Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse. Daniel B. Sharp
as a municipal emblem led to competing exhibitions of tradition. I outline how the Calixto and Lopes families documented their claims to the increasingly lucrative crown of local tradition. Focusing on the artifacts displayed and stories told in the two museums, I explore how the samba de coco families used homemade museum displays to make themselves visible (and audible) within the public sphere.
Chapter 3 explores the career trajectories of Coco Raízes and Cordel during the 2000s. Coco Raízes staged and choreographed samba de coco as the group became incorporated into Arcoverde’s São João Festival and participated in circuits of regional roots music performance. Cordel in contrast, distanced itself from other regional, traditional groups as it shifted between genres, sponsors, venues, and audiences. As the band members questioned notions of folkloric tradition, they experimented with embodying on stage the bandits and millenarian figures who loom large in the history of the region. Eschewing sanitized, reassuring celebrations of place and tradition, Cordel deployed visceral Artaudian screams and Brechtian alienation effects to evoke a history of violence, drought, and hunger.
Chapter 4 explores how Cordel and the samba de coco musicians both inhabit and unsettle nostalgic modes of representation by examining the production of a television documentary about samba de coco and the MTV video produced by Cordel. I accompany the filming of a television documentary by TV Globo and interpret how editorial choices excised modernity from its depiction of Arcoverde, distancing musicians from the Brazilian here-and-now. In the MTV video, members of Cordel make the claim that both their roots in Arcoverde and their present longing for their hometown from afar are equally central to who they are, acknowledging the weight of tradition while justifying their move away from Arcoverde.
The second half of the book is an ethnography of the events that followed the entrance of samba de coco into the circuits of state sponsorship and the music industry. I focus on the São João Festival, as well as year-round tourism, to render a portrait of Arcoverde as a canonized periphery where contemporary struggles over citizenship and social inclusion play out through musical performance.
Chapter 5 centers on the 2004 São João Festival. It explores how the layout of the festival places musicians performing as heritage within developmentalist narratives of progress. I show how the hierarchical arrangement of stages displays a movement from primitive to modern, from past to present. I outline the range of performances that took place on these stages, some festooned with palm fronds and others outfitted with state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems. The multiple roles that musicians play as star performers, party hosts, souvenir craftspeople, bartenders, and waitstaff reveal the complexity of their position as entrepreneurial culture bearers.
The ambiguous status of samba de coco musicians is also a theme in chapter 6, in which I focus on new forms of cultural tourism. Encounters with visitors attracted to Arcoverde as a cultural tourist destination play out with a push and pull of intimacy and social distance. Visitors are encouraged to dance samba de coco, as long as they can’t do it as well as the professionals. At an upscale folklore-themed restaurant, crêpes are named after local musicians. Staged “rehearsals” with visitors blur the line between outsider and insider. A samba de coco musician’s dream of building a mud house replica of his childhood home as a tourist destination unravels when he returns to the rural site for the first time in a half century.
Chapter 7 is an elegy chronicling the dissolution of Cordel and the splintering of Coco Raízes as the 2000s came to a close. Based on follow-up ethnographic research undertaken periodically between 2005 and 2013, it charts the role of Arcoverde within a changing Brazilian cultural landscape during the presidency of Lula da Silva, a Pernambucan who grew up just down the road in Garanhuns. I detail changes in the São João Festival, examine Cordel’s spectacular performance at the opening ceremonies of the 2007 Pan American Games, and describe the expansion of samba de coco tourist infrastructure as government funds sponsor the transformation of the Calixto house into a cultural center.
In the epilogue, I argue that the story of Arcoverde allows us to listen carefully to a postauthoritarian moment. It chronicles how redemocratization and the expansion of citizenship coexist in tension with neoliberal efforts to profit from tourist destinations. Both traditionalist and mutationist musical groups in Arcoverde have been reassessing the Brazilian national question during a moment of cultural reckoning. And neither those supposedly being “rescued” nor those doing the “rescuing” feel comfortable with their roles in this heritage drama. Instead, both are reaching beyond this older script and into new territory, where what it means to be Brazilian is being explored.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Staging Tradition
A week after the Associação Respeita Januário meeting, I drove to Arcoverde. The BR-232 highway running from Recife to Arcoverde had been recently repaved. Its lanes were doubled, reducing travel time to Caruaru, a city located 120 km from the capital. Billboards along the road advertised musical traditions to tourists. Caruaru, the largest city along the route, is a popular destination for the Saint John’s Day celebration in June known as São João. It is touted as one of the largest, oldest São João celebrations in the Northeast. Every year festival events such as quadrilha line dancing in colonial garb are televised throughout the region. Caruaru also promotes pipe-and-tabor groups called bandas de pífanos and a large craft market at which musicians roam the aisles of vendors. Stalls display rows of miniature clay figures of accordion and flute players and the legendary bandit Lampião, a figure as notorious as Pancho Villa or Jesse James. Satirical miniature doctor/patient scenes are also popular. One scene features a tiny dentist placing his foot on the chest of a patient for better leverage, and another depicts the delivery of a baby. The figures represent an attempt, through caricature, to contain anxieties about health that are pervasive in a zone of harsh economic disparity.
Beyond Caruaru, the landscape became dotted with cacti and caatinga scrub brush. The BR-232 narrowed from two lanes each way to one each way, pockmarked with deep, harrowing potholes. Driving became more treacherous, as drivers boldly threatened oncoming traffic trying to pass each other. Several towns along the road promoted themselves as part of the Route of Forró, an effort to alert visitors to dance halls and small-town festivals. Forró is a genre label that encompasses several rhythmic variations on dance music and most commonly features accordion as its emblematic instrument. In its various subgenres, including ultrapopular forró estilizado and its more rustic counterpart forró pé-de-serra, it has crystallized as a regional genre promoted as the essence of the white and mestiço Catholic cowboy of the northeastern interior backlands. One aspect of the projected image of Arcoverde that sets it apart from the rest of the Route of Forró is the decision by its municipal government around 2000 to promote sounds strongly associated with coastal Afro-Brazilian-ness in the mestiço backlands.
As I drove through the crest of hills dividing the coast and the interior, I thought of a passage I had read about shrinking driving times, modernity, and change in the northeastern sertão. The passage had come from a seminal text on the sertão called Vaqueiros e Cantadores (Cowboys and Troubadours) by folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo. The book was written in December 1937, a few months before the Mission of Folkloric Research recorded in Arcoverde. I looked up the quotation later, so I could remember the excerpts that bridged the era of the Mission of Folkloric Research and that of Sandroni’s recording project.
Câmara Cascudo’s text betrays an ambivalence toward the passage of time, longing for a past