Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, Transnational Encounters, and the Construction of Race by Lisa Shaw

Author:Lisa Shaw [Shaw, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.4. White women in baiana costume performing the number “Nós temos balangandãs” (We Have Amulets) from the show Joujoux e balangandãs (Trinkets and Amulets) at Rio’s Municipal Theatre. Correio da Manhã, 28 July 1939, p. 14.

The film Banana da terra was not the cinematic debut of the baiana, however; in the 1933 Hollywood movie Flying Down to Rio the Afro-American actress Etta Motten played the part of a Brazilian baiana wearing a very realistic version of the outfit, and in the Brazilian carnival film Alô, alô, carnaval! (Hello, Hello, Carnival! [1936]), the actress Heloísa Helena appears in this traditional dress. Flying Down to Rio was so successful in Brazil that it is quite likely that Carmen Miranda and the producers of Banana da terra saw it and were perhaps influenced by its representation of the baiana. In November 1938, in a performance at the Urca Casino witnessed by the Hollywood star Tyrone Power, Miranda wore a baiana outfit designed by the illustrator, cartoonist, and fashion designer J. Luiz (better known as Jotinha) and adopted visibly darker facial makeup than she had in Banana da terra, filmed earlier that month. Trading on the landslide success of this film, Miranda went on to perform “O que é que a baiana tem?,” written by Dorival Caymmi, at the Cassino da Urca in February 1939. It was this performance that attracted the attention of a particular member of the audience, the US show business impresario Lee Shubert, who promptly offered Miranda a contract to perform on Broadway.52 In a famous photograph taken at the casino in 1939 before her departure for New York, Miranda is dressed as a baiana and is again clearly wearing brownface makeup, as was the tradition when performing certain sambas that dealt with Afro-Brazilian characters in their lyrics, such as “Boneca de piche.”53

On 4 May 1939, Miranda set sail for New York, vacating the stage of the Urca Casino in time for Josephine Baker’s arrival a few days later. Rio’s casinos allowed elite audiences to feel a connection with the Casino de Paris by featuring international stars. Carlos Machado, a dancer who had lived in Paris and worked with the well-known star Mistinguett, became the master of ceremonies at the Cassino da Urca in 1940, and he created the resident dance band, the Brazilian Serenaders. As the use of English suggests, such venues were seeking to create a cosmopolitan allure, not least by contracting international star attractions such as Baker.54 Baker played a key role in transnational dialogues and exchanges, most famously between the United States (Harlem), France (Paris), and a mythical black Africa. Mediated by her passage through the artistic circles of cosmopolitan Paris, and performed by an “authentic” North American star associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Baker’s version of the baiana offered the white elite audience of the Urca Casino in May 1939 a palatable performance of one of the most celebrated yet “racially” marked popular tropes of Brazil’s colonial past. As Jules-Rosette argues, “[T]here is potential

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