Carnival in Porto Alegre? Tourists and historians alike might be surprised to find the two linked, given that Rio Grande do Sul is generally best known for more rustic entertainments. Alexandre Lazzari’s book offers a valuable look at the development of Carnival in what was still a small town of roughly 40,000, in the era when it began to be a national institution. Brazil’s southernmost state and its capital have made more important contributions to Brazilian economic and political history than they have to cultural history, but this revised master’s thesis is more than just a helpful reminder of how national cultural phenomena took on local manifestations prior to the development of radio. It is also a useful corrective to the notion that in the history of Carnival, long-term popularization was always the dominant trend. Historians will profit by using its insights in problematizing the historical development of Rio-centered “national” cultures and identities.Lazzari examines the important role that young men of the middle and upper classes played in creating the Esmeralda and Venezianos Carnival societies in the 1870s. While nationalists at roughly the same time tried to eliminate bullfighting in Cuba, these Brazilian founding brothers hoped to modernize Porto Alegre by eliminating another symbol of backwardness—the traditional Luso-Brazilian practice of entrudo. Moralizing reformist critics associated the practice of spraying friends, family, and total strangers with fair and foul liquids with both the decline of patriarchal authority and the spread of germs. Spontaneity, variety, and social disorder (according to the “progressive youth”) were to be replaced by elaborate planning and elegant justifications of hierarchy in allegorical floats. Lazzari makes clear that the Golden Age of Carnival remembered at the turn of the twentieth century was quite short-lived and that the attempt to replace entrudo with Carnival had begun to fail already by the 1880s. The popular classes resisted this assault on their favored means of diversion. Carnival society members themselves were guilty of holding onto old practices while ostensibly exemplifying new ones. Indeed, entrudo survived among rich and poor alike, while the societies themselves soon suffered from internal disputes and a general loss of direction before dying out.Lazzari also examines how involvement in Carnival by German immigrants and their descendants, as well as those of African descent, helped these groups assert their own citizenship identities. As elite Carnival declined, popular variations became more visible, varied, and “shameless”—and, therefore, a renewed target of journalistic complaint. Other people’s habits continued to need reforming, to paraphrase Mark Twain. Dominant groups were concerned with the loss of direct control over people of color that had accompanied abolition. To counter these trends, societies displaying more dignified, tamer subjects, and idealized female images were revived in an attempt to regain control of the unruly streets.Like many works of this type, this book is often more a study of attitudes regarding Carnival than of cultural practices themselves, and one is not always convinced that the newspaper columnists cited are necessarily representative (and of what). It is somewhat puzzling that the author did not make more of the fact that the vast majority (23 of 28 identified out of 30) of those involved in creating the Esmeralda society were public functionaries, agents of a centralizing monarchical state. Even though residents of the Court were obviously themselves trying to imitate foreign models, those in Brazil’s southernmost province had no doubts that to be modern meant to be more like Rio. Lazzari also could have done more with the changing political and ideological contexts in a state that endured more unrest than any other in the transition from monarchy to republic, and in which positivism flourished.One is tempted to suggest that the virtual invisibility of Porto Alegre’s Carnival in more recent years is due to the unfortunate success of the elite’s attempts to reassert control. Despite all of the changes that have taken place in Rio’s Carnival over the past century, there is no doubt that the creative center remains in the city’s favelas. Porto Alegre’s elites succeeded all too well in making Carnival something “for the people not to do,” as Lazzari suggests, and it is now of limited interest to most of the city’s inhabitants. Why the elite were so successful in a state known in recent years for the strength of the Partido dos Trabalhadores is a question for others to address.
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Sep 13, 2008
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Open Access