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116-147
Brazilian Mulatice:
Performing Race, Gender, and the Nation
resumo
Este artigo analisa afigurada mulata no imaginario brasileiro situando-a no contexto
do mito da mesticagem e procura estudar a relacao complexa que as mulheres cariocas tern com este ideal social. As experiencias de mulheres no mundo do samba
demonstram que a performance da mulatice demanda trabalho corporal e discursive
De fato, a identidade da mulata nao se opoe a de categorias como "branca" ou "negra",
pois o conceito de raca no Brasil e tanto bipolar como continuo. Por exemplo, mulheres
que se auto-definem como negras ao mesmo tempo utilizam o mito da mesticagem para
ganhar acesso a remuneracao economica e reconhecimento social. Isto e possivel atraves
da mulatice e de usos estrategicos da cultura afro-brasileira, dancando o samba em
boates e desfiles de carnaval. O uso da "hibridacao estrategica" permite que jovens mulheres
"sejam alguem" num pais que oferece escassas oportunidades aos afro-descendentes.
She says she has brown skin, and a feverish body
And inside the chest, love of Brazil
"I am Brazilian, my body reveals
That my flag is green and yellow"
-Carmen Miranda (1993)
A polysemic category, the term mulata1 in the Brazilian context can refer
to "a woman of mixed racial descent,"2 but it also evokes images of voluptuous bodies, sensuality, and the ability to dance the samba. In its restricted
sense, however, it names an occupation; that is, only women who engage in
dancing the samba in a commodified spectacle and receive some form of
remuneration for it can be called mulatas. As one of my female friends once
remarked, "We are all mulatos at home, but there aren't any mulatas!" Beyond
the subtleties of this and other distinctions, mulata is perhaps merely a privileged signifier in a larger paradigmatic chain associating cultural terms such as
cabrocha, morena, and baiana. These terms denote "black woman" or "ligh
skinned black woman" and are inscribed in Brazil's complex system of racial
classification, composed of both a "fluid system" where slight gradations in
skin color are construed as distinctions begging specific denomination, and a
The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(1):116-147 copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association
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Journal of Latin American Anthropology
Natasha Pravaz
York University
"bipolar system" where mulatos are conceived of as black (see Fry 2000).
Depending on the context of utterance, the above-mentioned racialized and
gendered terms carry with them a certain fetishistic quality. In Brazil the mulata
is commonly portrayed as a woman always ready to deploy her tricks of seduction
and bewitchment, embodying the tropical ethos and national culture in her
proficiency at samba. In doing so, she performs what, following local usage, I
call muUtice (mulataness)—that is, the embodiment of a mulata's "essential,"
fetishized features. The mulata has become a central and problematic figure of
desire in the Brazilian and Western imaginaries, as testified in recent feminist
scholarship that study mulatas's objectification in diverse fields, such as employment opportunities (Bairros 1991), Brazilian literature (Bennett 1999),
"interracial" sex relations in general (Goldstein 1999), and international sexual
tourism in particular (Gilliam 1998), the world-famous shows de mulata (spectacles where mulatas dance the samba on stage) (Giacomini 1992, 1994), and
samba lyrics (Pravaz 2000).
The presence of women attempting to embody the social ideal of the
mulata is conspicuous in Rio de Janeiro's nighdife and in the world of spectacle
where they exhibit samba skills in cabarets for tourists as well as in the nationally
televised carnaval parades. The mostly poor and working-class women who
embrace the mulata role (see Giacomini 1991) do so as one of the only forms
of accessingfinancialremuneration in a country with one of the most unequal
patterns of distribution of resources in the world. Even though the figure of
the mulata is celebrated during carnaval and in other symbolic ways, the social
and class status of mulatos in general is not very different from that of AfroBrazilians locally classified as "black" (Hasenbalg and Silva 1988). Social
exclusion of Afro-Brazilians is expressed in many domains, such as the ability
to participate fully in the public sphere (Hanchard 1999b), residential segregation (Telles 1999; Twine 1998), employment patterns (Bairros 1991; Twine
1998), educational performance (Warren 1997), and aesthetic evaluation
Brazilian Mulatice: Performing Race, Gender, and the Nation
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(Simpson 1993; Damasceno 1997). In fact, while representing 45 percent of
the national population, Brazilian blacks and mulatos retain a monthly income
that is less than half that of whites (Hasenbalg and Silva 1999). The unequal
distribution of wealth in Brazilian society is particularly acute in the case of
Afro-Brazilian women (see, for example, Bairros 1991; Lovell 1999). Paraphrasing Angela Gilliam, we can say that "the carnivalization of poverty and
Brazil's dependence on the tourism industry has pushed poor women into the
situation of seeking escape from their minimal access to the nations resources
via [strategic displays of mulatice]" (1998:65).
Understanding how processes of racialization and gendering work in Brazil
demands that we pay close attention to the local practices in which these
processes manifest themselves. This paper addresses such problems by (1) tracing
the historical place of the social ideal of the mulata within Brazil's myth of
mestiqagem (cultural and biological hybridity) and (2) exploring women's complex relationship to this ideal in their (sometimes ambivalent) efforts to re-present
it. Recounting a diverse range of women's experiences in the world of samba,
I show that becoming a mulata is always an unfinished process and that, in
fact, far from being a "natural" attribute, performing mulatice requires a
substantial amount of embodied and discursive work. Moreover, as I demonstrate here, women's identities as mulatas are not exclusive and oppositional to
categories such as "white" and "black." These racialized terms overlap in everyday
speech as people variously identify self and others and allow women to negotiate
social spaces to their advantage.
As participants in my study attested time and again3, embodying the mulata
figure goes hand in hand with self-definitions based on both "blackness" and
"whiteness," in what would appear to be a contradiction in terms. Circumscribed
within local parameters for passing, a woman will play up her "blackness,"
"whiteness," or "mulataness" differendy depending on the context. In particular,
young Afro-Brazilian women who have been systematically marginalized in
economic and social contexts find ways of coping with their oppression by
playing on commonsensical understandings of mulatice at the same time that
they affirm their identities as black women. I contend that in embracing a
kind of "strategic hybridity" these women show us that racial identity is not
fixed and that nonpoliticized subjects also participate in what has been referred to
as the recent racialization of subjectivities in Brazil (Winant 1999; see also
Daniel 2000; Hanchard 1999b). This participation, however, is usually erased
from most analyses because women who perform mulatice are seen as blindly
taking on the myths of racial democracy and mestiâgem as the truths of
national identity, and because of a lack of attention to the situated-ness of
many processes of identity formation. In thinking about my participants'
subjectivities, I follow Peter try's suggestion that perhaps "one should
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understand the social and historical construction of race in Brazil as lying in a
tension between one taxonomy [bipolar races] and another [color continuum]"
(2000:97).
Moreover, it is important to note that mulatice as both personal attribute
and professional practice is not exclusively about racialization processes, but
has come to constitute a gendered disposition where sometimes "race" ascription
is apparently unimportant. The difficulty in understanding practices of mulatice
in Brazil resides in a series of dilemmas. According to local mores, a mulata is
understood as both a woman of color and a woman who knows how to dance
the samba, professionally or not. The latter definition sometimes implies an
understanding that all women who dance the samba are mestigas (mixed
women). As mentioned above, the paradox exists, however, where self-ascribed
white and black women engage in performances of mulatice, in ways that can
even lead to racialized conflicts. Mulatice is talked about in everyday language
both as an innate capacity or gift (dom) and as a "performance" in the artificial
and produced sense of the term. When referred to as a gift, the ability to
perform the samba is usually explained by making reference to notions of blood,
race, and color that can indistinctly refer both to mulatice and to blackness.
When understood as a performance, the embodied aspects of mulatice are
emphasized and many times the white women who perform as mulatas will
clearly attempt to distinguish themselves from any attributes of mulatice understood as color or race. Nonetheless, for both Afro- and white poor Brazilian
women, becoming a mulata is a strategy of upward mobility4 (not only regarding
the extra income afforded, but also in terms of the opportunities for "marrying up" or traveling abroad) and social recognition in a socioeconomic context which offers these women a limited set of job options, such as domestic,
secretarial, and retail work, as testified by many of my research participants.
The way in which women in general and women of color in particular are
made into spectacles has been denounced by many authors because of the
racist and sexist connotations involved in such image production,
commodification, and circulation (see, for example, Browning 1995; Boyce
Davies 1994; Gilman 1985; Gonzalez and Hasenbalg 1982; Luz 1983;
Nascimento 1978; Stam 1997). While I agree that the problematic of representation is a very important one, most of these critiques focus either on what
Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1990) call the "social body"—
that is, the representational uses of the body as a symbol of nature, society,
and culture—or on the "body politic" as regulation and control of bodily
practices. With a few exceptions (Browning 1995; Boyce Davies 1994) most
critiques do not take into account the "phenomenological body," or lived
experience of the body as self (see Crossley 1995; Csordas 1994; Lancaster
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1997; Wacquant 1998). I do not deny the importance of visual or even sexual
exploitation of women in the context of mulata spectacles. In fact, it is not
surprising that many of the women involved in the performance of mulatice
also engage in the practice of prostitution. However, I am more interested in
overcoming the dichotomies between inscribed and phenomenological bodies by
looking at the intertwining of these different bodies in a set of social relations.
In other words, it is important to understand how the women involved in
mulatice interpret such experiences, problematizing preconceived notions that
objectify them either by imputing stereotypical meanings upon their practices
or by seeing them as victims of an oppressing system that denies them any
agency in the matter. I believe that analyzing women's narratives and accounts
of their experiences will enable us to better understand the importance of the
phenomenon of mulatice in Brazil. In doing so, my work follows the recent
trend in anthropological analyses to inspect the cultural dimensions of racial
inequality and identification among nonelites in Brazil (Giacomini 1992;
Sheriff 1999, this volume; Twine 1998). This trend pays close attention to the
formation of local subjectivities and their relation to broader problems such
as national ideologies and the gendered structure of social inequalities.
The Spectacle of Hybridity
After several years away, I returned to Brazil in October 1997 in order to
pursue fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation on the mulata and the myth of
hybridity as national identity. I had been living in Rio de Janeiro for a few
months and had begun to think that my fieldwork was heading toward complete failure. My intense involvement with the escola de samba (samba school)
Unidos da Cereja3 had been very rewarding on a personal level, but it had
been impossible to establish contacts with the mulatas of the escola. In order
to gain access to them, I had first to contact Tadeu, the director of passistas
(samba dancers) who had been ignoring my coundess phone calls since day
one. In January 1998, however, my luck turned. Xuxa, host of the Planet
Xuxa6 program, announced an upcoming contest on her television show. The
Carnaval Girl for 1998 was going to be elected, and the prizes would be a car
and the opportunity to participate in that year's carnaval parade with one of
the important local escolas de samba. Women between 18 and 25 years of age
who had completed their secondary education were eligible to participate.
My friend Enrica at Unidos da Cereja announced one Saturday during rehearsal
that she would enter the contest. She needed to go shopping for a new pair of
golden high-heel sandals and some almond oil to smooth over her skin—
apparently it makes one's skin shiny, a desirable thing when performing the
samba onstage. The following Wednesday I went to the Fenix Theatre—one
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of several studios of TV Globo, Brazil's largest media corporation—in the
Jardim Botanico neighborhood. It looked like a good opportunity to finally
find some participants for my study since the organizers of the contest had
clearly announced that "the preference was for a mulata."
At the Fenix Theatre there were over two hundred women ready to
participate in the contest. They were of all sizes, shapes, and colors: It looked
like anybody could be a mulata, as long as she was young. I went to the back
of the auditorium to find a place to sit and started chatting with some of the
women around me. They did not seem to know each other and looked bored
waiting for their turn onstage. I asked them what the contest was about.
"Samba," they all said at once. I inquired whether they thought they had a
chance. One of the women, Vitoria, answered immediately with a reference to
her skin color: "Of course, the one who really dances the samba is the mulata?
she laughed, teasing the other participants. "Where did you learn?" I asked.
"You don't learn, you are born knowing it; it's in the blood," she explained
proudly. Another woman emphasized the performative aspect of her mulatice
instead: "I am the real mulata, the one whofightsfor what she wants," responded
Sandra. "To shine and attract people's attention. Traffic comes to a standstill.
Likes to dress up, put makeup on, be looked at. You look over your shoulder,
there is someone staring, then everything is all right. I think that the charm of
the mulata is in the buttocks," she said, making it clear that the swinging of
the hips was one of her trademarks.
In spite of the evidently mediated and "produced" character of events
such as this contest, when I first arrived in Brazil, I still believed a "pristine"
space of primary production of these cultural forms should exist. This space
would in turn be transformed, put into circulation, marked discursively, and
lastly commercialized for the general public. I believed this so much so that
Unidos da Cereja turned into my second home. After all, escolas de samba
and the popular cultural forms associated with them are conventionally thought
of as the roots of samba and hence the place where mulatice must originate.
However, when entering through the doors of TV Globo, where over two
hundred participants waited for their call to fame, I had my ethnographic
epiphany: The practice of mulatice was not circumscribed to the sphere of
popular culture, where rodas de samba, rehearsals, and parades reproduced
embodied ways if being. Until then, Pierre Bourdieu's model of the habitus
(1977, 1984) seemed sufficient to theorize the relationship between mulatice,
bodily practices, social location, and the pedagogical persuasiveness of primary
socialization and imitation. But now it wasn't enough. In other words, I could
not conceive of mulatice as a "product" of Afro-Brazilian culture anymore. It
actually seemed to be structured in relation to a certain gaze. It was there in
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the anxious space of the waiting room—a space only possible in relation to
another space, that of the yearned for stage, of the spotlight in front of the
television cameras—that these young (black, white, and brown) women's
subjectivities were structured as "mulatas." In fact, even the spaces of escolas
de samba are caught up in this logic. Each escola has its grupo-show (show
group), whose members are often not part of the local communities that the
escola de samba is supposed to represent. For these women the escolas are yet
another space of circulation in their search for fame, another place, in Sandra's
words, "to shine and attract people's attention."
My experience at TV Globo illustrated the need to develop an understanding of the key issues that would eventually become the central axes of my
research. A number of questions already organized the project, such as "How
did the mulata become such an idealized figure in the Brazilian imaginary?"
and "Why isn't there a male equivalent to this image?" To these questions,
others were now added, concerning the entry of the mulata in the world of
spectacle and image consumption: "How do we explain that so many white,
lower- and middle-class women have learned and embodied the mulatas
habitus?" If the preference was for a mulata, "Why were there so many black,
white, blonde, and brunette women in the contest for the Carnaval Girl?"
The mulata appeared to be, more than a concrete person, an ideal or fantasy
that mulato and nonmulato women tried to incarnate. She was a promise of
glory allowing women to gain entry into a social space of symbolic gratifications.
In order to tackle old and new questions, the work of several feminist
anthropologists and philosophers has been very relevant. In particular, Judith
Buder's (1990, 1993) notion of performativity, allows us to understand identity
and identification as a fluid process and as a practice whose goal is never
completely accomplished. It helps us disclose the open-ended processes of
identification with discursively produced subject-positions. These ideas are
central to an understanding of the materialization of "sex" or "race" in the
body as a regulatory practice whose efficacy is not grounded in biological
truth but in the repetition of social rules based on the impulse to approximate
and embody normative ideals. In order to understand how these patterns are
produced, Butler incites us to explore the "convergent set of historical formations
of racialized gender, of gendered race, of the sexualization of racial ideals, and
of the racialization of gender norms" (Nelson 1999:206). Feminist anthropologists such as Dorinne Kondo (1990, 1995), Diane Nelson (1999), Ann
Laura Stoler (1991, 1995), and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1993) have pursued
Butler's question in their ethnographic work. Stoler (1991),forexample, explores
how imperial authority and racial distinctions in the Dutch East Indies were
structured in gendered terms, while Nelson's (1999) work on Guatemalan
ethnicity and nation-building pays close attention to local strategies in the
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gendering c&mestizaje. The bodies of women are territories upon which colonial
and nation-state powers have been deployed in symbolic and concrete ways
by resort to fetishized and racialized discourses. In the formation of Brazilian
national identity as it developed from the 1930s onward, mulatas' bodies would
become the privileged representation of the "mixed" character of the nation.
Mulatas, Mesti9agem, and Nation-Building
How has the mulata become such an idealized figure in the Brazilian
imaginary? The cultural specificity of this phenomenon needs to be
contextualized within three interrelated axes that set the stage for the idea of
the mulata to become iconic: the development of samba in early 20th-century
Rio de Janeiro; president Getiilio Vargas's nationalistic policies of cultural
promotion; and Gilberto Freyre's sociocultural theories of hybridity.7 These
phenomena congealed around the mulata with the aid of essentialist understandings of women of color's sexuality.
Twentieth-century iconographic, literary, and popular representations that
shape current discourses of Brazilianness at the national and international
levels stereotypically present an image of the mulatas body as the height of female
attractiveness, as the perfect embodiment of the heat and sensuality of the
tropics, and as a representation of Brazil itself. These associations can be seen
as pan of an ideological strategy which uses gendered and racialized representations (in this case, mulatas' bodies) to produce a metaphorical conception
of the social order (see Sanday 1990; Parker et al. 1992). While gender-race
ideologies legitimated specific sexual roles for white men and black women
during colonial times8, at the beginning of the 20th century a set of metaphors
and stereotypical associations glorifying the sex appeal of the mulata became
embedded in local understandings of Brazil as a mestico nation.
From literary writings spanning from the late 1800s (e.g., Aluisio de
Azevedo's O Cortigo) to the 1970s (e.g., Jorge Amado's work), from the samba
lyrics of the 1930s (see Pravaz 2000) to the pornochanchadas (erotic comedies)
of the 1970s (Stam 1997), the figure of the mulata has been celebrated for her
incandescent sexuality and her innate passion. Associated with the development
ofmaxixe (one of the precursors of samba) and samba in Rio de Janeiro (Efege
1974; Chasteen 1996), the mulatas embodiment of eroticism-qua-Brazilianness
would be best expressed in her ability to dance. In order to understand this
process, let us remember that during the 1930s samba itself was elevated to a
symbol of national identity, stimulated by the populist policies of cultural
promotion instituted by president Vargas's office and by the diffusion of the
radio and the expansion of record companies, which contributed to samba's
incorporation into the upper-classes' consumption patterns (Matos 1982;
Vianna 1995). Hermano Vianna suggests that from the 1930s on, all of Brazil
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began to recognize Rio de Janeiro's culture as source and emblem of their
sambista identity (1995:26). Black expression-turned-mestic,o culture,
samba would become the best indication of the hybrid character of the nation
(see Chasteen 1996; Fry 1982; Sheriff 1999).
In his work on samba's transformation from local practice to national
icon, Vianna (1995) points out that the historical development of this cultural phenomenon was closely tied to the advent of Gilberto Freyre's theories
on Brazilian identity. In fact, it has become de rigueur to mention the
importance of Freyre's myth of mesticagem (cultural and racial "mixture") in
Brazil's process of national identity formation (see Da Matta 1981; Mota 1977;
Fry 2000; Ortiz 1985; Parker 1991; Skidmore 1993). In what constituted a
devastating critique of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries' theories of
scientific racism and mulatos' degeneration, Freyre constructs a model for
understanding Brazilian society based on the trope of hybridity, a positive
sexual and cultural force promoting the integration of African, Portuguese,
and indigenous traditions in the formation of national identity (Freyre 1963,
1968,1975,1986). His "exercise in nation-building" (Fry 2000:89), Casa-Grande
e Senzala, constitutes
A deep and definitive inflection in the process of redefinition of national
identity. The bases for an ideology of mesticagem are constituted then, an
ideology that would orient the cultural aspects of Brazilian governmental
policy at least until the end of the military dictatorship. In such ideological
body, the affirmation of a "mestico Brazilianness" as a form of unity in
diversity—in the terms intellectually systematized by Freyre—is maintained
as a pre-requisite to the constitution of the national political community.
[S. Costa 2002:42, my translation]
The use of cultural forms such as samba became central in this "affirmation
of mestic/) Brazilianness," participating in the political process of transforming
ethnic symbols into national ones (see Fry 1982). The notion of cultural
mesticagem invoked here, however, did not fully overcome the biological
determinisms of previously dominant racial theories. It actually became deeply
intertwined with stereotypical and idealized understandings of "brownness"
which also participated in the production of a national community. As clearly
stated in recent literature on the politics of race in Brazil, "the nation cannot
be disregarded as a framework for the production of particular forms of racism"
(Segato 1998:135; see also Silva 1998:225).
Gilberto Freyre's conceptualization of Brazil as an inherently hybrid society went hand-in-hand with a eulogy of mulatagem (mulatoness), particularly
in its female or feminized form. If mesticîgem had been the process par excellence
of formation of national identity, mulatos stood as the most Brazilian of all
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national characters, with their extroversion, talent for intimacy, and plasticity
(1968:646-647). In fact, the Pernambucan writer has been praised for
conceptualizing mulatice as local ethos (see Coutinho 1994). In Sobrados
e mucambos he asserts, "In terms of his attunement to the Brazilian environment and his easier and deeper adaptation to its interests and needs, the mestico,
the mulato, the brown man . . . shows higher intelligence and leadership than
the white or almost-white man" (1968:661, my translation). Mulatos exemplify
for the author the tendency toward a common pattern and the fundamental
unity of the nation, which are opposed to foreign, multiculturalist models
emphasizing ethnic diversity (see Freyre 1963).9 Freyre's exaltation of the
mulato figure, however, was even more explicit when referring to women. In
Modos de Homem e Modas de Mulher Freyre tells of how filmmaker Roberto
Rossellini had expressed an interest in making a film based on Freyre's masterpiece Casa-Grande e Senzala, whose main goal would be to exhibit miscegenated
Brazilian women's shapes and colors. Freyre states that it is a real shame that
such a film did not find enough support in Brazil, for
It is the kind of support needed to commend the radiation of those Brazilian
female styles .. . associated with the aesthetic phenomenon .. . of positive
and creative aspects—as well as eugenic and hygienic, aesthetic [aspects]—
of a miscegenation that nobody can ignore as the process of affirmation
of Brazilian peoples, as an expression of new and healthy types of men
and, above all, in its aesthetic aspect, of women. [Freyre 1986:54, my
translation]
Freyre's book overflows with references to female morenidade (brownness)
such as these, emphasizing the role of Afro-Brazilian women's body shapes
(hips in particular) as aesthetic ideal in Brazil and pointing to the obvious
temptation these represent for Brazilian men, who "cannot ignore such provocations" (1986:178). In making such a clear connection between these bodies
and Brazilianness, Freyre's work can be conceived of as a privileged source of
archetypes articulating local myths of origins and current understandings of
the mulata. Not only do Freyre's texts "explain" Brazil anthropologically, with
its tendencies, preferences, and desires, but also constitute those very tendencies,
founding a certain discursivity (see Foucault 1984:101-120) that has become
hegemonic in local understandings of both mulatas and the nation. Clearly,
Freyre did not invent the sexual preference for the mulata; however, it is possible
to see that his discourse articulated particular ideas about race and gender into
a metaphorical conception of the social order (see Guimaraes 1995b:32).
Specifically, Freyre's understanding of mesticagem, constructed as a love fable
between white masters and black female slaves, was that it tended to dissolve
racial prejudices (1975:lx), constituting "the cornerstone for a common belief
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in Brazilian racial exceptionalism: the idea that Brazil, unlike other multiracial
polities, was not a land of racial inequalities" (Hanchard 1999a:5).
In spite its claim to the contrary, this exceptionalism, defined in Freyre's
theories by the idea of "racial democracy," was still dominated by the old
ideology of whitening (branqueamentd) which permeated the racist analyses of
the Turn of the Century, influenced by the theories of Louis Agassiz and Arthur
de Gobineau. In the local appropriation of foreign theories of hybridization,
Brazilian proponents of scientific racism had posited that miscegenation would
ultimately derive in a process of whitening through which the gradual
predominance of white traits over black ones could be ensured, both in the
body and spirit of mulatos (see Araujo 1994:29; Skidmore 1993). "Whitening
was the response of a wounded national pride assaulted by doubts and qualms
about its industrial and economic genius" (Guimaraes 1995a:219; see also
Ortiz 1985). Freyre's thought, in fact, did not change the racist assumptions
of whitening:
Actually the whitening thesis . . . came to signify the mobility of mesticos
within the social hierarchy. On the one side, whitening was an empirical
statement of fact, an upward mobility track followed by Blacks; on the
other side, it presupposed a racist view of blackness to which the theory
remained silent and acritical... Whitening hereafter signified the capacity of
Brazil to absorb and integrate mesticos and Blacks. This capacity implicitly
requires a willingness of people of color to repudiate their African or
indigenous ancestry. Thus, whitening and racial democracy are, in fact,
concepts of a new racialist discourse. [Guimaraes 1995a:220]10
The whitening ideal implicit in the myth of mestujagem has clearly integrated itself into current understandings of mulatas as aesthetically idealized
women. To be sure, common understandings of Brazil as a racial democracy
go hand in hand with the carnivalization of racialized desire (Goldstein
1999:572-573) and of poverty (Gilliam 1998:65), trivializing the deep social
inequalities permeating Brazilian society while reinforcing local and international
perceptions of the nation as a tropical paradise. Indeed, one of the oftenoverlooked aspects of the myth of mestiâgem pertains to how the historical
process of racial mixing is assumed to have been pleasant to both sides of the
race—gender divide (Gilliam 1998:62-63). White plantation masters raped
their female slaves (see Carneiro 1999:222), but the latter's double subalternity
was to be erased by a series of images which associated racial "essences" with
gender ones, and which came into play in fetishized understandings of black
female sexuality.11 "'Racism' exists when one generalizes about the attributes
of an individual.., based upon a predetermined set of causes of effects thought
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to be shared by all members of a physically defined group who are also assumed to
share certain 'metaphysical' characteristics" (Gates 1986:403-404), such as
the "ability to dance" or "play basketball," for example. In colonial Brazil,
black women in general and mulato ones in particular were stereotypically
seen as highly desirable and inherently lustful. Their systematic violation and
rape by the white master was ideologically legitimized by a symbolic inversion
in which white masters were depicted as "victims" of black female eroticism.
The "essence" of their nature was understood as wild and unbridled, and their
relationships with white men conceptualized as a love fable.12
Such associations were transformed in the context of early 20th-century
theories of mesticîgem as national identity, where mestico characters were
elevated as representations of Brazil. Mulatas, as opposed to black women in
general, would receive the publics attention in national culture, exposing the
whitening ideal behind the myth of mesticagem (see Skidmore 1993:192).
Despite the serious attack Freyre's ideas have received since the 1960s13, they
are still very much alive in everyday discourse, continuing to influence local
understandings of Afro-Brazilian women and expressing the bonds between
colonial, imperial, and contemporary race stereotypes that constitute mulatice
as beauty. In the case of mulatas sambistas, however, the whitening ideal described
above does not necessarily mean that people of color have to "repudiate their
ancestry" (Guimaraes 1995a:220). They are not only "rewarded in proportion
to their cultural and phenotypical approximation to the European psychosomatic
ideal" (Daniel 2000:155), but also by their ability to perform the Afro-Brazilian
cultural form of samba now turned into a privileged symbol of nationhood.
The development of the mulata's role is thus clearly framed by dominant
discourses on Brazilianness. Conversely, the performance of mulatice both on
and offstage contributes to the maintenance of an understanding of Brazilian
national identity as mestic.o. By the 1930s, the mulata had been elevated as
the epitome of national identity in the realm of the imaginary, representing
mesticagem in the objectified form of "woman." At the level of everyday
sociability in Rio de Janeiro, and particularly within the realm of the nightclub and the carnivalesque pre-Lenten celebrations, mulatas sambistas and
maxixeiras became the playful companions of elite white men, whose white
wives or girlfriends could not participate in such risque" activities without
threatening their "good name" (see Chasteen 1996; Efege 1974).
In the context of a national politics that hindered ex-slaves' and their
progeny's participation in the local economy by favoring the massive immigration of a (white) European labor force (Fernandes 1965, 1972; Hasenbalg
1979; Hasenbalg and Silva 1988), women of color would put into practice
creative means of access to economic remuneration and social recognition.
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Soon the society of Rio de Janeiro, where the development of samba (and its
precursor the maxixe) took place, would engage in the dramatic
commodification of cultural forms such as the samba, instituting a spectacle
out of what had been an ethnic form of self-expression.14 Mulatas and women
of color in general began to take part in the performance of mulatice in a
variety of social spaces, engaging in several practices of self-objectification
such as acting in movies, modeling, dancing the samba in local cabarets,
and participating in beauty contests and carnaval parades. In the 1960s, impresario Oswaldo Sargentelli created a spectacle for the entertainment of the
elite and tourists alike, which would bring him fame as the "inventor" of the
Brazilian mulata: the show de mulatas. This Broadway-inspired musical would
eventually lead to the professionalization of a previously existing social role,
contributing to the international marketing of Brazilianness and inciting hopes
of fame for local women.
The relationship between national identity, hybridity, and spectacle, then
again, becomes further complicated when one inspects the particular ways in
which women performing mulatice conceptualize this practice. Within this
national framework of mesticagem and whitening, particular subjectivities
become possible and, indeed, privileged. I am interested here in exploring the
gendered embodiment of the nation contained in mulatas' identification practices as both an emancipatory and a constraining political project, particularly
because "theories of 'race' and womanhood have become separated from the
way identity is experienced. The complex ways in which we talk about our
identities at the experiential level do not always fit with those expressed at the
conceptual level" (Weekes 1997:124).
Who is the Mulata, after All? Mulatice as Identification
One of the central elements in the constitution of the social figure of the
mulata in the realm of everyday interaction is indeed her perceived (through
color and other phenotypic characteristics) or "real" (traced through descent)
mestico quality, as many explained to me in our conversations. These conversations involved the identification of others as well as practices of selfidentification. Marenice, for example, the director of passistas of a small escola
de samba in Niter6i (a city neighboring Rio de Janeiro) described herself as
the following: "I am parda [brown]. In the larger context, I am a mulata.
Because my father was mulato and my mother was white. Therefore, I am not
white." This way of doubling color and descent in characterizing someone as
a mulata is very common in local discourse. For example, Patriska, a young
anthropology student who hosted me during the National Congress of the
Brazilian Anthropology Association (ABA) in Espirito Santo state, told me
128
when she heard about my research project: "You found me, the true mulata!
[Indicates her skin color.] . . . But you need a genealogy to determine the race.
My grandmother was native, real Indian, but my mom is also the daughter of
an Italian man. My dad is the one who is black, son of black people."
Oftentimes, however, the characterization of someone as a mulata is far
from straightforward. Two of the participants in the contest for the Carnaval
Girl engaged in a debate on Carla Perez in one of our interviews several weeks
after the event. Carla Perez is a locally famous young woman who, at the time
of the interview, used to dance to the sound of axe*-music (a Bahian musical
form) in a band named £ o Tchan.13 Sandra said, "Carla has everything the
mulata has: she dances the samba, has large buttocks, a curvaceous body . . . "
Isaura, on the other hand, insisted, "No way, she isn't a mulata, she is very
light-skinned. On TV she looks like a white woman." Sandra's reply, alluding
to Carla Perez's racial origins, seemed to put an end to the debate: "But her
father is black!"
Atfirstglance, these articulations seem to indicate the obvious: The category
of the mulata is just a local way of talking about a woman who is misturada
(mixed). This mix refers both to skin shade and to origin and makes claims to
some combination of "black" and "white" either in terms of phenotypic characteristics or of the racial identity of the parents. However, if this were all the
mulata is about, she would not be so famous. In order to understand the
importance of the mulata in identity formations, it is necessary to pay attention
to some of the ideas addressed above when discussing Gilberto Freyre's work
and the myth of mesticagem, since in everyday speech the figure of the mulata
as hybrid taps into the deep-seated discourse of Brazil as race mixture paradise
(see Caldwell 2000; Giacomini 1991, 1992, 1994; Silva 1998).
First, when people talk about race in Brazil there is a tendency to throw in
as many terms designating racial categories as one knows, in ways that appear
to reproduce this dominant narrative of racial hybridity. Vitoria, one of the
participants of the contest in Xuxa's program, met me for an interview a few
weeks after the event accompanied by her boyfriend Celso. They engaged in a
discussion about the different categories that existed in local usage when I
asked whether Carla Perez could be considered a mulata:
Celso: Carla is considered yellow, right? Because there are four races in
Brazil: blacks, yellow
Vit6ria: There are three races.
C: Cafuso16, yellow, blacks.
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V: No, there aren't any yellows. Black, mameluco17, cafuso, that's it. And
whites.
C: Yellow, mameluco, cafuso, that's it. And whites. But there aren't whites
in Brazil, real Brazilians, don't you agree?
Natasha Pravaz: So, there aren't any whites in Brazil?
V: Yes there are.
C: There are, but nowadays you only see a few of them in Brazil. Because
the races got mixed, since the invaders arrived to Brazil. The Portuguese
mixed with the blacks, the French mixed with the blacks, blacks mixed
with the races, understand? Mixed, Brazil is mixed, it's a race mixture.
The association between Brazilian identity as mixed and mulatice is made
explicit by Celma, a 40-year-old woman who used to perform in Sargentelli's
nightclub, the Oba-Oba, and now makes a living by selling clothes at home:
"Mulata is the mixture of the races, of the black and the white, showing what
Brazil is."
Mulatice, however, is not about mulatos in general. The idea that a
racialized figure can "show what Brazil is," is a very gendered one, much in
the way of Gilberto Freyre's narratives. As one of the pamphlets for tourists
advertising the Oba-Oba reads, the nightclub offers "a musical journey across
the authentic Brazilian folkloric show. Full of samba and carnaval with the
famous mulato girls." The Portuguese version reads " . . . com as mats lindas
mulatas" (with the most beautiful mulatas). It is the female mulato "girl" who
can perform authentic Brazilianness. In these particular associations, mixture
and femininity appear to be deeply intertwined with local values of beauty
and sexual attractiveness. These associations are part of the "job description"
for the mulata show (professional mulata)18, the same kind of associations
expected of a "go-go girl," with a twist—the need for brown skin color. However tied to mulatice as a job description, these associations spill over local
conceptions of the mulata offstage. Priscilla, a young, single, mass communications student, told me: "The stereotype [of the mulata] involves a certain
kind of clothing, hair, a way of walking, of talking. The hair is long, as long as
it gets. [Mulatice] is trying to pass on a lot of sensuality, to play with people's
libido. It is to have large buttocks and to wear skimpy clothes, high heels,
fetishes, right? You have to see it to understand." Held by many cariocas19 as
the quintessential Brazilian beauty herself, Valeria Valenssa, a woman who
performs the samba bearing her skin on a TV Globo video clip, embraces the
discourse that put her on the national pedestal: "Since I travel a lot, I've seen
130
such beautiful women, like brunettes, straight hair, you know? Amazon Indians;
I think it's because Brazil has that mixture stuff, of the races." She talks about
how wonderful it is to be seen by thousands of people when she dances the
samba in the carnaval parades and about how being a mulata opened many
doors for her.
The constitution of mulatice as beauty is inscribed in the "racial hierarchy of
desirability" implicit in both the practice and ideology of whitening (see Twine
1998:89), where whiteness is assumed as the norm, a dynamic also present in
the colorism and pigmentocracy of Caribbean plantation societies (Weekes
1997:114-118). Moreover, the codification of a mulata aesthetic is part of
what Kia Lilly Caldwell (following Patricia Hill Collins) has analyzed as the
"controlling images" which naturalize racialized and gendered forms of structural inequality and obscure power relations in Brazil (2000:10; see also Gilliam
1998). At the same time, however, women engaging in mulatice are not
necessarily trying to erase their blackness. Despite the severe criticisms against
the color system of classification20, it is important to point out that up to a
certain point, there are occasions when Brazilians do negotiate their racialized
identities.
Probing a litde further, Valeria switches from calling herself a mulata to
asserting her identity as a black woman. She explained this by saying, "Passou
de branco, negro e" (Darker than white, is black).21 In this slippage between
simultaneously defining oneself as a mulata and as black, she was not alone.
Patriska, for example, who claimed I had found the true mulata when I met
her, later stated, "But this mulata thing is worrying me. We have to define the
mulato as coming from the black, right? The mulato comes from a race. That
color is determinant."
One of the ways in which we can conceptualize this seeming paradox is
by understanding it as a distinction between color and race systems of classification. Robin Sheriff (this volume) has identified some of the problems presented
by the standard ways of interpreting the uses of color-race terminologies in
Brazil, which are based on Marvin Harris's and Roger Sanjek's model of the
"Brazilian system of racial classification," where supposedly "over a dozen
racial categories may be recognized in conformity with the combinations of
hair color, hair texture, eye color and skin color which actually occur" (Harris
1964:57-58). The arbitrariness of such imposition of a racialized typology
onto native categories based on color and other phenotypic characteristics
erases the subtleties of local discourse, where ambiguous distinctions perceived
in the color spectrum do not necessarily correspond to differentiated racial
identities. On the contrary, Sheriff argues, race is a bipolar category in Brazil,
and the use of other color terms to name the black race is a linguistic strategy
of etiquette addressing and avoiding the racist investments of such words.
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Being attentive to the dynamics of identity and social recognition specific to
Brazil and furthering the idea implicit in Sheriff's account, that black
Brazilians do not suffer from a "lack of racial consciousness," I would like to
suggest that race in Brazil is both bipolar and based on a color continuum,
and that women performing mulatice both play into dominant understandings of Brazilianness and recognize the ways in which they have been exploited
and marginalized.
This hypothesis can be seen at work in the discourse of women such as
Vit6ria, who asserts in the same breath that the mulata "is the color, someone
like me," and that "it is black. Because here we have three types: white, black,
and mestico, you know. You say mulato in order not to say black, which
sounds . . . " she says, adopting a facial expression that clearly indicates the
pejorative connotations of the word black. Away from the halls of the Carnaval
Girl contest, Vitoria had a very interesting and complex way of talking about
what a mulata was. When I interviewed her and Celso a few weeks later, I
picked up on her comment on the mulata being the one who truly knows how
to dance the samba and asked her to clarify what the word mulata meant.
Vitoria: Mulata . . . People say "mulata," the common people.
Celso: It's the people who are regarded as being lighter.
V: It is they who say "mulata."
Natasha Pravaz: Who says "mulata"?
V: People. Men say, "Ah, look over there, the mulata passing by" [With a
tone of admiration]. They put that name, but there isn't such a thing.
NP: Men?
V: Yes, men. "The mulata." But there isn't, mulato. It's either black or
white, isn't it?
NP: I don't know, you tell me! [Laughter.]
Such a characterization of the mulata is striking for its way of clearly
identifying the masculine gaze as the site where the term acquires it local
meanings (see also Bennett 1999). In addition, Vit6ria negates the category of
the mulata by embracing the bipolar model. She is in fact very proud of being
black, particularly because of the suffering and struggle encountered by the
black race. In her career as a runway model, Vit6ria sees a way of enhancing
racial pride.
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Elizete, another self-identified black woman whom I met during the
rehearsals of Unidos da Cereja, also recognizes the masculine gaze as producing
the notion of the mulata: "The fact that they [white men] slept with a black
woman is what generated the mulata: the mixture of the races. Not only the
Portuguese but also others who came here, Frenchmen. I think it is a form of
racism, this idea that the mulata has to be well-endowed, hot, good in bed."
Despite such heightened awareness of the play of dominant gender and race
relations, Elizete was one of the Queens of the Percussionists for our escola de
samba in 1998 and was very happy to perform the samba on stage and to
represent the escola de samba in that year's carnaval parade. This role, Elizete
claims, has nothing to do with the stereotypes of mulatas she described to me.
For Elizete, in this context racism is played out when professional mulatas are
not paid well for their work. She says that she performed in shows de mulata
for free many times, just for the pleasure of dancing the samba on stage,
exhibiting her skills to the public.
The interpretation of mulatice as victimization of women of color is
simplistic not only because of the immense delight women take in showcasing
their talents, but most importantly because mulatice is understood by many
as a source of racial pride itself. If samba as a cultural form can be alternatively
read as being both hybridly Brazilian and purely black, mulatice is also at the
same time interpreted as mixture and recognized as blackness in disguise. If
we put together Vitoria's comment on the mulata as "the one who really knows
how to dance the samba" and her assertion that the mulata is really black, we
can begin to understand why for many Afro-Brazilians dancing the samba is
conceived of as an attribute of blackness. This conception "harms the Brazilian
ideal of assimilation [through] the cultivation of differences" (Guimaraes
1995a:225), showing that mulatice is ambiguously related to both whitening
and negritude (blackness).
Celma, who is retired from the stage, nowadays participates as a member
of the jury in many samba contests and other carnivalesque events. She told
me of her outrage when a white woman won the first prize in the most recent
competition she had overseen, the "Tropical Samba Girl." When I asked her
to explain, she said:
Why? Because she is white. The white woman doesn't have the samba in
her race [nao traz o samba na raqa\. No matter how much she dances the
samba, she doesn't samba, she doesn't know how to do it. It has nothing,
nothing, nothing to do with it [nao tern nada a ver]. She can even know
how to dance the samba, but it has nothing to do with the samba. What
is the samba? It is the crioula22 [black woman] and the mulata. But deep
down, the black woman and the mulata are all the same thing, right?
133
[Laughter]. What am I, mulata? I am the child of a Portuguese and a
crioulo . . . What am I? Mulata. So, there are two races: black and white.
We say mulata because it is a common expression [4 forfa de expressao],
but deep down, what am I? I am black.
This "force of expression," this power of a historically-shaped language
which exposes the complexities of social relations and naming practices and
keeps inciting women to identify with their mulatice at the same time that it
reveals its constructed character, also appears in Sandra's remarks when she
contested the criteria used in the Garota Planeta contest:
It was war. The contest was only for blacks, but a lot of blondes and
brunettes showed up . . . If there was a contest for blondes, I wouldn't go
. . . the mulata has to be real good in order to get where she wants. In the
contest there were six different phases, first they wanted the bodies to be
clean . . . I think they should have selected all mulatas, but they chose six
blondes and six brunettes [morenas].
The space of samba and carnaval appears here as invaded by the presence
of whites, who do not belong. These white women now rival the spaces of
celebrity previously reserved for women of color. In her statement, Sandra
collapses the supposed distinction between blacks, morenas, and mulatas, alternating those words to make reference to nonwhite women in general23, and
pointing to the appeal samba contests are beginning to have for white women.
Even though a black woman ended up winning the contest, displaying dazzling
charisma and dance skills, mulatice is now disputed by women such as Luiza
Brunet and Luma de Oliveira, white models and television stars who desire to
capitalize the allure conferred by performing the samba for the camera in
carnaval parades.24
When the contest for the Garota Planeta was over, I went downstairs to
the hall where the participants in the event were heading. There I met the
mother of Branca Cortazar, one of the women who had just lost the contest.
The woman was talking loudly and in a very angry manner to one of the
janitors of the theater. She said, "This is totally unacceptable. Why is it that
they think only blacks can dance the samba? My daughter is an excellent
performer, look at her [she shows the janitor a picture of her white daughter],
isn't she beautiful? She is a model, and she has won many contests. That Berin
[one of the judges], it was his fault, he has this fixation with mulatas . . . " As I
came closer, she started talking to me too, and showed me the same picture.
She complained, "This is a real problem, you see, all these crioulos who keep
saying that carnaval is their business, but this is discrimination. If it wasn't for
the whites, they wouldn't have the Sambddromo" she said, referring to the
auditorium at Marques de Sapucaf Avenue where carnaval pageants take place
134
and which was designed by a white architect. "The crioulos have to stay in the
batuque [percussion], which is what they really know how to do, but it is the
whites who provide the organization." Such comments exemplify the ways in
which many white Brazilians relate to Afro-Brazilian traditions. Branca's mother
invests samba and carnaval positively and attempts at "appropriating" these
cultural practices while disavowing their use in any form of racial identity
politics. Her racist remarks on samba's roots in an Other's culture ("the crioulos
have to stay in the batuque") disclose the tensions present in hegemonic understandings of blackness, at once site of desire and contempt, at once source of
the myth of mesticîgem and object of structural and face-to-face discrimination.
Conclusion
There are many questions we can pose regarding Brazilian mulatice. My
research participants' statements puzzled me. If so many of these women clearly
identified themselves as black, why did they also play with the notion of the
mulata? If they identified the stereotypical connotations associated with the
concept, what justified their embrace of the stereotype? How can we make
sense of such contradictions? In the context of my research, these paradoxes
seem to be pointing toward something else beyond strategies for avoiding the
racist connotations of "blackness." I suggest that the use of the category of the
mulata as a practice of self-identification can also be understood as a strategy
of survival in a world of limited options due to class immobility and structural and face-to-face racism. This strategy to begin with can be a means of
upward mobility through a remunerated and socially valued job. In the larger
context, however, it is a way of achieving social recognition by tapping into
the polyphony of discourses of race in Brazilian society. The myths of
mestujagem and racial democracy have been analyzed by many authors as
ideological constructs whose most important consequence is a misrecognition
of the striking economic inequalities and power differentials that constitute
the relationships between blacks and whites in Brazil. Although this is certainly
true, I consider that the force of these myths can be better understood if we
also pay attention to the productive effects these narratives have in everyday
life, in identity formation, and in the world of spectacle.
Mulatice is not only a way of talking about Brazilian national identity or
even about masculinist, stereotypical understandings of "black" women. As
social narrative, it has also come to be an ego ideal and an ideal ego. By this I
mean that some Brazilian women have, on the one hand, come to desire and
aspire to the subject-position of the mulata as a kind of personal identity, and
on the other, view themselves as embodying the quintessential mulata. According
to Stuart Hall, "identities are points of temporary attachment to the subject
positions which discursive practices construct for us . . . They are the result of
135
a successful articulation or 'chaining' of the subject into theflowof the discourse
. .. An effective suturing of the subject to a subject-position requires, not only
that the subject is 'hailed,' but that the subject invest in the position" (1996:6).
Becoming a mulata, whether by means of embodying current stereotypes
regarding particular ways of walking, dressing up, and dancing the samba, or
through a gig at a nightclub, is just such an investment. The mostly AfroBrazilian (but also white) women who build temporary attachments to the
subject-position of the mulata do so in the context of a web of powerful discourses articulating the mixture of the races, Brazilianness, and femininity.
"Mulata is showing what Brazil is." The chaining of subjectivities to this discourse
becomes evident when women such as Vitoria proudly evoke their mulatice
in the contest for the Carnaval Girl.
The temporary nature of such chaining and the specificity of the contexts
in which it occurs have also been recognized by Alma Guillermoprieto in her
work on the escola de samba Mangueira:
There was the recurring, and crucial, distinction made between dark- and
light-skinned black women, between black women and mulatas: but
mulatas existed only, it seemed to me, in relation to whites . . . Black
women auditioning for the Oba-Oba, Rio's famous cabaret for tourists,
said they were hoping for the chance "to be mulatas? because, one explained
in an interview in the newspaper O Globo, "to be a mulata must be the
best thing in the world." In Mangueira, the fantastically beautiful Fia,
light-skinned and hazel-eyed, "worked as a mulata? someone explained
to me. She was a mulata when she put on net stockings and a sequined
bikini and danced for the white foreigners at the Meridien Hotel. She was
probably a mulata^ when, folding up a costume and pushing away from
the sewing machine at Dona Neuma's, she adorned herself with lipstick
and silver dangly earrings and went to meet her white boyfriend, a senior
official in the Rio military police. But in the favela she was simply a black
woman with light skin, black in her culture, black in her gestures, black
in her view ofthe world, like everyone else there. [Guillermoprieto 1990:180]25
The "effective suturing" of mulatas to the subject-position constructed by
the discourse of mesticagem reinforces local hierarchies of desirability and
perpetuates sexualized stereotypes about Afro-Brazilian women, perhaps further
limiting women's options in an already difficult labor market. On the other
hand, it appears that mulatice plays into the struggle for social recognition in
ways that defy simple interpretations.
Anthropology, as I see it, asks that we understand the dynamics of identity
and of social relations in contextually appropriate ways; moreover, it asks that
we give our research participants the "benefit of the doubt" when it comes to
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determining whether they are "conscious" of their social conditions. Following
recent trends in the analysis of race relations in Brazil (S. Costa 2002; Fry
2000; Segato 1998; Silva 1998), I refuse to understand mulatice in terms of
false consciousness, and I question the all-powerful nature of the grip of
mesticagem upon the women who perform such practice. It has been suggested
that black identity in Brazil is on the rise, that race is becoming more dualistic, as opposed to continuous (Winant 1999:106; see also Daniel 2000:170).
In truth, probably only an exhaustive longitudinal research on race selfascription could provide more definitive information on this issue. The racial
politicization of the public sphere has evidently allowed Afro-Brazilians to
talk in different ways about their identity, but at the level of everyday life,
blacks and mulatos have always been reminded of their "difference."
Many participants in my research have a deep awareness of the processes
of social exclusion impinging upon their lives. Even when they assert that
"mixed breeding forms the basis of contemporary Brazilian population" (Segato
1998:144), they still hold critical views about this process and question the
racism entailed in such practices. Moreover, they engage in what I call a form
of "strategic hybridity," performing mulatice at the same time that they participate in the production of racialized subjectivities. In fact, dancing the samba
is invested in the production of both hybridity and "blackness" as a cultural
value. It is not so much that "racial identities" do not exist in Brazil (Fry
2000:103). Rather, Afro-Brazilians have too much invested in the myth of
mesticagem as a productive narrative of subject- and nation-building. The
mulato escape hatch (Degler 1971) appears to be a "mulata escape hatch,"
giving young women a fleeting opportunity to be rewarded for their dance
skills and for becoming the embodiment of the nation.
Notes
Acknowledgements. I wish to thank Jorge Balan, Kenneth Little, Margaret
MacDonald, Carlos Neves, Ana Ning, Nancy Randall, and Mary Weismantel
for their comments. Special thanks go to Jean Rahier for kindly inviting me to
submit this paper and for his helpful feedback, and to the three anonymous
reviewers whose careful reading was a true source of inspiration.
1.1 use the local term mulata in order to make reference to these multiple
meanings.
2. While mestico is a term used to indicate "mixed descent" in general
(i.e., including all possible racial combinations), mulato is a term that makes
specific reference to the "mix" of black and white ancestry.
3. Between October 1997 and September 1998, I conducted a series of
unstructured and semi-structured interviews with Brazilian men and women
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about the social figure of the mulata and her role in the world of samba.
Although many of these conversations were with women who perform as
mulatas in a variety of spectacle forms, my main focus here is on the mulata as
an everyday life experience.
4. Mulatice is also a disposition cultivated by upper-class white actresses
and supermodels who use the televised carnaval parades as public spaces to
showcase their bodies and expand their sphere of influence.
5. A pseudonym. All personal names have been changed to preserve the
anonymity of my informants, except in the case of famous publicfigures,such
as Valeria Valenssa, who are used to having their personal views published and
take it as an opportunity to extend their fame.
6. One of the most watched television shows in Brazil, aired on Sunday
afternoons. The variety/talk show for teenagers hosts different music bands,
interviews, and a heavy content of merchandising. Xuxa is a tall, blue-eyed
blonde whose look is replicated in the Paquitas, teenage women who dance
and sing along with Xuxa. See Amelia Simpson (1993) for a sharp critique of
the politics of gender and race in Xuxa's television show.
7. Of course, this is a more complex issue. This schema is provided to give
the reader a general idea of the historical events involved in the cultural
production of the mulata.
8. Under slavery, the role of the female slave as sexual object was naturalized:
It was expected that as a regular "function" of her condition, she would satisfy
the sexual needs of her master (see Bastide and Fernandes 1959; Giacomini
1988).
9. These ideas were mirrored in Vargas's policies of ethnic unification and
erasure of hyphenated, migrant identities.
10. For a detailed ethnographic account of the pervasive effects of
whitening in the everyday practices of Afro-Brazilians, particularly the failure
to generate an alternative aesthetic hierarchy and an educated self-identified
black middle class, see Twine 1998, chapter 5.
11. This interplay of race, gender, and sexuality in the production of colonial
and neocolonial orders is not, of course, exclusive to Brazil. Many authors
have studied the impact of stereotypes of nonwhite and female eroticism in
diverse international settings. See, for example, ComarofT 1993; Fausto-Sterling
1995; Gilman 1985; Savigliano 1995; Stoler 1991, 1995; and Young 1995.
12. For an excellent examination of these issues vis-a-vis mulatas' respectability, see also Silva 1998:227.
13. See, for example, Fernandes 1965, 1972; Ianni 1970, 1972; E. Costa
1966, 1977; Da Matta 1981; Mota 1977; Skidmore 1993.
14. The understanding of samba as a product of black culture (Appleby
1983; McGowanan and Pessanha 1998; Lopes et al. 1987) has been the object
138
of debate in the literature and challenged by authors who inscribe it within a
more hybrid or syncretic origin (Vianna 1995; Chasteen 1996).
15. Literally, "It's the Tchan." The meaningless word "tchan" became
synonymous with "large buttocks" in local slang due to Carla's widely advertised
102 centimeters of "tchan."
16. The child of a black person and an indigenous Brazilian.
17. The child of an indigenous Brazilian and a white person.
18. See Sonia Giacomini's work (1992) on the professionalization of the
mulata.
19. Natives of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
20. Michael Hanchard, for example, has rightly stated that "focusing on
the numerous color categories in Brazilian racial politics can obscure the broader
racialized social totality in which these categories operate, and the racial meanings
that structure social interactions and limit individuals' ability to simply choose
their own racial category" (1999b:72). His analysis of race relations in Brazil,
however, lacks an awareness of the specifically gendered dynamics of these
relations. In particular, the absence of an explicitly feminist analytical framework prevents the author from understanding the racist aspects of the
fetishization of the bunda (buttocks), for example (see 1999b:78 n. 4).
21. Other possible translations of this expression are: "He/she who is not
white is black" (Fry 2000:97), and "Passed by white is black" (Sheriff, this
volume).
22. The word crioulo has a usage similar to the English nigger. It might be
used colloquially by self-identified black people quite casually, but it is usually
offensive when used by self-identified whites.
23. Sandra also complains about the restrictive criteria of beauty (no
blemishes, stretch marks, or cellulite) used in the contest. Samba contests
increasingly appear to be more about physical appeal than about dance skills.
24. For an analysis of the "theft" of carnaval by whites, see Sheriff 1999.
25. hfavela is a Brazilian shantytown.
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