Essay on the legacy of slavery in Brazil

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6. Reinventing Roots: From Athens to Africa in the Making of Salvador’s Identity

Anadelia Romo

The social and political elite of Salvador, Bahia, ushered in the twentieth century claiming

allegiance to the culture of ancient Greece rather than their native Brazil. Finessing their oratory

and naming their children after Greek philosophers, these men and women found in Athens a

symbol that expressed their ideal of whiteness and their connections to a broader European

heritage (fig. 6.1). Their admiration for Athens did not, however, extend to democratic political

ideals. Instead, in crafting an identity aimed at garnering national status and prestige, the wealthy

of Bahia ignored the profound and undemocratic inequalities of their region, which had only

recently seen slavery abolished. Such inequalities remained especially evident in a city like

Salvador, which had a small, white political elite and a large, disenfranchised black majority.

Accustomed to comforts accumulated through centuries of slave owning, the powerful closed

their eyes to racial barriers that kept the black majority far from hopes of literacy, let alone Greek

philosophy.

By the close of the twentieth century, however, the power brokers of Bahia, still

predominantly white, had done a complete about-face. Now, stressing their connections to Afro-

Bahian religion, music, and dance, they claimed Africa rather than Europe as the origin of many

of their most cherished cultural ideals. Remarkably, these new beliefs had come to be shared by a

wide swath of the Bahian population, regardless of racial background. Within a relatively short

time span, Bahian identity, or “Baianidade,” was reframed to make Salvador the center of a

uniquely harmonious culture focused on African-based rhythms and ways of life (figs. 6.2).1

Though it may be tempting to see this version of Bahia as a “truth,” long understood by

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Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian population and gradually accepted by a reluctant white elite, this new

narrative was just as much an invention as its Athenian predecessor. This chapter turns attention

to the constructed and shifting nature of Bahian identity over the first half of the twentieth

century. Tracing this complicated story in broad strokes provides a sense of the cultural

transformations that took place in Salvador and the host of dynamic actors who shaped them. It

should be stressed, however, that many of the racial inequalities that existed at the beginning of

the twentieth century have yet to be resolved, despite the theme of inclusion that became a

central feature of Baianidade. The vision of the city may have been completely reversed, but the

racism and poverty that characterize its population tragically still remain.

To understand Salvador, one has to grasp the fundamental role that the enslavement of

Africans played in shaping the city and its history. Enslaved Africans had become the backbone

of the new colony by the late 1500s, and Bahia was one of the earliest and most important slave

centers within Brazil. Over the course of almost four centuries, Brazil enslaved over five million

Africans, more than any other single country in the Americas. Despite horrifying rates of

mortality, Africans and their descendants became the majority of the population, whereas those

considered white remained a minority, comprising 44 percent of the population by the time of

abolition in 1888.2 This percentage varied greatly, however, depending on the state. Indeed, for

the city of Salvador and the state of Bahia, it was lower, precisely because of the region’s slave

economy and the production of sugar.

The slaves within this economy fashioned vibrant cultures in rural plantations as well as the

urban sphere. The rich soil surrounding Salvador and other regions in the northeast proved ideal

for growing sugar cane, creating a plantation culture whose heart lay far beyond the edges of the

city. At the same time, and as a result of the sugar economy, Salvador gained importance for its

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port, the protected Bahia de todos os Santos, or Bay of All Saints. The entry of thousands of

slave ships and the departure of massive amounts of sugar and other exports created an urban

slave culture, based around trade, transport, and commerce. Indeed, by the early nineteenth

century a large number of slaves in Salvador were owned by merchants, and many more

belonged to those who rented them out as general labor for hire (Reis 1993, 13). Though

plantation slavery and urban slavery each created its own particular dynamic, together they

resulted in a dense concentration of Africans and their descendants in and around Salvador.

Candomblé, an African-based religion with origins in Salvador and its surroundings (Parés

2013), emerged as a result of this, as did numerous other cultural practices. Indeed, it was

precisely this historical setting that allowed slaves to carve out social networks and new religious

and cultural communities, even as repression remained a mainstay of the slave regime.

As the slave regime marched slowly to its end, the impact of African descendants in

Bahia remained powerful. Bahia’s white population, for example, was lower than the national

average, and reported by the census of 1872 to be 24 percent. Only two states showed a lower

number of whites in their population.3 Correspondingly, a large segment of the population of

Bahia had some degree of African heritage. Color categories used at the time indicated that the

state was 46 percent black (preto) and 27 percent brown (pardo), the latter a result of intermixing

between Africans and Portuguese, whether consensual or forced.4

In the late nineteenth century, as the profitability of sugar declined and the prospect of

abolition loomed, the enslaved population, once viewed as an economic benefit, came to be seen

as a social liability by the white ruling minority. Though abolition brought new legal rights,

freedom remained restricted due to widespread poverty as well as new social hierarchies that

worked to maintain a white power structure. Brazilians now embraced a new reverence for

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“progress” and “modernity,” defined inevitably in terms of European, primarily French, culture

and explicitly framed in racial terms. Meanwhile, scientific racism gaining credence across the

West posited not only the superiority of whiteness but also the undesirability of racial mixing.

This proved an obvious dilemma for Brazil, which had a very large number of people with mixed

heritage and a very small number of people deemed white.

Brazil pursued two solutions to the problem of scientific racism, neither of which challenged

its essential assumptions. The south of Brazil, with new wealth from coffee and budding

industrialization, aimed to solve the problem with a large-scale importation of Europeans. São

Paulo aggressively began a state-sponsored program of immigration. Planters and industrialists

viewed former slaves in explicitly racist terms as not sufficiently modern, or lazy, or generally

unsuitable for the agriculture that they had long dominated as well as skilled factory labor

(Andrews 1991; Weinstein 2015).

The second solution took aim not at the demographic reality of the country, but its

interpretation. Brazilian intellectuals began to challenge European and American racial theorists

by revising racial doctrine in important ways. Most critically, they reframed the problem of racial

mixing, or as they termed it, “miscegenation.” In their view it was a source of strength, rather

than a cause of degeneration and decline. In this reframing, it became a positive force that made

for a stronger population and ultimately, and most critically, a whiter population. This theory of

“embrancamento,” or whitening, meant a redeemed future for those with both African and

European heritage, but it also ultimately endorsed whiteness as Brazil’s ideal.

To what extent the embrancamento ideal found acceptance in Bahia still remains unclear.

What is clear, however, is that one of Brazil’s most pessimistic racial theorists Raimundo Nina

Rodrigues (1862–1906), a medical doctor, was a Bahian resident. At the turn-of-the century he

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issued dire warnings about the limited potential of Africans, the instability of racial mixture, and,

most remarkably, the possibility that Brazil could “turn black.” At the same time, however, as an

amateur ethnologist, he collected many detailed observations about African cultural connections

in Bahia and its Candomblé community. As I have argued elsewhere, Nina Rodrigues actually

gave credence to as large a role for environmental factors as he did for race, and was not nearly

as deterministic as he has often been portrayed.5 He was nonetheless undeniably racist, and his

disastrous predictions arose from the particular context of Salvador and Bahia. For wealthy and

powerful whites hoping to portray themselves as an enclave of genteel philosophers, Nina

Rodrigues was surely an embarrassment, an obstacle, and an uncomfortable proponent of the

view that Salvador was predominantly black with a culture that drew as much or more from

Africa than from Athens.

Nina Rodrigues undoubtedly pulled his ideas of Africa’s centrality from many sources.

Perhaps most important, however, was Bahia’s black population itself. In his role as ethnologist,

Nina Rodrigues spent some time with informants, particularly within the religious communities

of Candomblé, who stressed their African connections. It is likely that during this fieldwork, he

was impressed with the centrality of African roots and their importance in Salvador. It was

within this context that he became one of the first to treat the material culture of Candomblé as

art. Significantly, he did so at a dynamic moment when African linkages were being established

in important ways among Salvador’s black community. As J. Lorand Matory has documented,

British colonial officials in Africa and a Yoruba elite helped establish ideas of a grand African

past in West Africa and helped consolidate the notion of Yoruba primacy among other

ethnicities. At the same time, Africans in Bahia traveled back and forth to the region for trade

and immersed themselves in these ideas, circulating them within Salvador as well.6

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These ideals may have been powerful within the Candomblé communities, but they were far

from mainstream in the early twentieth century. Candomblé occupied tenuous legal territory, and

though technically it should have been guaranteed religious freedom under the constitution, it

was regarded as witchcraft, deemed illegal, and often heavily repressed into the 1930s (Lühning

1995–1996). Indeed, not even academics took up the banner of religious liberty until the late

1930s in an attempt to guarantee some minimal protections from rampant police raids. Their

campaign, however, faced an uphill battle. At the turn of the century, Nina Rodrigues had

documented in his work numerous journalistic accounts that revealed middle-class and elite

characterizations of the religion as barbaric, dangerous, and savage. Although the national

climate had changed by the 1930s, inclusion remained tenuous and African identity still

controversial.

The shift in Brazil’s political and cultural climate can be traced to the impact of President

Getúlio Vargas. Vargas came to power through a coup in 1930, and his policies had a deep

impact in part because he was able to remain in power until 1945. His fascist-inspired

dictatorship, declared in 1937, allowed him even greater control. In the realm of culture Vargas

was exceptionally interested in forging a strong sense of nationalism and therefore dedicated his

cultural policies to enhancing these goals. His regime encouraged practices deemed to be

particularly Brazilian, and it aimed to displace any European ideal that portrayed Brazilians as

inferior. Authenticity became a watchword for the time, and cultural ministers took a new

interest in uncovering what was unique to Brazil. Within this context, Afro-Brazilian practices

such as capoeira, a martial art and dance form, gained government endorsement for the first time.

And samba, originally viewed as an exclusively black dance and music, came to dominate both

elite ballrooms and government radio waves (McCann 2004; Hertzman 2013).

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Rio and Bahia both laid claim to capoeira and samba. Regardless of the reality, however, it

was Bahia that gained steady acknowledgement as the site of inspiration and the most authentic

practice of Afro-Brazilian culture.7 Samba in particular drew on Bahian motifs to indicate its

authenticity, and sambas of the 1930s created a host of songs about Salvador. The Bahian writer

Dorival Caymmi (1914–2008) became critical in this movement, but so was the Rio-based

composer Ary Barroso (1903–1964), who wrote early rhapsodies about Bahia although he didn’t

actually visit until late in his career (see Dunn, this volume). Such songs and many others

celebrated Afro-Bahian culture and referred often to the charms of the Baiana (famously

reinterpreted by Carmen Miranda for American audiences). Whether in capoeira or in samba,

Salvador was portrayed as the wellspring of authentic practice.

This broader acceptance and celebration of Afro-Brazilian traditions fit into a larger national

pattern but in distinctive ways. Historian Daryle Williams has analyzed how the Vargas era

promoted a national agenda of arts that privileged both modernity and tradition (figs. 6.3, 6.4).

Bahian state officials occasionally tried to promote both of these axes, but increasingly chose to

reinforce an image of Bahia as the most authentic preserve of Brazilian traditions and the

birthplace of Brazil. National authorities endorsed this vision as well. When he arrived for a visit

in 1933, President Vargas, for example, insisted that he felt in Bahia “the excitement of drawing

close, for the first time, to the birthplace of our nationality” (Vargas 1938–1941, 2: 114).

While many of Salvador’s political elite embraced the celebration of the city’s colonial glory,

others began to herald the city for its role in preserving the most authentic Afro-Brazilian culture

in the nation. The first interpretation was certainly the most solidly consolidated and gained

official endorsement during the 1930s. As historian Paulo Santos Silva has brilliantly

documented, local intellectuals of the time rewrote Bahia’s history to construct a glorious

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representation of the sugar elites’ culture of the past, while also claiming the existence of a more

mild form of slavery within the region (Silva 2000). The second interpretation, however, gained

power through some remarkable alliances among local intellectuals and local black leadership.

This second view saw Salvador as central not for its colonial contribution to Brazil but for its

black and African culture. It gained significant traction during the thirties through a confluence

of events. Some of the most important of these were the Afro-Brazilian Congresses of 1934 and

1937. The first was held in Recife, under the direction of scholar Gilberto Freyre; the second was

held in Salvador, organized by journalist and scholar Édison Carneiro and colleagues. Overall

the scholarly presentations at the first congress revealed an ambiguous regard for Africa, in many

cases preferring instead to highlight Brazilian culture as the most formative for Afro-Brazilians

(Romo 2007, 31–54; 2010). The Bahian congress, however, set important new precedents as

participants turned more clearly to celebrating African roots and connections. Its organizers

insisted that Bahia was the true epicenter of Afro-Brazilian culture and aggressively campaigned

for this view through the press. In the process Édison Carneiro and fellow scholars gave official

endorsement to the legitimacy of Candomblé. Furthermore, leaders of the religion such as Mãe

Aninha (Eugênia Anna Santos) of the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá temple and her colleague Martiniano

do Bonfim hosted several religious ceremonies and participated more broadly in the congress.

The end result was the creation of a union of Candomblé leaders who sought official protection

for their religious freedoms. Furthermore, in many ways the congress can be seen as a successful

public relations campaign for Afro-Bahian culture. Gaining press coverage as well as new

scholarly focus, the event marked important victories for Afro-Bahian culture and for the vision

of Salvador as dominated by that culture.

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All of this was controversial to Gilberto Freyre, the organizer of the first congress, who was

uncomfortable with the more politically minded Bahian conference and who would have liked

instead to prioritize his own hometown of Recife as the heartland of Afro-Brazilian studies.

Although he ultimately rose to dominate much of Brazil’s thinking about race, he lost this

particular regional turf war (Dantas 1988; Romo 2010). His work was nonethless important for

the movement in Salvador, particularly his Casa grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves,

1933). In this book Freyre celebrated the contributions Africans had made to colonial Brazil and

insisted that the country was unique in its harmonious combination of indigenous, Portuguese,

and African cultures and peoples. In fact, an Afro-Bahian named Manuel R. Querino (fig. 6.5)

had published scholarship two decades earlier that emphasized the importance of Africans in the

making of Brazil and gave serious treatment to African culture more generally (Leal 2009;

Gledhill 2014). Freyre’s work, however, emerged at a more receptive moment in the middle of

the Vargas era and allowed him a remarkable impact on national thinking.

Jorge Amado, a young novelist steeped in socialism who would become Brazil’s most

famous and most translated author, attended the 1937 congress and played a critical role in

promoting Afro-Brazilian culture as the heart of Salvador (see Johnson, this volume). His first

novels, published in the early 1930s, took the city as their setting and focused on black culture

and life. Perhaps most celebrated was his novel Jubiabá (1935), which placed Candomblé at the

center of the story. In this book—in ways that would prove a precursor to his travel guide for the

city—Amado portrayed Salvador as a city remarkable for its poverty, rather than its Athenian

oratory. More importantly, he heralded it as a “black city,” relegating more traditional portrayals

of it as a Catholic center of Brazil’s colonial administration or as a preserve of European-inspired

sugar elites to the margins.

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The framing of Salvador as a center of popular and Afro-Bahian culture was further

reinforced in the 1940s through the work of Walt Disney. As is now well-known, Disney was

commissioned by the US government to produce films to help fight fascism during World War

II. Part of this agenda included encouraging closer relations between the United States and Latin

America, an effort known as the Good Neighbor policy. As a part of this initiative, Disney

produced two feature films: Saludos Amigos in 1942 (which premiered in Rio) and The Three

Caballeros in 1944 (which premiered in Mexico City). The premise of these films centered on a

curious but ignorant Donald Duck who visited sites across Latin America to learn about their

“folk” cultures and national traditions from compatriot animated birds. The films introduced the

figure of José Carioca, or Zé Carioca, a dapper animated parrot from Rio who shepherded

Donald through Brazilian life. Indeed, Brazil featured prominently in both features, and in the

Three Caballeros, Salvador took a starring role.

The Three Caballeros played upon several sambas already in circulation within Brazil that

celebrated the charms of Bahia and urged the listener to go to visit. Zé invites Donald to

Salvador in a scene that played with a twist on the song made popular in 1941 by Dorival

Caymmi, “Você ja foi a Bahia?” (Have you gone to Bahia yet?). While Zé announces to the

befuddled Donald Duck that he will show him Brazil, “the land of samba,” the extended musical

number set in the streets of Salvador made clear that the heart of samba was Bahia itself (fig.

6.6). Indeed, the song, and the vision of an Afro-Brazilian Bahia, was so central to the film that

Disney studios chose to use it for the film’s title in Brazil.

Within the film, the musical number that received the most attention was a samba performed

by Aurora Miranda (sister of Carmen) among brightly colored drawings of Salvador’s

Pelourinho, or colonial center. In the scene, Salvador, deemed the “city of romance,” enchants

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Donald so deeply that he loses his mind. He also becomes enamored with Miranda, who appears

dressed as a Baiana street vendor. 8 The tropes followed closely the lyrics for the dance number

“Os quindins de yayá,” written by Ary Barroso. In the song, the city is represented by the

captivating and mysterious Baiana, the Afro-Bahian sweets sold by Miranda, and samba itself.

This was a vision of Salvador with music in the streets and colorful animated colonial buildings

that literally vibrated and danced to its beat.

The trope of Salvador as the land of street festivals and Afro-Bahian influence gained

prominence through Walt Disney, but it had a life of its own within the city as well. Autonomous

forces within Salvador worked through the 1930s and 1940s to push acceptance of Afro-Bahian

celebrations into the mainstream. As historian Scott Ickes argues, some of the most important

players in this effort were members of the Afro-Bahian working class, who insisted on

celebrating public festivals with distinct Candomblé connections. As his insightful analysis

reveals, festivals were sites of contestation, and the determination of Afro-Bahian actors to

celebrate their culture in public spaces helped forge a new Bahian identity that became more

accepting of their vision (Ickes 2013a).

Tourism also influenced the development of a Bahian ideal. While scholars have often

acknowledged the way in which Bahian tourism became tied to the region’s black and African

roots, they have generally viewed these developments as relatively recent. I argue instead that the

roots of Bahian tourism began in the 1930s, were put on hold during the war, and then reemerged

with new vigor in 1945. This is based on my research into sources that scholars of Bahia have

not formally considered as a genre: the tourist guide. Yet the corpus of Bahian guidebooks that

emerged in the mid-twentieth century demonstrate a richness and a dynamism unequaled across

Latin America. The 1950s in particular witnessed a small boom in the publications written by

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native Bahians, or residents of Salvador, that were intended to entice domestic visitors from

across Brazil. Written in Portuguese, they appealed to Brazilians to visit a land paradoxically

described as unique within the country and central to it. While a limited number of visitor guides

in Portuguese were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, their nature changed by the end of the war,

and a completely new type appeared in the 1950s. They provide window into the shifting ways

that elites and intellectuals viewed the city and its identity. Such authors invested an immense

amount of work in reshaping and reenvisioning Salvador, but in their vision, the stakes were

important.9 Hoping to bring increased status for the native city, and perhaps for themselves, they

set out to put Salvador at the center of Brazil’s cultural map.

Anthropologist Osmundo Araujo Pinho has noted the importance of such books within an

expanding sector of works he terms guides to Bahianness. In his view, novels by Amado, local

histories, and select guidebooks ultimately served to teach readers about the ideal Bahian

identity, one which may not have actually existed but was in the midst of formation (Araujo

Pinho 1998, 109–20). This highlights the constructed nature of Bahian identity, which is critical

to understanding these texts: they were prescriptive and imagined more than a faithful reflection

of reality. I argue, however, that the guidebooks in particular, which Araujo Pinho mentions only

in passing, deserve much more attention and played a critical role that has thus far been

unappreciated.

What is stunning about many of these guidebooks is their intersection with and embrace of

the nascent modern art movement in Bahia. Indeed, one of the events that best highlights this

important connection is generally acknowledged as the first modern art exhibition in Salvador.

Held in 1944 at Bahia’s State Library, it was organized by Amado, newspaper editor Odorico

Tavares, and artist Manoel Martins from São Paulo, the illustrator of Amado’s newly completed

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tourist guide.10 What is less commonly remembered, however, is that the exhibition came about

as a result of Amado’s guide, which had brought Martins to Salvador to begin with, along with

select modern artworks on loan.

Amado’s very curious and idiosyncratic guide established a new view of the city and featured

some tropes that would be adopted by almost all of the intellectuals who produced their own

versions in the 1950s. It, also nonetheless, presented a view of the city unique to Amado, one in

which poverty played a starring role. Amado was perhaps the only writer of this genre who

romanticized the city while drawing attention to its serious social problems. These issues would

virtually disappear from the treatments of the 1950s, and so it is worth highlighting that Amado

not only forged a new path that would be enthusiastically followed but also established a social

realism that would be put aside.

By the 1930s, as noted above, Amado was already foregrounding Afro-Bahians and the city

of Salvador in his novels. His guidebook, however, went further, defining Salvador as a “black

city par excellence”11 and highlighting the influence of Candomblé. The book in fact opens with

Condomblé drumming and includes a remarkably detailed listing of temples. Amado further

insisted that the city was dark and mysterious, hinting at magic and enchantment and even

possession that might overcome one during a visit. These themes would be revived over and over

again by successive authors and indeed, had already been explored by the samba industry and

Disney.

In the final analysis, Amado’s guidebook failed to provide a consistent tone or framing for

Salvador. His very inconsistency demonstrates, however, that in the 1940s no single view of the

city had consolidated. This would only occur—and at a heightened pace—during the 1950s when

the tour guides played a primary role in shaping the definition of the city as black, dominated by

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Candomblé, and driven by popular festivals that created a celebrative mood and rhythm year

round.

One of the most important figures to craft this ethos was Tavares, the editor of two of Bahia’s

most highly circulated newspapers. Tavares lent authority to this newly solidifying vision of

Bahia through the columns that he and others wrote in his newspapers, and he penned his own

guide to the city in 1951 (Tavares 1951). While his importance has long been overlooked,

Tavares and his tourist guide played a critical role in publicizing a view of Salvador as a black

and festive city (fig. 6.7), as Ickes demonstrates (Ickes 2013b, 437–66). His chatty, idiosyncratic

guide accompanied with illustrations by Carybé, was organized around festival themes. The

previous year, moreover, Tavares had worked with Pierre Verger to publish a series of articles on

Afro-Bahian culture in Salvador in O Cruzeiro, the most important illustrated magazine of the

time. As is now well known, Verger also contributed to establishing a particular visual language

for Salvador, one dominated by many of the same preoccupations.

Some embraced this new vision more than others. Bahian art critic José Valladares, for

example, also wrote an illustrated guide in 1951, but his was perhaps more split between the dual

visions of Salvador as a preserve of colonial tradition and as a center for authentic Afro-Brazilian

culture (Valladares [1951] 2012). Valladares served as director for Bahia’s State Museum and

played an important role in encouraging modern art. As I explore elsewhere, he also

experimented with the inclusion of popular and African-based culture in the museum and his

publications (Romo 2010; 2009). More so than many others of his time, however, he hesitated to

embrace the city as exclusively black or as dominated by its festive life, to which he dedicated

less attention. His guide was illustrated by the artist Carlos Thiré of Rio, who echoed

Valladares’s stance in his images (fig. 6.8).

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The artist who dominated and shaped the vision of Salvador in the guides of the 1950s was

Carybé, although Carlos Bastos also played a prominent role. Indeed, the work of Carybé served

as a visual tour guide for the city in a thematic series of line drawings he published with

government sponsorship in the early 1950s (fig. 6.9). Prominent intellectuals and scholars

introduced each of these works, framing both the art and its reflection in the city itself. The texts

and the drawings worked to define a new Salvador, one that had been in the making through the

1930s and 1940s. This Salvador highlighted Afro-Bahian culture and developed an idea of an

authentic popular “folk” culture that dominated the city’s festivities and daily life.12 Not content

to let his drawings speak for themselves, however, Carbyé would eventually write his own guide

to the city some years later in 1960. Here he described Salvador as a city of confusion, of

mixture, and of mystery, with the deities of Candomblé integral to everyday life in the city.13

Though these depictions now seem natural, even expected for the city, at the time they were

still the source of some debate. Guides of the early 1950s produced exclusively by municipal

authorities, for instance, emphasized a much more conservative vision of the city, one dominated

by its colonial culture and defined by its Roman Catholic churches. Popular culture and Afro-

Bahian culture entered these guides briefly, if at all, during the early 1950s. Indeed, the

municipal tourism board devoted much of its energy to sponsoring an extended series of guides

on the city’s colonial churches, none of which mentioned popular faith, practice, or even popular

church celebrations.

By the early 1960s, all of this had changed. Official city tourism efforts shepherded visitors

to sponsored capoeira exhibitions, and a stop at a Candomblé temple was obligatory. These

efforts would be further solidified during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly with the reforms of

the colonial district of the Pelourinho and the establishment of Salvador as a UNESCO heritage

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site (Jocélio Teles dos Santos 2005; Riggs 2008). As anthropologist John Collins has noted, the

commodification of the city in the 1990s created policies that aimed to preserve its colonial

architecture but ultimately perceived the Afro-Bahian inhabitants of the crumbling historic

buildings as both hindrances to a true representation of the city and as a commodity themselves

(Collins 2015). The origins of these policies can be found in Salvador’s budding tourism

industry of the 1940s and 1950s and the tourist guides of the era. In creating a romanticized and

idyllic portrait of the city, these efforts failed to address the poverty of the population, viewing

the Afro-Bahian majority as a tourist “attraction” in ways that frequently neglected its general

social welfare.

Although Amado has often been criticized for his romanticism, which undeniably deepened

over the years, it is worth remembering that his guide was also a plea for help. Denouncing the

high rates of infant mortality, poverty, and inequality, he called for visitors to do something.

What precisely he meant by this is unclear. His portrayal of Salvador nonetheless remains equal

parts celebration and denouncement. It is worth remembering that in the midst of all of the

celebration of Salvador, much of it justified, it is also incumbent upon observers and locals to

recognize the poverty and suffering that created the city and that shaped Afro-Brazilian reality.

Racial inequality, though often written out of Salvador’s narrative, has been as much a part of the

city as its celebrated Afro-Bahian culture.