Forthcoming
“Credibility, Commitment, and Constructing an Archive in Rural Northeast Brazil”, 2026 in Radical Visions: New Perspectives on Special Collections Curatorship; Agnes Czeblakow and Jillian Cuellar, editors. Published by the Society of American Archivists.
Enhanced footnotes for the article Talking Pretty and Kicking Up Dust: Modernity and Tradition in Macatu de Baque Solto of Pernambuco, published in Latin American Music Review, Fall/Winter 2017 38:2
Estrada – Talking Pretty and Kicking Up Dust
Verses in the opening epigraph
Audio of the poetry workshop Mestres João Paulo and Barachinha gave at the Instituto Brincante, São Paulo, in May, 2011 (extracted from a video camera recording).
Footnote 28 : Mestre Zé Joaquim singing at a rehearsal for Estrela Brilhante
Self-released CD from Mestre Antônio Paulo Sobrinho, 2011
Footnote 29 “Homenagem a quem se foi,” by Antônio Paulo Sobrinho, from the album “A Força da Poesia,”
Footnote 30: Mestre Manoel Domingos singing at a rehearsal for Leão Mimoso.
Footnote 33: Excerpt of Track 3 from this recording of Barachinha and Zé Galdino made by Jaildo Carreiro of Maracatu Estrela Dourada, Buenos Aires (Pernambuco)
Dissertation
“Caboclos of Nazareth: Improvisation and Renovation in Maracatu de Baque Solto of Pernambuco.”
2015, University of Michigan, Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology & History
Keywords: cultura popular, traditionalism, improvised poetry, authenticity and cultural revivals, Northeast Brazil
This dissertation looks at an expressive musical-poetic form and Carnival tradition that has developed over the last hundred years, maracatu de baque solto of Pernambuco, which has only recently begun to receive critical attention. Based on three years of ethnographic and historical fieldwork in and around the town of Nazaré da Mata from 2009 to 2012, the dissertation examines different understandings of authenticity and the dynamic relationships between notions of modernity and tradition within maracatu and a growing network of official cultural patronage. In exploring how the expressive genre of maracatu continues to develop, I examine how cultural identities can shift, calcify, or transform over time in relation to socioeconomic change, political developments, or interaction with other social groups.
Since its “discovery” by elite artists, researchers, and funding institutions, an emphasis on rural identity and origins on the sugar plantations has cloaked maracatu’s subsequent development by generations of working-class practitioners in the urban peripheries since the rural exodus of the middle twentieth century. I explore how the institutional frameworks created by folklore research and elite intellectual production about popular culture represent attempts to restrain maracatu within certain proscribed boundaries, contrasting this with the ways that maracatuzeiros have reappropriated elite discourses about cultura popular in strategic ways. My arguments build a foundation for developing the idea of coronelismo cultural, or “cultural boss-ism,” as a way of analyzing how maracatu has developed within the persisting structures of patronage and domination in the region, while asking how maracatuzeiros are confronting those limitations in a variety of ways.