming increasingly important to sustain transnational ethnic networks. Kershen (2006) claims that the demands of “contemporary minority ethnic groups” for fresh food from home have encouraged the opening of retail outlets in host countries (106). In addition, ethnic goods can now be purchased online. Vanessa Fonseca (2009) notes that many Latin Americans in the United States (mainly Peruvians and Costa Ricans) use the websites of supermarkets based in their homelands to acquire the foodstuffs necessary to re-enact and reas-sert their cultural identity through the consumption of traditional food artefacts (2009, 173). These experiences have not reached Cuba yet, although websites such as Supermarket 448 and Compra’dtodo9 offer a variety of items and foodstuff that can be purchased online to be delivered to Cuba. however, this service is rather expensive. On average, products cost six times more than in UK supermarkets, excluding the delivery cost. None of my participants said that they use these types of services.

From the interviews, I gathered that homeland food was the preferred option if my subjects invited Cuban friends back to their homes, but that was not the case if they invited people from other nationalities.

I really don’t have much time for cooking and, well, if I know that friends are coming over for dinner, I go and buy them cassava, or plantain, and I make them congrí.

[Author: You mean Cuban friends?]

Yes. I make everything for them.

[Author: What about British friends?]


No, not really. I very seldom invite British friends over for dinner. That has more to do with Cuban, friends; it’s a Cuban thing. (Susana)

Susana clearly identified the practice of inviting friends over for meals as a “Cuban thing” because she would cook homeland food for them. In her case, food is a pretext for a reunion among friends. This goal proved to be the main reason behind inviting compatriots for dinner parties.

Generally, [the friends I invite] are Cubans. When I make a Cuban dinner it is for Cubans because I want to speak Spanish that night, because I want to eat Cuban food. Because [one of my friends] lives alone, the other [friend] lives alone; the other lives alone. I know that they do not cook Cuban food very often and I believe they miss it as much as I do. (Julia)

In the above excerpt, not only a food practice is re-created in di-aspora, but also the tradition of inviting friends to have a meal. Julia emphasized that, in addition to receiving the pleasure of cooking and sharing a homemade Cuban dish, she needed to communicate in her first language. Therefore, having Cuban friends taste homeland food and engage in “Cuban” conversation accounts for her idea of re-creating in London what the same invitation would have been if they were in Cuba. Another respondent told me that when he invites Cuban friends over they expect a homeland menu:

Yes, when I invite them to have Cuban food, they know. hey, I got fried ripe plantains, plantain that I get here and beans that you can now buy in Sainsbury’s that are very good, and they get tender very fast. Then [I have] that and rice, beans, you know, with sazón completo [all-in-one seasoning powder] that I have sent to me from Cuba because sazón completo gives [beans] a good taste. here you can find all kinds of seasonings, but I have it sent to me from Cuba. When my father came re-cently he brought me sazón completo and guava paste because I like guava paste bars.… I prefer the simplest things, guava, as I told you before, pan con timba (bread with guava paste)


and that is something that keeps me alive, that food taste from the other side [Cuba]. (Alvaro)

Alvaro illustrates how the diasporic space overcomes the constraints of food distribution on the island, enabling the creation of a Cuban-themed menu based on products available in the UK. he can re-create Cuban dinners by combining locally sourced ingredients with others sent by his relatives in Cuba. Aiming at an authentic Cuban recipe he ends up creating a transnational Cuban dish, which undoubtedly becomes Cuban again because of the way in which it is prepared and how it is garnished and presented at the table. What distinguishes his effort from a similar endeavour in Cuba is the freedom of not depend-ing on the state distribution system or the black market. his food party can be “Cuban” because of his intention, the availability of foodstuff to re-create national dishes, and because of his Cuban friends who would ultimately consume them and interact socially around the din-ner table as if they were in Cuba.

If we analyze the previous three quotes from a gender perspective, there is a clear distinction. The first two participants, Susana and Julia, both females, invite friends over and assume the traditional role of a host in a Cuban household. Food preparation is considered to be a woman’s task. however, in the third example, Alvaro, a man, cooks a Cuban meal. This is characteristic of those Cuban men married to British partners; when it comes to preparing Cuban food, cooking is up to them. It can be argued that this is a direct consequence of their migratory experience; male migrants are often required to perform non-traditional domestic roles, especially cooking. Mannan and Boucher (2002) and Narayan (1995) demonstrated that this situation tends to be temporary, generally changing upon marriage. however, according to Narayan, Indian men have generally remained in charge of public tasks such as cooking and waiting tables in Indian restau-rants where Indian women very seldom do such activities (1995, 78). The picture gets more complex when we consider research that sug-gests that men (especially Latin Americans) keep the same patriarchal structure of family lives and, although they get increasingly frustrated when their wives become breadwinners, do not share domestic tasks (McIlwaine 2008).


My argument here refers to the diaspora experience and how it changes behaviour amongst my interviewees. Susana and Julia are likely to repeat familiar patterns of domestic labour. however, as they also told me, they rarely cooked or were in charge of kitchens in Cuba. Because they lived with other females (grandmothers, mothers, older sisters), they were spared certain domestic chores. The same holds true with Alvaro and other male participants. These examples also challenge the limited notions of the gendered spaces known in the homeland. holgado Fernández (2001) argues that within the Cuban Revolution one can only be very macho or very motherlike; there is no room for chosen identities (2001, 320). She is elaborating from the dominant discourse of the society that assigns women and men very specific social roles: women as mothers, men as machos. Rosendahl (1997) observes that men who helped in the domestic milieu were generally perceived to have had a weakening effect on their mas-culinity (1997, 136). My participants’ experiences were different so that, in terms of gender, the homeland also loses its power to centre notions of identity.

For my interviewees, gendered roles are viewed as cultural con-structions and dismissed as essentialist versions of what it means to be Cuban. Diaspora is a space where even the seemingly most fun-damental aspects of identity such as gender roles can be revisited. Parallels can also be made with the findings of Batnitzky, McDowell, and Dyer (2009), who claim that in the context of migration, gender identities are renegotiated, which often results in the production of flexible and strategic masculinities distinct from those performed in the country of origin (1288). Felipe, for example, told me that he worked as a cook on a freelance basis, a profession that he never con-sidered while in Cuba. According to Batnitzky et al. (2009), migrants put aspects of their gender identities “on hold” for the duration of their stay in the host country, selecting and emphasizing aspects that will benefit them in the labour market (1280). While this is true with temporary migrants, my findings suggest that renegotiation of their gender identities amongst Cuban-Londoners has a lasting effect since, with the exception of Felipe, a professional cook, the rest of the men interviewed said that they cook whenever they wanted to do so. This is an example of what Cathy McIlwaine (2008) terms a restructuring of gender ideologies, which she particularly noticed among Latin


American men living in London, in relation to the domestic divisions of labour.

The examples quoted so far summarize a trend found in the inter-views that links Cuban food with the practice of having Cuban friends for dinner or other social occasions. It does not differ radically from similar events hosted by other diasporic groups where homeland food is the favourite meal option (Chang 2002; Meyer 2006). The main distinction I would make is that Cubans in London prefer smaller and more domestic locations.

Friends also play an important role in maintaining homeland customs and even in sharing them with those who regard themselves as “non-traditional” Cubans, by which I mean certain emigrants who left Cuba without knowing how to prepare certain Cuban food. Ileana, for instance, admitted she was not a good cook but that sometimes she has cravings for Cuban dishes like “good congrí” or “good black beans.” Luckily for her, she has other Cuban friends in London who are very good at cooking and invite her over for a meal. héctor, who came to London after living for several years in Spain, told me that his friends in Madrid taught him how to cook Cuban recipes:

They taught me to cook [Cuban food] in Spain. So, I learned to make cassava in Spain, to make congrí. In Spain I learned to make picadillo [minced meat]. In Spain I learned to make fried ripe plantain, I learned to make tostones. I learned to make all the Cuban food. (héctor)

héctor’s narration puts his experiences with Cuban food in the con-text of diaspora. he became interested in the recipes of his country after settling in Spain, where he increased his knowledge of homeland food and made it part of his identity. This example illustrates the double role of diasporic Cubans as keepers of homeland food recipes and traditions and as transmitters of them to the newly arrived. In hector’s case, his idea of national food was shaped by the versions of Cuban food provided by his fellow emigrants. he also embraced food preparation as part of his performance of identity, overcoming gender prejudices. In diaspora the kitchen has also been reconfigured as a male space. The relevance of diasporic groups in creating the standards of national food is not unique to the Cuban experience.


Wilk (1999) has documented how Belizean cuisine was a concept produced outside Belize, thanks to the many ethnic restaurants that operated in cities such as Los Angeles prior to the Central American nation’s independence in 1981.

Despite its associations with gatherings and social occasions, Cu-ban food can become part of intimate celebrations. One interviewee praised its value in evoking pleasant memories, which was specially realized on days of feeling “heavily” (his definition) like a Cuban.

[My diet] has had a little change, but yes, sometimes I feel … whenever I have the cubano subío [when the Cuban in him manifests greatly].

[Author: What is that?]

Cubano subío is a day when you get up thinking a lot about Cuba, right? And you feel like you’re again there. So, I grab the frying pan, pour some oil, and fry two eggs. Then I cook rice [and put] the eggs over the rice. I peel a banana, take a spoon, and I eat my rice with eggs and banana. And that hap-pens a lot. (Armando)

In the preceding quote, Cuban food is perceived as an individual op-tion. Armando’s comment also implies a way of eating rather than a typical Cuban meal. he mentioned a dish, neither elaborate nor partic-ularly part of a traditional Cuban menu. It arguably could be regarded as the national version of fast food in the sense that it represents the simplest food combination available in most Cuban houses. It also hints at the ration card and the state system of distributing goods. De-spite critical periods in food distribution, the provision of rice, eggs, and bananas to Cuban families in havana remained relatively stable. This menu could be characterized as “lacking initiative,” a term my participants used to denote the presumed repetitiveness of everyday food. however, for low-income families, this meal might have been the only option available.

Armando implied a re-creation of a “way of eating” food available in London in his own Cuban style, rather than preparing a “proper” Cuban dish. But in this case, his understanding of what “proper”


means is mediated by the social constrains of food in Cuba. I found it significant that, as he argued, when his perception of his identity is more intense—when he feels “more Cuban”—he goes for a version of the national food, which arguably constitutes a Cuban recipe. how-ever, it certainly connects him with his past and with his memories of the homeland. For him, the dish does not connote scarcity, monotony, or poverty, but a more positive feeling about his country of origin.

Some of the responses I gathered illustrate this trend of re-creating Cuban food practices in London in the same way Armando narrated. Several others described the practice of preparing Cuban recipes with ingredients, similar to those found on the island, that my interviewees can get in London. These include common meals made of rice, beans, pork, plantain, as well as more uncommon dishes:

I do the well-known fufú [plantain mash], and I make the fufú in many different ways, both in shape and content. I surprise my friends, because everything is Cuban food, but it always has a different touch, an artistic touch because that is just me at the end. […] For example, I find harina [cornmeal] delicious. I have looked for it here frequently and only the Colombians have been able to provide me with the raw material [to make it]. They have this corn flour, to make arepas. So, then this is what I do: I buy a couple of corncobs here, and I mix them with this arepa’s flour and I make an exquisite harina. To get it to taste like harina you have to mix it. Bear in mind that when I go to Cuba, I look for [and eat] harina and tamales, which are the only things I haven’t been able to substitute here, both harina and tamales. (Marta)

Marta’s knowledge of Cuban food appears to be wider than that of most of my respondents. She is interested in re-creating in London all the possible dishes associated with the homeland that she knows. having lived in Cuba before and after the Revolution, she can iden-tify with a more extensive repertoire of Cuban recipes than other participants. Additionally, some of the Cuban food she mentioned has acquired a different connotation since 1959. For other participants, especially those born in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, harina, for instance, may suggest periods of scarcity because it has been tradi-


tionally used as a substitute for rice. Many of the interviewees in this age group experienced the becas (boarding schools) and their infamous dining halls. In these schools, harina was fairly common as a meal option.

In summary, I can argue that, in terms of their identity, re-creating a Cuban meal in London has helped my participants value the diaspo-ra experience over their previous existence in the homeland. Since most of the emigrants are able to use locally obtained ingredients to re-create Cuban food, they relate to a stronger construction of national food in London, a construction also grounded in a “real” taste rather than in a “memory” of a certain taste. In this diverse city they were able to eat “better” than on the island and even to prepare recipes legitimized as “traditionally” Cuban by other diasporic Cubans or by cookbooks. Food facilitates the sense of becoming “more” Cuban in London that so many of my interviewees acknowledged. Once again identity was associated with issues of becoming as well as of being (hall 1996).

In conclusion, Cuban food provides my participants with a sense of belonging. It is regarded both as a marker of identity and personal identification and as a symbol of Cuban culture. In diaspora, national food retains its significance as a reference of home and family life, and it becomes a popular pretext for the gathering of friends and for family celebrations. Cubans in London seem to reduce the notion of Cuban food to a list of basic ingredients or recipes that constitute their idea of the national diet, but they also include lots of other foods, even from before 1959. however, the experience of living in Britain has introduced them to manifold culinary customs and to a new realm of flavours and tastes that some of them have incorporated as part of their everyday life. The emigrants opt for healthier variants of food, although they do not totally reject recipes and dishes from Cuban cuisine, which can be considered “unhealthy” in diaspora.

Food practices in diaspora can also be used to sustain theoriza-tions about gender and gendered spaces. While some practices re-produced the gender dynamics of Cuban households, others reveal a significant departure from traditional gender roles and the gender division of domestic labour. Male migrants, for example, negotiate certain aspects of their gender identity that challenge stereotypical versions of masculinities common in the homeland.


having come to a global city with a varied offering of local and ethnic food, they are able to re-create Cuban food with locally sourced ingredients. This strategy, not always successful, helps to mitigate the cravings for the tastes of the homeland but at times causes frustration because certain dishes are impossible to replicate in London. Food is also used to construct meanings about the homeland. The emigrants engage in a revision of the homeland’s culinary practices. Cuban food is situated in a diaspora context, and recipes and food habits are “revised” either because of health and nutrition, or because of socio-political factors associated with food in Cuba. Uses of national food and food practices invite a wider questioning of what constitutes “Cuba,” because personal stories of food in the homeland influence the process of subject construction. The incorporation of contextual-ized versions of national food result in narratives of belonging and pride in order to perpetuate the migrants’ creation of a diasporic space, where national identity can be comfortably performed.

Notes1 For a discussion on “race” in pre-revolutionary and post-1959 Cuba see de

la Fuente (2001) and Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs (2000).2 The Office for National Statistics estimated in 2000 that the majority (ap-

proximately 1,000) of Cuban emigrants to the United Kingdom settled in London (Office for National Statistics).

3 In 2011 Cuban poet Arístides Vega Chapú edited a collection of personal vignettes by Cuban authors who had experienced the Special Period, and narrations about food scarcity predominate in the pages of the book.

4 All the participants are identified by pseudonyms.5 Balseros (from balsa, lit. “raft”) was the common name given to those

Cubans who, especially in the early 1990s, tried to reach the shores of the United States by sea in improvised rafts.

6 The Observer, Travel Supplement, 30 April 2006.7 Founded in 1960 to confront counterrevolutionary activities, the CDR

organizes Cubans at street level.8 <http://www.supermarket44.com>.9 <http:www.compra-dtodo.com>.


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NOTE DE RECHERCHE :

EsT-CE quE L’ENViRONNEMENT A uNE iNFLuENCE suR LA MiGRATiON iNTERNATiONALE Au CANADA? NOTE DE RECHERCHE suR LE CAs DE LA DiAsPORA HAïTiENNE à OTTAWA-GATiNEAu

AMiNA MEZDOuRDépartement de Géographie, Université d’OttawaLuisA VERONisDépartement de Géographie, Université d’Ottawa

introductionhaïti est souvent mentionné comme un « hotspot » pour la migration environnementale (par ex., Diamond 2005) étant donné son histoire de déforestation continue, dégradation des sols et pollution des eaux de surface, ponctuée par des ouragans fréquents et plus récemment le tremblement de terre de 2010. Les chercheurs ont examiné haïti com-me un avertissement de ce qui pourrait arriver à d’autres pays en voie de développement dans les décennies à venir en raison du changement climatique (Myers 2002) et quelles politiques devraient être mises en œuvre pour protéger les réfugiés environnementaux (Doran 2011).


207


Bien que des études empiriques ont été réalisées sur les déplacements internes en haïti à la suite de catastrophes naturelles (Lu et coll. 2012), des modèles et des résultats de la migration internationale en provenance d’haïti (Amuedo-Durantes et coll. 2010) et de la diaspora haïtienne en général (Mooney 2009), il semblerait qu’aucune étude examine empiriquement comment les événements et les conditions environnementales en haïti influencent les comportements migratoi-res des haïtiens à l’échelle internationale. Il est important d’aborder ce manque de liens entre affirmations normatives sur les dangers que représentent les soi-disant « réfugiés environnementaux » dans des pays comme haïti d’une part et les comportements et processus migratoires réels de l’autre dans le but de créer des politiques in-ternationales éclairées sur les questions liées à l’environnement, le développement et la migration.

Depuis longtemps, le Canada est une destination importante pour la migration haïtienne et entre 2001 et 2006 a reçu en moyenne 2 138 migrants haïtiens par an (Statistique Canada, 2006). Bien que la migration haïti-Canada ne soit pas aussi importante en volume que les flux migratoires internationaux d’haïti vers la République Domi-nicaine ou les états-Unis, il est raisonnable de supposer que, si les facteurs environnementaux en haïti ont effectivement une influence sur les migrations internationales, cette influence jouerait un rôle dans l’expérience des haïtiens qui se sont installés au Canada. C’est avec cette hypothèse en tête que nous avons entrepris un projet de recherche participative avec les membres de la communauté haïtienne d’Ottawa-Gatineau pour entamer une discussion et documenter la manière dont des événements et des conditions environnementales en haïti ont peut-être influé, directement ou indirectement, sur leur décision d’immigrer au Canada.

MéthodologiePour saisir la perception des facteurs environnementaux ainsi que l’expérience d’immigration des haïtiens, nous choisissons la mé-thodologie qualitative, puisqu’elle nous permettra de comprendre les motifs derrière l’acte de migration dans leur contexte économi-que, politique, social et culturel. En premier lieu, nous avons réa-lisé une douzaine d’entrevues individuelles de type semi-structuré

Mezdour & Veronis / Le cas de la diaspora haïtienne à Ottawa-Gatineau 209

avec des informateurs clés à l’automne 2012, dont des intervenants auprès des nouveaux arrivants et des responsables de programmes pour les immigrants dans les organismes d’accueil et quatre leaders de la communauté haïtienne à Ottawa-Gatineau. Ceci nous a permis de comprendre les tendances générales dans l’immigration de cette communauté et surtout de mieux orienter nos questions pour des groupes de discussion. De plus, les informateurs clés nous ont servi comme porte d’entrée dans les réseaux de la communauté haïtienne. Avec leur collaboration nous avons organisé quatre groupes de discussion, également de type semi-structuré, entre février et avril 2013 avec 20 participants d’origine haïtienne qui résident dans la région d’Ottawa-Gatineau et qui ont immigré au Canada entre 1999 et 2009. Cette période d’immigration est un critère important dans notre projet, car nous voulons éviter de potentielles confusions entre les facteurs environnementaux et la catastrophe géotechnique du tremblement de terre qui a eu lieu en janvier 2010. Néanmoins, nous avons pris soin d’organiser des groupes mixtes en ce qui a trait le genre et les classes sociales, en incluant des haïtiens venus au Ca-nada sous différentes catégories (travailleurs qualifiés, réunification familiale, réfugiés, etc.). Les différents statuts de migration ainsi que le sexe des participants permettent de souligner les différences potentielles des effets de l’environnement et des stratégies d’immi-gration au Canada selon les individus. Nous avons aussi demandé aux participants de remplir un court questionnaire visant à obtenir des informations démographiques dans un but statistique, comme l’âge, l’état matrimonial, le niveau de scolarité et la catégorie d’im-migration. Ces données ajouteront une profondeur à notre analyse en nous permettant de déceler les différences potentielles entre les classes sociales. Ce questionnaire nous permet également de savoir quels participants désirent prendre part à une entrevue individuelle semi-structurée. Cette dernière étape de notre collecte de données aura le but d’approfondir l’examen des motifs et histoires d’immi-gration personnels en mettant l’accent sur le contexte d’origine et le statut social des participants pour mieux comprendre le rôle des facteurs environnementaux et leurs stratégies d’immigration. Dans le cadre de la présente note de recherche, nous présentons les résul-tats préliminaires des groupes de discussion avec des membres de la communauté haïtienne à Ottawa-Gatineau.


Résultats préliminaires : Profile démographique des participantsNos quatre groupes de discussion ont réuni un total de 20 participants haïtiens établis à Ottawa-Gatineau, dont 14 (70%) hommes et six (30%) femmes. Pour les groupes d’âge, 12 (60%) participants sur 20 ont entre 35 et 54 ans, six (30%) entre 25 à 34 ans et deux (10%) entre 55 à 64 ans. Tel qu’illustré dans le tableau 1, presque la moitié des participants possède une formation de niveau collégial ou universi-taire, ce qui explique la présence de six participants qui sont venus au Canada comme travailleurs qualifiés. Nous notons également que six participants sont venus par la catégorie de réunification familiale, dont la majorité était des conjointes de travailleurs qualifiés déjà installés au Canada. De plus, il y avait six participants dans la catégorie de réfugiés et deux qui n’ont pas précisé leur statut migratoire.

Tableau 1Niveau de scolarité des participants d’origine haïtienne

Niveau d’éducationNombre (sur 20)

Inférieur à la 8e année 0Quelques années de secondaire 5Diplôme secondaire 2Quelques années de collège/formation spécialisée/ postsecondaire/université

3

Collège/ formation spécialisée/postsecondaire/université 2Quelques années d’études supérieures 1études supérieures 3Diplôme professionnel 4

La majorité des participants justifie leur migration principalement par des facteurs d’ordre économique et sociopolitique, et aucun n’a mentionné avoir quitté haïti à cause de raisons environnementales (par ex., tempêtes tropicales, inondations, érosion, dégradation des sols, etc.). Néanmoins, les quatre thèmes suivants ont surgi durant nos groupes de discussion et indiqueraient que l’environnement aurait une influence du moins indirecte sur les décisions migratoires des haïtiens à l’échelle nationale et/ou internationale.


Résultats préliminaires : La déforestationLe premier thème central concernait la problématique de la défores-tation extrême en haïti. Les participants en ont parlé comme étant le principal problème environnemental dans leur pays d’origine tout en établissant des liens complexes avec les conditions économiques et sociopolitiques. La coupe des arbres engendre la dégradation des sols et l’érosion ce qui rend l’agriculture plus difficile et même im-praticable. À leur tour, ces problèmes contribuent à des glissements de terrain et des inondations, surtout à la suite de fortes pluies tor-rentielles, ainsi qu’à l’insécurité alimentaire et l’appauvrissement de la population rurale, qui représente 60% de la population haïtienne (IFAD 2008). Quant au justificatif principal de la déforestation en haïti, les participants ont expliqué que la fabrication de charbon est essentielle, car elle est la première source d’énergie pour des activités quotidiennes (cuisiner et s’éclairer) en haïti. Les arbres sont donc vus comme une source de revenu garanti à court terme puisque la demande de charbon est élevée à travers tout le pays. Autrement dit, la déforestation est directement liée à des facteurs économiques. En effet, le bois coupé est un moyen rapide pour les populations rurales d’obtenir un revenu leur permettant de subvenir à leurs besoins im-médiats comparé à l’agriculture qui représente une source de revenu imprévisible.

Plusieurs participants ont mentionné que les décisions politiques du gouvernement haïtien ont également contribué à accentuer la dé-forestation. Selon certains de nos interlocuteurs, la déforestation est si extrême en raison des problèmes politiques en haïti depuis plusieurs décennies et l’absence de l’état central. D’autres ont parlé d’un man-que de politiques et d’infrastructures pour soutenir les agriculteurs d’une part et pour procéder au reboisement des zones de coupe de l’autre. En effet, il ne reste aujourd’hui que 2% des forêts originales du pays (Dolisca et coll. 2007). Les participants ont aussi fait réfé-rence aux accords de libre-échange qui permettent l’importation de denrées alimentaires bon marché, notamment des états-Unis, avec lesquelles les producteurs alimentaires haïtiens ne peuvent concurren-cer. En conséquence les agriculteurs ont vu leurs sources de revenu diminuer et parfois même être éliminées et se tournent donc vers d’autres sources, dont la coupe de bois, pour subvenir à leurs besoins.


Résultats préliminaires : Exode ruralEn lien avec ces problèmes environnementaux, le deuxième thème abordé dans les groupes de discussion était celui de l’exode rural, un enjeu qui perdure en haïti. Selon les participants, les populations rurales se déplacent en grand nombre vers les villes autant dû à des facteurs liés à l’environnement qu’aux conditions sociales et éco-nomiques. Ainsi, quitter les zones rurales pour les centres urbains représente une stratégie d’adaptation, car d’après les participants, les populations rurales fuient leur vulnérabilité aux problèmes en-vironnementaux mentionnés ci-haut. En l’absence de soutien de la part de l’état central, ces populations se trouvent souvent démunies de leurs biens. De plus, elles migrent vers les villes à la recherche d’emplois divers et de services sociaux comme l’éducation (princi-palement universitaire). Aussi, plusieurs participants ont argumenté que les populations rurales recherchent une sécurité qui est autant environnementale que sociale et économique. Il semblerait donc que les facteurs environnementaux affectent le contexte social dans lequel s’exprime le mode de vie des populations rurales en haïti et jouent un certain rôle dans la migration interne des campagnes vers les villes de même que dans la migration régionale vers d’autres pays des Caraïbes comme la République Dominicaine (voir Alscher 2011) et les Bahamas ainsi que la Floride.

Résultats préliminaires : Conditions urbainesNos participants ont aussi parlé des problèmes environnementaux dans les zones urbaines d’haïti, principalement ceux liés à la surpo-pulation et dans une moindre mesure la pollution atmosphérique. Le manque de planification urbaine adéquate était un argument récurant concernant la croissance démographique des villes notamment Port-au-Prince, la capitale et centre urbain le plus important du pays. Selon nos participants, en l’absence de plans urbains, les bidonvilles crois-sent de manière démesurée et causent une multitude de problèmes environnementaux dans les villes. Entre autres, ils ont mentionné un degré élevé d’insalubrité (qui à son tour engendre et facilite la proli-fération de maladies) de même qu’un manque de biens de nécessité (nourriture, eau potable, services et établissements de soins, etc.) dans les villes.


En outre, plusieurs participants ont insisté sur la grande vul-nérabilité des résidents des bidonvilles à cause de leur localisation géographique, des zones qui sont souvent à risque d’inondations et de glissements de terrain. En conséquence, le passage de tempêtes tropicales engendre des pertes humaines et matérielles élevées chez ces résidents – un problème lui-même directement lié à la défores-tation discutée ci-haut. Ainsi, un stresse supplémentaire s’exerce sur le peu de ressources disponibles en ville et augmente la carence des nécessités de base.

Nos participants ont reconnu de manière implicite que la classe sociale joue un rôle dans l’expérience des problèmes environnemen-taux en zones urbaines. Ceci pourrait expliquer pourquoi les facteurs environnementaux d’ordre social (présence de bidonvilles, manque d’eau potable, mauvaises conditions sanitaires, etc.) agissent comme éléments répulsifs (push factors) pour les citadins scolarisés et nantis et les encourageraient à migrer à l’extérieur d’haïti, majoritairement aux états-Unis et au Canada. Au dire des participants, les haïtiens urbains et aisés migrent vers des destinations internationales principa-lement pour des raisons sociopolitiques et économiques et ne sont tou-chés qu’indirectement par des facteurs environnementaux physiques.

interconnectivité des facteurs Finalement, nos participants ont souligné le caractère complexe des liens entre les facteurs environnementaux, politiques et socioéco-nomiques dans leur pays d’origine qui contribuent à créer un cercle vicieux au centre duquel la déforestation est à la fois le symptôme et la source de problèmes socioéconomiques, politiques et environne-mentaux (voir figure 1). Certains participants ont débattu sur la ques-tion à savoir si la cause principale de ces problèmes est l’instabilité politique d’haïti (dont aussi la corruption des dirigeants) ou plutôt les problèmes économiques auxquels fait face le pays. Néanmoins, tous se sont entendus sur le fait que ces facteurs sont inter-reliés de façon extrêmement complexe de telle sorte qu’il est presque impossible de les dissocier les uns des autres.

Nos participants étaient aussi d’accord sur le fait que ces pro-blèmes influent sur les décisions migratoires des haïtiens de manière directe ou indirecte selon leur statut social et région d’origine : des


Figure 1La déforestation en Haïti au centre d’un cercle vicieux entre problèmes environnementaux, économiques et sociopolitiques

migrations internes (exode rural) et des migrations internationales de zones rurales vers les Caraïbes et la Floride ou des centres urbains vers les é-U, la France ou le Canada. De par ce fait, les résultats de nos groupes de discussion sont conformes à trois idées avancées par un petit nombre d’études empiriques sur les liens entre environnement et migration internationale: (1) les populations rurales sont plus vul-nérables et sont affectées de manière plus directe par les changements environnementaux que les citadins (Gila et coll. 2011; Bogardi et War-ner 2008) ; (2) les populations rurales ont tendance à migrer à l’échelle nationale et régionale faute de moyens (Gray 2009); et (3) les facteurs

Figure I : La déforestation en Haïti au centre d’un cercle vicieux entre problèmes environnementaux, économiques et socio-politiques

Absence de possibilités

économiques

Déforestation Problèmes environnementaux :

dégradation et infertilité des sols, insécurité alimentaire, érosion, inondations, etc.

Exode rural

Fabrication de charbon

Urbanisation : surpopulation, bidonvilles et problèmes d’écologie urbaine

États-Unis (Floride, Miami,

New York)

Canada

Caraïbes (Bahamas, autres)

République Dominicaine

France

Absence d’initiatives politiques


environnementaux semblent jouer un rôle tout au plus indirect dans les décisions des populations aisées et urbaines qui optent généralement pour des destinations internationales vu qu’elles ont les moyens et le capital social pour ce faire (Wrathall 2012; Gray 2009; Findley 1994).

De plus, les participants ont témoigné des conditions environ-nementales physiques difficiles (érosion et infertilité du sol, par exemple) qui affectent directement la population rurale d’haïti et ses sources de subsistance et rendent ainsi leur migration vers les villes et la région des Caraïbes une migration que l’on pourrait qualifier d’ « environnementale ». En outre, on peut conclure que la déforestation est un problème majeur qui a des répercussions non seulement sur les populations rurales, mais également sur les populations citadines en contribuant à la croissance des bidonvilles ainsi qu’en exerçant un stresse supplémentaire sur l’environnement et les ressources disponi-bles dans les villes (eau potable, insécurité alimentaire).

Prochaines étapesNotre prochaine étape consistera à entamer une dizaine d’entrevues individuelles avec des immigrants haïtiens dans le but de mieux comprendre les différences relatives au rôle des facteurs de l’envi-ronnement en lien avec la classe sociale des individus et aussi leur région d’origine, notamment ceux qui vivent dans des zones rurales comparativement à ceux qui résident dans des centres urbains tels que Port-au-Prince, et les influences de ces différences dans leurs décisions et expériences d’immigration au Canada.

Notre étude empirique rajoute à la complexité des liens entre en-vironnement et la migration internationale (voir Black et coll. 2011). Dans le cas de la diaspora haïtienne établie à Ottawa-Gatineau, l’en-vironnement ne semble pas avoir joué un rôle direct dans la prise de décision d’immigration de nos participants. Bien que ce soient plutôt les facteurs socioéconomiques et politiques qui les ont poussés à quit-ter leur pays, il semblerait que les facteurs environnementaux d’ordre social (la surpopulation, l’insalubrité et le manque d’eau potable dans les centres urbains) auraient joué un rôle indirect. En somme, les immigrants haïtiens de la région d’Ottawa-Gatineau sont convaincus que le problème environnemental, comme la déforestation, est pro-fondément lié aux problèmes politiques et économiques que connait


haïti, et semblerait contribuer du moins de manière indirecte aux motifs de migration de la population. Il est donc difficile de dissocier les facteurs environnementaux des facteurs sociaux, économiques et politiques dans les décisions des migrants de quitter leur pays d’ori-gine, ce qui soulève la question qu’est-ce vraiment une migration environnementale et comment l’étudier.

RemerciementsCe projet a été financé par une subvention de recherche ordinaire du Conseil de Recherches en Sciences humaines (CRSh) du Canada et une bourse d’études supérieures de l’Université d’Ottawa. Nous tenons à remercier tous nos participants pour leur temps ainsi que nos partenaires communautaires sans qui cette recherche n’aurait pas pu avoir lieu. Nous aimerions également remercier Robert McLeman pour son soutien à différentes étapes du projet et ses commentaires sur une ébauche de cette note de recherche. Nous remercions enfin Lidia Vargas pour son assistance durant le projet.

Ouvrages citésAlscher, Stefan. 2011. Environmental degradation and migration on hispaniola

Island. International Migration 49.1: 164–188. Amuedo-Dorantes, Catalina, Annie Georges et Susan Pozo. 2010. Migration,

remittances, and children’s schooling in haiti. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 630: 224–244.

Black, Richard, W. Neil Adger, Nigel W. Arnell, Stefan Dercon, Andrew Ged-des et David S. G. Thomas. 2011. The effect of environmental change on human migration. Global Environmental Change 21: 3–11.

Bogardi, Janos et Koko, Warner. 2008. here comes the food. Nature Reports Cli-mate. <http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0901/full/climate.2008.138.html> Consulté le 6 février 2013.

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking.

Dolisca, Frito, McDaniel, Joshua M., Teeter, Lawrence D. et Jolly Curtis M. 2007. Land tenure, population pressure, and deforestation in haiti: The case of Forêt des Pins Reserve. Journal of Forest Economics 13.4: 277–289.

Doran, Amanda A. 2011. Where should haitians go? Why environmental refugees are up the creek without a paddle. Villanova Environmental Law Journal 22.1: 117–140.


Findley, Sally E. 1994. Does drought increase migration? A study of migration from rural Mali during the 1983–1985 Drought. International Migration Review 28.3: 539–553.

Gila, Oscar Alvarez, Ugalde Zaratiegui, Ana et Lopez De Maturana Diéguez, Virginia. 2011. Western Sahara: Migration, exile and environment. Inter-national Migration 49.1: 146–163.

Gray, Clark L. 2009. Environment, land, and rural out-migration in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes. World Development 37.2: 457–468.

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). 2008. Enabling the rural poor to overcome poverty in Haiti. <http://www.ifad.org/operations/projects/regions/pl/factsheet/haiti_e.pdf> Consulté le 15 janvier 2013.

Lu, Xin, Linus, Bengtsson et Petter, holme. 2012. Predictability of population displacement after the 2010 haiti earthquake. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.29: 11576-11581.

Mooney, Margarita A. 2009. Faith makes us live: Surviving and thriving in the Haitian diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Myers, Norman. 2002. Environmental refugees: A growing phenomenon of the 21st century. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London: Biological sciences: Series B 357: 609–613.

Paul, Bénédique. 2008. Migration and poverty in Haiti: Economic and social consequences of remittances on inequality and poverty in Haiti. Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA), Paper No. 39019. <http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/39019/1/MPRA_paper_39019.pdf> Consulté le 18 janvier 2013.

Statistique Canada. 2006. Statut d’immigrant et période d’immigration (8) et lieu de naissance (261) pour les immigrants et les résidents non permanents, pour le Canada, les provinces, les territoires, les régions métropolitaines de recensement et les agglomérations de recensement, Recensement de 2006 - Données-échantillon (20 %). <http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/tbt/Rp-fra.cfm?LANG=F&APATh=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0&GC=0&GID=0&GK=0&GRP=1&PID=89424&PRID=0&PTYPE=88971,97154&S=0&ShOWALL=0&SUB=0&Temporal=2006&ThEME=72&VID=0&VNAMEE=&VNAMEF=> Consulté le 23 mai 2013.

Wrathall, David J. 2012. Migration amidst social-ecological regime shift: The search for stability in Garífuna Villages of Northern honduras. Hum Ecol, Springer 40: 583–596.

The Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) – which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2010 – is the premier multi-disciplinary scholarly membership-based association in Canada for university professors and

students, researchers, and anyone working or interested in Latin America and Caribbean studies. Its membership reflects its international scope.

We at CALACS invite you to become a member of our association. Doing so entitles you to two issues of The Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean

Studies (CJLACS), published since 1976. It also makes you eligible to present in our annual Congresses, which annually feature both student and senior researchers from

throughout Canada and the world. You may join by using our new online membership system, at http://www.can-latam.org/membership

CALACS also awards a dissertation prize to the best dissertation written on Latin America or the Caribbean at a Canadian University each year, and is now accepting

nominations for dissertations written in 2013 for the 2014 prize.

___________________________________

L’Association canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes (ACELAC) – qui a célébré son 40ième anniversaire en 2010 – est l’association scientifique

multidisciplinaire fondée sur l’adhésion des membres par excellence au Canada pour les professeur(e)s d’université et les étudiant(e)s, chercheur(e)s, et tous ceux et celles

qui travaillent dans la région ou s’intéressent aux études latino-américaines et caraïbes. Sa composition reflète sa portée internationale.

Nous, à l’ACELAC, vous invitons à devenir membre de notre association. Cela vous donne droit à deux numéros de la Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et des Caraïbes (RCELAC), publiée depuis 1976. également, cela vous rend admissible

à présenter des communications lors de notre congrès annuel, qui comprend tant étudiant(e)s que chercheur(e)s expérimenté(e)s de partout au Canada et au sein des Amériques. Vous pouvez joindre l’association en utilisant notre nouveau système

d’adhésion en ligne, à : http://www.can-latam.org/fr/membership

Chaque année, l’ACELAC décerne également un prix à la meilleure thèse de doctorat écrite dans une université canadienne et portant sur l’Amérique latine ou les Caraïbes.

L’ACELAC accepte maintenant les mises en candidature pour des thèses écrites en 2013, pour le prix 2014.

http://www.can-latam.org

LOOKiNG BACK AND MOViNG FORWARD— REFLECTiONs ON LATiN AMERiCAN AND CARiBBEAN sTuDiEs

CLAss, GENDER, AND RACE iN THE CARiBBEAN: REFLECTiONs ON AN iNTELLECTuAL JOuRNEY

HELEN i. sAFAUniversity of Florida

introduction. helen Safa, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, spent her career studying class, race, and gender in the hispanic Caribbean, work that revolutionized the field. As Jorge Duany (2010, 48–49) recently acknowledged, helen has left a “pro-foundly liberating legacy” in a variety of fields. Indeed, her pioneering efforts have touched variously upon important political and analytic problems in the Caribbean and Latin American context, including poverty and class inequality; labour; housing, household formation, and marriage/informal unions; racism; gender inequality; and more. By breaking ground on these social issues, helen has provided the building blocks for generations of young and even established scholars interested in the intersectionality among these various issues, includ-ing both the ways in which gender, race, and class overlap with and reinforce each another and the transnational linkages circulating around these points. Collectively, her dozens of publications—most notably The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico (1974) and The Myth of the Male Breadwinner (1995)—stand as a key node in the study of culture and society in the contemporary hispanic Caribbean. What follows are her reflections on her career, one that spans more than six decades and has had an immense impact on our understanding of the


219


multiple connections among social and economic inequalities, gender relations, and conceptions of race.

My intellectual journey begins in 1954, when I was invited to Puerto Rico for five weeks and remained for two years. From that moment on, I had a commitment to the Caribbean that is still a central focus of my life. But the scope of my research has evolved, from class to gender and then to race. This was not a conscious decision but the unfolding of an intellectual inquiry into inequality that revealed ever more complexity. The Caribbean has not become easier to understand as I came to know its people. But with over 50 years of study behind me, my understanding is deeper and more cognizant of its limitations than when I began.

The invitation to Puerto Rico in 1954 transformed my life. As a child of working-class German immigrants, I had always been interested in cultural differences. My first job in Puerto Rico, on the Puerto Rican staff of the Point IV program, brought foreign scholars to Puerto Rico to learn about their development programs. It gave me a wide exposure to the island and Operation Bootstrap, the Puerto Rican development program that was just beginning in the 1950s. As a young Cornell graduate with little work experience, I received far more opportunities in Puerto Rico than I would have had in New York City or elsewhere at that time. Puerto Rico also directed me toward the study of anthropology as a way of understanding and respecting cultures different from my own.

One important factor is that, beginning in 1980, I extended my research from Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic and to Cuba. Comparing these countries taught me a great deal about their dif-ferences and commonalities. I deliberately limited my work to the hispanic Caribbean because of its shared historical and cultural background. Although I came to know many other Caribbean islands and their scholars, I never did primary research beyond the hispanic Caribbean, and my academic life has been at US universities.

In the pages that follow, I will outline how the three prisms of class, gender, and race emerged, by focusing on my principal publi-cations: The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico (1974) for class, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner (1995) for gender, and my writing on Cuba and Afrodescendents in other parts of Latin America for race.

Safa / Class, Gender, and Race in the Caribbean 221

Class and the urban Poor of Puerto RicoMy first stay in Puerto Rico from 1954 to 1956 came before I started graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University in the fall of 1956. I had been given the opportunity to help direct a research study of Puerto Rico’s parcelero program, which resettled landless agricul-tural workers and their families who had been agregados (squatters) on their employer’s property to parcels in planned rural communi-ties. This experience confirmed my interest in social research and expanded my knowledge of the rural Puerto Rican poor. In one of the planned communities that we studied, which was along a major high-way outside the capital, the residents were beginning to commute to better paid non-agricultural jobs in the city, a reflection of the internal processes of migration then already underway. This study became the basis for my MA thesis at Columbia.

I knew that I wanted to return to Puerto Rico after graduate school and applied for a fellowship from the University of Puerto Rico, which was normally given to Puerto Rican students because the university then lacked its own graduate program in the social sciences. Acceptance of this fellowship (which covered my tuition at Columbia) obligated me to return to the island for the same amount of time I held the fellowship, which was two years. I returned to do my doctoral research in 1959 with the intention of studying one of the new middle-class urbanizaciones or subdivisions then springing up all over the San Juan Metropolitan Area. But the Puerto Rico hous-ing Authority, which funded the study, had another priority, which they asked me to undertake. They were having difficulty with the relocation of the urban poor from shantytowns or arrabales (as they were called in Puerto Rico) into public housing projects. The housing Authority blamed these problems on the urban poor—they were not well educated, they did not know how to use modern toilets and other appliances, they were said to be lazy and slovenly.

After doing ethnographic research in one shantytown and one large housing project, the reality I discovered was quite different. I was impressed by the cohesion of the shantytown, which had formed 30 years earlier around a core of old timers who still lived there and had established neighbourhood norms. People knew each other and helped each other, in everything from babysitting to repairing houses, which reinforced ties of kinship and place of origin. Neighbourhood


associations were quite active, especially in matters pertaining to the improvement of the shantytown, like bringing in electricity or pav-ing roads.

All of these ties collapsed as the urban poor were moved into public housing. The selection process favoured the most vulnerable, resulting in a higher percentage of female-headed households in public housing (Safa 1965). The upwardly mobile preferred to buy a home of their own in one of the newer urbanizaciones, and in the case of the shantytown we studied, the government actually provided qualified residents with house plots in one community to facilitate this process. Residents in public housing were assigned new hous-ing randomly, deliberately breaking up the older ties that had existed in the shantytown. Public policy at that time argued that these ties perpetuated the ills of the shantytown and had to be weakened. But the result in public housing was a much more vulnerable, depend-ent population that rebelled against the rules imposed on them, and in which collective cohesion and communal responsibility became replaced by individual anomie.

More than 10 years passed between the completion of my PhD thesis and its evolution into The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico published in 1974 (and later in Puerto Rico).1 My first academic job was at Syra-cuse University, and I married and had a child, then moved to Rutgers University in 1968. In the interval, my growing political awareness helped me to see the problems of the urban poor in a new light. Fol-lowing dependency theory, I saw Puerto Rico as a colonial depend-ency of the United States in which the Popular Party of Puerto Rico played a key role. The aim of slum eradication and urban renewal programs under Operation Bootstrap was never greater equality, but to help the poor with public programs that the government deemed to be in their interest. Many of the social welfare programs that Governor Muñoz and the Populares developed in Puerto Rico could be seen in this light. Increased educational levels and occupational mobility under Operation Bootstrap convinced the poor that oppor-tunities abounded and that they personally were to blame if they did not advance—they were lazy, alcoholics, single mothers, and so on. Increased migration to the mainland posed an alternative, especially for the young, who left in large numbers. The poor were so national-istic that they identified with the progress evident on the island, with


new shopping malls, bridges, and highways, and a modern airport. hence the subtitle of The Urban Poor: A Study in Development and Inequality.

The class dimensions of this analysis are clear. The primary basis for solidarity in the shantytown was the sense of shared poverty. But this solidarity did not extend beyond the shantytown’s boundaries. Through its process of co-optation, the state succeeded in forestall-ing any major political protest by the poor to change the political-socioeconomic order of society. I tried to explain the lack of class-consciousness among the urban poor in Puerto Rico with an analysis informed by dependency theory and political economy (Safa 1974). Political parties and labour unions became vehicles for controlling the poor rather than channelling protest. I noted briefly (108) the absence of a racial awareness as a basis for solidarity, as appeared to exist in the Anglophone Caribbean. Gender was also not a mechanism for solidarity. Women were active members of the shantytown, but few were employed full-time and they left leadership issues to men. They felt the immediate oppression of men in their daily lives more than the more abstract sense of class oppression (Safa 1975).

But this process of co-optation was predicated upon continued economic development, which became more difficult in succeeding decades. As unemployment soared and experiments with different types of industrialization programs failed, the poor lost their optimism while still seeming to accept the status quo (Safa 2011). Urbaniza-tion and modernization deepened Puerto Rico’s dependency on the United States, convincing most of the poor that independence was not a viable option. They cling to US citizenship as a form of salva-tion that protects them from the fate of neighbouring Dominicans, whom are now a substantial minority living mostly undocumented on the island. And US citizenship assures Puerto Ricans open access to the mainland, which became increasingly important as the economy stagnated. More than half the Puerto Rican population now lives on the mainland.

Structural inequality has deepened and contributed not only to the economic crisis now facing the island, but also to rising crime, drug addiction, and other social ills. The focus of much of this unrest is the public housing projects, which are now considered dens of iniquity as the shantytowns were earlier. They are hemmed in by barbed wire


and police patrols, although even the police are said to be reluctant to enter an apartment. I attribute much of this to the anomie latent in the physical and administrative design of the projects (Safa 1964). The grassroots leadership gap has been filled with criminal elements linked to powerful brokers outside the projects who control the sup-ply and demand for drugs. And although placed in well-off residential neighbourhoods, public housing has increased class segregation rath-er than ameliorating it — a sad ending to a bold public experiment.

Gender and the Myth of the Male BreadwinnerAt Rutgers I became increasingly involved in administrative responsi-bilities, first as Director of the modest Latin American Institute, then in 1974, as New Brunswick Chair of the Department of Anthropology. I had left the Department of Anthropology in 1970 for the interdisci-plinary Department of Urban Planning, where I obtained tenure and promotion to Full Professor. So moving back to Anthropology posed its challenges. The department grew to have a full-fledged graduate program, and I served on over 20 graduate student dissertation com-mittees, including students in other social science departments. Liv-ingston College of Rutgers, where I was based, was notorious for the radical leftwing bent of its faculty, and taught me a great deal about progressive academic politics.

I also became involved in the Marxist feminist movement in New York City, through which I met June Nash, a distinguished anthro-pologist and Latin Americanist then teaching at New York University and later the City University of New York. She was on the board of the Social Science Research Council, and asked me to help her organize a seminar on Feminine Perspectives in Latin America, for which she obtained SSRC funding.

June and I undertook a three-week tour of Latin American coun-tries in 1973 to see who the principal feminist researchers were, what they were researching, and where the seminar might be held. The trip was an eye opener, because it revealed the fear and even animosity toward feminism, even among well-established women researchers. hence the title of the seminar, “Feminine [and not Feminist] Perspec-tives on Latin America,” held in Buenos Aires in 1974. The Instituto Torcauto di Tella agreed to give us a small meeting room, but the


interest in the seminar forced them to open it up to a much larger, largely female audience. It should be remembered that these were volatile times in the Southern Cone, with military dictatorships taking over in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Despite these difficulties, this seminar and its publication as Sex and Class in Latin America (Nash and Safa 1976) became a landmark in the history of Women’s Studies in Latin America (Navarro 1979).

The seminar was my introduction to feminism in Latin America and the international women’s movement. I went on to co-direct a Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research seminar with Eleanor Leacock that analyzed the gender division of labour, from which we published a special issue of Signs (1981) as well as a second volume on gender with June Nash (Nash and Safa 1986). I also helped organize the Wellesley conference on Women and Na-tional Development, published as an issue of Signs (1977) and later as a book (1978). This activity increased my exposure to the inter-national women’s movement, enhanced by participation in the UN World Conferences in Copenhagen in 1980, in Nairobi in 1985, and in Beijing in 1995. This wider perspective helped me to place Latin American and Caribbean (as well as US) feminism within a compara-tive framework and kept me cognizant of Eurocentric biases in the analysis of class and race.

With so much co-editing, I became anxious to conduct my own gender research, which would prompt my return to the Caribbean (never completely abandoned, as Caribbean colleagues also collabo-rated in these publications). In 1980 I obtained an National Institute of Mental health (NIMh) grant to do research in Puerto Rico on women garment workers, who were a key but often underestimated compo-nent of Operation Bootstrap. Together with some Rutgers graduate students, I had done some research on women garment workers in New Jersey, part of a comparative study with heleieth Saffiotti on women textile and garment workers in Sao Paulo, under a small SSRC grant. One of the most notable findings was the older age of most New Jersey garment workers, resulting from a slow process of attrition in the United States as production moved abroad. We were among the first to discover “runaway shops” (Safa 1981), and two of my graduate students, Lynn Bolles and M. Patricia Fernandez Kelly, went on to write their PhD theses on related themes, the first in Jamaica and the


second on the Mexican border. Puerto Rico had been one of the first overseas locales for garment production, at that time still unionized by the ILGWU (now UNITE), who helped me gain access to the plants.

Thankfully I chose Puerto Rico, because the NIMh study coin-cided with a job offer from the University of Florida (UF) as Direc-tor of their Center for Latin American Studies. Fortunately, Carmen Angelica Perez, a Puerto Rican graduate student at Rutgers, was interested in this research and, with some guidance from me, she conducted the field research in 1980–81, the same year I moved to UF. In 1983, we extended the study to the Dominican Republic with the cooperation of CIPAF (Centro de Investigación y Promoción de Acción Feminist), a feminist NGO directed by Magali Pineda that had conducted a previous study of women working in the free trade zones, as the export processing zones came to be known. Several graduate students at UF helped analyze the data that CIPAF provided, and I compared these results with the Puerto Rican research.

The opportunity to do comparative research in Cuba presented it-self in 1986, with the cooperation of the Federation of Cuban Women. Through my role as President of LASA (Latin American Studies As-sociation) and other activities, I had established credibility in Cuba, and they offered me a team of researchers to carry out the study. This collaboration was also necessary because of US government restric-tions, which did not allow me to pay or otherwise compensate Cubans who helped with the research. So my research expenses were covered by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. It was also an invaluable opportunity to work with Cuban researchers and learn from their insights into a very different Carib-bean society than Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, as well as to help train them in anthropological techniques.

Fortunately, this Cuban opportunity presented itself after I had stepped down from my five-year tenure (1980–85) as Director of the Latin American Center at UF. This time also gave me the opportu-nity to return to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba to conduct in-depth interviews with a select sample of women factory workers, an essential component since my participation in the survey research had been limited. I taped over 50 interviews, which were later transcribed and analyzed and are assembled along with other research materials in the WID (Women in Development) digital col-


lection of the UF Library’s Latin American Collection.2 Analysis of all these data resulted in delays in full publication of the book, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner, until 1995. I also did extensive sec-ondary research on state policy and economic development on each society, a perspective I learned through participation with Carmen Diana Deere and our colleagues in the research and writing for In the Shadows of the Sun: Alternative Development Strategies in the Car-ibbean (1990). This work helped me understand how women’s paid employment fit into the bigger developmental picture. One reason for choosing garment workers is that garment work represented, for most of these women, their first experience with salaried employment and was thus invaluable in examining the impact on women’s lives and family structure.

It became even clearer to me as I analyzed the data that a true gender focus was necessary. In each of these Caribbean societies, the increase in women’s paid employment had been accompanied by a decline and deterioration in male employment, due largely to a shift in development strategy from agriculture (principally sugar) and some import-substitution industrialization to labour-intensive export promotion. One of the primary reasons women sought employment was to supplement the family income, but they often became the principal earners rather than supplementary. We were witnessing the erosion of the myth of the male breadwinner, which had previously governed all of these societies, in which adult men were expected to be the principal breadwinner and ultimate authority. The growth of female employment challenged male authority in the home, con-tributing to greater equity in marital relations in all of these islands. This increase in women’s authority in some cases contributed to an increase in female-headed households as men abandoned support of their households or were forced out by women who had assumed the provider role (Safa 1995).

But export-promotion industrialization proved short-lived, es-pecially in labour-intensive industries like garments, despite the stimulus provided by the US government’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, which provided special US tariff reductions for US products assem-bled in the Caribbean. Limited assembly operations did not provide for linkages into the local economy to stimulate further growth. The Puerto Rican case is classic, because it was one of the first overseas


locations for runaway shops. Now the Puerto Rican garment industry is moribund, as cheaper production areas opened in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, whereas federal law bound Puerto Rico to the minimum wage. Younger Puerto Rican women now work in the higher-tech pharmaceutical industry, which is also declining. But male unemployment continues to be much higher. The garment in-dustry is now collapsing in the Dominican Republic due to loss of its preferential status for export to the United States.

In Cuba the story is much more complex. The textile factory we studied has also closed, following the economic crisis brought on by the break with the former Soviet Union, initiating the Special Period beginning in 1989. From 1989 to 1994, the gross domestic product declined 40%, aided by the tightening of the US embargo. A dual economy evolved, based largely on foreign investment in tourism and joint ventures, along with a dual currency in pesos and official foreign exchange. Those with access to foreign exchange through work in tourism, remittances, or self-employment have much higher incomes than approximately half the population dependent on Cuban pesos. Full employment for men or women is no longer guaranteed, and state jobs are also being cut. The real value of wages in the state sector has fallen precipitously, and can no longer assure Cubans of an adequate standard of living.

But there does not seem to be any resurrection of the myth of the male breadwinner in Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic. Women have become too educated and autonomous to return to this subservient role.

With the publication of The Myth of the Male Breadwinner, I turned my attention increasingly to female-headed households, a topic that had interested me since my early days in Puerto Rico (Safa 1965). I tried to examine economic situations in which there had been a dramatic contrast between the growth of female employment and a decline in male employment, in order to see if this contributed to the growth of female-headed households. In 1997 I obtained a grant from the North-South Center to do research in Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic, a community where sugar production had shut down and been replaced by garment factories. We could not conduct a full-scale survey of the town, but it was clear that men resented being dislodged as breadwinners and replaced by young girls (Safa 1995,


1997, 1999). Young men migrated out, often leaving children and women behind. Female factory workers profited from new sources of employment, but the full burden of family support now often fell on them. Working conditions were poor, forcing women to work long hours without adequate compensation, while unions or other forms of worker solidarity were suppressed. Single mothers did support their children with these wages, but often a grandmother or other extended family looked after the children, either in the town or the rural area. I began to see the extended family as a key survival strategy, not only for single mothers but also for many of the poor. We were able to show statistically through a national sample that female-headed households were able to raise their incomes to a level comparable to male-headed households through the presence of additional wage earners in the extended family household (Safa 2001), although per capita income may still have been lower.

My interest in female-headed households forced me to examine their history and evolution in the Caribbean, where they have long been prevalent, especially in the Anglophone Caribbean. Starting with Melville herskovits, many have identified female heads with race or African origins, because of their prevalence among blacks under slavery and in colonial times. In our Cuban sample of women fac-tory workers, female heads of household were more prevalent among Afrodescendents. I would argue that there is a Caribbean cultural tradition, stronger in the black community, that places less emphasis on the marital or husband-wife tie (as does our Eurocentric model); women rely more on their female kin group for stability and mutual aid. In much of the Caribbean working class, this extended form of family structure has clearly been a major survival strategy, especially for single mothers. In Cuba, consensual unions are now becoming more common, even among professional women. Legal marriage is losing its legitimacy among all class levels.

A comparison of female-headed households in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba also highlights the role of state policy in the growth of female headship. In Puerto Rico, the percentage of female-headed households has been held down, which I attribute to the high value placed on marriage in Puerto Rican society. In part, this stems from the fragmentation of the extended family through decades of urbanization and migration, which deprives single mothers of their


support. But the value placed on marriage is also due to US influence on public policy in Puerto Rico, which dates to the US occupation in 1898 (Findlay 1999). In order to curb the growth of single mothers in Puerto Rico, the United States instituted civil marriage and divorce, and subsequently made it easier for legally divorced women (as op-posed to those in consensual unions) to obtain federal benefits like a husband’s pension, social security, or veterans’ benefits.

No such incentives to legal marriage are provided in either the Dominican Republic or Cuba, where the extended family is still a principal resource for the poor, and for single mothers in particular. however, the Cuban state did facilitate the growth of female head-ship, despite the official encouragement of civil marriage. Unlike Puerto Rico, there is no difference in legal benefits between legally divorced or separated women and those resulting from consensual unions, which are very common in Cuba, especially among the young. After the 1959 Revolution, consensual unions have increased at all class levels, and for many years, only civil unions were officially recognized. As in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the in-crease in women’s educational levels and in employment has given women more autonomy and ability to sustain their own household. The deterioration in employment during the Special Period in Cuba made female employment and income-earning even more necessary. Women try to earn dollars by operating paladares (small restaurants), renting rooms in their homes, or even in prostitution. Tourism and some joint enterprises provide access to dollars, which are worth much more than the Cuban peso. Afro-Cubans have been really disad-vantaged in employment in these newer growth sectors, as well as in the receipt of remittances, which are sent to relatives from the largely white Cuban population on the US mainland. Remittances have be-come increasingly important in Cuba during the Special Period, and continue to play a dominant role in the Dominican Republic as well. Because women are often the major recipients of remittances, this may be another factor contributing to the growth of female headship.

It is clear that the female-headed household needs to be under-stood within the prism of class, gender, and race. Such households are found primarily among the poor, where women have always played a special role in supporting the family and in maintaining family solidarity. I would argue that single mothers are not confined


to the Caribbean or to the black community, but have become a com-mon global survival strategy where people, and especially men, face decreasing prospects for employment. Despite the erosion of men’s authority as breadwinner, much of state policy in the United States and in the Caribbean implicitly continues to reinforce the myth of the male breadwinner.

Just as I was completing the manuscript of The Myth of the Male Breadwinner for publication, there was a major change in my own life. My husband of 32 years, Manouchehr Safa-Isfahani, died in December 1994. It was a terrible blow to my family, including our daughter, Mitra, and his two children from a previous marriage, Ka-veh and Arya, and their children. I now faced life alone, because none of them lived in Gainesville. It was one of the factors that prompted my retirement from UF in 1997. I no longer could face the constant volume of work at the university, and decided to dedicate myself to writing and research. I have never regretted my decision.

Race and AfrodescendentsDuring my last years before retirement at UF, I was able to initiate a Rockefeller Fellowship Program, which enabled us to bring two scholars a year as visitors to the Center for Latin American Studies. Both were designated scholars in Afro-American Studies and Iden-tity, which I saw as a unifying theme bridging the Atlantic world, as it is now called, and includes the Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa. The scholars we brought were from all these areas, and contributed to the formation of a core of scholars at UF interested in this theme. In 1996 we held a major conference, which resulted in the publication of a special issue of Latin American Perspectives titled “Race and National Identity in the Americas.” The Rockefeller Foundation was kind enough to give me a month’s stay at their fellowship centre in Bellagio, Italy, to edit the papers and prepare the introduction to this volume.

My personal life also changed. I married John Dumoulin, a US historian who had lived many years in Cuba and whom I had known since the 1970s. his wife, Isabel Larguia, had been a leading feminist in Latin America, and also a good friend, before she died in Buenos Aires. John came to the United States, and after spending a year in


New York City we married in August 1999. We are very happy and share a love of Latin America and other parts of the world, to which we travel when we can.

My interest in race and in South Africa prompted me to par-ticipate in the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, where I participated in an anthropology panel on race organized by Faye harrison, now at UF, and later published in a collection (Safa 2005b). The enthusiastic participation by thousands of Afrodescendents from all parts of the world, especially women, aroused my interest.

Through this conference, I made contact with officials from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, DC, who later invited me to conduct a brief study of Afrodescendent women in Latin America, focusing on Brazil. Brazil is the Latin American country with the largest Afrodescendent population and where the movement for the advancement of Afrodescendents is most advanced. My husband and I made a whirlwind two-week trip to Brazil, funded by the IDB, to talk to activists and gather data. On our own, we later visited the Atlantic coast of Central America, including honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, to observe a very different Afrodescend-ent population, living as minorities in essentially mestizo countries. I completed a report for the IDB with the assistance of Nathalie Lebon, a former graduate student in anthropology at UF, who was an expert on Brazil. All of these activities continued to spur my interest.

My first major article on Afrodescendents, “Challenging Mesti-zaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendent Move-ments in Latin America” (Safa 2005a), was published in 2005 in the journal Critique of Anthropology. I realized that mestizaje was the key to understanding the difference between race relations in Latin American and the Caribbean and in the United States.

Mestizaje, implying both cultural and racial mixture, was the ba-sis of Latin America’s claim to racial democracy. Mestizaje blurred distinctions between racial groups rather than setting them apart as had the one-drop rule in the United States. Mestizaje also implied blanqueamiento, or whitening, a bias in favour of white or European skin colour and culture. In short, Afrodescendents were encouraged to assimilate into the colonial Spanish or Portuguese population and culture, but were also told Afrodescendent culture was inferior and


that they should therefore adopt colonial European norms and values. It was this bias that the Afrodescendent movement sought to attack, in order to validate Afrodescendent culture and its people in its own right. This was a tall task because, after centuries of discrimination, many Afrodescendents were convinced of the inferiority of their black culture and reluctant to openly espouse blackness. Mestizaje implied that mulattos or pardos were better than blacks because they were further along on the route to whiteness, setting up invidious distinc-tions that the term Afrodescendent tried to overcome.

I also argued that Afrodescendent and indigenous women share a different gender ideology from most white women. They never be-lieved in the myth of the male breadwinner because Afrodescendent and indigenous men found it difficult to earn a living to support a fam-ily, and women had to work to add to the family income. however, I argued that Afrodescendent women were even more autonomous than indigenous women, who were confined to their villages for work and marriage by the system of gender complementarity and ethnic solidar-ity. This autonomy also contributes to greater gender consciousness among Afrodescendent women, who rely heavily on their female kin group for support.

This analysis took me out of the Caribbean to research Afro-descendents in many parts of Latin America, particularly Brazil. In a later article (Safa 2008b), I recognized there were substantial differences between Afrodescendents in mestizo countries, such as Colombia or Central America, and in Latin American and Caribbean countries in which they are a substantial segment of the population, such as Brazil or Cuba. Afrodescendents in mestizo countries tend to follow the lead of the indigenous movement, which is often older, better organized, and more fully recognized internationally than the Afrodescendent movement. Afrodescendents in Brazil and Cuba, however, are more assimilated and share with whites a strong sense of national identity. It is difficult for Afrodescendents to form a unified national movement, as the indigenous have, because they are very heterogeneous and divided by strong regional and class differences. Rather than forming a political party, as some indigenous groups have, many Afro-Brazilians support a national program of affirmative action designed to correct some of the severe socioeconomic inequi-ties to which Afrodescendents are subject. Affirmative action policies


in Brazil expanded under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, along with other highly effective social welfare programs such as bolsa familia, a cash assistance program that reduced the worst levels of poverty in Brazil’s Northeast, where many of the most impoverished Afrodescendents still live.

With the strong feminist movement in Brazil, gender inequality has been reduced considerably more than racial inequality, benefitting primarily middle-class white women. Brazilian women have made great educational and occupational gains in past decades, virtually eliminating gender gaps in schooling and illiteracy, but the illiteracy rates for poor black women remain much higher. Afro-Brazilian women have made greater educational gains than Afro-Brazilian men, but their wage levels are lower. This wage gap actually increases with education for both men and women, suggesting that affirmative action in education will not alone solve racial inequality. The increase in ra-cial discrimination in Brazil at higher education and class levels also underlines the importance of class as an important factor in analyz-ing racial inequalities in Brazil and Latin America generally, a point to which I return in the conclusion. Unlike the United States, where racial discrimination is attenuated at higher class levels, the opposite occurs in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Where does the Caribbean fit into this pattern? I shall confine my discussion largely to Cuba, where the documentation is better. Cuba and the other hispanic Caribbean islands share with Brazil a strong history of mestizaje, which promoted the assimilation of Afrode-scendents into the national culture. historical factors facilitated this process. The slave plantation developed slowly in the early colonial period and did not flourish completely until the 19th century in the hispanic Caribbean, while in the Anglophone Caribbean and haiti, the large-scale sugar plantation reigned supreme as early as the 17th and 18th centuries. The number of slaves imported into the hispanic Caribbean was lower, resulting in a lower percentage of Afrodescend-ents than in the Anglophone Caribbean even today. Mintz (2010) argues that this prevented the development in the hispanic Carib-bean of a creole society like that which developed in the rest of the Caribbean. his primary evidence is the development of creole lan-guages which became the popular vernacular in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, as opposed to standard English or French.


Afrodescendents in the hispanic Caribbean all spoke Spanish, though with African influences.

Mintz (2010) also argued that the plantation was a far more de-structive force in human culture than the peasantry and other forms of servitude in which Afrodescendants lived. The plantation forced together different African peoples speaking different languages and practicing different religions. Slavery imposed on them a uniform code of conduct and stripped them of most of their cultural and spiritual resources. This also helps explain why the Afrodescendents of the Caribbean and northeastern Brazil differed from those along the Atlantic coast of Central America and the littorals of Colombia and Ecuador, most of whom, while once slaves, are now peasants or uprooted urbanites. Some of them also lived on plantations and were enslaved, but not in numbers comparable to the large-scale industrial sugar combines of Brazil and Cuba or other parts of the Caribbean. Even within the Caribbean there were historical differences between the Anglophone and hispanic Caribbean, creating subcultures noted by Mintz.

Mestizaje was far more prevalent in the hispanic Caribbean, where in the early colonial period both the Catholic Church and the state encouraged interracial couples to sanctify their unions, unlike the strict opposition to miscegenation in the Anglophone Caribbean. As large-scale plantations developed in the 19th century, Cuba also adopted stricter rules against intermarriage of “status unequals” (Mar-tinez Alier 1974). A dual marriage system developed, in which legal marriages were confined to a white elite while the rest of the popu-lation lived largely in consensual unions. This pattern strengthened class differences in marriage patterns and persisted until the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

The matrifocal family that developed within the Cuban working class grew out of slavery in which women were expected to fend for themselves and their children. Consensual unions were often unsta-ble and led women to rely more on their female kin group than on their partners for economic and emotional support. This gave rise to extended three-generation families, often with a female head, that remain strong in Cuba to this day.

The number of matrifocal and female-headed households has risen rapidly in the revolutionary period, due to these historical roots


as well as revolutionary policies that promoted Cuban women’s equal-ity, such as sharp increases in educational and occupational levels, free health care and education (which made it easier for women to raise children on their own), and legislation that made consensual un-ions legally equivalent to legal unions. The influence of the Catholic Church, which always promoted institutional marriage, also waned. The state tried to promote civil marriage through mass weddings and the 1975 Family Code, which laid out the basis for a more egalitarian marriage. But despite these state efforts, legal marriage is losing its le-gitimacy in Cuba and consensual unions have become common, even among professional women. As early as 1981, racial differences in marriage patterns were converging, as legal marriage declined among whites (de la Fuente 1995). This was accompanied by a sharp decline in the birth rate, which now stands at below replacement levels, as the Cuban population is aging.

The focus of the Cuban Revolution on reducing class inequality had a marked levelling effect on racial inequality in various aspects, including marital patterns, fertility, mortality, life expectancy, and educational and occupational levels (Catasús 1999). Racial equality is also shown in the decline of racial endogamy and in the growth of interracial unions, especially among the young. Rodriguez (2008) found a high rate of interracial marriage in several working class neighbourhoods in 1990s havana, which he terms “mestizaje from below.” Telles (2004) found similar results in Brazil, where inter-racial marriage is much higher among the poor than in the middle class. Telles observes that horizontal relations among class equals, especially the poor, are much less race-conscious than vertical rela-tions between the classes, in which whites try to maintain their racial and class superiority.

The levelling of gender, class, and racial hierarchies in post-revolutionary Cuba is evidence of the erosion of the dual marriage system that sustained these hierarchies in the past (Safa 2009). Legal marriage is losing its legitimacy as consensual unions, female-headed households, and interracial unions grow. Some of these hierarchies began to reappear with the economic crisis of the Special Period start-ing in 1989. Afro-Cubans are particularly affected, because of their limited access to dollars in both the profitable tourist sector (which prefers white employees) and in remittances from the largely white


Cuban community in the United States, which have become increas-ingly important as a source of income. Remittances are also an im-portant source of income for the increasing number of self-employed, who again are largely white and have the wherewithal to establish paladares and other small businesses.

however, the Afro-Cuban population is strong enough to with-stand this adversity. It is thriving in sports and music, areas in which they have long excelled, and which are receiving increasing inter-national recognition. Because of improved educational levels, there is a growing Afro-Cuban middle class, whose members are public functionaries, university teachers, and writers. They are prepared to defend their revolutionary gains and are supportive of activities in the Afro-Cuban community.

ConclusionThis brief summary of my research leaves many questions, with which I am still grappling, unanswered. Where do Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic fit into this pattern of racial inequality? We know that historical and contemporary factors differentiate them from Cuba, but we do not have adequate census data to compare them. María del Carmen Baerga’s research on colonial 19th-century Puerto Rico (2005, 2005-06) shows clearly that, as in Cuba, race was a negotiated status, in which sexuality played a major role. Racially mixed mulata women were assumed to be sexually suspect and perhaps illegitimate, but they could improve their status by proper behaviour such as hard work, thrift, and an orderly family life. Marriage itself was a form of validating whitening, because the Spanish Crown discouraged the church from marrying persons of unequal status, and gave parents per-mission to petition to disqualify a marriage. Church marriage along with legitimate birth were the cornerstones of proof of proper sexual conduct and “whiteness,” sometimes to the exclusion of phenotype and descent.

Baerga argues that 19th-century notions of race in Puerto Rico are very different from the modern 20th-century notion, in which phenotype and descent predominate. It is possible that the strong US influence on race relations in Puerto Rico has made biological factors more important, but I would argue that, in the Caribbean generally,


class factors still heavily influence racial status. Acquiring a good education and a stable job is one way of whitening, or as they say in the colloquial Puerto Rican putdown, “pintarse de blanco.” It is one of the rewards of upward social mobility.

Marriage continues to be important in Puerto Rico at all class levels, which I think helps account for the low percentage of con-sensual unions. But this turns out to be a relatively recent phenom-enon, due primarily to US policies in favour of legal marriage insti-tuted after the US occupation in 1898 (Findlay 1999, Safa 2001). In contrast, my research shows that Cuba and the Dominican Republic maintain high rates of consensual union, which in Cuba includes professional women, for some of whom marriage has lost its le-gitimacy (Safa 2009). here again Cuban revolutionary policy has played a role.

In Cuba and Latin America generally, there is more racial democ-racy among the poor and working class than among the elite. For me, the clearest sign is the much higher frequency of interracial marriage among the poor, which further blurs racial boundaries. Even in Cuba, the elite remains largely white and there is less interracial marriage than among the poor. This is one way for elites to cement their status and draw boundaries.

Racial inequalities are also stronger among those of higher so-cioeconomic status in Brazil, where wage discrimination among the races is more acute among professionals than in the working class. This is one reason why affirmative action policies in Brazil have fo-cused on expanding the number of blacks among the Brazilian middle class by preferential admissions to public universities and other meas-ures. Educational expansion and other factors reflecting the growth of the Brazilian economy have contributed to a significant increase in interracial marriage in Brazil since the 1960s (Costa Ribeiro and do Valle Silva 2009). Both racial and educational endogamy have diminished overall, except among those with a university education, where endogamy has actually increased. This increased endogamy reflects the higher educational levels of Brazilian women, who now marry spouses with a university education like themselves. The rela-tionship of gender to racial and class inequality can also be seen by the way in which educational expansion primarily benefitted white middle-class women.


Why is the relationship between class and racial and gender in-equality apparently so different in the United States from that in the Caribbean and much of Latin America? In the United States racism is apparently as prevalent among the poor and working class as among the elite. The frequency of interracial marriage is still very low, and is more frequent in the middle class than below (Kaba 2011). here again class, racial, and gender factors, both historical and contemporary, are at play. All of these are issues I still hope to address.

Notes1 My first published article dealing with these issues was published in Carib-

bean Studies (4.1) in 1964, a decade earlier. 2 This collection is available through the UF Library at ufdc.ufl.edu/wid and

also in the Digital Collection of the Caribbean, ufdc.ufl.edu/dioc.

select Bibliography of Helen i. safa1964. From shanty town to public housing: A comparison of family structure

in two urban neighborhoods in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Caribbean Studies 4.1: 3–12.

1965. The female-based household in public housing: A case study in Puerto Rico. Human Organization 24.2: 135–139.

1974. The urban poor of Puerto Rico: A study in development and inequality. New York: holt, Rinehart and Winston. Published in Spanish as Familias del Arrabal. Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, 1980.

1975. Class consciousness among working class women in Latin America: A case study in Puerto Rico. Politics and Society 5.3: 377–394. Republished in abbreviated form in America’s working women: A documentary his-tory, 1600 to the present, edited by R.F. Baxandall, L. Gordon, and S.M. Reverby. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Also published in Peasants and proletarians: The struggles of Third World workers, edited by Robin Cohen, P.C.W. Gutkind, and Phyllis Brazier. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979. Reprinted in Spanish in La mujer en la sociedad Puertorrique-na, edited by Edna Acosta-Belen. Puerto Rico: Editorial huracan, 1980. Also published in Sex and class in Latin America: Women’s perspectives on politics, economics, and the family in the third world, edited by June Nash and helen Safa. New York: J.F. Bergin and Garvey, 1980.

1977. Women and national development. Signs 3.1. Published as Women in the informal labor sector: The case of Mexico City, in Women and National


Development: The Complexities of Change, edited by the Wellesley Edito-rial Committee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

1981. Runaway shops and female employment: The search for cheap labor. Signs 7(Winter): 418–433. Published in Spanish in Debate sobre la mujer en America Latina y el Caribe vol. III, edited by Magdalena Leon. Co-lombia: ACEP, 1982. Reprinted in Women’s work: Development and the division of labor by gender, edited by E. Leacock and helen Safa, 58–71. Westport: J.F. Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1986.

1990. In the shadows of the sun: Alternative development strategies in the Caribbean, edited by Carmen Diana Deere, helen Safa, et al. Boulder: Westview Press.

1993. The new women workers. NACLA 27.1: 24–29. Reprinted in Free trade and economic restructuring: A NACLA reader, edited by Fred Rosen and D. MacFayden, 129–140. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995.

1994. Export manufacturing, state policy, and women workers in the Dominican Republic. In Global production: The apparel industry in the Pacific Rim, edited by E. Bonacich, L. Cheng, N. Chinchilla, N. hamilton, and P. Ong. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

1995. Economic restructuring and gender subordination. Latin American Per-spectives 22.2 (Issue 85): 32–50. Published in a revised Spanish transla-tion as Restructuración económica y subordinación del género. Caribbean Studies 28.1 (1995): 197–222. Also published in Spanish in El trabajo de las mujeres en el tiempo global, edited by R. Todaro and R. Rodríguez. Santiago, Chile: Isis Internacional and Centro de Estudios de la Mujer, 1995. Reprinted in Rereading women in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Jennifer Abbassi and Sheryl Lutjens. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.

1995. The myth of the male breadwinner: Women and industrialization in the Caribbean. Boulder: Westview Press. Published in Spanish as De mante-nidas a proveedores: mujeres e industrialización en el Caribe. San Juan: Editorial Universitaria de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998.

1997. Where the big fish eat the little fish: Women’s work in the free trade zones. NACLA Report in the Americas 30.5: 31.

1999. Free markets and the marriage market: Structural adjustment, gender relations and working conditions among Dominican women workers. En-vironment and Planning 31.2: 291–304.

2001. Changing forms of U.S. hegemony in Puerto Rico: The impact on the family and sexuality. Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History 25.3/4: 90–111. Republished in Urban Anthropology 32.1 (2003): 7–40.

2005a. Challenging Mestizaje: A gender perspective on indigenous and Afro-descendant movements in Latin America. Critique of Anthropology 25.3: 307–330.


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2008a. Globalization, inequality and the growth of female-headed households in the Caribbean. In Women on their own: Interdisciplinary approaches on being single, edited by Rudolph Bell and Virginia Yans McLaughlin, 239. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Published in Spanish in De Lo Privado a lo Publico: 30 años de lucha cuidadana de las mujeres en América Latina, edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon. Mexico: Plaza y Valdez, 2006.

2008b. Igualdad en la diferencia: género y ciudadanía entre indígenas y afro-descendientes. In Mujeres y escenarios ciudadanos, edited by Mercedes Prieto, 57–82. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador.

2009. hierarchies and household change in Cuba. Latin American Perspectives 36.1: 42–52.

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2011. The transformation of Puerto Rico: The impact of modernization ideol-ogy. Transforming Anthropology 19.1: 46–49.

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Costa Ribeiro, Carlos Antonio, and Nelson do Valle Silva. 2009. Cor, educacao e casamento: Tendencias da seletividade marital no Brasil, 1960–2000. Dados 52.1: 7–51.

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Findlay, Eileen. 1999. Imposing decency: The politics of sexuality and race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920. Durham: Duke University Press.

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REViEWs / RECENsiONs

Ángel RamaWriting Across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin AmericaEdited and translated by David FryeDurham: Duke University Press 2012, xix + 243 pp.

José Antonio Giménez Micó, Concordia University/The University of Calgary/Université Laval

Sería vano, en el exiguo espacio de esta reseña, intentar realizar un resumen ni mucho menos un análisis de Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, conjunto de ensayos de uno de los más influyentes pensadores de Latinoamérica de las últimas décadas del siglo XX aparecido originalmente en 1982. No porque el libro haya “envejecido” mal: al contrario, todavía puede y podrá decirse mucho a propósito de esta obra y de la de Rama en general, así como de la de coétaneos suyos como Antonio Cornejo Polar y Antônio Cândido. Este trío de “tenores” de los estudios latinoamericanos si-gue inspirando a un buen número de críticos literarios y culturales actuales, aunque quizá menos de lo que sería de desear, quizá porque han sido poco traducidos al inglés: en el caso de Rama, sólo La ciudad letrada y, ahora, Transculturación narrativa han gozado de este privilegio.

Estos autores quizá pertenezcan a la última generación de humanistas latinoamericanos que, aun ocupándose primordialmente de aspectos litera-rios, poseían un vasto y extremadamente variado bagaje cultural. Si desde hace unos años “lo interdisciplinario” es ya un lugar común del discurso académico –explícitamente “rompiendo” fronteras, sí, pero reafirmándolas de modo tácito–, estos autores no tenían necesidad de hacer referencia a “lo interdisciplinario”: simplemente, lo practicaban en sus escritos de modo completamente espontáneo.

Un buen ejemplo de ello es el libro que nos ocupa, en el cual el autor uruguayo toma prestado –y expande– el concepto de “transculturación” inicialmente acuñado por el antropólogo cubano Fernando Ortiz (Con-trapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, 1940) como clave principal de comprensión de una oleada de textos y autores aparecidos hacia mediados del siglo pasado en regiones apartadas geográfica y culturalmente de las

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capitales de países como Colombia (García Márquez), Paraguay (Roa Bastos), Perú (Arguedas) o Brasil (Guimarães Rosa). Estos textos “se ajustan” o parecen ajustarse, tanto genérica (novela) como lingüística-mente (uso del castellano o del portugués), al modelo occidental… y sin embargo, demuestra Rama, están socavándolo o, en todo caso, transfor-mándolo profundamente. La transculturación narrativa supone la irrup-ción de lo rural/popular/indígena en La ciudad letrada –por citar la obra clave, infinitamente más citada, de Rama: ciudad exclusiva y excluyente que se constituyó durante la colonia y pervivió, culturalmente aletargada pero políticamente omnipotente, hasta bien avanzado el siglo XX; y que, de algún modo, todavía persiste y firma, aunque ya metamorfoseada en tantos sentidos.

La traducción al inglés de los ensayos que conforman Transculturación narrativa…, “soberbia” (superb) según juzga John Beverley en la contra-portada, se muestra de gran utilidad no sólo para los estudiosos de Latino-américa, sino en general para quienes se ocupan de estudios subalternos, poscoloniales y de Area Studies: esta es la opinión de Jean Franco, también manifestada en la contraportada, que comparto plenamente. Es en efecto extremadamente positivo que este libro en particular y, hasta cierto punto, la extensísima obra del autor uruguayo en general pueda alcanzar una difusión más amplia que la que contaba hasta ahora.

Ahora bien, es igualmente imprescindible no obviar el efecto poten-cialmente perverso que cualquier versión contemporánea al inglés de obras especializadas en los estudios latinoamericanos (o en los hispánicos, de la francofonía, germánicos, eslavos, asiáticos, etc.) conlleva o, en cual-quier caso, de la cual es sintomática: una tendencia pesada a la rampante Anglicization de estos estudios, si no a su supresión pura y simple bajo los “paraguas” supuestamente “interdisciplinarios” (en un sentido de “interdisciplinariedad” administrativo y, claro, ideológico muy diferente al humanista que se le puede aplicar a Rama, Cornejo Polar o Cândido) como son los Area Studies o llamada World Literature; “interdisciplinas” cuyas investigación y enseñanza se llevan a cabo obvia y exclusivamente en inglés. Desde hace ya años, pero particularmente en los últimos tiempos, disciplinas académicas enfocadas en las diferentes culturas (y, por lo tanto, en las diferentes lenguas) que conforman la diversidad de nuestro planeta van perdiendo terreno o se ven abocadas a la uniformización, tanto en el terreno de la investigación como de la enseñanza. Lo “eficaz,” lo “eficien-te” es abrazar la lengua mayoritaria, para tener más estudiantes en nuestros programas y cursos –o simplemente para que estos no sean suprimidos– y más lectores de nuestros artículos académicos –o, pura y llanamente, para que estos sean publicables…

Reviews / Recensions 245

Se me objetará que me he desviado del tema de esta reseña. Permíta-seme discrepar: “la transculturación” es una noción concebida justamente para problematizar el concepto de “aculturación” entonces en boga en la academia norteamericana. Salvando las distancias, algo similar puede afir-marse del libro de Rama: frente a una crítica hegemónica que no veía en la literatura latinoamericana más que una “copia” devaluada de la europea, el uruguayo muestra cómo aquella es preciosa precisamente por su capacidad de integrar los elementos más fecundos de las propias y singulares culturas que conforman la diversidad americana.

En conclusión, muy bienvenida sea la aparición de esta obra fundamen-tal de Ángel Rama. Esperemos que sigan muchas otras traducciones de este y otros autores fundamentales del pensamiento latinoamericano. Eso sí, hagamos todo lo que esté en nuestro poder para que éstas no contribuyan, nolens volens, a la uniformización de los estudios latinoamericanos en la academia norteamericana: proseguir la batalla de estos pensadores pioneros por el reconocimiento de la singularidad de las diversas culturas latinoa-mericanas frente a la hegemónica será el mejor homenaje que podamos tributarles.

Javier AuyeroPatients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in ArgentinaDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, xii + 196 pp.

Jean Grugel, University of Sheffield

This is a book about the “pilgrimage” (1) through the state that is demanded of the poor. Empirically, it draws on Auyero’s detailed knowledge of the way the poor experience the forced act of waiting in Argentina and learn their “place” through it, but its message is much bigger. It reveals to us one of the least studied dimensions of power and powerlessness and offers what Auyero calls a “tempography of domination” (4). What interests Auyero most is not the macro politics of why and how people are kept waiting but their own actions and responses, which, he argues, are “consequential for the production of compliance” (35). The exhaustion of waiting and the time it takes are central to why the poor remain poor. Waiting becomes a device for managing social conflict.

The book draws on an eclectic body of work to try to construct a sociol-ogy of waiting. It is certainly rare to find references to Edna O’Brien sitting along Lukes, Wacquant, Bourdieu, Paul Willis, and E.P. Thompson. But, as Auyero acknowledges, the sociological tradition is thin when it comes to


understanding what happens when people are forced to wait, especially for scant gains, and, as a result, the author seeks inspiration in literature. This is at one and the same time a strength and a weakness in the book. To deal with the weakness first: the fact that Auyero spends so much time feeling his way toward a framework for analysis also means that the book is perhaps exces-sively loose stylistically. This is especially the case in the first part when we jump from a discussion of Beckett and Kafka to short sections on squatting, eviction, and byzantine and bizarre application of housing subsidies. In fact, I would contend that waiting as a way of disciplining the poor is far from new and it has always been central to displays of class power. Waiting for health care, for charity, for benefits, for transport, for casual employment—this is how the poor have lived in Europe and the Americas since at least the onset of capitalism. So, although Auyero makes a good case for the need to theorize waiting more effectively, he is less convincing, at least to my mind, when he suggests that waiting has become a more conspicuous feature of life for the poor in Buenos Aires under neoliberalism.

As for the advantages of Auyero’s meandering style: certainly the loose-ness of the book and its impressionistic approach make it riveting reading. Long sections of field diary quotes and interviews are intermingled with a knowledgeable and detailed descriptive narrative about the lives of Buenos Aires’ poor. We learn from Milagro’s experience in Chapter 3 that waiting is a process, to be repeated again and again, in which confusion and misunder-standing are not necessarily cleared up; from Serenita and Juan, we discover the arbitrariness of state officials who open and close the desks that attend to the queuing public when they wish to. In Chapter 4, on the Welfare Of-fice, we see the way children and babies confront waiting and learn of their mothers’ despair and desperation. In the end, the book becomes a layered tour de force of anger at the indignities forced upon people who are trying hard to get by. And the anger is amplified by the fact that the book reads in the end like a co-production between the author and his cast of characters, who range from formal research collaborators such as the school teacher Flavia Bellomi, whose field notes are cited extensively here, and the waiters who fill the offices of the state across the city.

The primary focus on the book is undoubtedly how waiting is lived out. But, for me, part of its richness also lies in the centrality it ascribes to the state in poor people’s lives. As Auyero himself points out, his findings contradict the idea that states are necessarily in retreat or hollowed out—a point he makes early on but does not pursue in depth. Looked at through the prism of the state, this is a book about everyday governance and a descrip-tion of the political processes that both incorporate and exclude the poor. It is a valuable reminder that notions of a return of the state in the wake


of economic growth in Argentina or contemporary discussions about the extension of welfare have to sit alongside an analysis of how benefits of citizenship actually work and the way they simultaneously offer advantages and systematic humiliation.

Pierre Sean BrothertonRevolutionary medicine: Health and the body in Post-Soviet CubaDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, xxvii + 288 pp.

Denise Challenger, York University

Declaring that “socialism was under siege,” in 1991 the Cuban govern-ment attempted to revive the economy through policies and institutional practices that changed the lived experiences of its citizenry. Based on a decade of research conducted in havana (1998–2010), Brotherton engages ethnographic, historical, and epistemological modes of analysis to explore two themes: first, how government health campaigns affected individual lives and changed the relationship among citizens, government institutions, public associations, and the state; second, how the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the strengthening of the US embargo are changing the relationship between socialist health policies and individual practices and how these changes have redefined the way in which state power becomes enacted through and upon individual bodies (3–4).

In a series of penetrating vignettes, Brotherton chronicles the experienc-es of physicians, everyday citizens, public health officials, and research sci-entists participating in the country’s primary health program—the Programa del Medico y la Enferma de la Familia (MEF). The program requires family physicians and nurse teams to live and work in small clinics (consultorios) on the city block or in the rural community they serve (3–4). his perceptive analysis and assessment of the day-to-day lives of Cubans enabled Brother-ton to convey cogently the way that the changing wider socio-economic cir-cumstances were imprinted on the bodies of Cubans through “physical and mental ailments” and were “palpably and materially experienced through deep senses of loss, betrayal, disillusion, and longing” (3).

This ethnographic study is divided into three sections: Part 1 exam-ines how, in the context of the economic decline of the health care sector, individuals negotiated the role of the state in providing health and welfare and their own personal desires to seek comprehensive health care. Part 2 examines the mechanisms and practices through which power relations operate in the primary health care system. It explores the relationship be-


tween health ideology as an explicit discourse and lived experience. Part 3 considers how Cuba’s shifting state policies and external global factors have interacted with each other to change the course and practice of health and medicine in the nation.

Brotherton convincingly demonstrates that the state’s effort “to shift the cradle-to-grave expectations” of health care, to those more in line with the capitalist market economy, resulted in greater numbers of individuals depending on lo informal practices to attend to their health care needs. In navigating networks of client-based relations with select individuals, aver-age citizens were able to illegally acquire medicine, services, supplies, and food beyond what the state could provide. Brotherton maintains, however, that the normalization of an “economy of favours” due to the deficiencies of the health care system are not indicators that Cuba is on a direct path to liberal capitalism and democratic politics. Instead, Brotherton raises a thought-provoking argument that individual bodily practices effectively integrate the formal and informal economies and “play an important role in the maintenance of Cuba’s health care system and, more generally, con-tribute to the daily functioning of the country’s modern welfare state” (9). however, the relationship between the “economy of favours” and gender could have been more rigorously explored. Despite Brotherton’s inclusion of compelling female doctors and patients, questions that remain unanswered are those that consider the ways that gendered biologies shaped individual bodily practices and strategies. how did gender norms shape the way that patients and doctors related to one another? What were the differing experi-ences of the female and male doctors as they performed their roles in the communities? In the final section, Brotherton explores how doctors increas-ingly became commodities in humanitarian aid for oil programs. Which doctors were selected and why? In other words, was the state’s responses to the shifting global realties gendered?

Nevertheless, by the end of this short but dense book, undergraduate and graduate students alike will be able to empathize with la lucha—the struggles of the people—and understand the complexity of the challenges they faced in light of the crumbling state infrastructure. Brotherton provides a nuanced perspective on the plight of the socialist agenda in the context of the economic conditions of revolutionary Cuba. he deftly weaves together multidisciplinary approaches to craft an intricate and engaging “ethnogra-phy of contradictions.” however, despite Brotherton’s claim that the path to capitalism in Cuba is neither linear nor inevitable, one cannot help but won-der if it is not a matter of when rather than if the troubled Cuban economy will become increasingly dependent on tourism and the sex-trade industry as has occurred in much of the wider British, Spanish, and French Caribbean.


Julie M. Bunck and Michael R. Fowlerbribes, bullets and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in Central AmericaUniversity Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012, 431 pp.

Julia Buxton, Bradford University

The suffering endured in Mexico’s drug war has been appalling. It is esti-mated that since 2006, 60,000 people have been killed in the violent conflict among criminal organizations and between these organizations and the Mexican state—just as they were in Colombia’s drug wars of the 1980s. The logic of the unending cycle of failure that is the “war on drugs” moves our attention inexorably to Central America.

It is timely that as the US steps up its Central American Regional Security Initiative, its latest regional counter-narcotics strategy following Plan Colombia (2000) and Plan Mexico (2008), Bunck and Fowler have produced a first-rate analysis of the history and dynamics of drug traffick-ing in Central America and the capacity of regional law enforcement. Their conclusion is convincing and inevitable. There is very little that Central American governments can do to halt the coming tsunami of drugs traffic, criminality, and violence displaced from Mexico and Colombia. The best Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, honduras, Costa Rica, and Nica-ragua can hope to achieve is a minimization of those “bridge” factors that make them vulnerable to trafficking.

This is a meticulously researched piece of work, teeming with a diver-sity of references. Conveyed throughout is the passion and integrity of the authors. They set themselves the task of identifying those factors that led the seven Central American states to emerge as significant bridges for the illicit South to North drug trade in the 1980s, and explaining why the role of these countries is set to expand. The book is framed around five country case studies that are exhaustive in their detail. El Salvador and Nicaragua are omitted due to lack of reliable data, but the factors driving drug trafficking in Belize, Guatemala, honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica are assumed to hold. The chapters point to the Central American countries having common challenges; they are all small countries, tiny territories to police but geo-graphically complex, with weak institutions, wedged between drug markets and producers north and south.

Geography emerges as the most difficult bridging factor for these countries to address. Countries in the region possess long Caribbean and Pacific coast lines, micro islands, lagoons, mangrove swamps, deep-water ports, and the longest barrier reef in the hemisphere. They are traversed by


Continental highways and connections east and west through the Panama Canal. In sum, they make for the perfect illicit drop-off and transit zone for methamphetamine and cocaine produced in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia to be sold to markets in the US and Europe.

Nature would make these national territories difficult for a well-equipped and well-organized security sector to police and guard. But as the country case studies detail, this is a region where the security sector is weak, vulnerable to corruption, inefficient, and with a long history of involvement in the drugs trade. Impunity and lack of civilian oversight are ongoing problems. There is nothing in Bunck and Fowler’s analysis to persuade the reader that militarizing the response to organized crime—as with the Central American Security Initiative—will do anything other than exacerbate these problems.

There are two other important bridge factors that are common to Central American states and that are addressable. The first relates to the lack of law enforcement co-operation across national borders. Although there is some improvement in regional intelligence sharing and co-operation, the norm is suspicion, distrust, and the primacy of distinct national security agendas. With intergovernmental relations unnecessarily fractious and Belize per-ceived as a Commonwealth anomaly, a primacy must be placed on improv-ing diplomatic relations for law enforcement co-operation to gain traction.

The second vulnerability is poverty. The average annual GDP per capita in the region is below $5,000, with local economies offering lit-tle prospects for employment, particularly for young people. Rather than generating jobs and sustainable growth, regional free trade and strategies of economic liberalization and privatization have created favourable condi-tions for drug trafficking and money laundering. Bunck and Fowler detail the challenge of economic development, but more importantly equitable economic distribution, in these small countries, and conversely the oppor-tunities provided by involvement in the narcotics drug trade. The trade-off between development and security is revealed in the fact that 8% of nation-al GDP is now being dedicated to counter narcotics rather than education or employment creation.

Costa Rica emerges as a counter case study, with Bunck and Fowler detailing factors that would be expected to insulate the country from the drugs trade. It is economically and institutionally robust, with no history of military involvement in drugs—or military at all, Costa Rica having abolished its armed forces in 1948. But although Costa Rica does not share the same vulnerabilities as its neighbours, it has to confront its own unique bridge factors. These include international tourists visiting the country who are increasingly being targeted for lucrative trafficking opportunities, and


gaps in security capacity that make Costa Rica a relatively benign environ-ment for criminal organizations.

Bribes, Bullets and Intimidation makes for an enlightening, informa-tive, but ultimately depressing read, particularly in relation to the growing trend of narcotic drug production and drug crop cultivation within Central America. The analysis provided by Bunck and Fowler adds to the weight of evidence that militarizing responses to the illicit drug trade is counter-productive. From their data and detailed country scrutiny, the trajectory of the Central American Regional Security Initiative is clear: yet more vio-lence, death, and civilian casualties in this unwinnable war.

Molly DoaneStealing Shining Rivers: Agrarian Conflict, market Logic and Conservation in a mexican ForestTucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012, 201 pp.

Michael K. McCall, UNAM and University of Twente

This is a book about people, global conservation policies and institutions, migration, land settlement, cattle, forest degradation, territorial conflicts, and personalities. Above all, it is about a resilient people struggling to hold onto land (and some of the customs and activities and resources that go with it) against many outside forces—colonialists, displaced people from other states, ranchers, government agencies, international environmental NGOs, climate change, and the whole devil’s orchestra of globalization. There is a broad cast of characters: the inhabitants of Chimalapas, this forested part of northern Oaxaca state—the “original” Zoque; the Tzotzil and Tzeltal from Chiapas; Zapotec from Oaxaca; the NGO Maderas del Pueblo; and many, many actors from the acronym soup of Mexican government agencies and programs (filling nine pages of appendices).

Section I of the book sets out the history—colonialism, the transforma-tions of landscape by neoliberal governments in the 1960s–70s, the meg-aprojects of Proyecto Mesoamerica that co-opted jaguar corridors and other green icons, and, central to the book, the Campesino Ecological Reserve, a would-be posterchild of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). There is a pro-vocative Section II on the “emergence of the environment,” the production of a green social paradigm called “environmentalism” and “nature,” which Doane stimulatingly interprets as a Plan B (or C) for neoliberal market ap-propriation, to turn land into a market commodity open to all the manipula-tions and trickeries of finance capital. This chapter has a global conceptual


sweep, but comes back to reality in the geography, history, and social frame of Chimalapas, to explain why the WWF and other ecological imperialists wanted to create an ecological reserve there. Section III is more specifically on the Mexican federal- and state-level political manipulations, actors, driv-ers, rationales, and outcomes.

To explain the trajectory of the reinventions of Chimalapas, Doane examines the history of environmental policies at global and local scales, from conservation enclaves to Joint and Community Forest Management to Payment for Environmental Services and Certification, and now to “stew-ardship.” This critique of “barbed wire” conservation enclaves flogs some dead horses, and readers of this book will be well-versed in the arguments. Doane convincingly argues that the neoliberal idiom of “stakeholders” and Marxist argumentations, explanations, and proffered solutions are equally alien and unconvincing “western inventions” for the Chimas (the inhabitants of Chimalapas). Both tend to ignore place and locale.

Paradigms conceptualizing the local people have shifted from deroga-tory views of primitiveness (as in the purported banditry of the Chimas as destroyers of nature for short-sighted gains), to a recognition of the lack of alternatives (“not perpetrators, but victims” of their situation), to visions of stalwart resistance to colonialism and globalization, and thence to current idealizations as stewards of a global patrimony (thus, no longer ignoble, but perilously close to reinvention as “noble savages”).

These sections of the book are hard-hitting, perhaps cynical. There is an implied challenge that the shifts in external attitudes, especially toward the “ecological native” as steward of local conservation knowledge and practices, are a knowing reinvention of the peasantry in support of accu-mulation. The author does not concede that—perhaps—the NGOs, WWF, and conservationists recognized the values of local peasant knowledge and practices after decades of seeing overwhelming evidence. The author rarely gives credence to stated motivations, always seeking hidden power drives—even for the local actors.

Insightful in the book is learning how the Chimas adapt to and exploit new external paradigms of themselves. This is a smart history of a resilient and opportunistic people—notably their initiatives in recent decades to form alliances, as in the “the greening of identity” that can link the Chima people’s persistent struggle to claim land to the global environmentalist hegemony. Doane provides a similarly nuanced account of how constructs of tradition, usos y costumbres, can be adapted to serve power in the communities.

“Attachment to land” runs throughout the account, nurturing the strug-gles of the Chima against numerous invaders—the displaced peasantry from Chiapas, “middle class” ranchers from anywhere, hydroelectric reservoirs


drowning villages, international NGOs (of which WWF appears as the big-gest villain), and the barbed wire ecological reserves. Yet why the peoples of Chimalapas are so attached to these lands is not deeply explored. Doane repeats the local conviction that Chiapas State stole Oaxaca land by what could be called “sleight of map,” and the Chimas, as Oaxaqueños, want to expel the Chiapanecos. Are they struggling to retain this land for Oaxaca? Or more pertinently, is land to be controlled, occupied, “owned,” and be-holden to themselves as Chimas?

The narrative stimulates the reader to ponder and question many sec-ondary issues, all interconnected with the main story, such as the primeval struggle between agriculturalists and pastoralists, vilified in many political cultures. In this book, the pastoralists moving in from other states are al-lowed no defence of their livelihoods, their own struggles, or their contri-butions. They are given no voice, only portrayed as murderous ruffians. Similarly, caciques are essentially seen also as villainous, yet they can fulfil a necessary function as boundary actors between people and the state, as do NGO leaders. Doane addresses how the relationship of academics to local campesino and indigenous movements impacts on significant external actors and on changing scale and consciousness internally, as with the nurturing of Mestización by intellectuals in Mexico, and thence into the national political arena and cultural imagination.

Gender issues are not addressed separately, but Doane does observe how women and children are brought into the (male-dominated) move-ments. Their presence in the movement introduces performing as a show of inclusiveness—aimed partly at external legitimacy. In the ideological imagination, this can reinforce the image of the protection of the environ-ment as the feminine, and these images and slogans are again important for external empathy. Women’s membership may also “soften” the confronta-tions, hopefully limiting violent responses of the state (this doesn’t always work, when state or private agents deliberately target women to intimidate the movement).

Although the book presents a comprehensive and thoroughly argued thesis, it leaves untouched two important questions. First, what are the via-ble alternatives within the current market liberalism? The rapacious demand for Chima land and its resources is not disappearing. It will not be replaced by “leakage” to other landscapes in Mexico, and Mexico’s constitutional amendment of 1991 granting legal provisions to parcel and privatize ejido (communal) lands will not be revoked. Cannot the legal appropriation of the land as a “campesino reserve”—with conditionality to ensure the survival of local entitlements—offer a better solution than a slow (violent) death through incursions, invasion, and excisions?


And second, should the moral enigma of rights and entitlements to land be based on ancestral occupancy or on good stewardship? The author sup-ports the Principle of First Occupancy which would grant the right to land to the Chima, the descendants of original inhabitants. Doane, however, accepts that the legalistic claims to these lands, based on a document of 1687, are disputable, and she recognizes explicitly that the present inhabitants are a broad ethnic mix. Indeed, the story is fascinating on how the defining terms of place and people, “Chimalapas” and “Chima,” are appropriated by savvy local NGOs and politicians to claim a chimerical unity of people and place and brush over internal conflicts.

The book presents a very impressive confluence of theoretical critique based across literature, grounded with thoughtful observations gleaned from discourse and discussion with wide-ranging sources, and very personal ex-periences in the field, although the author can appear arch and patronizing when describing meetings as clashes of objectives and worldviews between “razzing“ government officers, “bragging ranchers,” USAID officials, and academic ecologists. Are cultural anthropologists the only actors who have an untainted bird’s eye overview?

The book rightly claims to inform us on the “production of space,” but achieves much more than that. It is about social forces and contestation and resilience. It is not just a post-modernist lens on what “Chimalapas” signifies to outsiders, but a witness to a persistent, resilient people and their deep, hard-wired commitment to “their” land.

Ifeona Fulani, ed.Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and musicKingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2012, vi + 343 pp.

Mike Alleyne, Middle Tennessee State University

Detailed book-length cultural and historical examination of women’s crea-tive roles in Caribbean music remains a literary rarity. Despite the wave of gender studies publications in recent years, Caribbean music’s marginal role has often been focused on women’s overt sexualization at the hegemonic hands of male patriarchy. This 14-essay anthology aims to valorize the fe-male Caribbean musical presence on the global stage in more empowering ways, and it is subdivided into three thematic segments: “From the Postco-lonial to the Transnational,” “Performing/Contesting Identities,” and “At the Diasporic Crossroads.” It identifies its multiple intercultural and national identities and the intersecting representations of race and feminism, with the


subjects as active rather than passive participants. The book also integrates work on multicultural Caribbean and Latin American female performers of both the foundational past and the pop-centred present, navigating beyond the region’s many linguistic divisions that sometimes shape critique as fragmented as the islands at the anthology’s analytical centre. This review specifically references nine of the contributions (though not necessarily following the anthology’s sequence) to portray the overall character and diversity of the text. Archipelagos of Sound largely succeeds in productively consolidat-ing the trans-regional breadth and depth of gender-based popular music analysis, although, fundamentally, music (i.e., the soundscape of the subject recordings/performances versus clinical musicological deconstruction) is only a supplementary concern amongst the essays, a conduit through which matters of identity and gender reality become foregrounded as the collec-tion’s central thematic elements. In some instances, the authorial enthusiasm that propels the writing may have also narrowed the scope of the musical evaluation. The introduction by editor Ifeona Fulani discusses the cultural geogra-phy of the region and its diaspora, outlining a book structure that integrates the local and the global as interactive elements in shaping female Caribbean musical identity. Beyond the editor’s standard summary of the included works and rationalization of the anthology’s content, some of the introduc-tion’s references to recording industry specifics may require minor amend-ment. In highlighting the international success of Caribbean artists, the editor notes (2) the particular success of Bob Marley & The Wailers’ 1977 album Exodus, acclaimed by Time magazine as the Album of the Century in 2000, but the included assertion that Rolling Stone magazine gave the record the same accolade does not appear to be accurate. There’s also the statement (6) that reggae emerged from Jamaica in the 1970s. Although that decade represented a crucial golden age for reggae, the genre had clearly announced its presence by 1968, and firmly consolidated it with Desmond Dekker’s transatlantic hit single “Israelites” in 1969, accompanied in that year by “Liquidator” from the harry J All-Stars, The Pioneers’ “Long Shot Kick De Bucket” and Jimmy Cliff’s “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” all of which broke into the British pop charts. Given the inexorable difficul-ties associated with assembling data on reggae history and the many con-flicting narratives, these apparent discrepancies do not, however, undermine Fulani’s incisive conceptual focus. The presence of two essays on Cuban singer Celia Cruz underlines her vital role in musically projecting and defining aspects of the black Caribbean female aura from the late 1940s through to her death in Fort Lee, New Jer-


sey, as an exile from her homeland in 2003. Though not the only artist rep-resenting the hispanic branch of the diaspora within the anthology, Cruz’s career—filled with issues of race, class, gender, and the varied politics of nationhood—allows Frances R. Aparicio and Frances Negrón-Muntaner considerable analytical latitude in their respective contributions. Aparicio’s essay, “The Blackness of Sugar: Celia Cruz and the Performance of (Trans)nationalism,” and Negrón-Muntaner’s “Celia’s Shoes” delineate the cul-tural crossroads that meet as a result of Cruz’s centralized consciousness of Cuba in her life and work. The latter work imbues the singer’s abundant footwear with a profound transformative cultural power, situating her shoes as animated prisms through which audiences witnessed Cruz’s affirmations of herself and her native country. For readers less familiar with the singer’s chronology and career complications, both writings are highly expository while also accessibly foregrounding the paradoxes of place and displace-ment in both geographical and spiritual senses. The crossroads of Caribbean culture are given further high profile in “The Rhetoric of hips: Shakira’s Embodiment and the Quest for Carib-bean Identity” by Nadia Celis. Through the artist’s vivacious hips and their signification of her aesthetic relationships to her music, Colombian singer Shakira is represented as symbolically and materially interfacing the hybrid Latin and Caribbean worlds and challenging linguistic and other cultural perimeters to achieve broad commercial success. As Shak-ira herself centres her body as a focal point in the international 2006 hit collaboration with haitian artist Wyclef Jean, “hips Don’t Lie,” Celis elaborately explores manifestations of identity through Shakira’s corpo-real medium. The French Caribbean is examined in “Guadeloupean Women Perform-ing Gwo Ka: Island Presences and Transnational Connections” by Kathe Managan. As one of the introductory components in her anthropological accounts of Guadeloupe’s musical, political, and gender cultural histories, Managan interestingly cites singer Jocelyne Béroard as the leader of the in-ternationally renowned zouk group Kassav’. It may simply be that in stating that Kassav’ is “led by” Béroard, the author is referring to her central stage presence. however, though Béroard is probably the group’s most distinctive vocal presence and certainly in the visual forefront on several of the Kas-sav’ album covers that feature band members, she has never undertaken the principal songwriting or production duties. Given that the essay focuses on the relationship between the music and the designation of women as central figures in Guadeloupean society, the foregrounding of Béroard’s group role is certainly appropriate (and the author points out that the singer is from the neighboring French Caribbean island of Martinique), but in this instance its


centrality may have been unduly magnified. Perhaps an adapted descriptive phraseology may be necessary. Lyndon Gill’s essay, “Calypso Rose’s Phallic ‘Palet’ and the Sweet Treat of Erotic Aurality,” is centred on a single 1968 recording by the female performer from Trinidad and Tobago. Following its conceptual mission, the essay raises questions surrounding gender politics, perceptions, and (mis)in-terpretations of lyrically articulated sexuality in calypso contexts. however, it is arguable that the gender counter-positionality that Gill attaches to the singer’s lyrics divorces Calypso Rose’s vocal performance from the overall sonic dynamics of the song, setting aside the embedded male participation in the recording and ways in which that aural interaction impacts the musical totality and gender projection. It would also have been intriguing to learn the extent to which Calypso Rose’s multifaceted gender constructions have impacted the contemporary female presence in the calypso realm. Lisa Amanda Palmer makes a case for a critical re-evaluation of the lov-ers rock subgenre of reggae in its British context. She argues that lovers rock has been gender-centrically relegated to a lower league because of its appar-ent emphasis on romantic matters and the vocal performance centrality of women. Instead, echoing a stance iterated by black British cultural critic Paul Gilroy, the writer seeks to endow the music with a much larger significance usually ignored in scholarly (and mainstream media) analyses by linking “the intersection of the erotic and the political” (260). Palmer’s intriguing assessment incorporates broad dimensions of the black female experience in the UK within and beyond popular music, and offers a theoretical recon-ceptualization of gender in reggae spaces. The extent to which this expansive discourse convinces the reader will undoubtedly rest upon adoption of this acute cultural perspective on music that is often reflexively rejected as overly sentimental and lacking social commentary credibility. It may well be that further engagement with the paradox of record production patriarchy charac-terizing lovers rock (about which many of its female singers have remarked) and its sonic distinctions from the male-centred roots reggae of the 1970s decade in which it flourished will enhance Palmer’s premises. While Fulani’s essay “Who is Grace Jones?” foregrounds the complexi-ties of the Jamaican singer’s dramatic image constructions and performance personae, her analyses of the artist’s recordings exclude the significant Slave to the Rhythm album (1985). That LP features an album cover that splices slices of a photo of Jones in a manner mirroring the digital charac-ter and clinical studio-centred dissection within the music’s sound. More importantly, Slave to the Rhythm also signals a crucial redefinition of Jones’ sonic presence in the digital era, thus providing opportunities for critical comparison and contrast with the aural fabric of her earlier releases. More


than any other Grace Jones album, Slave to the Rhythm represents extreme manipulation of the music within the stereo spectrum (overseen by ace Brit-ish producer Trevor horn), creating a metaphoric soundscape for her own multiple dissolutions of norms. Moreover, that album’s title track includes narrative segments voiced in part by Jones that emphatically articulate as-pects of her self-realization philosophy, making the record intrinsic to the anthology’s assessment of Caribbean female musical presence. Although significant segments of that album feature instrumentation rather than Jones’ vocals, breaking the typical pop mold, the content of her vocal appearances carries major conceptual and artistic weight. In “From Third Wave to Third World: Lauryn hill, Educated and Un-plugged,” Cheryl Sterling’s opening sentence is potentially problematic: “Like every other person who enjoys popular black music, I love the music of Lauryn hill” (279). however unintentional, it unfortunately implies that one is wholly synonymous with the other and automatically marginalizes those who would interrogate and dissect hill’s works from other perspec-tives. Sterling’s hagiographic critique of hill’s genre-amorphous work in-tends to underline the artist’s feminist role as “an exemplar of the processes of re-diasporization” (280). The issues surrounding hill’s cryptic circular monologues between songs on her MTV Unplugged 2.0 are attributed by Sterling to a display of realistic human vulnerability as a philosophical jux-taposition with the larger-than-life portrayals of her R&B/hip-hop female contemporaries. The questionable clarity of those verbal interludes and the frequency with which they occur on the album seem to invite challenges to hill’s idiosyncratic use of her artistic license. Nonetheless, Sterling extracts a bounty of meaning within the essay’s clearly identified feminist and racial contexts, proposing that hill’s spiritual and creative evolution embodies postcolonial diasporic discourses thoroughly at odds with hegemonic norms. heather Russell’s “Whose Rihanna: Diasporic Citizenship and the Economies of Crossing Over” addresses the numerous contradictions sur-rounding Barbados’ reception of its most famous and widely commodified pop artist, and the embedded commentaries on national identity emerging as a result of her commercial and cultural circumstances. Disassembling the components constituting contemporary nationhood in postcolonial Barbados and global media spaces, Russell insightfully targets the historical circum-scription of black female sexuality and ontological presence, linking both spheres of subjection to national and diasporic attitudes to 21st-century pop superstar Rihanna. This performer’s prolific output—a worthy essay topic by itself—has since generated three more studio albums (excluding remix compilations) beyond the 2009 release Rated R at which Russell’s narrative ends. Loud (2010), Talk That Talk (2011), and Unapologetic (2012) have


each sustained and advanced Rihanna’s pop profile, magnifying the themes Russell highlights while also accelerating the singer’s ongoing self-actual-ization process. The author succeeds in establishing key parameters for the cultural study of Rihanna’s career, though the contextual issues raised in the essay’s title do not completely encompass the international songwriters and record producers whose own work makes the Barbadian singer’s seemingly nonstop recording activity possible. Indeed, it’s well worth considering that little of her commercial success is due to her own non-image-related creative agency, and this too has a direct (though perhaps slightly more nuanced) bearing on the perceptions of national identity, crossover facilitation, and black female self-expression that are all conjoined within Rihanna’s perso-nae. The fact that the degree of artistic autonomy she is currently assumed to possess as a result of her continued success has not materialized in the form of new artistic directions or clear authorial participation in the production of her musical texts raises further questions for which Russell’s critique lays intriguing foundations. Other consolidating essay contributions incorporating dimensions of diasporic influence include advocacy of Jamaican dialect (Donna Aza Weir-Soley’s “Louise Bennett in Performance: Pedagogies of Nation and Gen-der”), the effects of Caribbean music in places such as Canada and Ireland (respective essays by Lisa Tomlinson and Adam John Waterman), and the national identity implications of preference for foreign brand-name cloth-ing in Jamaica’s dancehall culture (“‘Born in Chanel, Christen in Gucci’” by Andrea Elizabeth Shaw). Ultimately, Archipelagos of Sound blurs the borders of Caribbean cultural geography, more closely linking the narratives of the region’s island fragments to suggest that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its already-powerful parts.

Sandra Lazo de la Vega and Timothy J. SteigengaAgainst the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, FloridaMadison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013, x + 200 pp.

Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Loyola University Chicago

As working-class immigrants, many of them undocumented, have spread across the geographical landscape of the United States, punitive immigration policies have often followed. In particular, there has been a rapid prolifera-tion of anti-immigrant bills at state and local levels; these bills are often fueled and funded by national groups. Timely and relevant, Against the Tide


chronicles the convergence of global connections, national politics, and lo-cal issues in the struggle for a day labour centre in Jupiter, Florida. As the book title suggests, members of this Florida community worked together to address common concerns and, in the process, ultimately bucked the tide of hostility and divisiveness that characterizes immigrant integration issues in much of the nation. Ethnographically rich and detailed, this book fore-grounds the human stories, both immigrant and non-immigrant, that often get lost behind polarizing rhetoric about undocumented migration. This book should be of interest to scholars and students of migration as well as to policy makers and community organizers who face immigration-related concerns in their own localities. The book is based on Steigenga and Lazo de la Vega’s experiences as participants in the struggle for Jupiter’s day labour centre, called El Sol, and on their documentation of the local political and social contexts that led to the centre’s formation. In addition, the authors interviewed key figures in the town who were involved in the effort to get El Sol up and running. This includes migrant community leaders, whose migration stories are related in the book, local political figures, El Sol staff and volunteers, and long-time residents concerned about the changes wrought by a rapid influx of immi-grants. The result is a holistic and in-depth story of local interactions that are shaped by national political debates and by transnational connections between the United States and Guatemala. The book opens with a description of the town of Jupiter, Florida, which underwent a period of rapid and uncontrolled growth from the late 1980s through the first decade of the 2000s. This growth attracted immigrant workers from Guatemala, particularly in the construction sector, who often solicited work on a heavily trafficked street in town. As the population and visibility of these workers grew, so did long-term residents’ concerns about public safety, property values, and adequacy of local resources. When town politicians failed to act, national anti-immigrant groups tapped into grow-ing frustrations and rushed to implement their own political agendas in Jupiter. As a result, local concerns about traffic and litter were appropriated by national rhetoric about laws, jobs, and borders, and Jupiter became an unwitting flashpoint for national immigration politics. The second chapter pans outward to examine the emigration of Mayans from Guatemala, who compose the majority of Jupiter’s immigrant com-munity, and their settlement in Jupiter. The authors incorporate extensive ethnographic accounts of the conditions that drive Mayans to migrate, and they describe the transnational networks that have funneled them from vil-lages in Guatemala to jobsites in Jupiter. This chapter also explores how Jupiter’s immigrant residents organized around social and cultural activities


and, in the 1990s, mobilized in response to anti-immigrant rhetoric and the need to better articulate their own concerns as residents of the town. The book then turns to a detailed description of the debate over, and eventual creation of, a labour centre for immigrants seeking day work in Jupiter. Of particular interest, the authors show how growing connections between immigrant and non-immigrant residents of Jupiter allowed com-mon concerns to come to the fore: all of Jupiter’s residents want to live in a safe, attractive, and economically viable town. By building bridges between the immigrant and non-immigrant community, local leaders fos-tered the communication and trust necessary to plant the foundations for a successful centre. The day labour centre itself is then described in detail. The primary function of El Sol is labour placement for day workers, but it also offers ESL and computer classes, as well as a legal clinic that special-izes in immigration-related problems. A food program means that clients receive two hot meals daily, and volunteers and worker-clients help maintain daily operations and run El Sol’s many programs. By all accounts, El Sol is a resounding success story that resolves many of Jupiter’s most pressing immigration-related problems.

The human connections forged and strengthened through El Sol are the subject of Chapter 5, which tells the story of an unlikely family. The account of how Lee, an El Sol volunteer, comes to adopt three migrant children—Ulises, Isac, and Jose—reaffirms the focus on human relation-ships that undergirds the book as a whole. The final chapter compares the model of El Sol to other immigration “solutions,” including restrictive and punitive local policies. The authors make a compelling case that El Sol provides a model for workable solutions to local problems that benefit the community as a whole.

Against the Tide represents some of the best of what micro-level eth-nography can offer: it invites readers to experience a human community in all of its complexity. The writing is clear and lucid and makes this book accessible to a wide audience outside of academe. I especially appreciated that the authors refused to elide the concerns of non-immigrant residents of Jupiter, which makes it stand out from other books in this genre. From a social science perspective, the book’s greatest weakness is that it avoids discussion of broader issues raised within, such as racism and nativism, labour force inequalities, globalization and U.S. imperialism, and human rights. Still, the focus on practical, local solutions to practical, local prob-lems is a welcome complement to more theoretically oriented works on immigration and could be instructive for community organizers and policy makers who face immigration-related concerns in their own communities. More broadly, Against the Tide should appeal to scholars and students of


migration, as well as members of the general public who have an interest in contemporary immigration issues.

Barry S. LevittPower in the balance: Presidents, Parties, and Legislatures in Peru and beyondNotre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012, xv + 340 pp.

Maxwell A. Cameron, University of British Columbia

Power in the Balance is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on constitutionalism in Latin America, and an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary Peru. As the title implies, Levitt is primarily interested in the balance between the legislative and executive branches of government in the period between 1985 and 2006. This interest arises from the sense that politics became acutely unbalanced under the rule of President Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000). The power of the executive was augmented at the expense of the legislature, and not only as a result of the new constitu-tion adopted in 1993 following the April 1992 presidential self-coup. More subtly, a gap emerged between the formal rules of the constitution and the everyday practices and behaviour of politicians—and the political system was dangerously destabilized as a result. The story has a happy ending, however, as Levitt persuades us that constitutionalism has been at least partially restored in recent years; since 2001, a more positive dynamic has emerged in relations between the branches of government. What explains the waxing and waning of constitutionalism in Peru? Levitt emphasizes the degree of organization and influence of political par-ties, on the one hand, and variation in the adherence of political elites to constitutional norms, on the other. For a legislature to serve as an influential and effective check on the power of the executive it must be more than an assembly of undisciplined and bickering politicians. Reasonably coherent and organized parties are necessary to make legislatures strong enough to shape and direct national affairs through their faculties of legislation and oversight. But that is not enough. The strength of a nation’s constitution also depends on whether political elites are prepared to play by the rules of the game. This, in contradistinction to the constitution itself, is what Levitt calls constitutionalism: whether constitutional rules effectively constrain the actions of politicians. In Peru, a fatal combination of economic crisis and political violence in the late 1980s led to the emergence of a regime in which organized parties were replaced by electoral movements, and the


constitution was repeatedly retrofitted to serve executive power. The con-sequences for democracy were predictably catastrophic. The partial rebirth of parties, and a restoration of the rule of law, however, led to a revival of constitutionalism after Fujimori fled Peru in 2000. Levitt’s argument opens itself to a number of queries. In the first in-stance, we might ask whether events in Peru in recent decades were shaped more by changes in norms or by the balance of power among political forces with different degrees of commitment to constitutionalism. A second line of inquiry might probe the evidence for a revival of political parties since 2000. Peru’s political left and right have not recovered their pre-1990s vigour. Peru Posible is little more than a vehicle for the aspirations of Alejandro Toledo (who held executive office between 2001 and 2006), and even the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) has been subordinated to the personal whims and ambitions of Alan Garcia (in office 1985–90 and again in 2006–11). Above all, and most tellingly, Ollanta humala was elected president in 2011 on the ticket of yet another ephemeral party: the Partido Nacionalista. And still, constitutional democracy has proven sur-prisingly robust despite the weakness of political parties. These arguments are not fatal to Levitt’s thesis, but they do suggest that there is room for further research on the ways in which the disposition of politicians to play by the constitutional rules of the game is associated with (a) the dialectic be-tween partisanship and anti-party sentiment, and (b) whether office-holders find greater political advantage by attacking each other as sworn enemies or balance and bargain with one another through existing institutions. Perhaps such questions take us beyond a neo-institutional framework. A major contribution of Levitt’s work is to reinforce the claim that consti-tutionalism is not only about formal rules but also about practice. At times he seems to suggest that the new institutionalism is primarily about formal institutions, or that institutions can be defined in terms of the formal rules of the game. If that were the case, the problem could be rectified by greater attention to informal rules. I suspect, however, that Levitt wants to get at a deeper problem. his target is more “meta-institutionalist” (24): the presump-tion that the relationship between constitutionally prescribed rules and the actual behaviour of politicians in new democracies, like Peru, is similar to such relationships in established democracies. In this respect, Power in the Balance is a valuable corrective to a certain kind of monochromatic insti-tutionalism that has gained currency in political science research. Indeed, his case could be pressed further. A balanced political order demands more than compliance with the rules and incentives established by constitutions. Citizens and rulers alike must have the capacity to listen patiently, to de-liberate wisely, and to compromise fairly. Such resources were certainly


eroded during the Fujimori regime when a servile Congress and obsequious judges took orders from thugs operating out of the basement of the intel-ligence service. One can only hope that capacities for citizenship are being cultivated anew, and that this book will find readers among those who aspire to make the current era of working constitutionalism more permanent—and more balanced.

Laura A. LewisChocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the making of “black” mexicoDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, xv + 362 pp.

Joan Bristol, George Mason University

Chocolate and Corn Flour tackles themes central to Mexico’s past and present: national identity, race and racism, and the meaning of home, com-munity, and self-identity within the context of migration. Lewis explores these issues through an ethnography of San Nicolás Tolentino, a moreno town in the state of Guerrero, and extends her study in the final chapter to the San Nicoladense migrant community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Unlike scholars who have focused on San Nicoladenses’ African roots, she examines what she identifies as a moreno identity, translating “moreno” as “black Indian.” This involves two steps: Lewis studies the current com-munity of San Nicolás and its colonial and independence-era history. She also unearths assumptions underlying scholarship on race and blackness in Mexico and traces their impact on coastal residents as well as Mexican and US scholars.

Lewis claims that, instead of seeing themselves as “Afro-Mexicans” or “Afro-Mestizos,” as scholars have identified them, San Nicoladenses see themselves as black Indians and as Mexicans. San Nicolás is located on the Costa Chica, a coastal belt straddling the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. Its residents, like many on the coast, identify as morenos and are of African descent, although not exclusively. Lewis explores the interactions between morenos, Indians (including Amuzgos and Mixtecs), and whites (largely outsiders to the coast). She is particularly interested in San Nicoladenses’ interactions with “culture workers.” These politicians, artists, journalists, community organizers, and scholars espouse the “Africa thesis,” John McDowell’s term for the belief that the coastal culture is African to a large degree. Lewis reveals the Africa thesis as a US import, a set of assumptions passed by the anthropologist Melville herskovits to his disciple Gonzalo


Aguirre Beltrán, the influential 20th-century scholar of people of African descent in Mexico. Current groups such as México Negro and the Meetings of Black Towns, organized to unite economically disadvantaged communi-ties and claim political recognition, rest on this thesis. Lewis does not deny the importance of their efforts, yet she argues that the Africa thesis and the search for African survivals do not reflect morenos’ identities as black In-dians. She claims that community groups do not address moreno concerns, which are more about daily survival and the need to migrate for work and less about possible connections between coastal and African cultural prac-tices. Moreover, Lewis notes that many elements that Aguirre Beltrán and others saw as African—a style of building round houses and religious ideas about the soul and destiny—are also found in indigenous cultures. Lewis points out that the Africa thesis, meant to include morenos in the formulation of Mexican national identity and bring them into diasporic discussions, actu-ally serves to distance morenos by implying they are outsiders to Mexico.

Lewis demonstrates how morenos have developed their identity within an understanding of mestizaje, or racial mixing, the discourse that under-girds Mexican national identity. Instead of the usual Indian-white mix, however, morenos have reworked the idea of mestizaje as a black-Indian mixture. For example, the dark-complected statue of San Nicolás is located in a church in an Indian town rather than in his namesake town. Morenos from San Nicolás explain this through a kinship idiom; they appreciate the loving care the Indians bestow on “their” saint and value the connection between the two towns. Lewis shows that the story of the saint serves to actively exclude whites. Morenos explain that when a Spanish priest tried to remove the statue of San Nicolás from the coast, Papa Nico (as they af-fectionately call him) became so heavy he could not be moved beyond the Indian town. Yet Papa Nico allows himself to be brought to San Nicolás for his feast day, again showing the connection between the two towns. Moreno identity is also gendered, with women responsible for interior spaces and men for exterior. Changes in gender roles and family balance due to migra-tion or other factors threaten the community as well as individuals. Trans people do not threaten the gender balance, however, as they are categorized according to their gender performance rather than physical characteristics.

Despite their fictive and actual kinship ties with other groups, morenos experience racism. Non-morenos sometimes borrow from the common dis-course that morenos are lazy and dirty (and morenos sometimes talk about Indians this way as well). Indians also talk about morenos as outsiders, even in areas where morenos settled first. Morenos themselves adopt these paradigms, rejecting “black” as a pejorative term. San Nicoladenses do not identify with African Americans in Winston Salem and at times character-


ize them as lazy and dangerous. Even as they make their way north, San Nicoladenses maintain their moreno identities and their sense of the coast as their true home, sending remittances to build houses and returning to be buried after death.

Lewis makes important contributions to Latin American studies. The discussion of the Africa thesis is revelatory—she is the first to connect herskovits and Aguirre Beltrán, and this connection reveals the way that assumptions about how race works in the US affected studies on Mexico. I was also struck by the way that Lewis’s ethnographic interpretation reflects the 17th-century situation that I have studied. Colonial documents show that Africans and their descendants were mixing physically and culturally with Spaniards and Indians in densely populated urban areas and that new kinds of communities were emerging from this mixture. Although it would not make sense to draw a direct connection between colonial Mexico City and the coastal region today, we see the results of a somewhat similar mixing in modern San Nicolás. Seen from this perspective it is perhaps surprising that a moreno identity still exists and was not subsumed into the larger mestizo identity. Instead, Lewis shows us how this moreno identity developed and was maintained precisely though ideas about the coast as home to morenos and through morenos’ sense of rootedness as Mexicans.

Jorge NállimTransformations and Crisis of Liberalism in Argentina, 1930–1955Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2012, xi + 288 pp.

Benjamin Bryce, SShRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto

Jorge Nállim’s recent monograph offers fascinating insights into the con-tested nature of liberalism in Argentina between 1930 and 1955. In the face of a changing political scene, Radical, Socialist, and Progressive Democrat politicians and intellectuals embraced different elements of the country’s liberal legacy. Nállim argues that “the varied groups that defended the lib-eral ideology engaged in a dynamic process of ‘invention of traditions,’” deliberately but not always coherently drawing connections to the liberal policies created in the second half of the 19th century (4). Several pieces of legislation such as the Constitution of 1853, the penal code, the civil code, and the code of commerce characterized this liberalism, and they all sought to guarantee the economic and political rights of individuals.

This book shows that liberalism became the major ideological reference for anti-Peronist politicians and intellectuals. however, the failure of anti-


Peronist groups “demonstrated the political and ideological limits of those who used liberal discourse to oppose Perón and their ultimate inability to reconcile liberalism and democracy” (106). By 1955, liberal discourse had grown more conservative and less capable of winning the support of the popular classes. The crisis that liberalism faced, as the author shows, was that this loose set of ideas ceased to be the ideology that gave social actors access to political power. This book is principally a study of Argentine politics and how political groups laid claim to liberalism rather than an ex-amination of the development of this ideology over time. Nállim states that by the 1930s liberalism had become merely a “discourse” (66).

The book makes several important contributions to the historiography on Argentina. The focus on the decade and a half before the rise of Peronism clarifies many aspects of a transformative period of the country’s history. Many historians have ignored the ongoing relevance of liberalism in the 1930s, and Nállim shows that many political actors continued to espouse liberal ideas and explicitly linked their political position to liberalism. The author shows that various political groups used liberalism to legitimize their opposition to the country’s changing leadership. Nállim seeks to create a dialogue with recent scholarship on the rise of neoliberalism. his focus on the decline of the liberal order between 1930 and 1955 illustrates the need to pay greater attention to the differences between the country’s liberal founda-tions and the re-emergence of neoliberal policies in the late 20th century.

Nállim’s detailed study of antifascism in the 1930s and early 1940s highlights how many political groups contested the changing nature of the country’s political authority. The analysis of antifascism in mainstream national politics will surely prove informative to the study of how Italian, Spanish, Jewish, and German immigrants and exiles navigated between local and transnational politics in the country in this period. The book also provides a detailed study of the Argentine political arena—in both formal politics and in discussions in the public sphere—in the 1930s and early 1940s. Congressional debates and a number of periodicals that laid claim to ideas about liberalism, particularly Hechos e Ideas, Sur, and Orden Cristiano, newspapers such as Clarín, and organizations such as SADE (Sociedad Argentina de Escritores) and CLES (Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores) form the documentary base for this study. By focusing on both political parties and intellectuals, the author shows the widespread impor-tance of the liberal tradition in debates about the shifting nature of national politics.

Nállim provides an in-depth examination of Argentine political his-tory between 1930 and 1955. A key strength of this book is the detailed attention paid to how a range of groups on the left and in the centre of the


political spectrum jockeyed for power within the limited democratic regime (1932–43), under two military regimes (1930–32 and 1943–46), and during Peronism (1946–55). This book will appeal to anybody interested in Argen-tine history or Latin American political history as well as those who want to learn more about the evolution of liberalism in the Americas.

Jason SeawrightParty-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and VenezuelaPalo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, xi + 293 pp.

Henry Dietz, University of Texas at Austin

The rise and fall of political parties has generated an endless literature over the years, and one might well ask if another monograph on the topic is war-ranted. The answer, at least as far as Jason Seawright’s book is concerned, is a serious and resounding affirmative. Seawright does what all authors of monographs should do—select a good topic, treat it carefully and thor-oughly and innovatively, and report on it in exactly the same way.

Seawright starts his study by asking what combination of factors can lead to the collapse of a party system. his concern is not with a particular party but with a party system collapse, a much more widespread and shat-tering event that brings about the downfall of a cluster of parties that had previously competed with one another to an outsider (a word now widely used in Spanish throughout Latin America), who as a rule rejects any and all linkages with that cluster. To address this question (or more realistically, this group of interrelated questions), Seawright constructs a comprehensive model and applies it to two cases—the collapse of what had been widely viewed as a highly institutionalized two-party system in Venezuela and the concomitant rise of hugo Chavez in 1998, and the downfall of a much more inchoate party system in Peru and the triumph of Alberto Fujimori in 1990. These two cases give Seawright substantial differences in terms of the party system involved but a common outcome.

his model (12) requires multiple kinds of data, since it includes explan-atory variables on the individual level (e.g., voter anxiety and anger, voter attention to corruption, and voter degree of risk acceptance), along with more macro-level variables (e.g., generalized societal crisis, ideological under-representation, declines in party identification [ID]). Applying such a model to two countries requires a great deal of care and effort; after all, the data sets must be comparable one with the other, or else the whole advantage of comparison will be lost.


Seawright brings to his effort a considerable background in political science and also graduate work in statistics and computer science, and this background is evident throughout the book. he realizes from the start that he cannot test every component of his model; in particular, “systematic data regarding political affect are, to date, rare for Latin America” (29). he therefore adopts an eclectic approach that uses quantitative data and ex-perimental evidence to examine emotions, risk, and willingness to vote for an outsider. And throughout his study, Seawright also frequently compares his two principal cases with Argentina and with Latin America as a whole.

One of the most notable aspects of Seawright’s book is his careful step-by-step analysis. he begins with a quantitative analysis of both countries’ economic crises (inflation, growth, unemployment) that concludes that “none of the statistical models considered here adequately accounts for the changes in governing-party vote that occurred … in Peru and Venezuela” (79). That such factors may be enabling causes is, however, quite likely, as a deep and/or prolonged economic crisis can raise individual citizens’ levels of generalized anxiety (85).

To investigate this proposition, Seawright then moves to a consideration of party ID, which as he notes has been well established as a virtually es-sential precursor to party-system collapse. Seawright examines both of his cases for reasons that generated the precipitous decline of the established party system, and concludes that corruption, especially the perception “that the traditional parties really only represented themselves” (95), was a fun-damental factor in the downturn in party ID in Venezuela and Peru. But he also cautions that such a decline does not automatically equal either support for an outsider candidate or complete party-system collapse.

Seawright therefore moves on to a chain of logic that runs as follows: voters who feel most unrepresented ideologically and who are concerned about corruption are also most likely to support outside challengers and to become the “core constituents for party-system collapse” (113). Roughly comparable survey data for both countries support his theoretical arguments, although the book reports the results of more easily interpretable restricted models that have several assumptions built into them (142–143; fuller infor-mation here as well as elsewhere in the book is available online). But these data do not address the affect-and-cognition and emotional mechanisms that the model links to willingness to risk party-system collapse.

To do so, in Chapter 6 Seawright introduces an experimental design to test the relationship between anger and outsider voting. Seawright is very clear on the limitations of this chapter, and for the most part concludes that his experiments generated suggestive (if not definitive) findings. This chapter does not lend itself to a facile synopsis; my own conclusion is that


Seawright deserves great credit for trying experimental research in a difficult setting. Briefly put, voter concerns about corruption/under-representation bring about anger, which in turn motivates people to vote for an outsider.

Finally, Seawright finds that existing parties in both countries were un-able/unwilling to adjust themselves to this rising voter dissatisfaction and anger. his analysis of the Venezuelan case is especially persuasive in this regard.

Overall, Seawright’s monograph is persuasive, and even if it will find its critics, it is safe to say that anyone undertaking further work on the topic or the two cases will find the book obligatory and essential reading.

henry Veltmeyer and Darcy Tetreault, eds. Poverty and Development in Latin America: Public Policies and Development PathwaysSterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2012, xv + 274 pp.

Carmelo Mesa-Lago, University of Pittsburgh

After a raise in the 1980s and a small decline in the 1990s, population pov-erty incidence in Latin America shrank from 43.9% to 29.4% in 2002–11 and extreme poverty from 19.3% to 11.5% (ECLAC 2013; these figures do not match the authors’ data). This collection of 10 essays attempts to answer four key questions on such dramatic reduction: (a) how real it was; (b) whether its main cause was a conscious social strategy from interna-tional community, governments, NGOs, or the poor themselves or instead was the commodity boom prompted by China’s demand for the region’s products; (c) the implications of such reduction in understanding the root causes of poverty; and (d) which new anti-poverty policies are needed to redress poverty. Unfortunately, these questions are not answered systematically with an explicit methodology, and the chapters are of uneven quality, not well integrated and containing frequent repetitions. The book is based on the existing literature and contributes neither new research nor hard data related to the questions nor statistical tables (different figures are given instead of providing one table showing poverty trends in the period). Several chapters trace the background of the anti-poverty policies, and only a few undertake a thorough evaluation of those policies. The book targets the policies of the World Bank and other international financial organizations (IFO) and their effects on poverty over more than four decades, arguing that they have not had tangible results. The real cause


of poverty, state the authors, has been the IFO structural adjustment and “pro-growth” policies that expanded social inequality, directly correlated with the persistence of poverty, and generated by the capitalist market sys-tem—regulated or not—and its production- and political-power relations. Criticism of the IFO neoliberal globalization policies based on the Washington Consensus and their adverse effects on inequality and poverty are well summarized and effective. More interesting but less convincing is the compilation of arguments against the Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) that “brings back the state to social policy” with an inclusive and more equitable development paradigm, a mixed system that combines capi-talism and socialism, empowering the poor. Brazil and Chile are given as world examples of the biggest cuts in poverty, but their social policies by two successive moderate socialist gov-ernments are not analyzed. Nothing is said, either, about the International Labour Organization’s universal basic social floor. Instead the authors con-centrate on anti-poverty strategies in Mexico (two chapters) and to a lesser extent on Bolivia, honduras, and Nicaragua, not the most successful coun-tries in reducing poverty. The best chapter, by Enrique Valencia on conditional cash transfers (CCT), offers a solid summary of the literature (significant omissions are the works of Arturo Barrientos and Joseph hanlon) and a balanced assessment of CCT performance, noting achievements in education, health, consump-tion, and nutrition, and reducing the severity of poverty. Conversely, he pin-points the lack of substantial effects on the quality of education and health care, reducing anemia, and not generating a greater accumulation in human capital and cutting the poverty incidence. In his conclusions he focuses on the CCT supporters’ “illusions.” That does not mean these programs have failed but rather that the expectations were too high and should be tampered with and the programs adjusted. Two countries with “different systemic” socialism (as opposed to the “pragmatic neoliberal/social liberal” cases of Brazil and Chile) are presented as the most successful in poverty reduction: Cuba’s centrally planned econ-omy and Venezuela’s “radical populist/socialist” or “socialism of the 21st century.” None of these terms are defined, and the two cases are summarized in half a page. It is acknowledged that poverty reemerged in Cuba in the 1990s during the crisis after the USSR collapse that required a “structural adjustment (market-oriented policy reform),” and yet the authors argue that Cuba’s continuous policy of socialist human development did not allow it to close one single school or clinic, hence the “emerging inequalities and poverty were kept in check” (22). The authors ignore an official survey that estimated poverty as 20% of the havana population in 2000 (when the re-


covery was in full swing) and the deeper market-oriented structural reforms that have been implemented since 2007 under Raul Castro’s government, significantly expanding inequalities and poverty. Social service expendi-tures are deemed excessive and must be reduced, hence secondary schools in the countryside and several hospitals and clinics have been shut and the health care and social assistance budgets have been cut (Mesa-Lago 2012). ECLAC (2012) reports that Venezuela showed a decline in poverty from 48.6% to 27.6% in 2002–08 but an increase to 29.6% in 2011, one of two countries in the region that experienced an increase. The book proposes a “New Comprehensive Development Framework,” loosely characterized as a substantial transformation of the structure of production and social inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income, through improved access of the poor to the means of production and de-centralized democratic governance in a participatory manner. Such a new development paradigm is not fully developed; the last chapter briefly de-scribes two rural-sector policies for “the peasant pathway out of poverty”: (a) agroecology, that promotes a set of principles based on traditional peas-ant/indigenous technologies but applying modern science and participatory experimental procedures to increase yields, recycle nutrients, and conserve soil and water; and (b) La Via Campesina and food sovereignty, that foster democratic decision making through a participatory process and the right of peoples to determine their agricultural and food policies. Summarizing, this book is useful to understand the radical-socialist criticism of the IFO policies and failure of the Washington Consensus to reduce poverty; as a good summary of the PWC policies, albeit not well demonstrated by the selection of case studies; and for their proposal of a new development paradigm that unfortunately is not fully developed.

Works CitedEconomic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). 2013.

Social panorama of Latin America 2012. Santiago: ECLAC.Mesa-Lago, Carmelo. 2012. Cuba en la era de Raúl Castro: Reformas económi-

co-sociales y sus efectos. Madrid: Editorial Colibrí.

273

NOTEs ON THE CONTRiBuTORs / NOs AuTEuRs

iván Darias Alfonso is a journalist by profession with more than 10 years of ex-perience in both print and broadcast media in his native Cuba. he recently obtained his PhD in Latin American Studies from Birkbeck, University of London, UK. he also holds a Master’s degree in journalism studies from Cardiff University, UK, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of havana, Cuba. he has published articles on the Cuban diaspora, Cuban popular music, and Cuban cinema during the Revolution. his short stories have won many prestigious awards such as the David Prize in Cuba and Casa de Teatro in the Dominican Republic and have appeared in collections published by Union (Cuba), La Luz (Cuba), Plaza Mayor (Puerto Rico), and Casa de Teatro (Dominican Republic). <[email protected]>

scott Alves Barton is a doctoral candidate in the Food Studies program at New York University. he holds a BFA in metalwork and jewelry from Washington Uni-versity. Scott has worked for more than 25 years as an executive chef, restaurant and product development consultant, and culinary school teacher. Ebony Magazine named Scott one of the top 25 African-American chefs. he has been a fellow of Instituto Sacatar in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and the Tepoztlán Institute for Trans-national history of the Americas in Tepoztlán, Mexico. his research focuses on the intersection of secular and sacred foodways of Northeastern Brazil as a marker of cultural and ethnic identity. <[email protected]>

Maria das Graças Brightwell is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Depart-ment of Geography, Royal holloway, University of London, managing an ESRC/DFID project on ethical consumption and public sustainable procurement in Chile and Brazil. She received her PhD from the same university in 2012 with a research on Brazilian food provision and consumption in London. She holds a BA in history and an MPhil in geography from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (2006). She has published her work in the Brazilian journal Travessia and the Spanish Geo Critica and is in the process of publishing from her thesis and postdoctoral research. She is an executive member of the Brazilians in the UK Research group (GEB; Grupo de Estudos sobre Brasileiros no Reino Unido <http://www.gold.ac.uk/clcl/geb/>) and assistant editor for the Journal of Wine Research. <[email protected]>

Natalia Coimbra de sá has a doctorate in culture and society from the Univer-sidade Federal da Bahia. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of human Sciences at the Universidade do Estado da Bahia in Salvador, Bahia. <[email protected]>

Daniella Maia Cruz is in the Department of Sociology at the Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil. She is the author of the book Maracatus no Ceará: Sentidos e


Significados. In 2012, she conducted fieldwork in New York City with Maracatu New York while affiliated with New York University. <[email protected]>

Amina Mezdour est candidate à la maîtrise au Département de géographie à l’Université d’Ottawa. Son sujet de recherche porte sur le rôle de facteurs envi-ronnementaux dans la migration internationale. Plus spécifiquement, elle étudiera la question en se penchant sur la diaspora haïtienne d’Ottawa-Gatineau. Amina Mezdour a possède un diplôme de baccalauréat bilingue au même département en études approfondies de l’environnement, durant lequel elle a rédigé un projet de recherche portant sur le lien potentiel entre la taille des communautés ethniques à Ottawa et les impactes des changements climatiques dans le pays d’origine, sous la direction de Dr Robert McLeman. <[email protected]>

Carolina Ramírez is based in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, Uni-versity of London. She completed an MA in social research in the same university and worked as a researcher and lecturer in the Diego Portales University before starting her PhD. her main research interests are migration and diaspora studies, memory studies, and ethnographic and visual methods. She has published in the Journal for Latin American Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Runnymede-Trust series. <[email protected]>

Helen safa is a Professor Emerita at the University of Florida, where she was pre-viously Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies. Earning her PhD in social anthropology from Columbia University in 1962, she began a more than half-century career studying class, race, and gender in the hispanic Caribbean. Au-thor of dozens of publications, her major works include The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico (1974) and The Myth of the Male Breadwinner (1995). A past president of the Latin American Studies Association and a former director of both the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida and the Latin American Insti-tute at Rutgers University, helen has held visiting fellowships and professorships in six countries.

Olivia sheringham is a researcher at the International Migration Institute, Uni-versity of Oxford as part of the Oxford Diasporas Programme. She holds a BA in modern languages and an MA in Latin American studies (Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2005). She received her PhD in 2011 in geography at Queen Mary University of London, looking at religious practices of Brazilian migrants in the UK and “back home” in Brazil. This is also the subject of her book, Transnational Religious Spaces: Faith and the Brazilian Migration Experience, published in April 2013 by Palgrave MacMillan. She has also published her work in journals including Portuguese Studies and Geography Compass and has written chapters for a number of published and forthcoming edited collections. She is on the executive committee of the Brazilians to the UK research group (GEB). <[email protected]>

Luisa Veronis est une géographe sociale qui s’intéresse aux questions d’inégalité sociale et spatiale, des expériences des groupes marginalisés et de justice sociale

CJLACS / RCELAC 37/74 2012 275

dans les villes. Ses intérêts de recherche traitent des enjeux de l’immigration et du transnationalisme, la formation identitaire et communautaire, la citoyenneté, la gouvernance et le secteur bénévole. En particulier, ses travaux examinent les processus d’inclusion et d’exclusion par et à travers l’espace et les expériences quotidiennes d’appartenance des groupes minoritaires en utilisant l’approche de l’intersectionalité. Luisa est présentement impliquée dans plusieurs projets de recherche collaboratifs et interdisciplinaires sur les expériences quotidiennes de groupes minoritaires dans la ville transfrontalière d’Ottawa-Gatineau, l’influence des conditions environnementales sur la migration internationale au Canada et la production et consommation des médias multiculturels. <[email protected]>

"Latin American Perspectives fi lls a vital gap in our knowledge of this area, which is not currently covered by other journals." - Helen I. Safa, University of Florida,Past President, Latin American Studies Association

Latin American Perspectives is a theoretical and scholarly journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. Offering a vital multidisciplinary view of the powerful forces that shape the Americas, most issues focus on a single problem, nation, or region, providing an in-depth look from participants and scholars.

Learn more at lap.sagepub.com or www.latinamericanperspectives.com. Follow LAP on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LAP.Journalhttp://www.facebook.com/latinamerican.perspectives

www.sagepub.com

Art, Activism, and Performance Resistance in Latin American Art Chile and Bachelet

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The Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies accepts manuscripts written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

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• For two or more works cited - (Nolan 1983; Solís 1982; Fernández 1999,12) - (Nolan 1983, 400; 1984, 2000; Solís 1982a, 1982b)

Examples of listings in the Works Cited• References to journal articles

Nolan, Peter. 1983. De-collectivization of agriculture in Mexico. Cambridge Journal of Economics 1: 381-403.

• References to booksDomeyko, Ignacio. 1978. Mis viajes: Memorias de un exiliado. Santiago:

Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile.

• References to an article in a bookPortes, Alejandro. 1995. Economic sociology and the sociology of immigra-

tion: A conceptual overview. In The economic sociology of immigration: Essays on networks, ethnicity and entrepreneurship, edited by A. Portes, 22-35. New York: Russel Sage Foundation.

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• Pour plusieurs auteurs - (Nolan 1983; Solís 1982; Fernández 1999,12) - (Nolan 1983, 400; 1984, 2000; Solís 1982a, 1982b)

Exemples de références dans la bibliographie• Renvoi à un article

Novaro, Marcos. 2002. Populisme, réformes libérales et institutions démocra-tiques en Argentine (1989-1999). Politique et sociétés 21.2: 67-98.

• Renvoi à un livreDel Pozo, José. 2004. Histoire de l’Amérique latine et des Caraïbes. De 1825

à nos jours. Montréal: Septentrion.

• Renvoi à un chapitre dans un livreZimmermann, Bénédicte et Trom, Danny. 2001. Cadres et institution des

problèmes publics: les cas du chômage et du paysage. Dans Les formes de l’action collective. Mobilisation dans des arènes publiques, sous la direction de D. Cefaï et D. Trom, 281-315. Paris : éditions de l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales.

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