The Other Other Festa: June Samba and the Alternative Spaces of Bahia, Brazil’s São João Festival and Industries

Abstract

Carnival is likely the best-known aspect of expressive culture in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, yet it is by no means the only significant public festival in a city widely known for the richness of its Afrodiasporic expressive culture. Indeed, another seasonal celebration known as the festas juninas (June Festivals) or more colloquially, Sao Joao, deeply informs music, dance, and related industries throughout Brazil, the state of Bahia, and its capital city, Salvador. In fact, according to A Tarde (Loenelli 2013; Quiteria 2013), one of Salvador's principal newspapers, Sao Joao is actually bigger than Carnival. Moreover, since 2008, the state government has actively promoted and invested in developing tourism during Sao Joao, which was long considered to be the depth of the so-called low season. All of this suggests that the festas juninas are or are rapidly becoming as economically important as carnival. In addition to changes related to economics, the political complexity of Sao Joao that was long overshadowed by a veneer of rural simplicity and related social harmony is now becoming more visible (Packman 2012). Whereas concerns over racial politics have been contested openly during Bahian carnival since the 1970s (Dunn 1992; Crook 1993), Sao Joao celebrations in Salvador have historically lacked similar overt expressions of resistance. Now, however, alongside the increased commercialization that many residents suggest is making the festas juninas more like carnival, challenges to dominant racial imaginings through music and movement that have become the norm during pre-Lenten celebrations are also on the rise in June. These interventions take place amidst a series of commemorations that have and, in general, continue to idealize particular notions of rural life, glossing racial inequities both through discourse and the privileging of music and dance practices known as Forro, which are distinct from those more common in Bahia during the rest of the year. Along with what I have described elsewhere (Packman 2012) as June season festive interventions--challenges to dominant notions of race and black Bahian subjectivity through the samba (rather than Forro) practices of self-identified black members of Salvador's popular classes--much of my interest in recent shifts in Bahia's Sao Joao celebrations lies with the implications of various industries of cultural production. In this article I explore how residents of Tororo, a primarily black working-class neighborhood in Salvador, participate in and, indeed, produce June samba in a politically engaged manner that includes various activities explicitly situated to generate financial return. While questions may remain among scholars, activists, and many members of the public as to the coexistence of commercial interest and political efficacy (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 1997; Adorno 2008; Gilroy 2010), I argue that these two facets of June samba in Salvador not only coexist but are in many ways complementary and interdependent. With this analytical goal in mind it is important to state this economic-political-expressive cultural activity takes place against a backdrop of mesticagem (racial/cultural mixing) and a related myth of racial democracy--two concepts that have remained central to notions of Brazilian national identity despite numerous challenges from scholars and activists. At the risk of oversimplifying a deeply complex issue, nationalist discourse in Brazil has, since the writing of Gilberto Freyre in 1933, emphasized an absence of racism owing to the historical fact of extensive and ongoing mixing between people of Indigenous, European, and African descent. Continuing assertions of little or no racism in Brazil, following Freyre, typically reference the idea that the uniqueness of Brazilian people and culture is as a result of their particular racial and cultural mixture. Those who uncritically embrace the notion of racial democracy--most of whom in my experience tend to be phenotypically privileged (i. …