Performing Mulata -ness

La Belle Époque, Rio-Style

Racialized struggles in Brazil have a long history, ³ and samba is one aspect of this history. Its origins are contested. While a number of writers (e.g., Appleby, 1983; Lopes, Siqueira, and Nascimento, 1987; McGowanan and Pessanha, 1998; Moura, 1983; Santos, 1999) emphasize the direct links between samba and urban Afro-Brazilian culture, Hermano Vianna (1995) and John C. Chasteen (1996) inscribe it within a more hybrid or syncretic framework. From this perspective, the traditional formulation of samba as springing directly from the batuque (a type of percussive polyrhythm) of Afro-Brazilian religious ritual is called into question. While batuque is undoubtedly one of the main sources of modern samba, the history of the dance is also linked to the evolution of lundu and maxixe, couple dances that attracted the upper-class in gatherings where rich and poor intermingled. “Typically, it seems, the people most likely to enter such encounters were white men (involved in extra-marital adventures) and women of color, especially mulatas.” Since the maxixe was not danced in the houses of “‘decent’ people,” such encounters were structured by “overlapping gradients of race, wealth and power” and established “highly unequal relationships, a fact that no amount of romantic interest could undo” (Chasteen, 1996: 35).

The social divisions of gender, race, class, and sexuality upon which the subordination of mulatas rests are historically produced, symbolically loaded structures—contested sets of relationships embedded in locally defined struggles for power and recognition. Moreover, as Patricia Hill Collins (cited in Zinn and Dill, 1999: 107) has pointed out, they constitute interlocking inequalities within a matrix of domination. This concept helps us understand that“people experience race, class, gender, and sexuality differently depending upon their social location in the structures of race, class, gender, and sexuality.” As Maxine Zinn and Bonnie Dill highlight, a multiracial feminist approach shows us how “at the same time that structures of race, class, and gender create disadvantages for women of color, they provide unacknowledged benefits for those who are at the top of these hierarchies—whites, members of the upper classes, and males” (1999: 108). One of the reasons this happens is that categories such as race, while not natural, “play a central role in the construction and rationalization of orders of difference, making group relations appear as if they were natural and unchangeable” (Torres, Mirón, and Inda, 1999: 5).

Many scholars have begun to explore the ways in which gendered and racialized social divisions have become naturalized through articulations with the larger political projects of colonialism and nationalism (e.g., Harden, 1997; Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem, 1999; Povinelli, 1997). In previous work (Pravaz, 2002; 2003; 2008a; 2008b) I have discussed the historical emergence of the mulata as an icon of Brazilian identity in connection with nationalist trends during the Vargas era (between 1930 and 1954, with a brief hiatus), conducting a gendered analysis of the government’s appropriations of Carioca Afro-Brazilian culture and its redeployment as a symbol of the nation through the circulation of samba music. The mulata came to figure as a sexy Brazilian not only because she danced the samba (the Afro-Brazilian-turned-Brazilian art form) but also because her skin color and other phenotypic characteristics deemed archetypal, such as small nose, light-colored eyes, and wavy (not “kinky”) hair, were read as the perfect embodiment of mestiçagem, a mixing that enabled the “whitening” of African traits.

An incitement toward whitening has been prevalent in Brazilian thought since the late nineteenth century. ⁴ Members of the local intelligentsia argued that through racial mixing a kind of “racial purification” would take place: the population would grow steadily whiter through the gradual predominance of white traits over black ones. In the 1930s the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1933) subsumed this idea in disguised form under the trope of mestiçagem, a narrative that became the dominant discourse of national identity. His narratives articulated Brazilianness through a very particular framing of race, class, and gender relations. Colonial sexual reproduction between white Portuguese males and both native women and women of African descent was conceptualized by Freyre as a reciprocal, harmonious process—a “love fable,” as Da Matta (1981) has put it—erasing the violence inherent in these interactions. By praising the mulata figure as the apotheosis of beauty, his narratives turned the objectification of women of color into a patriotic endeavor (Freyre, 1986; see Pravaz, 2003; 2008a; 2008b; 2009).

Mestiçagem, whitening, and the appropriation of Afro-Brazilian samba culture provide the broader context for understanding both the highly unequal relationships between women of color and white men in contemporary Carnival and tourist spectacles and the widespread acceptance of the mulata as a national symbol, but it is also important to trace the historical dimensions of these dynamics. According to Chasteen, it was the interracial encounter between “white, middle-class or elite males and women of darker complexion” (1996: 39) in the dancing of maxixe that gave way to samba. The maxixe, a dance whose style involved requebros (pronounced movements of the hips) and very close contact between the bodies of the dancers, started in the 1870s. As urban dance became individual, inheriting styles of body movement to accompany polyrhythmic percussion from both maxixe and batuque (Chasteen, 1996: 40), the mulata maxixeira of Carnival celebrations and social dances (Chasteen, 1996; Efegê, 1974) eventually became the mulata sambista (mulata samba dancer). While the Carnival associations that emerged in the second decade of the past century preserved percussive polyrhythms derived from Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, they welcomed nonreligious participants and fostered the development of highly skilled solo dancers known as passistas, particularly women, becoming privileged venues for women’s artistic expression. Today these dancers are not only central attractions in the Carnival parades but coveted female companions at year-round rehearsals for these events (see Pravaz, 2003; 2008b).

Carnival associations are a staple in the tourist circuit and sites of heightened emotional investment by locals, who cheer for the association of their choice as they would for a local soccer team. For the women who perform the samba atop parade floats or as part of a group of special solo dancers known as ala de passistas, one of their greatest thrills is to have their skills and art recognized and appreciated by the local audience (Pravaz, 2008b). While being part of an association is usually a matter of amateur passion, many of the women who grow up learning their first steps in this context eventually end up using their skills to secure paid employment in the many nightclubs Rio has to offer its largely white, male middle- and upper-class and mostly foreign audiences.

The participation of women in nightclub spectacles known as shows de mulata (mulata shows) was promoted in the 1960s by the businessman Oswaldo Sargentelli, who drew on this talent to create a Broadway-inspired musical in which scantily clad mulatas gyrate to samba music. This spectacle brought him fame as the “inventor” of the Brazilian mulata and eventually led to the professionalization of a previously existing social role, that of dancing women of color, contributing to the international marketing of Brazilianness. Today a samba performer known as a mulata-show is a woman of presumed mixed racial descent who dances the samba on stage for pay. (The term “mulata” is often used as short for “mulata-show.”) Carnival associations themselves have adopted the small-venue spectacle format of nightclubs by forming what is called grupos-show, small off-season samba ensembles that include a few select musicians and dancers and perform for pay in venues from social clubs and bars to international hotels, business conventions, and television programs.

While samba and Carnival spectacles in general and mulata performances in particular have come to be part of larger narratives on the mixed character of Brazilianness, participating in the ideological construction of Brazil as a “racially democratic” (i.e., nonracist) society, samba, both as music and as dance, also continues to figure prominently in Afro-Brazilian narratives of cultural resistance, autonomy, and alternative forms of sociability (see Pravaz, 2008a). Whether the art is a syncretic product or a purely Afro-Brazilian form, Cariocas have articulated a powerful discourse—expressed in lyrics (such as those of Jorge Aragão, Elinto Pires, Sidney da Conceição, Wilson Batista, Geraldo Pereira, José Ramos, Aniceto, and Monarco), academic scholarship (e.g., Costa, 1982; 1996; Montes, 1996; Rego, 1996; Santos, 1999), and personal narratives (see IPHAN, n.d.; Pravaz, 2002; Sheriff, 1999)—that reclaims samba as a black tradition opposing assimilation by emphasizing samba de raíz (roots samba). Samba is fundamentally a disputed cultural product, and different social actors stake claims to “appropriate” and “authentic” modes of its performance (Pravaz, 2011). Female samba dancers in general and mulatas-show in particular have much invested in the definition of this cultural form.

The Contest Over Dance Skills

One of the things that most puzzled me during fieldwork in Rio was the different terms used to refer to female samba dancers. I was particularly interested in finding out why and how seemingly identical routines appeared as different to locals. Here I attempt to answer the following questions: What conceptual distinctions do these different terms reveal? What is at stake in dissecting what seem to be uniform performances into different types? Throughout my research, I encountered a recurring distinction made between “mulatas” and “passistas” that revealed significant dimensions of the role of women performers as they have come to represent the nation at home and abroad. In this section I explore the implications of this distinction for “cultural authenticity” in the context of Afro-Brazilian dance performances.

The word “passista” literally means “she who makes steps,” while “mulata” refers to a brown-skinned woman of mixed Afro-Brazilian and European descent. Strictly speaking, in the world of samba, passistas are those who perform as solo dancers in Carnival parades while mulatas or, more specifically, mulatas-show, dance the samba in nightclubs. Although the same women usually perform both roles, a series of different attributes socially assigned to each figure emerged in the context of various conversations. Passistas are said to need stamina because they dance the samba nonstop for up to 80 minutes in the parades of Carnival associations. They are also defined by their highly skillful practice and by the hard work and study this practice entails. Mulatas, in contrast, are usually associated with certain physical attributes that make them attractive. Many women I spoke to made this distinction clear with detailed explanations of the relationship between dance and music in samba.

Marenice, the director of passistas of the small Carnival association Pau Brasil, told me during an interview that the true passista dances to the sound of the repique (or repinique), a percussion instrument played with a stick and a hand that alerts the percussion section to rhythmic changes with chamadas (calls). The repique is marked by intricate, continuous rhythmic patterns. Marenice explained: “A passista has to follow the repique, be fast, her legs have to be as fast as the repique. She has to dance in the same timing as the repique.” Performers who have samba no pé (samba in the foot)—who dance the authentic samba skillfully—dance to the repique and to the tamborim, a small percussion instrument that brings variation to the samba cadence and is played very fast. According to Marenice, the dancer in mulata performances does not follow such complicated moves. She follows the surdo (bass drum), which marks the main beat of the samba with a steady, slow tempo (“one, two, one, two”):

This is a much slower thing, much easier to do. Anyone can follow the surdo, I follow, you can follow. Since she doesn’t have the swing (cadência) to follow a repique, to follow a tamborim, she makes steps, her feet mark the beat of the surdo, and she makes her pirouettes, so to speak, her evolution, in different ways, but not dancing true roots samba.

Many of my interviewees reinforced these ideas. Roberta, one of the passistas of Fluminense, a very large Carnival association in Rio, said, “The passista who is a true passista has to take advantage of and enjoy the percussion. That is what we do. We analyze the samba, at home, we know it inside out.” Fabricia echoed: “A passista knows the rhythms of all the different associations, and she can pick up any rhythm.” Bete told of an experience that highlighted the perceived differences between the mulata and passista: “I once went to perform at the Plataforma [one of the most important nightclubs with mulata spectacles in Rio], to fill in for someone, and after the show I had a chat with the regular members of the cast. One of the mulatas told me proudly, ‘Dear, you have to know how to do the samba, we don’t. We are mulatas!’ So there is this difference between the mulata-show and the passista. A mulata-show could never become a passista.” Clarisse followed: “What’s the point of being a mulata if you can’t endure dancing for 80 minutes?” Roberta gave another example: “I’ve heard mulatas saying ‘What’s with that? Making so much effort, exerting yourself! I’ve already made my money, darling.’ ” And Jussara explained, “It’s because there is no love [of samba].” One of Fluminense’s few male passistas, Mario, joined in: “When you talk about the mulata, you have to realize this: today the women who go abroad to perform in shows almost don’t know how to dance the samba at all.”

What these women do have to offer is another quality: mulatice (mulata-ness). They embody the sensuality stereotypically associated with their personas. On the global stage, samba spectacles sell for foreigners’ visual consumption a highly racialized brand of eroticism fueled by narratives of Brazil as a tropical paradise. In this context, the brown surface of the dancers’ bodies is read as the product of mestiçagem, the mythical nation-making love encounter between European men and African women. Activists in the black movement condemn mulata spectacles for celebrating a myth steeped in racism and sexism. The movement challenges the whitening impulse behind mestiçagem and calls for strategies of dissociation from the mulatto position in general and the mulata in particular (see, e.g., Gilliam, 1998; Nascimento, 1978; 1989).

While the majority of those involved in the world of samba do not directly engage the discourse and strategies of the black movement, some have developed their own way of indicting the role of the mulata-show by questioning the authenticity of the performances. In particular, as becomes evident from the remarks just quoted, for those who defend roots samba you cannot call yourself a proper samba dancer without skill, sweat, blood, and tears. Not only do you have to work hard, study, and hone your skills but you have to have a deep love of samba in your heart. This is a question of pride for many, who associate the high levels of skill and the unrelenting dedication involved in perfecting their art with the defense of an undying Afro-Brazilian tradition that outside forces have tried to manipulate and co-opt as a symbol of national identity (see Pravaz, 2008a).

Santos (1999) and others have argued for an understanding of samba as a space of resistance and resilience with the potential for political action. They link the subversive potential of samba to its inherent availability for the formulation of a black identity politics in which a defense of blackness goes hand in hand with the acknowledgment of the extreme racial inequalities and racist practices that dominate Brazilian society. Maria Lúcia Montes (1996: 62) and Miryan Sepúlveda dos Santos (1999: 47–48), for example, stress the way in which black Brazilians are discriminated against in the realm of cultural practice. Black sambistas have historically been denied access to elite Carnival clubs and the broadcasting of their sambas (unless they are performed by white elite musicians) on the radio. Santos (1999: 44) advocates a self-conscious strategic mode in which the recovery of the black presence in Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival becomes a central tactic in the construction of political power,personal enrichment, and self-esteem for disenfranchised local communities. She says that while Carnival associations have been commonly understood as part of a homogeneous mestiçagem and as a representation of Brazil, such discourses can coexist with projects about heterogeneity and racialization. She argues that the conflation of Carnival associations with national identity has in fact become a fundamental element of increasing self-esteem for various social groups (1999: 60). Her work seeks to position this self-esteem and pride within “the subtext of race” in the hope that the Brazilian black movement will take into account the artistic accomplishments of Afro-Brazilians in the world of samba.

The women who regularly dance in mulata shows have a particular way of explaining their practices that resonates with academic discourse while perhaps expanding its scope. Those who claim Afro-Brazilian descent do not see a clear-cut opposition between “authentic” (as represented by passistas) and “inauthentic” samba. They exercise what I have called “strategic hybridity,” simultaneously embracing mulata-ness and defending samba as an Afro-Brazilian tradition they are proud to call their own (see Pravaz, 2003; 2008a). While they embody the qualities associated with Brazil’s mestiço identity, they call themselves black outside of Carnival contexts, participating in the racialization of subjectivities that is emergent in Brazil. Those who do not readily identify themselves as black, moreover, problematize the claims to authenticity made by passistas in significant ways as well. Jussara, one of the few Fluminense passistas who also perform in shows, was uncomfortable with the negative remarks of her colleagues about the mulata. She tried to explain what really constituted the difference between the two roles:

The passista who is a mulata-show doesn’t reject her roots, which is to be a passista. She was just chosen, if she is dancing well, if she hasn’t put on too much weight, if she has a good body. You know, nobody has a stable position in this role. You have to have a good body, have a good posture, you can’t become involved with just anybody, you can’t make out with any guy, you can’t drink or make a scene. The mulata is the one who stands out among the passistas.

Front and center in Jussara’s remarks is the compulsory surveillance of female bodies’ conformity to local beauty standards in the world of samba (see Pravaz, 2008b; 2009). In a different register, her comments destabilize the neat division introduced by other Carnival dancers. If the mulata is the one who stands out, it is because she dances the authentic samba. We could think of this claim to authenticity as the typical appropriation of Afro-Brazilian culture by whites in general and elites in particular (see Homero, 1998; Sheriff, 1999). Such appropriation would fit the hegemonic mestiçagem discourse in which samba and Carnival become the domain of the whole nation (Fry, 1982; see also Pravaz, 2009). However, it is important that such a reading not prevent us from seeing the subtle ways in which Afro-Brazilian sociability, aesthetic values, embodied ways of being, and ethical stances themselves are transforming mainstream culture.

For example, while many women seem to take on mulata work merely as an opportunity to make money, Jussara makes it clear that “love of samba” is what drives her pursuits both on stage and in the parades. In fact, every year she parades with several associations, sometimes more than three in a day. She says that many people want to really take in the samba but don’t “release the adrenaline.” Moreover, even though the increased presence of white women in Carnival associations may be seen as co-optation, Afro-Brazilians themselves, including the organic intellectual Haroldo Costa, articulate Carnival as a “party of all,” a truly racially democratic space (see Pravaz, 2008a). The adrenaline of samba is what makes women like Jussara and Marenice dance to the sound of the music. The enthusiasm with which they embrace their art contrasts with the comments attributed to mulatas-show that they are there only for the money and do not want to exert themselves beyond the minimum necessary. I did not once encounter this “straw woman” during my fieldwork. While I do not believe that these reported statements were made up, it is important to ask what purpose they serve for passistas and mulatas alike.

In the global market of cultural performance, authenticity is a highly valued asset (see, e.g., Daniel, 1995; Godreau, 2002; Guss, 2000; Little, 1993; Savigliano, 1995). Certainly it is part of the package being sold to tourists in Rio and to cosmopolitan Western travelers. As a constructed and always contested feature, however, this trait can exist only in dualistic relation to that which is labeled “inauthentic,” “not real,” “made up,” “fake,” etc. While most foreigners will probably accept what is sold to them as authentic at face value, locals have more invested in ensuring that their art receives proper recognition. At the same time, it seems to me that, as much as passistas want to claim that their performances stand outside the circuit of commoditization, their understanding of samba is deeply affected and shaped by the transnational forces that made mulata spectacles possible in the first place. In other words, their claims to authenticity, untainted love, and spontaneous adrenaline release make sense only as opposed to the supposedly unskilled and deceptive aspects of mulata-ness.

While keenly aware of the “put-on” aspects of their performance, mulatas see this artificiality not as taking away from their art but as enhancing it—making it more valuable and therefore marketable. This is what Jussara referred to when she talked about posture. She told me, “The mulata is a posture. That’s what they want to see in a mulata-show, it’s the stage presence they have.” In this way, mulatas’ identities are akin to Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as a performative practice that materializes normative ideals (see Pravaz, 2003). The importance of “posture” for the role of the mulata points to the relevance of being seen—to women’s use of the language of their bodies to produce particular effects. The atmosphere of intoxication created in samba-for-export spectacles is not, as tourists want to believe, a product of unbridled sensuality but the effect of cultivated attitudes of which women are highly aware.

These effects are also age-specific: as Priscilla, a young self-identified black communications student, pointed out, “The old mulata, what is she? She disappears, she is not a mulata anymore.” The young women who perform as mulatas may not become aware of this until later, when they painfully discover that the limelight is gone. In the end, the difference between a passista and a mulata, as the prominent choreographer Mary Marinho (her real name) explained, may be just an invention of women who are not chosen to perform in shows: “So the passista who isn’t as pretty but knows how to make the steps, she isn’t called because she doesn’t correspond to the type of girl needed to perform on stage, so she is angry, and that’s why they make this distinction and say that the others don’t know how to dance.”

What emerges from my field data is that mulatas are the ones who are best able to manipulate the optics of beauty through artifice. As Isaura, Priscilla’s sister, once remarked, “The mulata gets into any hole and gets changed—in looking like a frog, out like a mulata. They carry a bikini in their purses at all times and say, ‘If there’s a chance of talking to someone, someone comes up to me, maybe they want me to perform in a show that very day.’ ” Priscilla told me that her mulata-show friends called each other bicha (queer), a term that connotes, in particular, the effeminate demeanor displayed by some gay men and transvestites. The use of the term points to the exaggerated character of their practices, indicating that for them the world is something of a stage on which personal display and embodied conduct are privileged sites for self-expression and identity formation. While calling a mulata “bicha” suggests that the role is mostly based on a visual effect, it also makes clear that this effect is involved not only in the spectacularization of the nation (Pravaz, 2003) but also in the production of personal understandings of self. ⁵ As Priscilla once told me, “Being a mulata involves a certain kind of clothing, hair, a way of walking, of talking. The hair is long, as long as it gets. [Mulata-ness] is trying to pass on a lot of sensuality, to play with people’s libido. It is to have big buttocks and to wear skimpy clothes, high heels, fetishes, right? You have to see it to understand.”

Women who embody mulata-ness and engage in highly unequal relationships with local and foreign men manipulate these men’s desire by exercising a seduction that might even help them realize their “Cinderella dream” (as Laura, one of my research participants, called it): meeting the gringo who will take her abroad. In pursuing this dream, women of color are hopeful not only of improving their lot financially but also of actively participating in the so-called bettering of the race through an explicit pursuit of whitening,producing lighter-skinned children. Given the limited opportunities that life presents them with, subaltern women are often caught in contradictory and self-defeating trajectories. Moreover, their actions are frequently read by others, particularly the elite, in less than generous ways. One of the only avenues for social recognition and economic remuneration this world offers Brazilian women of color is the ocularcentric (Soussloff, 1996) stage of samba spectacles, where their bodies are made widely available for masculinized visual consumption and where they exercise their agency within the constraining landscape of female objectification (see Pravaz, 2003; 2008b). They do so by proudly embracing samba as a strenuous physical and artistic skill that is sometimes claimed as an “authentic” Afro-Brazilian practice and sometimes understood as the backdrop to elaborate self-display.

Playing With Fire: At the Limit of Sexual Availability

While the discourse of mestiçagem has begun to lose its grip on the Brazilian imaginary (see Daniel, 2000; Htun, 2004; Winant, 1999), encouraging the racialization of women’s identities, discourses that celebrate female physical beauty have not. On the contrary, as Goldenberg and Ramos (2002: 25) explain, beauty has become a mark of virtue in the context of a new morality that, in the guise of physical and sexual liberation, promotes conformity to a specific aesthetic standard: the “good shape.” Today what is indecent is to show too much of a body that does not match this “good shape.” Women who perform as mulatas are submitted to the scrutiny of a disciplining gaze both on and off stage, and while local cultural norms on bodily exposure have become increasingly lax, these norms are regulated by increasingly strict beauty standards. Liberation has not fully translated into an “anything goes” attitude toward showing skin. Racialized understandings of beauty greatly shape samba dancers’ perceptions of themselves, contributing to a nationwide obsession with plastic surgery (Pravaz, 2009; Edmonds, 2002). This preoccupation with beauty in the context of increased physical visibility at times brushes up against dominant moral codes of respectability that make the unabashed display of female bodies in the context of mulata spectacles an uncomfortable subject for many of my research participants.

Much of my fieldwork involved attending Carnival parade rehearsals with Eduarda and her brother Sansão. One evening, we went over to their home after recording an eventful rehearsal experience on videotape. On the screen, Eduarda saw herself skillfully dancing the samba with a fast movement of the hips and an abandoned look on her face. She exclaimed, “Oh, this is horrible! Look at that, the mouth open like that, I look like a prostitute.” Sansão had rewound the tape and was playing the part again, and she begged him to turn it off. Her reaction reflected a bourgeois Christian preoccupation with being read as sexually available and therefore not respectable. It is important to point out here that contemporary erotic investments are rooted in Brazil’s patriarchal colonial and imperial relations. While white (and free) women’s sexuality was regarded as “pure” and fundamentally subsumed under its reproductive functions in the sphere of sanctified marriage, the sexuality of black and mulatto women, particularly slaves, “appeared for the master as free from obstructions and ties of any kind, foreign to reproduction, moral norms, and religion, stripped of all the series of functions reserved for white women, in order to be appropriated under only one aspect: that of sexual object” (Giacomini, 1988: 66). The systematic violation and rape of slave women by white masters was ideologically legitimized by a symbolic inversion in which the latter were depicted as “victims” of black female eroticism whose “essence” was understood as wild and unbridled.

Nowadays, highly gendered and racialized colonial mores and ideologies permeate understandings of mulata-ness, whether it is performed by black or brown women or white women like Eduarda. The fleeting gratifications involved in performing as a mulata work against the development of the personal attributes rewarded in the white-dominated world of middle-class liberal professionals. Sonia Giacomini’s work (1991; 1992) calls attention to the problem of the sexual availability of the women who perform samba onstage as a central paradox in the struggle for the definition of the role of the professional mulata as “a job like any other,” in the sense that the illusion of access to dancers promoted by mulata performances is not to be interpreted literally. The proximity with the audience and the idea that “the stage imitates life” suggest that “the mulata is also a mulata off-stage, establishing . . . with the public a typical form of sociability: seduction, at the limit of availability” (1992: 70).

At the meeting of Fluminense passistas mentioned earlier, Tony, the director of the section, talked about the need to distinguish mulata behavior from sexual availability and then introduced Marenice, explaining that she would be coordinating their performances: “If you have a wrong posture, she will give you some direction. Now, the requebrado and malemolejo are yours [the “swing” belongs to you], but the posture that a mulata needs to have requires some coordination. There are people who think that they are outshining everybody else, but they have no posture.” With this notion of “posture” he elaborated on the theme introduced by Jussara:

When the mulata is dancing the samba with posture, gracefully, she opens a space for herself. She doesn’t need to go there and try to invade the space of other mulatas, try and break the other, outdo the other in front of the cameras. When she forgets that she is in the parade and tries to get the attention of the photographers and the cameras, she sticks her bum out and begins to do this [imitates a dancer bending over sideways and shaking her buttocks in an exaggerated manner]. So this is wrong, we have to organize ourselves and do a serious job.

Mulatas negotiate a tenuous, potentially transgressive space. For many of the women who pursue mulata-ness as a career, one of the imperatives is to be able to distinguish themselves from the shadow of prostitution. In Sargentelli’s club Oba-Oba, for example, this was a prerequisite. According to Celma, a former mulata, “He was like a father to all the mulatas. There are people who say ‘Ah, Sargentelli, ah, they are all hookers,’ but he never encouraged us mulatas to date, to arrange or turn tricks. If you wanted to do it, it had to be outside of the samba establishment.” For this reason, entertainment establishments such as the Oba-Oba and, increasingly, the passista sections of Carnival associations have developed posture and etiquette courses to teach “proper manners” to the mostly poor and uneducated women who perform as mulatas.

Yet, my fieldwork experience revealed a wider range of orientations toward prostitution within the circuit of staged samba performances. Through personal in-depth interviews it became evident that prostitution is not necessarily something that goes against the profession of the mulata. It is an activity that may even be expected of these women, depending on the context and on the establishment. Places with a reputation to maintain such as the Oba-Oba take the work of teaching women “proper manners” seriously. Other businesses thrive on the very sexual exploitation for which mulata performances serve as a shop-window. Marenice talked about having being invited to dance in Italy and making the difficult decision not to go:

It was then that I met Roberto, my husband. I was in love with him, and it would have been a great risk, because the majority of women who go abroad do not succeed, because most don’t have a good education. So, they most certainly will end up prostituting themselves, understand? She will be driven to it because there will be no other way. They are going to offer, for example, x amount of dollars, a sum she has never seen in her life, for a night, and she will go. . . . Even I was a mulata with [another Carnival association], which was great because it was such a famous association, an association of the people, but it was also very complicated because there was a lot of politics. The mulata section [there] was a very, very selective section. Why? I not only had to know how to dance the samba—I didn’t just have to be a good dancer. I had to be an excellent mulata, because here there is another question, because there is the question of prostitution in the mulata’s role, OK? Of course, only those who want it will follow this path. But generally, the directors select and give preference to certain mulatas, with sculptural bodies, to do the mulata performances. It’s because they make money off of it. They are the go-betweens.

These remarks reveal the logic associating mulata-ness and sex appeal that traverses mulatas’ performances. Sandra, one of the young women participating in the “Carnival Girl” contest that Eduarda had abandoned, told me that she had gone to Uruguay to work as a mulata in a nightclub and had come back to Brazil when she found that instead of receiving the promised remuneration she would be expected to turn tricks to supplement her income:

I went to Uruguay to work in a mulata show, but I got screwed over. It wasn’t what I expected. An acquaintance came over to my house, a woman who had been performing as a mulata for a long time, and told me about this show in Uruguay where you had to work Monday to Saturday and you had Sunday off, and you got your money, so I said “OK” and went. You know, that stuff, you want to travel, get to know places. So when I got there, it wasn’t anything like what I thought. It was me and five other girls. I was the first one to come back. We were supposed to stay for three months, but after 29 days I left. I got enough money for my ticket, got on the bus. . . . Never again. Really, it was a mulata show. In Montevideo there are lots of casinos, so we would perform in the casinos. Look, we would work really hard, we would begin at midnight and go until six o’clock in the morning. At night, anything went, even prostitution. But the woman who took us there said, “Look, you know how this is, it’s a casino. If you want to do it [turn tricks] you do it.” So, what I would do, really, was after the three shows we had to perform—the last one would end at six in the morning—the casino would still be full. I would get my things and—“ bye, everybody”—go home. I would cry every day. I had never traveled before. I’d taken some money with me, but I thought I was going to make more. That was the idea, but really only if you worked on the side.

Marenice’s and Sandra’s remarks highlight the sexualization of transnational gendered contacts between mostly non-Brazilian white middle- and upper-class men and Afro-Brazilian women. This sexualization is deployed upon racialized understandings of non-Western women’s bodies, understandings that are embedded in long-established trends in globalized multicultural encounters (see, e.g., Enloe, 1990; Savigliano, 1995). While samba spectacles are now performed all over the world, either by touring companies or as regular shows in cosmopolitan cities, these spectacles have long been featured in Rio’s nightclubs as a staple of the tourist circuit. According to Laura, “The gringos, when they see the mulatas, the men get out of control. You know, they get here, the weather is so hot, everybody is drinking, when the mulata show begins the guys can’t believe their eyes, can’t believe that something like this exists.”

In the mulata shows performed in Rio, two interrelated elements are staged: the sensual bodies of dancing women of color and Brazilian identity. As a total visual experience, they interpellate the audience by tapping into ways of seeing invested in the construction of Brazil as an erotic tropical haven. On display, the mulatas’ flesh becomes burdened with the task of signifying the desires of the audience’s gaze, satisfying the scopophilic drives and masculinized fantasies of mastery of audiences that are seduced precisely by the visual intensity solicited in such spectacles (see Mercer, 1993; Mulvey, 1990). This visual intensity rests upon not only the exuberance of costumes, props, and moves but the specific way in which elements come to represent national identity. How Brazilianness is effectively brought into being depends upon the context of any specific performance. For example, where mulata shows are performed mostly for tourists, as in the famous cabarets Oba-Oba, Scala, and Plataforma, they are generally part of a broad program that includes other folklore attractions such as candomblé or capoeira. In this way they become part of what we can call the stage genre of “Brazilian Culture,” objectified as national folklore, on sale and display for an exoticizing foreign gaze.

According to Marta Savigliano, the gaze with the power to exoticize is a “colonial gaze”: “the passion of the exotics is molded by the exoticizer’s desire. It is neither an essence, nor a drive; it is a stigma of the colonial condition” (1995: 75, 169). Moreover, “Desire and Passion have been constructed, allocated, and qualified through the manufacturing of exoticism in different cultural spaces ruled by imperialist understandings of who should provide ‘raw,’ ‘primitive’ emotionality (passion) for the enjoyment and satisfaction of ‘civilized’ Desire” (1995: 205). Savigliano is not only talking here about colonial relations sensu stricto: she is extending the scope of historical analyses of relations of oppression to encompass contemporary social dynamics, including those embedded in tourism, cross-cultural consumption, and identity formation. In the context of a discussion of gender stereotypes in Fortaleza’s prostitution ring, Adriana Piscitelli (2004) has addressed the ways in which Brazilian women of color, particularly morenas (brown women), figure in the imaginary of sex tourists as “hotter” than North American and European women and as “embodying a high level of sensuality” (2004: 22). In interviews with foreign, mostly white male sexual tourists in Rio, Silva and Blanchette (2005: 256–257) also highlight that Brazilian women are characterized as possessing a heightened “natural” sexuality. In this way, Brazilian women’s “easiness” is naturalized as part of a tropical disposition that, while taking on specific dynamics when displayed on stage, is generally part of a larger discourse objectifying non-Western female sexuality.

Yet the erotic dynamics of mulatas’ objectification are evidently not restricted to foreigners. In order to support my fieldwork in Brazil, I took on several odd jobs. I attempted to work as a field researcher for the Project for the Decontamination of the Guanabara Bay, and the preparatory meetings proved a good opportunity to meet some men who, with little probing, volunteered their impressions on the figure of the mulata. Ivan, a white astrologer, explained:

Brazilian men like women with large behinds, who have a molejo, a balanço, a pongado, that is, the hips swinging from side to side. That is really a true African inheritance that we have—it is even a genetic matter, African women have big behinds. Americans, on the other hand, are more the Cancer type. They get hooked on breasts, which are a maternal symbol. They are also more puritanical.

Oswaldo, a white journalist, followed: “The kind of woman with sex appeal for the Brazilian man is deeply linked to this African inheritance. Check out the Carnival, for example. It’s an event that exudes sensuality.”

A white Brazilian acquaintance of mine occasionally accompanied me to rehearsals and once commented on the impact a specific mulata dancer had on him: “If I were to go to bed with that woman, I wouldn’t even know what to do. It is frightening, really scary, you know.” When I asked him to expand on his comments, he explained that “every man has this fantasy, to be with a woman who exudes sexuality.” He also explained that a woman like Cristina was not “datable.” She was someone to go to bed with once or even a few times, but because she was not “someone you can really talk to, or go out to dinner with,” you could not sustain a long-term relationship with her unless you were really in love. In short, she was something very “primitive.” It was not only white men who held these stereotypical views, however. When I eventually found a job as event coordinator for a conference on poverty statistics, the driver I was assigned, Federico, a self-identified black man, expressed similarly clear-cut ideas:

You know, the mulata is the true Brazilian woman, the one who is the “mixture.” The mulata is the one that is well endowed, she has thick thighs and a good behind. Every man here likes women like that. She is the one who knows how to dance, who has the swing. You know, gringos love coming here just to be with a Brazilian woman. I think it’s because they have less hang-ups, they are more liberated than women elsewhere.

In the play of performance and desire enacted by Brazilian mulatas, these brown-skinned women are “the Other within” (Rivera, 1996). Many black men also participate in their exoticization, given that their imaginaries are, like those of other Brazilians, largely shaped by Brazilian social and ideological history. As I have pointed out, the sexual role of black slave women was naturalized: it was expected that as a regular function of their condition they would satisfy the sexual needs of their masters. While for Brazilian men the contemporary hypersexualization of mulatas’ staged bodies evokes a colonially determined availability predicated upon physical proximity and redeployed through celebrations of mestiçagem, the allure of scantily clad mulatas for foreigners is linked to the production of exotic Brazilians as erotic Others. The women who perform as mulatas, for their part, are highly aware of the stereotypes surrounding their role and generally weary of being misread as sexually available. They negotiate the tension between allure and aloofness by carefully monitoring their bodily comportment and “refining their posture.” At the same time, they clearly capitalize on the ability to embody the exoticism and eroticism invested in them by a colonizing gaze. In this way, mulatas embrace mulata-ness as a source of social recognition and financial compensation in the context of transnational practices of cultural consumption.

Conclusion

Carioca samba dancers have become icons of Brazilian identity because of the confluence of multiple factors, including the fact that Rio de Janeiro was the nation’s capital until 1960 and that during Vargas’s term the city’s Afro-Brazilian culture, particularly in the form of samba, was widely broadcast across the country while the songs’ lyrics were encouraged to have “patriotic” content. This meant roughly that, in addition to praising the government, composers embraced the then-emerging trope of mestiçagem as Brazilianness in which the mulata figured as representative of the nation. The masculinized subject position of samba composers greatly added to this state of affairs (see Pravaz, 2000), and Sargentelli’s Oba-Oba institutionalized the links among mulatas, samba, and tropical, erotic Brazilianness.

The performative specificity of mulata shows may be understood through the concept of spectatorship, which in this case is typically a masculine subject position. As feminist film theorists remind us, the ways in which individual spectators are addressed by spectacle and the ways in which their identification is solicited in performance are deeply connected to their gender (de Lauretis, 1987). The masculinization of viewers is directly mirrored by the feminization of objects of the gaze. As Mulvey (1990: 33) has described women’s traditional exhibitionist role, they are “simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle.”

In understanding systems of visuality, discourses of sexuality, and the construction of the mestiço subject/object, it is therefore important to look at not only representations of gender but the way in which such representations are subjectively absorbed, performed, and transformed by those being interpellated. By focusing on the experiences and voices of women who perform the samba in Carnival parades, this article has shown how subaltern social actors deploy strategies of dissociation from social stereotypes—in this case the demeaning aspect of the mulata, which some of my participants characterize in terms of lack of skill, dedication, and love of samba. In this way, passistas honor and celebrate the Afro-Brazilian art form of samba as a tradition and a source of both authenticity and racial pride against the dominant narratives of mestiçagem as national identity invested in samba shows. The women who perform in such spectacles, however, also regularly confound hegemonic investments by engaging in a form of “strategic hybridity” through which they simultaneously embrace dominant discourses on national identity as mestiça and racially democratic and deploy forms of identification with blackness and particular cultural values.

Passistas and mulatas are erotic figures typically praised for their beauty and sex appeal. Women who occupy this subject position express their struggles with the threat of prostitution and attempt to achieve a modicum of respectability as they manipulate the objectifying gaze of Brazilians and foreigners to the best of their ability. At the same time, for performers, the embodied practice of dancing the samba involves an immensely pleasurable experience in which personal skill, wit, and creativity come into play in the improvisation of new moves. This pleasure, however, is not only about one’s corporeal relationship to space and sound through movement but also about how these performances are enacted in relationship to a gaze. Women who perform mulata-ness understand the overdetermined nature of their position and struggle to grasp the advantage in a moment of emergency. Ultimately, samba remains contested territory, a stage upon which the economic needs, embodied desires, and ethnic identities of local Brazilian women clash and collude with the neo-colonial dreams of tourists and cosmopolitans alike.