Abstract
ABSTRACT Brazilian pop star Anitta has achieved several indicators of a successful crossover to the U.S. music market. In this essay, I perform a close reading of the music video for “Girl from Rio” that pays special attention to how Anitta rhetorically deploys racial hybridity and mobility to construct and authenticate Brazilianness and Latinidad. Through a series of visual and textual dichotomies, “Girl from Rio” aims to appeal to a globally recognizable Brazilian identity that relies on well-known constructions of mestizaje. As rhetoricians continue to study how racial scripts prompt racial recognition, this essay contributes to this scholarly movement by focusing on Latinidad’s relationship to Blackness. Ultimately, Anitta’s music video is one among many examples of how rhetorics of mestizaje and Latinidad work together relationally to sanction both the movement and containment of certain bodies and move closer to whiteness and away from Blackness.
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