music, citizenship, and violence in postdictatorship...

Music, Citizenship, and Violence in Postdictatorship Brazil

Moehn, Frederick.

Latin American Music Review, Volume 28, Number 2, Fall/Winter2007, pp. 181-219 (Article)

Published by University of Texas PressDOI: 10.1353/lat.2007.0032

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Frederick Moehn Music, Citizenship, and Violence inPostdictatorship Brazil

ABSTRACT: This essay shows how individualsapproaching debates over citizenship, development, civil society, and prob-lems of violence in Brazil evoke music as a kind of audiotopia (from JoshKun, 2005)—or a sonic space of an imagined country where inequalities areleveled out. It explores these themes in a variety of contexts, such as a con-cert in Carnegie Hall; the work of Nega Gizza (of the urban hip-hop organi-zation CUFA); music recordings associated with the Rural Landless WorkersMovement (MST); a televised MPB song festival; and the cultural policies ofthe Lula administration. The essay traces a web of horizontal and verticallinkages between radically different sectors of Brazilian society and betweencultural practices, social structures, and the state.

RESUMEN: Este artículo demuestra cómo es quelos individuos implicados en éstos debates sobre ciudadanía, desarrollo, so-ciedad civil y problemas de violencia en Brasil evocan la música como si fueraun tipo de audiotopía (de Josh Kun, 2005)—o espacio sónico de un país imag-inario en donde las desigualdades son equilibradas de cierta forma. Algunosde los contextos aquí explorados son: un concierto en Carnegie Hall, el tra-bajo musical de Nega Gizza (de una organización de origen hip-hop urbano,CUFA); grabaciones de canciones asociadas con el Movimiento de los SinTierra (MST); un festival televisado de la canción MPB; y las políticas cul-turales de la gestión presidencial de Lula. El artículo traza una red de eslaboneshorizontales y verticales entre sectores radicalemente diferentes, y entre cos-tumbres culturales, estructuras sociales y el estado.

With how many Brazils do you make a Brazil?–Lenine/Lula Queiroga1

We need to know what message Brazil wants to sendthe world—as an example of opposites living side-by-side and of tolerance of differences,at a time when fierce discourses and banners of war are being raised across the globe.

–Gilberto Gil (2003a, 43)

Latin American Music Review, Volume 28, Number 2, December 2007 © 2007 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

moehn.qxp 9/5/07 1:56 PM Page 181

A 2004 concert review in the New York Times by Larry Rohter bore theheadline “The Two Brazils Combine for a Night at Carnegie Hall.” It de-scribed how classical pianist Marcelo Bratke, from a prominent family inSão Paulo, and young musicians from the percussion ensemble Charangacame together to perform pieces by the composers Darius Milhaud,Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Ernesto Nazareth. Professional musician MarceloAlves formed Charanga with five youths he met at the Despertar Com-munity Center in Jardim Vilas Boas of São Paulo city, which Rohter iden-tifies as “one of the toughest sections of this metropolis of 20 millionpeople.” In a society as stratified as Brazil, he writes, “there is no reasonfor people from such markedly different backgrounds ever to meet, muchless perform together.” They did, however, meet to make musical sound,in Carnegie Hall no less. This essay explores how discourses about musicas well as musical practices themselves narrate the figurative space be-tween the proverbial two Brazils (the term space here should be under-stood as a conceptualized location, while I use the term place to refer tospecific physical and cultural geographies). Shared and sometimes con-tested beliefs about music, national identity, the historical trajectory ofdevelopment in Brazil, and the country’s role on the global stage arepowerfully intertwined, with the result that music plays a prominent rolein current re-imaginings of Brazilian citizenship.

My analysis here is based in part on my reading of a variety of sourcesthat might be described as texts (documents, recordings, Weblogs, etc.);it is intended to offer a broadly comparative perspective on specific dis-courses about music and society in Brazil. This perspective is also, how-ever, informed by my experiences visiting and conducting fieldwork inBrazil beginning in the 1990s, when I was able to observe and interviewpop musicians such as singer-songwriter Lenine and producer DuduMarote; or in 2004 at the Hutúz Rap Festival at the Bank of Brazil Cul-tural Center in Rio de Janeiro, where I met hip-hop activist Nega Gizza;and finally at the Caiubí Composers Club song festival in São Paulo in2006, where I encountered singer-songwriter Max Gonzaga, all of whomI discuss below. The essay also grows out of a seminar I taught on socialmovements in Brazil at Columbia University’s School of Internationaland Public Affairs, where I was able to meet visiting members of theRural Landless Worker’s Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Ruraissem Terra, or MST) in 2004, and to participate in a meeting with Brazil’sMinister of Culture Gilberto Gil pertaining to his Culture Points projectin 2005. I thus seek here to draw together a variety of my personal pointsof engagement with topics Brazilian, as they reflect on key issues of citi-zenship, class, race, and expressive culture.

The idea of “two Brazils” has been a refrain in interpretations ofBrazilian society since Euclides da Cunha proposed a distinction between

182 : Frederick Moehn


the modern and urbanized coastal regions and the archaic but authen-tic interior in his classic book Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões, 1944[1902]). Today the expression is used to refer more generally to thedifferent national spaces inhabited by the privileged few and the disad-vantaged many. Sometimes people speak of “many Brazils” when urban-rural or other regional distinctions are being highlighted.2 Because musicis so closely associated with national identity in Brazil, it enjoys specialcurrency as a mediator between different social classes and spaces onthe one hand, and between the state and civil society on the other. It isalso the most effective expressive medium for evoking that imagined com-munity of Brazil which privileges mixture and the juxtaposition of con-trasts. The above-mentioned Marcelo Bratke explained his use of a streetpercussion group for the performance of art music pieces in CarnegieHall thus: “The hallmark of Brazilian culture is its miscegenation, its mal-leability, its ability to blend seemingly antagonistic elements” (Rohter2004). Culture, and music in particular, is in this conception a reagentfor mixture with the capacity to sound a national space unmarred by so-cial division.

I see discourses about music, and practices associated with making,consuming, and even legislating music, as framing a “third Brazil” be-tween the two Brazils. This space in between bears comparison with whatJosh Kun calls audiotopias, or the “spaces that music helps us to imagine”and in which one can take “refuge” (2005, 14).3 Psychologist Maria RitaKehl, for example, writes of having “dual citizenship”—one in the Brazil“of widespread injustices and futile struggles,” the other in the countryof popular song, “where all Brazilians have the right to exile when reallife becomes too insipid” (2002, 60). Arthur Nestrovski, similarly, main-tains that Brazilians “live daily in two countries: a few minutes with inten-sity, imagination, and carelessness in Brazilian popular music; the rest ofthe time, in the other one” (2002, 12). Kehl and Nestrovski are ambiva-lent about their national political citizenship, but popular music consti-tutes an alternative “country” to which one has the “right” to exile for afew transcendent minutes. The choice of words here is significant, fornot too long ago exile from the “real-life” Brazil of injustices was an in-voluntary violation of one’s rights as a citizen, not an exercise of thoserights. We might recall, for example, that two of Brazil’s musical super-stars, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, endured political exile for twoyears (1969–71) early in their musical careers, while celebrated song-writer Chico Buarque, an adept critic of the military regime in his music,voluntarily chose exile in Italy in the late 1960s for about a year.

For Kun, audiotopias are “sonic spaces of effective utopian longingswhere several sites normally deemed incompatible are brought to-gether” (23). They are “identificatory ‘contact zones,’ in that they are both

Music, Citizenship, and Violence in Postdictatorship Brazil : 183


sonic and social spaces where disparate identity-formations, cultures,and geographies historically kept and mapped separately are allowed tointeract with each other” (23). Kun’s desire to engage problems of na-tion, identity, and citizenship in the United States through audiotopicspaces, in which difference is not erased but is instead listened to, res-onates with my analysis here. I appreciate also his interest in the emotivesounds of the spaces of citizenship. I tried to evoke this sonic space my-self when reading this at a colloquium by first performing on guitar andsinging a couple songs that I knew would generate sentiments of nationalbelonging among Brazilians or Brazilophiles present in a way that read-ing a paper or even playing a recording cannot (e.g., the famous 1939samba “Aquarela do Brasil,” by Ary Barroso).

Kun is concerned with the way music is intertwined with problems ofrace and identity in an America that has often struggled with its ownmulticulturalism, where musical homes of “dual belonging, dual culture,dual identity” coexist in audiotopic tierras that supposedly destabilizedominant discourses of assimilation (2005, 221). In Brazil, by contrast, theprevailing narratives of nationhood have tended to emphasize hetero-geneity and the juxtaposition of contrasts, the capacity to choose not tochoose between oppositions but rather to combine them (the “virtue” ofthe middle ground, in Roberto DaMatta’s phrase, 1995 [1978]). It is adiscourse not of assimilation into a supposedly already existing “Ameri-can” identity, but of continual (racial) mixture and transculturation intoever new formulations.

Yet discourses of mixture and heterogeneity may obfuscate certainpersistent structures of inequality and opposition in Brazil, enabling asense of dual belonging, comparable to what Kun describes for theUnited States, as suggested by Nestrovski’s “we live daily in two countries”and the metaphor of the two Brazils in general. Recently enacted poli-cies for affirmative action in government hiring and university admissionsin Brazil—made possible in part by a clause in the 1988 constitutionallowing for what is known as positive discrimination—reflect new levelsof awareness of the fissures in received narratives of relatively harmoniousrace relations, such as that suggested in Barroso’s “Aquarela do Brasil,”with its apparent nostalgia for a bygone plantation setting. Notwithstand-ing, some policy makers have interpreted affirmative action policies as aU.S. import that is out of place in the Brazilian context. In appreciationof such heterogeneous views, I am interested in emphasizing the insta-bility of audiotopias and the competing interests in and different uses ofthem by individuals and groups variously situated in the fabric of civil so-ciety. Whereas Kun harnesses popular music to remap existing dynamicsof difference and national identity in the U.S. context into “effectivelyenacted” heterotopias (from Foucault) that help us cope with this world



(Kun 2005, 23), my elaboration here reveals a parallel but differentlyinflected musical space traversed by distinct dynamics of race, class, vio-lence, nation, and state. Some may seek refuge in this space in order tocope; others may mobilize it for more radical change in a society of ex-treme social stratification.

I highlight postdictatorship Brazil (1985 onward, but especially sincethe mid-1990s) as a time frame marking several developments—bothpositive and negative—that bear upon questions of citizenship and cul-tural expression. These include democratization and political stabiliza-tion (with a new constitution in 1988); currency reform and the taming ofhyperinflation; market-oriented economic policies (generally referredto as neoliberalism) with limited economic growth and modest progressin reducing inequality; the increased importance of social movementsand nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); a sharp rise in violence as-sociated in part with escalating drug trafficking, and seen by many as athreat to the full realization of modern citizenship; and various develop-ments associated with globalization such as the increasingly complex in-ternational dynamics of finance, communications, the media, and socialactivism and policy. The election to the presidency of long-time laborleader and Workers Party (PT) founding member Luís Inácio da Silva—or Lula—in 2002, and his reelection in 2006, signaled that social issueswere central to politics in Brazil at the beginning of this millennium,and this is reflected in Minister Gil’s policies. Yet the Lula administra-tion was crippled by scandal in its first term, and thus far has not beenable significantly to alter the durable social stratifications that continueto make the metaphor of two Brazils meaningful.

Among the questions that motivate me here are the following: Whyand how does musical sound evoke an alternative Brazil? What role dodifferent kinds of musical sound play in this Brazil in between the two(or many) Brazils? Precisely how do aesthetic and performative practiceswork to rethink and even reconfigure citizenship? What kinds of rela-tionships exist between the individual, the group, and the state in thesescenarios? Or between live performance, recorded sound, and the pub-lic sphere? How do Brazilian audiotopias speak to regional concerns, orto global dynamics of difference and inequality? In my aim to visit thesequestions in a variety of settings, I sacrifice detailed analysis of the spe-cific music cultures involved, but I hope to provoke further thinkingabout these issues. I consider musical examples of a variety of genres, in-cluding what is known as MPB (música popular brasileira), a broad categoryof music encompassing various styles and often (although not exclu-sively) associated with a middle-class public; Brazilian rap and hip-hop;and certain rural traditions in connection with the Landless Movement(MST).



Citizenship, Social Class, and Audiotopic Rhythms

Most writing on citizenship begins with the typology famously outlined byThomas H. Marshall in his essay “Citizenship and Social Class,” originallypresented as a lecture in 1949. Focusing on the English case, Marshallargued that there are three components to citizenship: the civil, the po-litical, and the social, which historically emerged roughly in that order.A citizen possesses a set of rights and duties associated with each of thesecomponents as defined, protected, and enforced by the legal-political ap-paratus of the nation-state. The civil component pertains to legal inclu-sion into the definition of citizenship. The political part of citizenship,in this definition, refers primarily to participation in democracy throughvoting; while the social is generally understood as pertaining to thoserights and duties associated with the modern welfare state.

In Marshall’s analysis, there is a progressive historical expansion ofthese components to citizenship. Increasing levels of democratic repre-sentation would seem to go hand-in-hand with the extension of citizen-ship rights and duties to greater portions of the population. However, asTeresa Caldeira and James Holston have argued, in Brazil there is a dis-junction between the expansion of democratic representation since theend of the military dictatorship in 1985 (the political component of citi-zenship), and the extension of civil and social components—in particu-lar, egalitarian legal protection of citizens and the right to decent livingconditions, which have actually become even less accessible for manycitizens (1999). José Murilo de Carvalho argues that Marshall’s typologyis in fact inverted in Brazil, as many civil rights—which formed the foun-dation of Marshall’s sequence—remain inaccessible to the majority ofthe population (2001, 219–20).4

In the present analysis I find it worthwhile to retain Marshall’s empha-sis on social class in relation to citizenship, for what most obviously sepa-rates the two Brazils is a highly polarized class structure. The averageincome in Brazil is about $374 per month, and about 20 percent of thepopulation lives below the poverty line. In the United States the medianincome is about 90 percent of the average income, while in Brazil it is onlyabout 30 percent of the average, which is to say that the average is skewedupward by excessive wealth at the top, and about half the populationearn considerably less than that (Rothkopf 2005). A standard index ofincome inequality used by economists for the purposes of comparativelygauging development is the gini coefficient. At .57 in 2005 (estimated),Brazil’s gini coefficient is among the worst in the world, although it isslightly better than it was in 2000 (Germany and Swizerland, by contrast,have coefficients of .25, while the United States has a strikingly poor .47,having worsened dramatically in the past ten years). The lowest 20 per-cent of income earners account for just over 2 percent of total income in



Brazil, while the highest 20 percent earn 64 percent of the total incomein the country (and the top 10 percent of earners account for 45 percentof income).5

Class should be understood in relation to various other determinantssuch as race, with the poorest Brazilians tending to be phenotypicallydarker; or to violence, which disproportionally affects poorer, darker-complexioned (and also younger) Brazilians. Class status, of course, alsobears directly on level of education (including access to formal musicaltraining and instruments, and musical tastes), and consequently on thekinds of work available to different sectors. It indexes access to the mediaand political leadership, and the degree of integration into consumerand information society. Finally, class is also intertwined with place. Hip-hop in Brazil, for example, emerged in the favelas (shantytowns) in andaround major cities (particularly São Paulo), and it has been incorpo-rated into a number of urban NGOs in recent years. The MST (RuralLandless Worker’s Movement), on the other hand, is a social movementoriented precisely around the problems of place and class as these per-tain to ownership of cultivable land.

To refer again to the Carnegie Hall concert, it is the relatively privi-leged, white, educated, and well-traveled Marcelo Bratke who is the“award-winning pianist” appearing at Carnegie Hall, while the (mixed-race) percussionists of Charanga have little formal musical training andwere awed at the opportunity to see New York. They conceded that theyhadn’t heard of Milhaud, Villa-Lobos, or Nazareth, so “it was hard at firstto understand what was going on in this music.” (Ernesto Nazareth com-posed numerous now classic choros, waltzes, polkas, schottisches, andother “salon” genres popular in Old Republic Rio de Janeiro; DariusMilhaud, the French composer, traveled to Brazil in 1917 and was influ-enced by the music of Nazareth and his contemporaries; Villa-Lobos wasBrazil’s preeminent modernist-nationalist composer.)6 Bratke explainedthat what the compositions from Milhaud, Villa-Lobos, and Nazarethhave in common is that they draw on the rhythms of Brazilian popularmusic in their blending of the erudite and popular (what is referred toas “art music” in English is música erudita in Portuguese). The politicaleconomy of music making in this particular audiotopia has the poorerblack youths—who would have had little opportunity to play piano—provide the rhythmic swing for the music of relatively privileged mod-ernist composers: Bratke told the members of Charanga that even thoughthey would be playing for a select audience, “the music should alwaysswing.” Percussionist Santos observed, “That, fortunately, is somethingwe don’t lack.”

The two sonic Brazils that combined at the Carnegie Hall concert,then, can be described roughly as erudite, cosmopolitan, musically liter-ate, harmonically complex, and featuring orchestral instruments and



arrangements on the one hand; and musically “non-literate,” compara-tively local, subaltern, “authentic,” rhythmically swinging, and featuringpercussion instruments on the other. While these are oversimplified dis-tinctions, they do have interpretive meaning for participants who viewmusic making as a symbolic and aesthetic practice in which radically dif-ferent classes of citizens can participate jointly in the production of na-tional culture. It is an idea formulated in the period of Brazilianmodernism in the 1920s and 30s. The influential intellectual and musi-cologist Mário de Andrade, for example, envisioned an aesthetic nation-alism that navigated the received contradictions between popular anderudite, local and cosmopolitan culture. Importantly, as Mariza Velosoand Angélica Madeira observe, Andrade conceptualized Brazilian cultureas a “synthesis that was not a mere sum of the parts, but a process of so-cial relations in transformation” (2000, 127).

This emphasis on the process of constructing Brazilian national cul-ture, on the aesthetic and symbolic negotiation of social, structural, andcultural differences, and this confidence that art can do the identity workof nation- and citizen-building are also present in the cases I explorebelow. Andrade granted rhythm the ability to do much of this identitywork (a term I borrow from Isin and Wood 1999). In his Essay on BrazilianMusic (1928), for example, Andrade wrote: “We are in a stage of rhyth-mic predominance,” and he suggested that “in accommodating andadapting foreign elements to his own tendencies the Brazilian acquiredan imaginative way of ‘rhythmicking’ [ jeito de ritmar]” (1962 [1928], 21).The connection between syncopated (and racialized) rhythms and na-tional identity would help propel urban samba to the status of Brazil’snational music in the 1930s and 40s. Even today Brazilian music in gen-eral tends to be regarded internationally as rich in rhythms, as Afro-diasporic sounds continue to have a privileged place in world musicmarkets (Brazilian music that is not particularly “rhythmic” seems toenjoy little exposure outside of Brazil).

Rhythm and drumming also participate on some level in what mightbe termed the symbolic economies of NGOs (nongovernmental organ-izations) and citizens’ action groups, some of which enjoy funding frominternational sources, such as the AfroReggae Cultural Group in Riode Janeiro, which has received Ford Foundation support. AfroReggaeeven terms its identity work batidania, combining batida (beat) withcidadania (citizenship). The group, based in the Vigário Geral favela ofRio de Janeiro, initiated a rather remarkable series of residencies in 2005that joined the military police in the city of Belo Horizonte with favelaresidents. Said Lt. Col. Josué Soares of the 34th Battalion: “Not long ago,a lot of officers believed we had to use force to stop criminality. Our men-tality has changed in the way we approach favelados [favela residents]”(Reardon 2005). Journalist Christopher Reardon reports, “The 23-year



police veteran figured he’d mastered the tools of his trade: a two-wayradio, handcuffs and a 9-millimeter service pistol. He never imagined thatone day he would add a bass drum or a can of spray paint [for graffiti]”(2005). The sound of drumming here replaces the sound of guns—atleast on a small scale—literally taking over both the space and the placedividing the police and the favela residents, and having a real effect oncivil society.

In the northeastern state of Bahia, which has the highest concentra-tion of African Brazilians in the country, the Olodum cultural group hascentered its community activities and commercial enterprise arounddrumming since the late 1970s, taking an active role in redefining thecivic landscape of Salvador, the capital of that state. Also focused onBahia is the “Rhythmic Uprising” project coordinated by a team ofBrazilian and U.S. media professionals who aim to “tell the world the in-spiring tale of how a powerful grassroots movement based in the arts isovercoming social and economic depression.” Another organization withinternational ties and working in Bahia is called “Rhythm of Hope,” an“informal network association” that aims to “strengthen social programsin the Bahia community, to better the quality of life of its marginalizedpopulations, and to foster awareness, tolerance, and understanding onthe part of non-Brazilians.”7

In the song “Under the Same Sky” (“Sob o mesmo Céu,” 2005),MPB singer, songwriter, and guitarist Lenine (Osvaldo Lenine MacedoPimentel), along with his songwriting partner Lula Queiroga, describerhythm as mediating between—and bringing together—the variousBrazils. Following are excerpts from the lyrics:

With how many Brazils does one make a country called Brazil?Under the same sky every city is a village, a person, a dream, a nation. . . .My heart has no frontiers nor clock, nor flag, just the rhythm of a greatersongWe come from the drum of the IndianWe come from Portugal; from the black drumming. . .We come from samba, from forróWe came from the future to learn about our pastWe come from rap and from the favela. . .from the center and from theperiphery. . .We bring a desire for happiness and peace

These lyrics illustrate some of the conceptual architecture of this musicalspace in between. The question of how many Brazils it takes to make oneunified country serves primarily as a device for introducing a subsequentlist of differences (of which I have only excerpted a few); it is a way ofsongfully celebrating the juxtapositioning of contrasts in a complex national whole.8 There is also the suggestion in these lyrics of an embod-ied national geography, at the center of which is a “heart” beating with-out frontiers to the free rhythm of a “greater song.” The “country of the



future,” as Brazil is often called, is preoccupied with its past. Taken to-gether, these lyrics describe a temporally ambiguous space emanatingfrom a simultaneously individual and national body whose heart beatsout a rhythm that transcends difference, and whose mind dreams up aBrazil that in its inclusive diversity is also universal. The metaphor of thenational “body” is pervasive in Brazilian cultural discourse. Minister Gil,for example, speaks of approaching the country as “a living, pulsatingorganism that is enveloped in contradictions and in constant need ofbeing energized and balanced” (Turino 2003, 16).

A performance of this song can be seen on Youtube.com, with Leninejoined on stage by a small band of electric bass and guitar, drum kit, pan-deiro (a tambourine used in a wide range of Brazilian popular musics),and several female Brazilian singers from various parts of the country(and also racially diverse): Fafá de Belém; Margareth Menezes; ElbaRamalho; Sandy; Ana Carolina; Fernanda Abreu. Like Ary Barroso’s“Aquarela do Brasil” from the late modernist period, the tone in thissong is nationalistic and celebratory, although the musical sound is lesscharacteristically “Brazilian” than a traditional samba (the most obviouslyBrazilian aspect, aside from the language, is the pandeiro). It comesacross as something like a pop anthem of the “country” of popular songto which Maria Rita Kehl says Brazilians have the right to exile. In fact, thesong was composed for a French celebration of Brazilian culture cospon-sored by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. The Ministry identifies it asthe Anthem of the Year of Brazil in France, 2005. If Ary Barroso’s na-tionalistic sambas (sambas-de-exaltação) ended up fitting comfortably withGetúlio Vargas’s populist agenda in the 1930s and 40s, “Under the SameSky” speaks to the aims of the culture ministry under one of Brazil’sgreatest MPB stars, Gilberto Gil—clearly a radically different, albeit curi-ously analogous context.9 Notwithstanding, the opening question in theselyrics hints that work remains to be done before a single country calledBrazil realizes its “audiotopic potential” as a fully inclusive space. In manyways, the modernist musical vision of the Brazilian nation is evident inthis song (as in the Carnegie Hall concert), but in postdictatorshipBrazil other musical spheres may interpret this space and its symbolsdifferently, as the examples of Nega Gizza of CUFA and the recordingsassociated with the MST will show.

The United Favela Federation (CUFA) and Nega Gizza

According to the 2004 UNESCO Brazil report, Map of Violence: The Youthsof Brazil, 92 percent of homicide victims are males between 18 and 24 yearsold, and of these 74 percent are black. Furthermore, between 1993 and2002, there was an increase of 88.6 percent of homicides among the total



population aged 15 to 24 (Waiselfisz et al. 2004). For Júlio Tavares of theFluminense Federal University in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro, this violenceamounts to a genocide of black and predominantly male bodies. Tavaressees hip-hop as a corporeal and narrative response to this genocide, col-laborating “in the construction of a new social landscape for Brazil,” andaccelerating the “fight for civil rights and citizen-consciousness”(Tavares n.d.). Hip-hop, he argues, is a “third way,” negotiating betweeninstitutionalized, formal capitalism and the informal parallel economyof the drug trade, both of which he views as complicit in this genocide.

In Rio de Janeiro the United Favela Federation or CUFA (CentralÚnica das Favelas), describes itself as an organization that unites residentsof over 100 favelas as well as artists, producers, and people connected toresidents associations.10 CUFA’s mission statement describes the Federa-tion as “a national organization that emerged in meetings of youths—generally black—from various favelas in Rio de Janeiro who were lookingfor a space in the city to express their attitudes, problems, or just theirdesire to live.” Most of these youths participated in or were oriented bythe hip-hop movement, and they organized around the ideal of trans-forming “the favelas, their talents, and their potentials in the face of asociety in which prejudice based on color, class, and origin had not yetbeen transcended.” Rap music can be useful in this effort, the missionstatement argues, because it helps raise the consciousness of those whoare on the periphery of their citizenship, and because it is gaining recog-nition in the media. There is, the statement adds, an affinity betweenthe militancy of hip-hop and the work of CUFA: they both seek “to stim-ulate the residents of favela communities to take action; to promote apopular revolution in Brazilian culture.”11

In June 2004 I attended some events organized by CUFA and itspartner group Hutúz at the Bank of Brazil Cultural Center in the mid-dle of the city. These featured hip-hop bands from various countries ofLatin America and took place in a theater during the middle of the day,rather than at night in areas of the so-called periphery. Such linkagesbetween potentially transformative movements and financial or corporateinstitutions are part of what George Yúdice has called the “privatizationof culture” in neoliberal Latin America, a trend that risks the adoptionof “expedient” culture-based programs at the expense of real changesto the structural causes of inequality (Yúdice 1999, 2003). Despite suchrisks, these music-based movements can potentially draw increased atten-tion to the problem of the two Brazils among the general population,and they provide a grassroots community-centered space of solidarity forfavela residents to debate problems of citizenship and representation,and to organize actions that seek to remedy such problems. For exam-ple, in 2005 CUFA received $60,000 in Ford Foundation funds to sup-port a series of workshops on race, gender, human rights, and film with



youths from the hip-hop movement in Rio as part of the organization’sCitizenship and Audiovisual Project.

One of the founding members and current treasurer of CUFA is rapartist Nega Gizza (Gisele Gomes de Souza). She was born in the favelaof the Hope Park (Parque Esperança) in Rio de Janeiro. Her brother isthe rapper MV Bill (Alex Pereira Barbosa). She and MV Bill contributedto the soundtrack for the film City of God (Cidade de Deus, 2002), based onPaulo Lins’s 1997 novel by the same name, which portrayed the lives oftwo youths growing up amidst brutal violence in that neighborhood. Alsoin 2002, Nega Gizza released her album In Humility (Na humildade), whichpresents a black female favela resident’s perspective on rap, race, class,and Brazilian citizenship (Fig. 1). It is a subject position she regards asalienated by the discourse of miscegenation, and deprived of the fullcomplement of rights associated with modern citizenship in the West.The album begins with “Horror Film” (“Filme de Terror”), a sparse, sim-ple, minor key ostinato, a beat that stutters before settling into a groove,and periodic chordal interjections on violins that evoke the suspense-inducing music of a horror film soundtrack—for from Nega Gizza’sperspective, that is precisely what Brazil looks like. I excerpt from thelengthy lyrics:

Country of racial democracy, of the mulata for export, of natural beautyBrazil! Happy nation, a tropical country. . .Brazil, who condemns us to live like irrational animalsLet’s pretend that it will pass, that it is natural!The time of conformism is over. I don’t want war, I only want love! . . .Change this horror film. . .We are born to die of hunger. We are born without being proud of ourown nameHow can Sarney’s family try to convince me


Figure 1. Front and back covers of Nega Gizza’s 2002 CD Na humildade.


How can ACM’s family think I can believeThat I would find all this lovely and natural?12. . .They concentrate wealth, and they don’t think it’s obsceneOh Maranhão, land of blacks transformed into doormatsOh Salvador, land of blacks already subdued by the ropes of the hangman Uncross your Arms, follow in my footstepsThe sound is rap, this is the beat. . .We are part of a people without future, of folks without culture, withoutprideThe whites on the seaside, the blacks on the hillsideThe Indians suffocated against the wall. Police persecution is not normal. . .A horror film is what I see. . .Lock the gates of the castles. . .Treat us like diseased ones, just because we don’t have teethI won’t die for Brazil.

The general framework in these lyrics remains that of two Brazils—the elite and the poor, or alternatively, the whites and the blacks. Racemixture is mentioned but with deep irony (the racial democracy, themulata), although it is noteworthy that there is brief mention of Brazil’s“Indians,” consistent with the “three-race” mixture in the foundationalmyth of the Brazilian people. The temporal dimension is racialized: poorblack Brazilians are people without a future, and this is due, Nega Gizzaargues, to the normalization of social and racial stratification and violencewithin a conformist social order. “Let’s pretend that it will pass, that itis natural!” The poor live like starving, diseased animals (not citizens)whose teeth are falling out, hunted by the police. They lack “culture”anyway, so it is natural to view them as animals. In this view the problemthat Brazilian identity has with both the future and the past is race. Morespecifically, it is the naturalized correlation between race and class inBrazil that impairs the teleology of modernization and development.Rather than coming from the future to learn about the past, as in theLenine/Queiroga song, the present reality makes the future almost be-side the point for many. There is also a geographical dimension, pertain-ing especially to Rio de Janeiro, where the wealthy live near the prizedbeaches and the poor build their shacks on the steep slopes, which lackroads and services (the contrast between the asphalt and the hillsideslums that Zuenir Ventura analyzed, 1994). As in the Lenine/Queirogasong, the body enters into the picture, but it is black, hungry, perse-cuted, and relegated to the favela.

Yet Nega Gizza’s “Horror Film” and Lenine’s and Queiroga’s “Underthe Same Sky” do have something in common: a different Brazil isevoked through the musical rhythm (the “rhythm of a greater song” inthe Lenine/Queiroga piece). “Uncross your arms, follow in my foot-steps,” Nega Gizza sings. “The sound is rap, this is the beat.” Lenine,however, uses the first person plural: “We come from the center and the



periphery; we come from rap and from the favela.” Lenine speaks forthe national “we.” Nega Gizza, by contrast, speaks for the black and eco-nomically marginalized “we,” while her musical beat has little direct con-nection to grooves traditionally associated with poor blacks and mulatosin Brazil, such as samba. Rather, the musical connection is more BlackAtlantic; it is transnational and diasporic. Her track “Release the Ani-mal” (“Larga o bicho”) further elaborates on her subject position quacitizen: “Black woman with the warring spirit/. . . /I’m not a mulata, I’mnot a drug mule [mula], I’m a cannon/.. . /African descendent preservingmy faith/. . . /My dialect is rap, a tough bone to chew.” Her co-rapper onthe song, Yeda Hills (alternatively written as Ieda), adds, “I’m black inskin and mind, this makes me courageous, because I know that I’m adescendent of the fighting Zumbi13/. . . /I go on living one day after an-other, in accordance with my rhythmology [ritimologia]/. . . /My micro-phone is my weapon.” The track ends with the following: “It’s the soundof black my brother [som de preto meu nego], the sound of black.”

In sum, the perspective offered by Nega Gizza here is indeed “periph-eral” to the dominant national narratives of miscegenation and the cele-bration of contrast, mixture, and the coexistence of differences. Insteadof celebrating difference Nega Gizza wishes to mobilize it in order even-tually to negate it—not through mixture, but through the leveling out ofsocial inequalities. The hip-hop “sound of black” provides a more “mili-tant” and politicized rhythm for conjuring this audiotopic space thanwould, for example, traditional samba (although Brazilian hip-hop doessometimes mix in samba rhythms). Rap production in Brazil is highlyvaried and Nega Gizza cannot be taken as representative of the fullbreadth of this output. Certain São Paulo hip-hop artists, for example,de-emphasize race and blackness while highlighting violence and mar-ginality (see Pardue 2004). Yet as already demonstrated, violence andmarginality correlate strongly with race in Brazil, and most rap artiststend not to celebrate miscegenation and the harmonious juxtaposition-ing of differences, as MPB artists like Lenine often do. My choice ofNega Gizza as a case study is motivated by her association with theUnited Favela Federation (or CUFA) as a kind of social movement or cit-izens’ action network that emphasizes a black subjectivity and ostensiblyblack beats. I would like now to contrast this eminently urban perspec-tive with the rural activism of the MST.

Music and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST)

The MST was conceived in 1984, the last year of military dictatorship inBrazil. It was in large part an outgrowth of the Pastoral Land Commis-sion (CPT), an organization founded by progressive Catholic Bishops in



1975. According to the MST Web site, less than 3 percent of the popula-tion owns two-thirds of Brazil’s arable land.14 The principal work of theMST is oriented around land redistribution, specifically peasant occupa-tions of underutilized but privately owned land, and activism aimed atthe subsequent legalization of community ownership and agriculturalproduction on such land. Legalization is sometimes made possible bypetitioning the state to redistribute land in accordance with Article 184of the 1988 constitution, which states that land not “carrying out its so-cial function” can be appropriated by the federal government.15 Accord-ing to the MST’s own statistics, more than 350,000 families have wonland titles to over 20 million acres after MST land takeovers, while morethan 160,000 families are in encampments throughout Brazil awaitinggovernment recognition.16 It is the largest social movement in LatinAmerica, and one of the most successful grassroots organizations in theworld. Once a given territory is occupied, the MST establishes food andagricultural cooperatives, as well as literacy and other educational pro-grams. Not surprisingly, such conquests have often come at the cost oflives. The members of the MST have often been in violent conflict withboth the landowners (or their private security forces) and the police. Be-tween 1984 and 2004, more than 1,000 people were killed as a result ofland conflicts in Brazil, one of the most notorious being the Eldoradode Carajás massacre of 1997, in which nineteen unarmed peasants werekilled by the military.

An important part of the movement’s activities is the mística, a utopianand millenary vision of the world, and also a ritual celebration held atthe start of MST events. The mística ceremonies with which all MSTevents begin feature various art forms, including theater, dance, and,most importantly, music and poetry. The music is typically drawn fromrural styles such as cantoria—a sort of ballad singing—but sympatheticMPB and hip-hop artists have also contributed to the musical activitiesof the movement. Interestingly, at these events both the red MST flag—which features an outline of the Brazilian nation as a reminder that landreform is a national problem—and the Brazilian flag are present, againsuggesting an ambivalent and dual sense of citizenship. I want to high-light how the movement reaches out to and collaborates with variedsectors of the population in audiotopic musical recordings, addressingin particular the issues of poverty, land redistribution, and violence.Malcom McNee, for example, analyzed an MST project proposal enti-tled “Musical Formation and Training in the Camps and Settlements.”The proposal calls music “an important and efficient channel of pene-tration into the social sphere” (cited in McNee 2003, 99). It argues that“contagious melodies and rhythms take control of groups and reaffirmon a daily basis their message and their behavior, divulging their ideasand reaffirming their positions” (McNee 2003, 99).17



The MST released five CDs between 1997 and 2002 featuring mostlysongs written by people associated with or supporters of the movement,and sometimes performed by pop musicians not necessarily directly in-volved with it. The cover art for the first CD, Art in Movement (Arte em movi-mento), features a dramatic photo by Sebastião Salgado of peasants at anencampment on the lands of the Cuiabá plantation as they celebrate—hoes raised, with one of the peasants playing a flute—the latifundio ex-propriation decree adopted on May 6, 1996, that allowed them to form thecommunity of 2,800 families (Fig. 2). Pop musicians not directly associatedwith the MST performed several of the tracks on the CD. Samba/MPBstar Beth Carvalho, for example, sings “Order and Progress” instead ofZé Pinto, the song’s MST composer. Rather than prioritizing acousticinstruments and limited electronic manipulation in the studio, as onemight expect of a recording associated with rural, agricultural peasantlife, this first MST release has a rather “commercial” sound, owing pri-marily to the use of synthesizer and electric bass. Commenting about thisdisc music professor and MST supporter Graciano Lorenzi wrote that therecorded releases of MST music “should not be aggressive” but should“conquer the sympathy and the support of the people that listen to it”(cited in McNee 2003, 100). That is to say, the recording was intendedto reach a broad public beyond local MST settlements, consistent withthe movement’s adept usage of the media and its extensive networkingwith other spheres of civil society—in this instance the world of MPB, asphere of pop music with considerable national visibility, market share,


Figure 2. Frontcover of MST 1997CD Arte emmovimento withpeasants at Cuiabáplantation.


and status. Chico Buarque, another major MPB artist who has supportedthe landless movement, released a four-song CD called Terra (Earth) inassociation with Sebastião Salgado’s book of photographs of Brazilianlandless workers. Although ultimately the MST CDs did not see wide cir-culation, in the case of these recordings music was viewed as a “channelof communication with society and as a space to be occupied by the MST”(Lorenzi cited in McNee 2003, 100).

This view of music’s communicative potential and the suggestion thatmusic itself is a space that can be occupied is precisely what is proposedby CUFA, by AfroReggae, and by Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil. Itrecalls Artur Nestrovski’s “we live daily in two countries”—where oneof those countries is the “space” of music itself—but for middle-classprofessionals like Nestrovski, the idea remains largely metaphorical. Forlandless peasants, by contrast, the metaphor of the space of music is ur-gently connected to the struggle to occupy places, in this case land for agri-culture, and also fully to occupy the space of citizenship to the extentthat legal protection from violence and social welfare protection fromstarvation and lack of income, education, or medicine, etc., is wanting.The recorded CD, in this context, takes on a performative role parallelto the use of music at live mística events. In entering into market andmedia circuits and establishing links with popular music artists andother sympathetic publics, the CD Art in Movement seeks to “conquer”—to use Lorenzi’s word—the national (and even international) publicsphere in which citizenship is debated.

The “Anthem of the Landless Movement” (“Hino do Movimento SemTerra”) from this same recording is a remarkable track, for although thelyrics to the anthem are by MST poet Ademar Bogo, the music is writtenby Marxist avant-garde art music composer Willy Corrêa de Oliveira, aparticipant in the Música Nova movement that included Rogério Duprat(equally known for his participation in that movement as he is in theTropicália movement as arranger and producer) and others. The song,a march with trumpet, flute, and snare drum arrangement, features thechoir of the University of São Paulo singing an angular minor key melodyconstructed around a forceful descending fifth. It ends with a resound-ing choral modulation to the parallel major key. The piece sounds moreKurt Weil and Bertold Brecht than rustic camp song. Here the musicalspace in between joins a simple anthem for agrarian reform with an urbanmusical vanguard: “With arms raised, let’s tell our story/Smothering ouroppressors with strength/Let’s raise the colored [MST] flag/Let’s awakenthis sleeping fatherland/Tomorrow belongs to the workers!” MPB musi-cian Chico César—whose pop music draws heavily on traditional stylesfrom the Nordeste (the Northeast), an area rich in folklore and very muchassociated with both agriculture and inequality in the national imagi-nary, sings the track “Flowering” (“Floriô”) featuring the characteristically



Northeastern xote rhythm and lyrics by Zé Pinto: “The rice is in sheavesand the beans have blossomed/The corn is on the husk, and the heart isfull of love./. . . /Raising our voices shouting for agrarian reform/For thestruggle does not end with taking over the land/[It continues with] mak-ing schools, bringing comrades together/Creating cooperatives to in-crease [agricultural] production.”

The second MST CD, Songs That Embrace Dreams (Canções que abraçamsonhos, 2002) features songs from the First National Agrarian ReformFestival, which took place in Rio Grande do Sul in 1999. It has a muchmore acoustic production sound than the first recording. The beautiful“Migrants Procession” by Martin César Ramires Gonçalves and PedroMunhóz, for example, is sung in the cantoria ballad style, with the tradi-tional steel-stringed double-course viola guitar used in this “countrymusic”: “Brazil-land, Continent, Motherland of my people/Today I wantto ask—/If your arms are so great/Why deny a space/To those whowant to have a home/I cannot understand/How in this immense land/It is still kill or die/For a piece of earth.”

The CD A Song for Peace from 2001 features a mixture of traditionallyrural and more popular sounds, evidencing various sympathies and al-liances across genre, nation, region, and class. The track “Latin prayer”(“Oração latina”), for example, sounds similar to the nueva canción groupInti Illimani from Chile, with the use of the Andean cuatro (a small, four-stringed, double course, ukulele-like instrument) and an open-throatedvocal style.18 The song “The stones will scream” (“As pedras gritarão”),by contrast, is a jazz-rock fusion. To give one final example, the track“Eldorado dos Carajás” is performed by a hip-hop group based in afavela in Belém, capital of the northern state of Pará, near where theAmazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean. The group, MBGC (for Manosda Baixada de Grosso Calibre, or Brothers of Large Caliber Way), tellsthe story of the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre on April 17, 1996, whenabout 1,200 landless workers blocked a road in protest of delays of a rel-atively small land redistribution that had been promised by the NationalInstitute of Colonization and Land Reform (INCRA).19 Powerful locallandowners, fearing further MST invasions, pressured the state to removethe protesters forcefully. Colonel Fábio Lopes, commander-in-chief of themilitary police in Pará, sent two heavily armed squadrons. Evidence sug-gests that the military police intended to use violence “to teach the MSTa lesson they would never forget,” as one journalist at the scene reported(Branford and Rocha 2002, 139). This musical track recounts the eventin detail at a lugubrious tempo and in a solemn voice: “Fourteen minutesof dense shooting. Thick lead. . .and bone/Amidst that tumult one heardcrying and shouting from those attempting to flee./. . . /Desperate peo-ple begged for help/All victims of a brutal, violent, and bloody police


moehn.qxp 9/5/07 1:56 PM 8

action/With summary executions, a tragedy comparable with those ofCarandiru, Candelária, Vigário Geral, Corumbiara.”20

The last line of the song connects the Eldorado dos Carajás massacreto other notorious police killings that received national and interna-tional attention. On October 2, 1992, over 100 prisoners were killed bythe police at the Carandiru prison in São Paulo after a riot broke out atthe facility.21 On July 23, 1993, eight street children were murdered bypoliceman in front of the Candelária Church, in the center of Rio deJaneiro. Vigário Geral refers to the 1993 massacre in the Rio favela bythe same name (the AfroReggae Cultural Group formed in response tothis tragedy). At Santa Elina Ranch, in the Corumbiara municipality inthe interior of Rondônia state, a violent confrontation between policeand landless squatters resulted in the deaths of nine peasants and twopolicemen. Again, evidence suggested that the peasants were shot at closerange in the back or in the head.22 This musical example from a favela-based hip-hop group sympathetic to but not directly associated with theMST shows music as a key horizontal link between widely different ac-tivist groups—one urban, emphasizing race and racism, privileging therhythms and styles of hip-hop culture and combating the drug trade;the other rural, Marxist-oriented, and millenary, shunning any formal al-liances with the state, political parties, or international foundations, andtending to favor the sounds of caipira country music for its live místicaevents. Both, however, see music as an important force in reimaginingBrazilian citizenship in response to institutionalized violence, as well asto the “violence of everyday life” (Scheper-Hughes 1992).

“The New Music of Brazil”? An MPB festival, the middleclasses, and a cyberdebate

If the musical output of Nega Gizza in association with CUFA, and ofmusicians connected in some way to the MST, interrogates problems ofcitizenship and class as they pertain to social welfare, violence, and civilrights, what of those social sectors that enjoy relatively higher economicsecurity, specifically populations considered middle class? The middleclass in Brazil is typically described as persons earning more than aboutUS $450 per month per family, and the sector tends to be further sub-divided into lower middle class ($450–$1,200); “middle middle class”($1,200–$2,300); and upper middle class (above $2,300). It is a demo-graphic group that, “although with relatively little property, is character-ized by high and intermediary positions both in the social-occupationalstructure and in the distribution of income and wealth” (Pochmann etal. 2005, 16). As such, the middle class is understood as “possessing



recognized social status and authority and a superior level of consump-tion” (ibid.). Middle-class intellectuals, creative artists, and professionalsrepresent an important national public for a CD like the MST’s Art inMovement; they constitute that sector the sympathy and support of whichProfessor Lorenzi said the recording should “conquer.” Although thedeeply Marxist MST speaks and sings of radical social revolution and animagined utopian future, in the audiotopic present the organization hascarefully established significant links with sympathetic members of themiddle classes, as have CUFA and AfroReggae.

Middle-class music makers often serve a mediating role, such as, forexample, the professional musician Marcelo Alves who put together theCharanga percussion ensemble; or Dudu Marote, one of the producersof Nega Gizza’s recording Na humildade.23 Such mediations can have im-portant aesthetic consequences. One reviewer of Nega Gizza’s albumwrote that her sound has a greater musical richness than her brotherMV Bill, “not exactly for her style of rapping. . .but for knowing how toput herself in the hands of the right producers. Zégonz, Ganja Man, andDudu Marote provide a deep musical foundation for Gizza to rap over.They managed to create a rarity: a disc of Brazilian hip-hop that balancesthe strength of the verses with the musical part; electronic interventionsin the perfectly exact measure mixed with acoustic instruments, scratches,and changes in the musical ambience on each track” (Barbosa n.d.).“The right producers,” in this case, are taste brokers who make sure theCD meets certain aesthetic standards of balance and proportion—much in the same way, I imagine, Marcelo Bratke negotiated the rhyth-mic foundation to the Carnegie Hall concert discussed above.

The role of mediator may include using publicity clout to supportcauses agitating for social reform, such as when Chico Buarque releasestracks for the Terra project, or when Caetano Veloso offers his supportto the AfroReggae cultural group, or when pop musician FernandaAbreu crosses from the so-called South Zone of Rio (where many of thecity’s middle- and upper-class residents live) to the North Zone (whereRio’s favela-based hip-hop communities are typically located) to appearat events with artists like Nega Gizza, AfroReggae, and MV Bill, as sheoften does. There exists also a network of intellectuals, professionals,and government officials who may act in a mediating role between thehaves and have-nots or between the state and civil society, such as jour-nalist and author Zuenir Ventura, who wrote about the Vigário Geralfavela (1994) and who appears in the movie Favela Rising, or certainNGO staff, or Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil.

Yet there is also a heightened sense of ambivalence amongst the mid-dle classes, as suggested by the statements from Maria Rita Kehl andArtur Nestrovski about “dual citizenship” cited above. Economist WaldirJosé de Quadros at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) fears that



the Brazilian middle class is angry. “It just hasn’t exploded yet,” he says,“because it is also confused. The forces that succeed in channeling this anger will find a great ally for its interests. The problem is that wesee disillusionment with the Lula government, creating conditions forthe right to strengthen its position” (Sugimoto 2004, 8). According toQuadros, the middle class accounted for 42.5 percent of the country’stotal population in 1981. By 2003, that figure had dropped to 33.2 per-cent, and those who left the middle class moved down, of course, ratherthan up. Another study showed small increases in the income of thepoorest sectors in recent years, but a tightening of the labor market forthe middle class.24 Economist Márcio Pochmann found that the medianincome of middle-class workers fell 19.4 percent in the past ten years,while in the same period taxes increased 20 percent.25 Carlos AntonioRibeiro Costa, a specialist on social mobility at the State University of Riode Janeiro, says “the fight to stay in the middle class is tougher. In the1970s middle-class children had 2000 times better chances to get a goodjob than a farmer’s child. Today the difference is one fourth that.”26

Singer-songwriter Max Gonzaga, from São Paulo, captured the anxi-eties of this social sector in his song “Middle Class” (“Classe Média”),which he presented in a televised song festival in 2005, and which I wasable to see him perform at a smaller song festival in November 2006 inSão Paulo (Fig. 3). The Festival Cultura—the New Music of Brazil (Festi-val Cultura—A Nova Música do Brasil ) took place in the SESC Pinheirostheater in São Paulo city from August 31 to September 14, 2005. Theevent was a song contest recorded in front of a live audience in the tradition of the legendary festivals of the 1960s that launched the ca-reers of Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil, among manyother household names of MPB, and that also became the main forumfor protest song (canção engagada) that paralleled the new song move-ment (nueva canción) in the rest of Latin America. The event, broadcaston the public television station TV Cultura, commemorated forty yearssince the first such festival. The project was to be “open to all the musi-cal tendencies and rhythms of the country,” and it sought to “present,without restrictions, the best of what exists of a Brazil of living and vi-brant colors and rhythms.”27

“Middle Class” made it to the semifinals and seemed to strike a chordamong many viewers, listeners, and bloggers in Brazil, despite the fact thatit was eliminated in that round. Musically, the song is firmly in the MPBmold: Gonzaga’s smooth and practiced low tenor voice, and the rangy,well-constructed, pop melody “conquer” the listener; the altered chordshe finger-picks on his nylon-stringed classical guitar evoke jazzy bossanova harmonies with tempered syncopations, as does the discrete accom-paniment played on synthesizer. An “MTV Acoustic” sound predominates,with bongos and other light percussion completing a sophisticated pop



texture, and judicious amounts of reverberation added to the PA mix.One of the organizers of the event, Solano Ribeiro, said of the stagesound, “We have opted for subtlety, to show acoustic music, music that isa little more elaborated in terms of instrumentation [as in the originalsong festivals].”28 “Subtlety,” “acoustic,” “elaborated instrumentation”—these terms describe a fairly restrained and nostalgic aesthetic that re-calls the original song festivals of the 1960s, where electric guitars, forexample, were at first notoriously rejected by the public. Notwithstand-ing, the lyrics to Max Gonzaga’s “Middle Class” (“classe Média”) franklycaptured the interrelationships between consumption, violence, and themedia from a perspective that Gonzaga suggests is shared by a significantportion of the Brazilian middle classes today:

I’m middle class, a parrot of every news programI believe in the impartiality of the weekly magazineI’m middle class, I buy clothes and gas with a credit cardI can’t stand buses, I travel in my car that I bought with a loan


Figure 3. Max Gonzaga performing at the November 2006Caiubí Composer’s Festival in São Paulo.


All I do is pay taxes, I’m always at the limit of my check overdraft. . .But I’m not concerned if the drug trafficker is the one who controls thefavelaNor am I if there’s a flood or people are dying in Itaquera [a low incomeneighborhood in the East Zone of São Paulo city]I wish the entire periphery would explodeBut I am indignant with the state when I am inconveniencedBy the starving beggar extending his hand, the windshield washer soapingmy window. . .And if the assault is in Moema [an upper-middle-class neighborhood ofSão Paulo city]Or the assassination is in Jardins, and the executive’s daughter is raped todeathThen the media show up. You begin to think about the death penaltyagainOr about reducing the age of majorityAnd I who am well-informed agree and join a demonstrationWhile the readership of the newspaper increases. . .Disasters only interest me when they knock at my doorBecause it’s easier to condemn someone already condemned to death

The contrast between the “smooth jazz” acoustic sound of this song andits primarily middle-class live performance setting on the one hand, andthe biting irony of its lyrics on the other, disrupt the space in betweenthat Marcelo Bratke described as a celebratory mixture of high and lowin Carnegie Hall, or that Maria Rita Kehl describes as an “other” Brazilto which everyone has the right to exile. This Brazil in the middle istroubled by the two Brazils on either side of it: it is the coexistence of thegrossly overprivileged and the embarrassingly impoverished that inhibitthe full realization of a modern middle-class cosmo-consumer conscious-ness and way of life. “Middle Class” also subtly interrogates the premisesof the festival itself: while the latter celebrated the great MPB artists ofthe 1960s—whom the military dictatorship censored or even forced intoexile—Gonzaga sang about joining a demonstration in favor of the deathpenalty. The singer applied an extra-syrupy sincerity to his vocal timbreon this line, making it sound especially ironic. The clever usage of thefirst person singular—making it seem as if the singer himself has expe-rienced the emotions he cynically narrates—heightens the sense of aconflicted and ambivalent self-consciousness about being stuck betweenviolence and consumption, between backwardness and development.

An MPEG video recording of Gonzaga’s performance of the songcirculated through cyberspace and generated mixed reactions (it is nowon Youtube.com). Several bloggers felt that Gonzaga captured an un-comfortable truth: “This song really says it all—Applause!” commentedone; “A really good song,” wrote another, “the lyrics speak for them-selves.”29 Another well-educated blogger (he presented his commentary



as a quasi-Socratic discussion in which he cited Aristotle) observed that“the average middle-class type. . .can be summarized with the phrase ‘forthe masses, charity or the police.’”30 On the other hand, one reporterwrote that this kind of pop music and criticism was simply out of stepwith the sound of today, which is better represented by rap music: “Thesound [of rap] is electronic, accelerated, and “rhythmed” [ritmado] to thetempo of the big city, and the same for the lyrics, the concrete poetry ofa reality marked by inequality. . . .Rap and the whole hip-hop movementare not represented at the Festival Cultura.”31

Yet another blogger appreciated Gonzaga’s talent but was incensed bythe lyrics and provided an important counterperspective on the Brazil-ian middle class, meriting a lengthy quotation:

The guy has creativity, but. . .the middle class in this country is beingsqueezed year after year and its ability to generate income and consump-tion has been reduced to an extent never before seen here. Taxes, interestrates, impunity in the government, the lack of an efficient health-care sys-tem, excessive embezzlements, the manipulations of the media, the absurdprotectionism of the worker’s statutes [leis trabalhistas], and so forth, onlymanaged to destroy the vitality of those who still held out any hope forthis country (namely, the middle class). How else can the middle class. . .mobilize if not through public demonstrations and constant appeals forjustice? . . .Please, Mr. Gonzaga, be more attentive to the possibility thatyou might offend one who gives his blood for this land, . . .who works,sometimes 12 to 14 hrs a day to pay for decent schooling for his children(as if he had not already paid for this in taxes), to stay employed despitebeing over 40, etc. Have more respect for those who have lost someone(middle class or not) to the violence so in vogue these days (what hap-pened to the security that we pay for with our taxes?). I myself had the sadluck to have to bury the daughter of a friend of mine who was a victim ofrape and assassination.32

Clearly this blogger was unable to distance himself enough from thetopic to appreciate Gonzaga’s irony and hence understandably seems tohave missed the point of the song. His are important concerns that givea broader picture of the contexts of inequality into which music, vio-lence, social movements, and public policy are thrust in Brazil. I heardsimilar concerns during a visit to Mosh recording studios in São Pauloin 2006. The composer/arranger/producer Marco Pontes Caixote, forexample, complained to me of rising taxes on the middle class, while hehas to turn to private schooling to assure a good education for his chil-dren, and to private health care, while protection against violence re-mains a persistent concern.

Max Gonzaga’s song “Middle Class” is significant, therefore, not be-cause it is harnessed to a social movement seeking greater equality andbasic citizens’ rights, but because it speaks to a fundamental problem



blocking the transformation of civil society in Brazil: on the one hand,many in the middle classes see themselves as living in a different coun-try from the rural farmworker or from “the periphery”—which somehope would just “explode”; on the other, social programs seeking to ele-vate the poor into the middle sectors are not supported by a sufficientamount of economic growth, and high taxation threatens the middle-class consumer-citizen lifestyle. This musical example is also significantfor the aesthetic and media context in which it was presented. Not pe-ripheral, or marginal, MPB and the Festival Cultura are mainstream, andthe sound of Gonzaga’s song is the kind of smooth pop that perhaps Pro-fessor Lorenzi sought for the first MST album in order to conquer themiddle-class public. Yet contemporary singer-songwriters like Gonzaga(or Lenine and Lula Queiroga), who have been influenced by the greatfestival musicians of the 1960s and 70s (Chico Buarque, Gal Costa,Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, Os Mutantes, among others), nolonger have a dictatorship to criticize, or a countercultural leftist studentaudience. Instead, they are stuck between violence and the rising cost ofa secure, stable middle-class lifestyle, and between consumption and tax-ation. Chico Buarque himself ruffled a few feathers in a recent interviewfor the newspaper Folha de São Paulo when he made the following obser-vations: “The fear of violence in the middle class turns into a rejectionnot only of the so-called marginal individual, but of the poor in general,of the guy who has an old car, of the mulato, the one who is poorly dressed.To be reactionary became the popular tone to take” (quoted in Silva2006). Max Gonzaga’s “Middle Class” is unusual in its destabilizing ofthe audiotopic “refuge” of MPB, described by Maria Rita Kehl as a coun-try to which one has the right to exile and given sonic form in Lenine’sand Queiroga’s “Under the Same Sky.” It reveals that audiotopia to befragile, threatened especially by rising violence and persistent social in-equality. In the following section I briefly explore how the state has en-gaged the problems of citizenship, violence, social class, and the nation.

MinC: The State massaging the national cultural body

“Either Brazil does away with violence, or violence will do away withBrazil,” declared Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil at his inaugural ad-dress in Brasília on January 2, 2003. “We must complete the construc-tion of this nation, include the excluded groups, reduce the inequalitiesthat torment us.” He continued:

Otherwise we will not be able to keep sending a message to the world of anation which set the highest ideal that a collectivity can possibly set: theideal of living side by side in tolerance, an ideal in which a wide array ofbeings and languages coexist amid differences and even contradictions.



The role of culture in this process. . .is not merely tactical or strategic—itis central: to objectively contribute to overcoming social inequalities, all thewhile focusing on the full realization of human potentials. (Gil 2003a, 42)

As might be expected of the state, questions of violence, inequality, differ-ence, and cultural expression are of critical importance in the manage-ment of national identity, development, and Brazil’s image in the globalcommunity. The Ministry of Culture (MinC) states that its activities arebased on three interwoven dimensions: “culture as a symbol factory, cul-ture as a right and as citizenship, and culture as part of the economy” (Gil2003b, 8). It is noteworthy that Gil speaks of completing the constructionof the nation, consistent both with development-speak and with mod-ernist Brazilian identity discourse wherein, as mentioned above, theprocess of cultural mixture is understood as central and also incomplete.

Gilberto Gil’s remarkable career took off with his participation in theTropicália movement of the late 1960s. When Lula appointed Gil minis-ter of culture late in 2002 the international press was abuzz. A world musicstar once imprisoned and exiled by the military and now directing thecultural policy of the first socialist government in this “developing”country thought to be the world’s eighth largest economy is newsworthy.In his role as minister Gil has traveled widely to publicize his “LivingCulture: National Culture, Education and Citizenship” program. This so-phisticated and ambitious cultural policy seeks as its partners “culturalagents, artists, teachers, and social activists who not only see culture asartistic languages [sic], but [who] also realize that it shapes rights, behav-iors, and economics” (Ferreira 2003, 11). It emphasizes working with al-ready existing social actors, organizations, and mechanisms, and it citescritical geographer Milton Santos, who has argued that utopia should befounded on “what already exists as an embryo, which thus holds the po-tential of being realized” (as paraphrased in Ferreira 2003, 11), recallingJosh Kun’s use of the concept of heterotopia. The program is consistentwith an administration that has a social agenda but that is also respon-sive to the market and to the global economic and political landscape.In the words of the MinC’s executive secretary Juca Ferreira, it is intendedto encourage and enable “a large scale convergence of low-incomegroups with that other portion of society that has kept its distance dueto a lack of security. . .and that today enjoys greater access to the uni-versity, services, and cultural goods” (Ferreira 2003, 11). The ministerseeks to plan a Brazil, he says, that will be integrated by the circulationof merchandise and values, by symbolic production, by the transit ofpopular culture through mass markets, and by stimulating a creative di-alogue between local and foreign cultures. Through spurring “real andhuman exchanges between Brazilian people,” the program will pave theway, Secretary Ferreira says, “to drawing together the various Brazils”(Ferreira 2003, 11).



Here I will only make brief mention of the Culture Points part of thisprogram. These are spaces that should stimulate dialogue between civilsociety and the state following, in part, Jürgen Habermas’s conceptionof the public sphere (1989 [1962]), and “bring together key players tolink up and drive community-based actions” (Gil 2003a, 42). Gil de-scribes the culture points as “anthropological do-ins” that massage “vitalpoints that have been momentarily left aside or dormant in the coun-try’s cultural body” (2003a, 42). Financial support, computer and otherdigital equipment, free open-source software to aid in producing music,video, etc., are among the items provided through the program to helpdevelop existing grassroots and other cultural agents and organizations.The culture points should also be connected with each other, especiallyvia the Internet, suggesting an incorporation of the latest technologiesof communication into a long-standing modernist (and perhaps origi-nally positivist) corporeal trope of the nation—that is, the country’s“cultural body.” Thus far, the monitoring of the initiative is incipient; theMinC’s own Web site, moreover, provides little information about spe-cific culture points.

One already existing community-based and music-centered organiza-tion that is participating in the program is the Organized Brazilian HipHop Movement (MHHOB) which, according to Lamartine Silva, one ofthe movement’s coordinators, has a presence in sixteen different states.Silva reports that the public programs of digital inclusion, part of theMinistry’s plan, “give peripheral youths access to other technologies be-sides weapons” (quoted in Pimentel 2005a). Silva is responsible for a cul-ture point in São Luís do Maranhão in the Northeast. He describes whathe sees as a new kind of politics that echo the emerging participatorypublics already pioneered by Worker’s Party municipal governments(see, e.g., Avritzer 2002): “Until today, in order to do anything at all withthe federal government in the sphere of culture, you had to pass throughthe state government. These days, I was surprised to find a former sec-retary of culture from Maranhão state seeking me out to borrow my Cul-ture Point proposal. . . .Previously the guy wouldn’t even talk to me”(Pimentel 2005a).

The Piaui Hip Hop Association (Associação Piauiense de Hip Hop),also part of the MHHOB, is another example of a culture point estab-lished where a grassroots organization had already shown initiative. Thecenter began to take shape in an old building belonging to the Secretaryof Education of the state government but abandoned for ten years. Youthsfrom the hip-hop movement occupied the building until they could getofficial permission to stay there. Rap and other music groups use the re-hearsal space and recording studio at the center. The Bank of Brazilpromised forty recycled computers. The Ministry of Education intendsto provide satellite Internet connection. Also supporting the site are the



U.S.-based Kellogg Foundation, the NGO FASE (Federation of Socialand Educational Assistance Organizations, which is itself supported by theRio de Janeiro–based activist musical group O Rappa), and the studentsof a local school who are associated with the international group SIFE(Students in Free Enterprise). The Ministry of Labor, which is workingjointly with the MinC on the culture points project, has reportedly pro-vided eighty-five work stipends for youths that the organization helps. TheFrench NGO Acajuyê also provides materials and has sponsored exchangeprograms, bringing Brazilian youths to France (Pimentel 2005b).

This list of positive dialogues traversing various sectors of civil societyis, I would note, reported on the Ministry of Culture’s own Web site. Thusfar little public critique has emerged of the culture points program (thecomments I have heard in casual conversations with Brazilian musiciansare skeptical). One complaint I found pertains to delays of several monthsin the transfer of the promised stipends to certain MHHOB culturepoints. According to Secretary Célio Turino of the MinC, it is a bureau-cratic delay stemming from the fact that the stipends actually come fromthe Ministry of Labor, and the two ministries are working toward sort-ing it out.33 A blogger on the official Culture Points Weblog, “Conversê,”also noted that someone from the Pensarte cultural think tank in SãoPaulo described the culture points as “weak, without content, organizedby people of low cultural level” (a derisive way of referring to Brazilianswho have little formal education), and “just for show” (pra inglês ver).”34

The jury is still out, then, on how well the culture points massage thepublic sphere, and what kind of effect the program will have on citizen-ship in Brazil, especially now that Lula has won reelection.

Conclusions: The identity work of cosmopolitical citizenship

I have sought to present a set of examples from different perspectives inwhich discourses about music as well as musical practices are understoodas traversing a “space” in between radically different Brazils, one that ischaracterized in part by a disjuncture between postdictatorship democ-ratization processes and the unequal realization of the civil and socialcomponents of citizenship in the face of durable forces of inequality andrising violence. I have tried also to explore on a limited scale how spe-cific sounds are taken to represent different Brazils, and how “rhythm”and drumming have a privileged place in certain re-imaginings of citi-zenship. Detailed ethnographic research and musical analysis can illu-minate more fully the relationships between discourses and musicalpractices in a given setting, but my aim here has been to highlight, on theone hand, how central music is to discussions of themes and problems



that bear on citizenship and social class in a sort of audiotopic space, and,on the other, to emphasize how ambiguous and unstable this space is.

Some of the recent literature on so-called cultural citizenship under-stands rights associated with cultural practices and identity as an impor-tant fourth component not envisioned by Thomas H. Marshall. Thisliterature tends to focus on the recognition of alternative or oppressedsocial identities within a polity, and in many ways it parallels the rise oftheories of multiculturalism.35 It emerged in a context in which scholarswere arguing that the complexity of postindustrial society rendered classdivisions less important than identity politics. The new social movementsthat organized around issues like the environment, gay rights, or democ-ratization were also interpreted as displacing class-based mobilization.In the cases explored here, however, questions of collective identity andcultural expression are very much about “citizenship and social class,”to evoke Marshall. The examples of CUFA and the MST suggest that itis not so much a question of whether class or identity (as we explored itthrough music) is more important in new social movements; rather, wesee new ways in which class is tied to other aspects of the group experi-ence of citizenship, such as race, place, gender, violence, aesthetic pref-erences, and development. Max Gonzaga’s song “Middle Class” shows analternative class perspective on some of the same problems that preoc-cupy Nega Gizza of CUFA, or Zé Pinto of the MST. However, that per-spective does not represent a social movement identity—at least not yet.It has the potential, perhaps, to become a “post-citizenship movement”in which participants who already enjoy most or all of the normal rightsof citizens have established channels for mobilizing and putting pressureon political decision makers (Jasper 1997). Some, like economist WaldirQuadros, fear that extreme conservative forces could exploit such poten-tial. It seems vitally important, therefore, to play close attention to howrelationships between culture, identity, and citizenship change inflectionsacross class lines, rather than seeing these as distinct realms of experi-ence and practice. Moreover, as an analytical category “class” seems mostoften to be evoked in the Latin American context in association with thelabor or subaltern sectors. Relatively few studies take the cultural expres-sions and preoccupations of the Latin American middle class—that“rather gelatinous and opaque sector,” as Altamiro Borges refers to it(2006)—as their object.

The MinC’s Culture Points initiative demonstrates, on the other hand,that state policies may traffic in some of the same discursive currencypermeating the identity politics of social movements, pop music, or evenof a disillusioned middle class. Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasperobserve that new social movement scholars have inadvertently turnedcollective identity into “a kind of residual category” that describes whathappens “outside structures, outside the state, outside rational action”



(2001, 285). Research on identity and social movements, they argue,should allow “for a number of different relationships between culturaland discursive practices on the one hand, and legal, political, economic,and social structures on the other” (285). The collection of examples Ibriefly explored here support Polletta and Jasper’s argument that theanalytical challenge is to “identify the circumstances in which differentrelations between interest and identity, strategy and identity, and politicsand identity operate, circumstances that include cultural processes aswell as structural ones” (285).

Engin Isin and Patricia Wood offer a useful framework for theorizingthe role that culture and identity play in contemporary conceptualiza-tions of citizenship by viewing the latter as both a bundle of rights andduties (civil, political, and social), as well as a set of practices (cultural,symbolic, and economic) that define an individual’s membership in apolity (1999, 4). Citizenship is thus not simply a legal or entirely a soci-ological concept, but a relationship between the two, a relationship be-tween status and practice (4). Music, in the cases described above, can beseen as a set of cultural, symbolic, and economic practices that engage,negotiate, and interrogate this relationship and the attendant questionsof status. Viewed thus, the notion of cultural citizenship becomes morethan simply about rights to produce and consume symbolic goods andservices; it refers to the identity work required of “active producers ofmeaning and representation and knowledgeable consumers under ad-vanced capitalism” (Isin and Wood 1999, 152).

I began this essay with the two Brazils in Carnegie Hall, New York,and throughout I have employed Josh Kun’s concept of audiotopias, aneologism he coined in reference to music and the politics of differencein the United States. To close I want to bring my native country backinto the discussion as a nation where social stratification is on the rise,and which has its own dynamics of violence. Economist Paul Krugman,for example, reports that the gap between the rich and the middle classin the United States is “as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the po-litical coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was takingshape” (2007). In his January 2003 inaugural address Minister Gil askedwhat message Brazil can send to the world in a time when “fierce dis-courses and banners of war are being raised across the globe” (2003a,43). This was eight months before the Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieirade Mello, the UN Special Representative in Iraq, was killed in the CanalHotel bombing in Baghdad on August 19, 2003.

Four years later, my government is preparing for a surge in troops inBaghdad, where today, January 16, seventy people were killed outside auniversity in so-called sectarian violence. In Los Angeles, on the sameday, members of a Latino gang were, police alleged, “looking for a black



person, any black person, to shoot”; they found 14-year-old CherylGreen chatting with friends and shot her dead (Archibold 2006). CanBrazil, a country also struggling with problems of violence and inequal-ity, set a global example of “opposites living side by side,” in Gil’s words,of the tolerance of differences? That is obviously not a question I cananswer, but posing it is important to the urgent task of bringing this dis-cussion into a larger frame of reference where musical audiotopias in-tersect with global dynamics of difference, identity, class, violence, andcivil society.

Acknowledgments

I presented earlier versions of the essay at the 2004 Society for Ethnomu-sicology annual conference; at Stony Brook Manhattan’s 2005 Inequali-ties Workshop; and at Princeton University’s Program in Latin AmericanStudies in 2005. I thank my interlocutors on these occasions as well asthe anonymous reviewers of the essay for their feedback. Thanks are alsodue to Cláudio Gonçalves Couto, Albert Fishlow, Charles Kirschbaum,Eric Herschberg, Jason Stanyek, and David Treece for their readings. Iam also grateful to Nino Chapa Preta and Nega Gizza of CUFA, MaxGonzaga, and Lenine, among others in Brazil, for their help in this re-search. Any shortcomings herein are entirely my own responsibility.

Notes

1. From Lenine’s and Lula Queiroga’s song “Sob o mesmo céu,” dis-cussed below.

2. One corporate foundation called BRASIS (the Portuguese plural forBrazil), for example, states as its aim “to insert the greatest numberof Brazilians into the map of citizenship, reducing the distances be-tween the different social realities which continue to constitute manyBrazils within our country.” “Novos Brasis,” Insituto Telemar (http://www.institutotelemar.org.br/novosbrasisresultado.asp), accessed Oc-tober 4, 2004.

3. The idea of the “space in between” is originally Silviano Santiago’s(2001 [1973]), although his meaning is somewhat different as it fo-cuses on the postcolonial problem of imitation versus originality andrelated dynamics as they play out in Latin American literature andculture. Both Santiago’s usage, however, and the space in betweenthe two Brazils I am describing here are intertwined with modernistideologies of the nation and development.



4. Although the Old Republic (1889–1930) granted citizenship only tothe very elite, under populist dictator Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945)the social component of citizenship was greatly expanded. Yet thiswas done in a highly controlled, statist, and corporatist top-downmanner, and precisely during a period when political and civil rightswere reduced. Political rights were expanded after 1945 and votingrights in fact saw their greatest expansion under the military dicta-torships of the 60s and 70s, when civil rights were heavily curtailedand elections and political parties highly controlled. Finally, today,with democracy seemingly firmly in place, many civil rights—whichformed the foundation of Marshall’s sequence—remain inaccessi-ble to the majority of the population (Carvalho 2001, 219–20).

5. Sources: Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA); InstitutoBrasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE); World Bank; and U.S.Census Bureau (2005 gini for the United States is estimated). Classin Brazil is typically categorized in five gradients (sometimes labeledA through E). Economist Waldir Quadros, for example, delineatesthe following income levels: upper middle class (family income aboveR$ 5,000 [~US$2,300]), “middle middle class” (R$2,500 to R$5,000[~$1,200–$2,300]) and lower middle class (R$1,000 to R$2,500[~$450–$1,200]). Below these are the working class (family incomefrom R$500 to R$1,000 [~$230–$450]), “the poor” (less than R$500[~$230]) and “the indigent” (Sugimoto 2004).

6. See Lago 2002 in this journal for a detailed analysis of the Brazilianpieces that Milhaud draws upon in his Le Boeuf sur le Toit, composedin 1919.

7. The Rhythmic Uprising documentary project is coordinated by Amer-ican Benjamin Watkins. It highlights four performing arts groups,of which one is a female drum troupe, one is a capoeira group, another is a children’s circus, and the last is a youth theater group.The project Web site is http://www.rhythmicuprising.org. Rhythmof Hope was founded by American Phillip Wagner, a former IT pro-fessional who is also associated with Benjamin Watkins’ RhythmicUprising project. http://www.rhythmofhope.org.

8. The “listing” of seemingly incongruous aspects of national life is afairly common practice in MPB (música popular brasileira) song lyrics.A classic example from the Tropicália era would be “Geleia Geral”(“General Jelly,” 1968) by Gilberto Gil.

9. By no means do I mean to draw a political parallel between theVargas era and the Lula administration, or even between Barrosoand Lenine/Quiroga. Lenine’s music, for example, is not particu-larly nationalist (although it does often celebrate mixture, miscegena-tion, and cultural heterogeneity).



10. Central Única das Favelas could also be translated as “United FavelaCenter.” I have chosen “Federation” because it more closely matchesthe nature of the organization, whose name was perhaps inspired bythe United Labor Federation (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, orCUT).

11. Central Única das Favelas (CUFA) home page (http://www.cufa.com.br/oquee.asp#), accessed October 15, 2005.

12. José Sarney from the state of Maranhão, was the first vice presidentof Brazil after redemocratization in 1985, immediately assuming theposition of president when Tancredo Neves died before taking office.Sarney, who had been associated with the military-controlled politicalparty ARENA, attempted but ultimately failed to control inflationwith his Cruzado Plan. More recently he has been a senator. AntônioCarlos Magalhães, known as ACM, was also associated with the mili-tary dictatorship and was behind the 1964 coup d’état. He was a three-term governor of the state of Bahia, and a two-term federal senator;a very powerful politician widely considered to be entrenched in cli-entilist circles of money and power, but who also enjoyed popularityin his home state as a charismatic leader. Thousands attended ACM’sfuneral in Bahia in July 2007.

13. Zumbi was an African-Brazilian born on the runaway slave colony(quilombo) Palmares in the middle of the seventeenth century andwho led the colony in battle against the colonial forces. It took yearsfor the Brazilian army to destroy Palmares in 1694. Zumbi was be-headed in 1695 and is today a national icon of the struggle of blacksin Brazil.

14. MST English Web site, main page (http://www.mstbrazil.org/index.html), accessed October 28, 2004.

15. In practice, the ambiguity of this constitutional article has often al-lowed landowners to interpret it to their own benefit (see Branfordand Rocha 2002, 59).

16. “1984–2004: MST 20 Anos de Lutas, Conquistas e Dignidade!” MSTWeb Site, June 24, 2004 (http://www.mst.org.br/historico/historia.htm), accessed October 20, 2004.

17. Professor Else Vieira’s Landless Voices Web-based archive focused onthe MST is a truly impressive research project and resource (http://www.landless-voices.org). I am grateful to her and Malcolm McNeefor sharing their work with me.

18. This sonic reference to the nueva canción genre may also evidence arenewed burgeoning of pan-Latin American social awareness spurredin part by post-neoliberal governments in the region such as that ofHugo Chavez in Venezuela. Chavez supported the Rio de Janeirosamba school Vila Isabel in 2006 with their theme, “Soy loco por ti



América,” which ended up taking the winning prize in Carnival, al-though not without controversy. (Thanks to Jason Stanyek for point-ing this out to me.)

19. A baixada is a lowland, hollow, or slope, but I translated it here as“way” to communicate the sense of a dangerous neighborhood, orpassage.

20. Although 127 military police and nineteen higher-ranking officerswent on trial in June 2002, none of the police involved in the mas-sacre has been imprisoned. (see Amnesty International Press Release:“Brazil: The Eldorado dos Carajás massacre 10 years on,” April 18,2006).

21. Dr. Drauzio Varella’s book Estação Carandiru (1999) described hisexperience as a physician who made regular visits to the prison. The2004 film Carandiru was a vivid dramatization of this book and themassacre.

22. See “Brazil: Corumbiara and Eldorado de Carajás: Rural violence,police brutality and impunity,” January 1, 1998, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR190011998, accessed June 13, 2006.

23. Marote, from São Paulo, was also one of the producers of the firstBrazilian hip-hop album, Hip Hop Cultura de Rua, (Hip Hop StreetCulture, 1988).

24. From the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).25. “Classe média no sufoco” (Revista Época–Edição 395–14/12/2005).26. Ibid. Note that the authors cited here use the singular “middle class,”

while I have been using the plural “middle classes” in most instances.For a discussion of the two options as they pertain to analysis seeO’Dougherty 2002, 9.

27. Festival announcement, “A Nova Música do Brasil–TV Cultura,” athttp://www.brasilcultura.com.br/conteudo.php?menu=85&id=42&sub=458, accessed June 16, 2006.

28. Revista e no. 101, “Música,” http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/revistas/revistas_link.cfm?Edicao_Id=227&Artigo_ID=3540&IDCategoria=3864&reftype=2, accessed June 17, 2006.

29. Bloggers “StRaNgE,” Nov. 14, 2005, and “alltrillian,” Nov. 17, 2005,respectively, on http://www.radarpop.com.br.

30. Ricardo Antônio Lucas Camargo, January 16, 2006, on http://tuliovianna.org.

31. Ludmila Ribeiro, “Nem verso, nem prosa: Críticas rasas e poucapoesia na 3a eliminatória do Festival Cultura,” http://www.jornalismocultural.com.br/musica/cultura3.htm. As this reporter went on tonote, rap was, in fact, represented at the festival, but only with thespecial guest Thaíde who stood out as representatitve of hip-hop“and a whole generation of young musicians also absent from thefestival. . . .He reinforced the nostalgia that hovers over this festival



of 2005, really searching for a bygone era that will never return, rap-ping the classic protest songs of the [19]60s and 70s, ‘Roda Viva’and ‘Caminhando,’ [but] with the liberty for much more up-to-dateextemporizing.”

32. Blogger “Abrão,” January 18, 2006, on http://www.radarpop.com.br.33. “A cultura vive do que tece.” Revista A Rede, May 15, 2006.34. Blogger ricardo.ruiz, “Esses pontos de cultura são fracos,” referring

to an interview with Maria Stella Leite of the Pensarte Institute thathe read in the Viração Magazine. Blog posted on http://converse.org.br/, June 26, 2006.

35. In the cultural citizenship literature it remains unclear what dutieswould correspond to identity rights. (see, e.g., Miller 2001; Ong 1996;Pakulski 1997; Rosaldo 1999; Stevenson 2003; and Turner 2001)Theoretical efforts to work around this issue have been awkwardbecause there is a fundamental tension between communalist anduniversalist conceptions of citizenship on the one hand, and theparticularist nature of identity rights on the other.

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