Prose Fiction and Non-Fiction Prose: A Thirtieth Anniversary Issue || Black Rome and the Chocolate...

Black Rome and the Chocolate City: The Race of PlaceAuthor(s): Christopher DunnSource: Callaloo, Vol. 30, No. 3, Prose Fiction and Non-Fiction Prose: A Thirtieth AnniversaryIssue (Summer, 2007), pp. 847-861Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30139281 .

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BLACK ROME AND THE CHOCOLATE CITY The Race of Place*

by Christopher Dunn

The horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which for thousands of former and current residents of New Orleans is still ongoing, cast a spotlight on the inequalities of racial formations in the United States. No other event since the civil rights era has generated more outrage and debate on the state of race relations in the United States, but these discussions rarely note the specificity of New Orleans in relation to the rest of the country, nor to its place in the larger context of the Afro-Atlantic world. As a resident of the city, I have thought about the profound racial implications of the Katrina catastrophe for New Orleans. As a scholar of Latin American, specifically Brazilian culture and society, I couldn't help but to understand the ongoing crisis, and the debates it has generated, in comparative terms.

After four months of exile following the storm, I moved back to New Orleans during a contentious mayoral race involving the African American incumbent, Ray Nagin, and a slate of mostly white candidates, including prominent Democrats like Mitch Landrieu, the son of New Orleans's last white mayor to date and the brother of Senator Mary Landrieu. There were several Republican candidates, representing tony Uptown neighborhoods, who wouldn't have even considered running before Hurricane Katrina displaced tens of thousands of black working-class residents.

The mayoral race cast a spotlight on the "place of race" in the reconfiguration of the city: How would the displacement of so many people, most of whom were black, impact racial politics in the city? What were the racial implications of calls for the city to have a smaller "footprint" as recommended by Uptown politicians, real estate developers, archi- tects, urban planners, and environmentalists alike? How would the influx of thousands of workers, mostly from Latin America, impact the culture and politics of the city?

The mayoral contest also raised the question of the "race of place," which is perhaps more difficult to define and determine, yet seems to be the subtext for so many of the political debates in the city. How does race figure into the fragmented and contested "imagined community" of New Orleans? What does it mean to define a place in terms of race, a suspect yet persistent category of social identification and categorization?

This question was foregrounded on January 16, 2006, as Ray Nagin addressed a small group of supporters on the steps of the federal courthouse following a Martin Luther King

* This essay was originally prepared as a lecture for the "Race and the Americas" symposium at the 2006 South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting in Charlotte, NC. I wish to thank Barbara Ladd for her kind invitation to participate in that event. I am grateful to Garnette Cadogan, Bruce Raeburn, and Joao Jose Reis for their insightful comments on this essay.

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Day parade: "It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day." As critic Ned Sublette remarked later in an editorial for The Nation, "political campaigns are built on hooks much the way pop songs are," and Nagin's "chocolate city" speech would be the defining moment of his reelec- tion. It was all the more resonant because he in fact referenced a pop song, the title track of Parliament's 1975 album Chocolate City, written by George Clinton. Chocolate city was originally the nickname for Washington, D.C., but Clinton's song expanded the term to include those cities, like New Orleans, that achieved black majorities in the sixties and seventies in the wake of white flight: "There's a lot of chocolate cities around / We got Newark, we got Gary / Someone told me we got L.A. / And we're working on Atlanta / But you're the capital, C.C."

There was much in the speech that I found regrettable; namely, his suggestion that hurricane Katrina was God's way of punishing black America for its social problems. Yet I was also dismayed to find that most of the opposition to Nagin's speech had nothing to do with his reference to God's hand in destroying New Orleans. Instead, white middle- class New Orleanians and the mainstream press focused their outrage on the idea that New Orleans was a "black" or "chocolate" city, an idea that seemed perfectly reasonable, even obvious, to me, since I moved here ten years ago.

On the day after his ill-fated Martin Luther King Day speech that provoked such a nega- tive reaction from white residents, the business community, and especially tourism and convention promoters, Nagin quickly back-pedaled on his characterization of New Orleans as a chocolate city. "How do you make chocolate?" the mayor asked rhetorically. "You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That's the chocolate I'm talking about." His explanation, with its echo of the popular metaphor of cafe con leche (or in Portuguese, cafe corn leite) in Latin America, was not convincing to most New Orleanians, despite the city's self-fashioning as a place of racial mixture. His rhetoric likely helped with the black community, including thousands exiled. Indeed, Nagin was eventually reelected after a run-off against Landrieu.

There is no doubt that the crisis provoked by Hurricane Katrina cast a spotlight on persistent and profound racial inequalities in this country, raising basic questions about citizenship rights for a population that was so miserably treated and represented in the weeks after the storm. Subsequent controversies over race and identity raised important questions relating to the way New Orleanians imagine the city's blackness, an understanding of which is essential for coming to terms with the city's identity as a place of mixture.

In 1960, when New Orleans's population peaked at about 630 thousand, the black population made up only 37%. Forty years later New Orleans was a city of about 480 thousand people, 67% of whom were African American, with nearly 1.4 million in the entire metropolitan area. The city's current population, two years after Katrina, comprises 270 thousand residents, an estimated 58% of whom are African Americans. Predictions that New Orleans would become again a white-majority city after Katrina appear to have been wrong.

The city's identity has always been a contested one, subject to competing characteriza- tions often qualified with superlatives. Citing its long history of Afro-Creole expressive and material culture, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has argued that "New Orleans remains, in

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spirit, the most African in the United States" (59). Tourist guidebooks, on the other hand, often herald the city as the "most European" of all American cities, usually with reference to the French Quarter, with its distinctive architecture, its outdoor cafe+- and its abundance of street performers. New Orleans is also frequently described as the "most Latin" city in the United States, due to its French and Spanish colonial history, but also to its historic ties to the Spanish Caribbean. The first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, El Misisipi (1808), and the first Spanish-language daily, La Patria (1846), were published in New Orleans. Yet today there are vastly more Latin Americans, both in absolute and relative terms, in other metro areas. Indeed, from the perspective of post-war immigration, New Orleans has been one of the least "Latin" cities in the country, notwithstanding a large pre-Katrina Honduran community. This has changed in the last two years with the influx of Mexican, Central American, and Brazilian workers, who have been contracted (and often exploited and defrauded) to gut houses, repair roofs, and rebuild infrastructure.

Latin American intellectuals have also claimed New Orleans as a city stranded in the "Anglo north," but spiritually and culturally allied with the "Latin south." Writing in the mid-1940s, Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade remarked that "in North America, we have a sister region--Latin, Catholic, and mestica Louisiana. With her we can get along and communicate (51)." For him, the rest of the United States was driven by Protestant capitalist values of competition and conquest, leading to internal social conflict at home and imperialist aggression abroad. Recently, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes wrote a series of articles for the Madrid daily El Pais urging fellow Latin American writers to rally to the cause of aiding the city. These articles appeared in the weeks following the hurricane, at a time when several Republican politicians, most notoriously the former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, were openly expressing doubts about whether New Orleans should be rebuilt with federal aid. Fuentes appealed to his colleagues for their support, arguing that New Orleans was a "ciudad mestiza" (a "mestizo city"), unlike any other city in the United States, and invoking the old adage: "Latin America begins in New Orleans."

The Chocolate City affair and to some extent Fuentes's essay prompted me to think comparatively about New Orleans. I thought specifically about Salvador, Bahia--like New Orleans, one of the great cities of the Afro-Atlantic world. This particular comparison does not depend solely on the simple fact that these are the two cities that I know best, but stems also from impressionistic observations, expressed by Brazilian visitors and residents of New Orleans as well as by New Orleanians who have traveled to Brazil, of the similarity between the two cities. I have always found this comparison appealing in some ways, but also problematic.

In the 1930s, Mae Aninha, a famous priestess of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble, began promoting the idea that Salvador was the Roma Negra ("Black Rome"). She reasoned that just as Rome was the center of Catholicism, Salvador would be the center of Candom- ble, even though orisha worship developed among the Yoruba of present-day Nigeria. The anthropologist Ruth Landes later cited Aninha's characterization of Salvador in her classic 1947 study City of Women: "Brazilians had sound reasons for considering Bahia as the gateway to West Africa. One prominent Negro woman even called the city the 'Negro Rome" (17). The term gained wider circulation via the French-Swiss avant-garde poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars, who first came to Brazil in the 1920s and had a significant influence on Brazilian modernists in Sao Paulo. In his travel writings he referred to Bahia

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as the "Black Rome," apparently also influenced by Mae Aninha. Most recently, French anthropologist Michel Agier published a book, Rome Noir, Ville Metisse, in which he argues that despite centuries of miscegenation and cultural mixing Salvador has constructed a national and international discourse around Africanness. The term Roma Negra has largely fallen from use but reemerges now and then in popular culture, as in Caetano Veloso's song "Reconvexo": "Eu sou a sombra da voz da matriarca da Roma Negra / Voce ndo me pega, voce nem chega a me ver" ("I am the shadow of the voice of the matriarch of Black Rome / You can't get me, you can't even see me").

Although she never traveled outside of Brazil, Mae Aninha inherited a tradition of practices and discourses that assigned great value to cultural connections with West Africa. Early leaders of Candomble belonged to post-abolition transnational community who traveled frequently between Salvador and coastal ports like Lagos, Porto Novo, and Ouidah. As J. Lorand Matory has shown in Black Atlantic Religion, Afro-Brazilian retornados played a significant role in forging expressions of African nationalism under British colonial rule. Afro-Brazilians who received secular and religious instruction in Nigeria would in turn have a decisive impact on the Africanist and markedly Yoruba-centric discourse of Candomble. The leaders and organic intellectuals of Candomble placed a premium on notions of African, specifically Yoruba, purity precisely at a time when modernist intellectuals and the Brazilian state were constructing a national identity discourse that celebrated "mixedness" and cultural hybridity. Several key white (or light-skinned) intellectuals of Bahia also promoted the discourse of Yoruba purity, often as a way to mark what was distinctive and noble about Bahia. For the most part the discourses of purity and hybridity have coexisted with relatively little tension, producing the duality captured in the title of Agier's book--Black Rome, Mestico City. This is not to suggest that there is no racial conflict in Salvador, only that the openly Afro-centric forms of cultural expression and group identity have historically coexisted with the discourse of mesticagem promoted by the Bahian political and cultural elite.

The reconciliation of notions of African purity and Brazilian hybridity is central to the discourse of baianidade, which in its contemporary form typically combines a celebratory affirmation of blackness and black culture with notions about cordial, non-confrontational race relations, sensuality, aesthetic beauty, and specific performative competencies captured in the popular saying "baiano n nasce, estreia" ("Bahians are not born, they debut"). These are stereotypes, but ones that have had a significant impact on both collective self- fashioning, promotional discourses, and outside perceptions. In general, Bahians of all colors, including the white elite and middle-class, have no problem with the idea that Salvador is a black city. In fact, it is precisely the cultural elite, through official institutions like the Bahiatursa (the state tourist board) that seems most invested in this particular construction of baianidade. This has had little bearing, however, on forms of racial exclusion and violence that have adversely affected the black community of Salvador.

The Afro-Brazilian community constitutes roughly 85% of the total population of Salvador, now a city of nearly two million people. Fifty years ago it was about the same size as New Orleans, which highlights the very different demographic trajectories of the two cities. Edward Telles argues in Race in Another America that the black community of Salvador is unique in Brazil for maintaining a distinct cultural identity shaped largely by the force of Candomble religious communities and popular cultural expressions. He

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quotes a white former mayor who asserted proudly that Salvador is an "African city." Although the majority of Salvador's city council is black, most of these representatives do not seek electoral support on racial terms, nor do they advocate identifiably "black" causes once in power. Telles observes that Salvador is a city "where blacks are granted nearly free run of the cultural realm, and where the culture of Africa is celebrated, apparently in exchange for relinquishing claims to economic and political power so that it can continue to be monopolized by a small white elite" (213). In contrast, New Orleans is a city with a well-established black political elite that has been in power for three decades, but that has maintained an ambivalent relationship with its cultural identity as a black-majority city.

The contrasts between the two cities are abundant, but so are the points of convergence. They have remarkably similar economic trajectories, from sugar production rooted in slave-based plantation economies, to the boom in off-shore petroleum exploration and production in the 1970s, to the development of tourism as a major source of revenue. New Orleans and Salvador are "festive cities," in the sense used by David Guss in his study of the "festive state" in Venezuela, invested as they are in the promotion and management of festive rituals for economic development, international visibility, and negotiation of local tensions and conflicts.

New Orleans and Salvador are often imagined in their respective countries as special or "unique," but for different reasons. Salvador, also referred to simply as "Bahia," was the original colonial capital of Brazil until 1763 and still maintains the aura of a founda- tional city, symbolized by its impressive architectural patrimony. In recent years the state government has promoted the city with the slogan, "Bahia: Brasil Nasceu Aqui" ("Bahia: Brazil was born here"). New Orleans also cultivates a public identity as "unique," but its singularity is represented and imagined in relation to an ideal rationality and propriety of an efficient "puritan" United States. In "The New Orleans Manifesto" (2003), C. W. Cannon writes: "Let us thank the gods for the generous strains of French, Spanish and, above all, African cultures that have inoculated New Orleans against the body-hating, life-hating Puritanism that brutally curtails the sensual lives of too many Americans. Praise Bacchus, praise Legba" (139). New Orleans is the "Big Easy" and "the city that care forgot," where, until Katrina destroyed much of the city's urban infrastructure and services, it was common to see bumper stickers blithely celebrating the city's dysfunction and underdevelopment with the slogan, "New Orleans: Third World and Proud." Today I see fewer of these bumper stickers, which seemed especially popular among college students and others who didn't have to worry much about the scandalous inadequacy of the public school system and other basic services that primarily affected working-class black communities. In Salvador, a city with hundreds of thousands who live in abject poverty, "thirdworldism" is not ripe for irony; it is invoked rather in an insurgent, Afro-Diasporic vein, connecting the social conditions of the city to more globalized struggles for recognition and inclusion.

Throughout the twentieth century, both cities were economically and politically marginalized but also emerged as recognized centers of black cultural production, most notably in the realm of music. The early story of jazz and its national projection involves musicians such as King Oliver and Louis Armstrong traveling up to Chicago, where they would have opportunities to perform and record, spreading the sound of New Orleans "hot jazz" in clubs and via the airwaves. Likewise, the story of samba centrally involves Afro-Brazilians from Salvador who migrated south to Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth

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century, especially following the abolition of slavery in 1888. Establishing "origins" is almost always a dubious endeavor, but we can identify the presence of many of the most important samba musicians and composers-like Pixinguinha, Donga, Joao da Baiana, and others-as habitues of the home of the famous Tia Ciata (Aunt Ciata), a Bahian matron who hosted parties in her home near the Praca Onze, in the area around the port known as Little Africa, in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In the 1920s and 1930s, modernist intellectuals and nationalist politicians seized upon samba as a symbol of Brazilian identity that was aesthetically useful, but also politically expedient for forging multiracial cross-class alliances and for projecting via the airwaves modern, urban popular music closely associated with brasilidade, or Brazilianness, thereby helping to unify a vast and regionally diverse nation. The sambistas themselves played a key role in advocating their music as an emblem of nationality much in the way that Candomble leaders positioned their religion as an emblem of regional identity in Bahia.

In the United States, jazz also was heralded as a symbol of American cultural identity in the 1930s. Early critics recognized New Orleans jazz as a unique cultural vernacular from which other "hot" styles developed and also as a form of American high art. With the advent of swing, jazz also became a popular phenomenon. In the northern cities large audiences, sometimes integrated, would go out to listen and also dance to big bands. A dichotomy between "art" and "entertainment" developed in the 1940s with the emergence of bebop, which consciously positioned itself as high art for aesthetic contemplation. In this context, New Orleans-style jazz was often derided as mere "entertainment," devoid of formal complexity. In the 1950s, emergent popular forms like R&B and rock captured the attention of youth, while modern jazz became the domain of musicians, specialized critics, and connoisseurs. The notion of jazz as a symbol of a multicultural national identity was also critiqued by critics and musicians who sought to position jazz as reaction to racism. The rise of black nationalism in the 1960s further distanced jazz from the discourse of "Americanness," as musicians and critics alike sought to emphasize its cultural specificity in a context of acute racial conflict.

Despite the efforts of writers like Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, it took decades to reclaim jazz as quintessential Americana. This discourse finally reached a mass audience with the Ken Burns documentary, which devoted a great deal of time to New Orleans music and relied on a narrative arc shaped by Wynton Marsalis, who positioned jazz as "the purest expression of American democracy." In the first episode, Marsalis affirms that jazz "is America's music born out of a million negotiations [. .1between black and white {. . .1 between the Old Africa and the Old Europe that could only have happened in an entirely New World." Metaphors of dialogue, mixture, and negotiation guide the narrative from the first episode, titled "Gumbo," the regional cuisine that contains contributions from Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans. "Gumbo" is the standard metaphor for cultural hybridity in New Orleans, recognizable as such throughout the country, but not generalizable as a national trope of mixture and collective belonging in the way that feijoada is for Brazil or congri is for Cuba. Instead, gumbo remained a regional cuisine, associated with the unique cultures of New Orleans and southern Louisiana.

Several years after the documentary, Marsalis produced a program of Brazilian in- strumental music for Jazz at Lincoln Center. In preparation for the event, he read exten- sively about the history of Brazilian music available in English translation. In an article

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promoting the event published in the New York Times, he cited enthusiastically Hermano Vianna's study The Mystery of Samba, which documents the intersection of artistic modernism, popular music, and the articulation of a mestico national identity. Marsalis writes, "during the 1930s the Brazilian intellectual elite decided to embrace and foster a national philosophy in which the African was not denigrated but celebrated as a fundamental and inseparable component of the Brazilian national identity." Marsalis contrasted the position of prominent American intellectuals in relation to jazz: "Our failure to embrace the best of African-American music as central to our national identity sent our music culture into a tailspin that we are still reeling from." Although not explicitly stated, it seemed clear that Marsalis was interested in the early history of samba because it related to his efforts to position jazz as a metaphor for mixture and dialogue in the United States.

From a Latin Americanist perspective, it is tempting to view the 1930s and 1940s in the United States from the point of view of what "might have been." What if jazz had always remained "central to our national identity"? What if the Harlem Renaissance had become the dominant force in American modernism? Several scholars have argued convincingly that the movement may be read as an expression of multiracial American cultural nationalism involving the circulation of ideas among black and white people. But given the context of segregation and racial violence, the Harlem Renaissance remained relatively limited in scope and impact in comparison with various Latin American modernisms often allied with state power, which privileged "mixed" ideals of nationality-what Tace Hedrick has suggestively called "mestizo modernism" in her book largely devoted to Mexico and Peru.

The most influential architect of Brazilian national identity discourse, Gilberto Freyre, may be understood within this general paradigm, although he was dismissive and hostile toward the modernist avant-garde of Sdo Paulo, who he regarded as excessively influenced by European literary trends. As a student at Columbia University in the 1920s, he also held a dim view of jazz and seems to have been oblivious to the Harlem Renaissance, which then flourished around him. Freyre argued that mesticagem -biological and cultural "mixture" between Europeans, Africans, and Indians-was the very condition of possibility for Portuguese colonization in the tropics. In 1933, he published his first and most acclaimed study, Casa Grande e Senzala (translated in 1946 as The Masters and the Slaves), which focused primarily on the relationship between the "slave quarters" and the "big house." Freyre describes in graphic detail the specific forms of gendered and racialized dominance and violence in this context, but ultimately constructs a narrative around reconciliation, harmony, and cultural exchange. Later, he would develop the theory of Luso-tropicalism, celebrating the supposed adaptability and miscibilidade (the height- ened capacity for interracial sexual reproduction) of Portuguese colonials in the tropical climates of Brazil, Africa, and Asia. Freyre's vision became increasingly more rigid and ideological, eventually coalescing around the notion that Brazil was a "racial democracy," which would be promoted as quasi-official discourse by the military regime in the 1960s and 1970s. Today he is read less by historians of colonial and imperial-era Brazil than by scholars of "mestico modernism" in Brazil.

Freyre regarded Salvador, not his native city of Recife, as paradigmatic of mestico Bra- zil. As Patricia Pinho has recently documented, Freyre affirmed that Bahia was the "most harmoniously mestica of the Americas and most expressively Brazilian of Brazil" (238).

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Freyre had a notable impact on Bahian modernism most famously represented by novelist Jorge Amado, who dedicated his long and successful literary career to chronicling the social struggles and affective experience of working-class blacks and mesticos of the Bahian coastal region. He is best known for his later novels that praised sexual and cultural mesticagem, much along the lines of Freyrean Luso-Tropicalism. Artists from other realms of cultural production also contributed to the national and international projection of Salvador as a place of magic, sensuality, and tradition. Noting that Salvador was largely left out of the first phase of national modernization, Bahian intellectual Antonio Riserio has argued that the city's "mythic aura" increased in direct proportion to the national perception of its "traditionalism" (166). Dorival Caymmi made a career in Rio with songs about Afro- Bahian fishermen, female street vendors, neighborhood parties, and Candomble festivals. His first hit was "0 que e que a baiana tem?" ("What is it about the Bahian woman?"), recorded and performed on the silver screen in 1939 by Carmen Miranda, who was thereby aided in launching an international career in Hollywood with her highly stylized baiana costumes. It is during this period, roughly between 1930 and 1950, that Bahia was constructed in the national imagination as a place that was simultaneously exotic and paradigmatic vis-a-vis the nation.

In contrast, New Orleans is typically regarded as idiosyncratic, even exterior to the southern United States. A Jamaican friend who has lived in New Orleans for many years recently told me that a friend back home once remarked that he "loved New Orleans because it's so close to the U.S." Whether or not it was intentional, there is a wonderful irony in this observation in the way that it doubly inverts the popular saying that New Orleans is the "northernmost city of the Caribbean"-a discourse that is related to but not the same as those that celebrate the city's African and Latin identities. The "Caribbean- ness" of New Orleans is typically imagined today in terms of festive traditions, especially carnival, and an ambiguous system of racial classification.

There are good reasons for drawing historic cultural connections between New Or- leans and the Caribbean. In 1809, the population of the city doubled with the influx of ten thousand refugees from St. Domingue, via eastern Cuba, in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Historians estimate that these migrants were divided in thirds among white plantation owners, free people of color, and black slaves. This population joined an already established multiracial population of French and Spanish-speaking Louisiana creoles in the Vieux Cane (or "French Quarter") and adjacent faubourgs of Treme and Marigny, at a time when Anglo-American Protestants, mostly from the south, were settling Up- town, bringing with them English-speaking black slaves. The influx of refugees from St. Domingue likely delayed the process of Americanization of the city for several decades, and certainly contributed to the performative practices linked to Catholic Mediterranean and Caribbean cultural traditions.

The discourse of Caribbeanness is closely connected to the identity that emerged around the term creole during the colonial period. A complicated and disputed term, its meaning changed radically across space and time. It derives from the Latin word creare, to beget or create, and its early modern usage is usually attributed to the Portuguese crioulo, which referred to blacks, both freed and enslaved, who were born in the New World. Still today, in Brazil the term crioulo only refers to people of African descent and is typically used in a derogatory or condescending manner, unless used informally by Afro-Brazilians among

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themselves as a form of collective affirmation. In Spanish America, criollo also referred to American-born people, but depending on the historical and geographical context could refer to people of European descent or to people of mixed or African descent. It was introduced to Louisiana in the late eighteenth century during the period of Spanish rule to refer to the native-born of any color. French and Spanish-speaking people of all colors used the term to distinguish themselves from Anglophone whites and blacks. In the nineteenth century, however, the designation "creoles of color" emerged, suggesting that this identity did not entirely transcend race.

More than any other city in the United States, New Orleans has been historically associated with racial mixing. In his study Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach cites a popular poem penned in 1829, clearly written from an Anglo-American perspective: "Have you ever been to New Orleans? If not you'd better go / It's a nation of a queer place; day and night a show! / White men with black wiyes, et vice-versa too! / A progeny of all colors-an infernal motley crew!" (185). In the postbellum period, however, the racial order that allowed for a good deal of social interaction between whites and creoles of color was increasingly strained by an emergent biracial logic enforced by Anglo-Americans. By the late nineteenth century, as Anglo-Americans gained political and economic supremacy in the city, the "creole" identity became bitterly contested as white creoles endeavored to dispel any associations with racial mixing or blackness.

The federal statute that ushered in the age of Jim Crow segregation was built on the Supreme Court case of Homer Plessy, a light-skinned creole of color, identified as "white" on his voter's registration card, who was nevertheless arrested for attempting to enter a whites-only coach of a passenger train. With the Plessy case, the ambiguous, "Caribbean" character of the racial order in New Orleans was definitively undermined by what Roach calls the "apocalyptic Anglification of the old Code Noir," referring to the French legal code that was considerably more tolerant of racial mixture (181). Jim Crow didn't put an end to creole culture, community formation, and sociability, but it did mean that the creoles of color were increasingly subject to the same pressures and restrictions endured by Anglo-African Americans, generally a poorer population with less access to formal education and other means of social ascension. The creoles of color found common cause with the black population at large, forming an important core of early civil rights leaders. The new biracial order intensified existent relations between Downtown creoles of color and Uptown blacks, contributing to cultural exchange that played a role in the formation of early jazz.

In this context, it's worth examining the roots of New Orleans carnival, typically imagined as a distinctly "Latin" and Catholic celebration that sets the city apart from the rest of Anglo North America. Yet the dominant parading tradition of the city was established in the mid-nineteenth century by prosperous white Protestant men who detested the older creole carnival that dominated the streets of New Orleans up through the 1850s. Seeking to "civilize" carnival and turn it into an occasion to celebrate their prosperity and increasing political power, the Anglo Uptowners formed parading organizations known as krewes, which have monopolized both public space, the local social imagination, and the national image of Mardi Gras for the last hundred and fifty years. Comus, the first krewe established in 1857, introduced a themed processional with allegorical floats, separating for the first time the parading revelers and the spectators. Its themes were, as historian

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Reid Mitchell notes, "aggressively English," with tableaus based on literary references to Milton, Spenser, and Dickens (25).

In the postbellum years, the so-called old-line krewes-Comus, Proteus, Momus, and Rex-were segregationist organizations that made use of carnivalesque irreverence to ridicule the multiracial Republican government during the period of Reconstruction. For carnival of 1873, Comus presented the theme "The Missing Links of Darwin's Origin of Species," featuring grotesque representations of black politicians as simian-like creatures. Mitchell reminds us that a link between white supremacy and seemingly whimsical, fun-loving social clubs was not unusual during Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan was originally formed as a social organization of confederate veterans who found diversion masquerading as ghosts. Members of White League of New Orleans, involved with some of the most violent racial conflicts during Reconstruction, also paraded in the old-line krewes. By the 1890s, with the demise of Reconstruction and the reestablishment of white rule, there was an attempt to project an image of modernity and reconciliation, primarily to attract northern tourists, but a structural and symbolic template had been established. Carnival krewes that were established in the twentieth century expanded in terms of social class, but remained primarily white organizations.

Elite parading clubs were also founded in Brazilian cities in the late nineteenth century, also with the explicit intention of "cleaning up" and "civilizing" traditional carnival festivities. Since Brazil has multiple carnival traditions throughout the country, it is necessary to include in our discussion the carnival of Rio de Janeiro, the former national capital, which for decades enjoyed emblematic status in Brazil. In the late nineteenth century, local authorities suppressed the entrudo, a form of pranksterish revelry of Portuguese origin that often involved spraying people with perfume and other less pleasant liquids. In Rio de Janeiro, the urban bourgeoisie formed organizations known as grandes sociedades ("grand societies") to distinguish themselves from popular revelers. Their parades featured elabo- rate allegorical floats based on classical or early modern European high culture much in the same manner of the New Orleans krewes. In Salvador, the white middle and upper classes formed similar groups, known as prestitos, in an effort to introduce a "Venetian- style" carnival to the city. The most famous of these groups was called the Fantoches de Euterpe ("Puppets of Euterpe"), named for one of the classical Greek muses fathered by Zeus. In 1887, on the eve of abolition, the Fantoches de Euterpe presented a float with an abolitionist theme, and then, during a masked ball, presented letters of manumission to two slaves (Fry et al. 249). The contrast with the blatantly racist 1873 Comus parade is suggestive, but should be relativized. By 1887, it was abundantly clear that slavery would soon be abolished in Brazil, so the freeing of two slaves at a carnival ball was a rather paternalistic and opportunistic gesture.

Salvador was unique in post-abolition Brazil for its explicitly "African" parading organizations, formed by groups of black men who used carnival as an occasion to occupy urban space and enact secularized music and dance performances rooted in Candomble. With names like Embaixada Africana ("African Embassy") and Pandegos da Africa ("Afri- can Merrymakers"), these groups paraded through the streets of Salvador, expressing emphatically their kinship and cultural ties to Africa. Kim Butler has shown that some of these groups used carnival as an occasion for protesting the repression of Candomble, which continued well into the twentieth century, and for satirizing European colonial-

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ism in Africa (176-79). During the 1890s, these groups were not only tolerated by local authorities, but also heralded as an expression of "African civilization" parallel to the civilizing efforts of the prestitos. In 1905, however, local authorities suppressed all Afro- Bahian carnival organizations due to anxieties about Salvador's growing reputation as a black city. Elite and middle-class white prestitos again dominated public space during carnival, while black clubs were actively suppressed. Several decades would pass before black parading organizations with African and Afro-Bahian themes and performance practices would reemerge.

During this period, New Orleans saw the formation of its own black carnival organizations. The first Mardi Gras Indian "tribes" established a presence in the 1880s. The earli- est participants were likely inspired in part by the popular Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, which made a stop in New Orleans in 1884-85, but were also referencing affinities and strategic alliances that had brought together local indigenous groups and blacks (both free people and escaped slaves) since the colonial period. An entirely distinct parading tradition developed around the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, which were benevolent societies that provided insurance to their members to cover medical and funeral costs. Founded in 1909, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club began as a ragtag satiric parade that ironically appropriated the black-face performance tradition, ostensibly to level a sly critique of the segregationist krewes. Both traditions are still vibrant, but in different ways remain marginal, or at least subordinate to the mainstream carnival festivities. Since the late 1960s, Zulu has paraded in front of the Krewe of Rex, the most celebrated old-line krewe, as a sort of comic prelude to the main attraction. The Mardi Gras Indians make their own routes through the side streets and thoroughfares of the black neighborhoods, removed from the main parading avenues.

A century ago, analogous working-class, mostly black parading clubs were present in Brazil during the reign of the grandes sociedades and prestitos. Rio de Janeiro even had its own African Indian carnival performance tradition, the cucumbys, that began in the late 1880s, around the same time the Mardi Gras Indians were forming in New Orleans (Chasteen 37). The carnivals of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador were structurally parallel, notwithstanding significant differences in terms of social and cultural context.

This analogy was disrupted in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the establishment of mass parading organizations in Rio that were directly related to the rise of samba as an urban, mass-mediated genre of popular music. In 1928 the first escola de samba ("samba school") was founded, providing a model for community-based carnival associations in the predominantly black and mixed-raced working-class communities of Rio de Janeiro. During the 1930s, the samba schools came to dominate urban space in Rio's carnival with the aid of a sympathetic populist mayor allied with Gettilio Vargas, the decidedly nationalist president. Samba school parades became highly codified and competitive events with basic requirements that governed the performative repertoire of each group. All samba schools needed to narrate some aspect of Brazilian history in their carnival theme songs and allegorical floats. They were also required to present an ala das baianas, a wing of black female paraders, dressed in the distinctive attire of the female matriarchs of Candomble, as an homage to the Bahian tias who had provided the space and occasion for the inven- tion of samba. By this time, the grandes sociedades - the structural analogues to the old-line

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krewes of New Orleans-had ceased to exist, having been eclipsed by the samba schools, the beneficiaries of popular acclaim and government largesse.

In Salvador in the late 1940s, there was a revival of Afro-Bahian parading clubs known as afoxes, led by the Filhos de Gandhy ("The Sons of Gandhi"), formed by black stevedores who worked in the port of Salvador where they likely had contact with Indian sailors during the struggle for Indian independence. As in most Latin American carnivals, performative trends come and go, but the Filhos de Gandhy have remained as an enduring symbol of the Bahian carnival. In the 1970s and 1980s, more politically assertive expressions of black identity developed within the carnival tradition of Salvador, led by the blocos afro such as Ile Aiye, Olodum, Muzenza, and Male Debale. All of these groups have followed different trajectories in terms of cultural politics and racial discourse, but are united in using carnival as a stage for narrating black history, denouncing forms of social exclusion and marginality, claiming citizenship rights, and establishing links to other insurgent political and cultural movements of the Afro-Atlantic world with little interest in the grand nar- ratives of Brazilian nationality performed by the Rio samba schools. The blocos afro have had a powerful impact on Bahian culture and perhaps most importantly on patterns of racial formation and identification among black youth.

In broad brushstrokes, admittedly imprecise, we might say that New Orleans remains essentially a nineteenth-century European-style carnival, with the most vibrant black manifestations occurring on the margins. The carnival of Rio de Janeiro is typically modern, with its focus on the allegories of national identity performed on TV by massive mixed-raced organizations rooted in the populist accommodations of the mid-twentieth century. Finally, Salvador is home to a kind of postmodern carnival, resolutely globalized and Afro-Diasporic, in which cultural expression becomes a vehicle for expressing dissent, claiming citizenship rights, and ascending socially.

In Salvador, some forms of assertive Africanity and blackness coincide with the city's official self-promotion as a privileged destination for cultural tourists, but they have also generated new symbols and discourses for movements demanding greater access to political power and economic opportunity. During my last visit to Bahia in 2006, for example, there was a demonstration of Afro-Brazilian students who occupied the reitoria (the equivalent of the President's Office) of the Federal University of Bahia, demanding the expansion and institutionalization of affirmative action measures-specifically, racial quotas for Afro-Brazilians. The students chanted slogans like "Reparacdo jar ("Reparations Now!") and denounced the "white devils" who maintained a system of "apartheid" that should be combated even if it meant bloodshed. This type of demonstration, obviously at odds with official baianidade, would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Trans- formations in Bahian racial formations have accompanied the simultaneous escalation of urban violence, which has disproportionately victimized Afro-Brazilians, and new forms of civil rights activism that have had real consequences, especially in terms of access to higher education and public sector employment.

The emergence of more assertive black identities, active in civil society and visible in the national media, has also occasioned a rethinking of the old "mestico modernist" discourse of national identity in Brazil. Critics have tended to regard mesticagem as a discourse that implicitly values whiteness and marginalizes black and indigenous identities. From this perspective, mesticagem is nothing more than an ideology of social control that justifies

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forms of racial exclusion and undermines efforts to mobilize communities along racial or ethnic lines. Scholars, activists, and students have rallied to the cause of affirmative action, a program that depends to some extent on well-defined "racial" identities as well as class criteria.

In response to increasing polarization around this issue, there has also been an effort to salvage the Freyrean discourse of mesticagem, extricating it from its more overtly ideological uses, namely the promotion of Brazil as a "racial democracy." Many of the intellectuals articulating what I have called a "neo-Freyrean" vision for contemporary Brazil have been historically allied with or supportive of the black movement. This is the case of Caetano Veloso, who recently signed a manifesto denouncing affirmative action in Brazil, arguing that it will "create conflicts" and replace multicolor ambiguity with rigid biracial categories imported from the United States. From this view, fluid, nonessentialist, and even nonracial identities are seen as the very condition of possibility for the creation of a more egalitarian society. Racial ambiguity is, in Veloso's view, one of Brazil's greatest social and symbolic assets.

Others have argued for a kind of "multicultural mesticagem" that celebrates mixedness and hybridity, while simultaneously promoting black, indigenous, and other ethnic identities as integral and irreducible parts of an unstable and even conflictive national "mosaic." This would be the position of Gilberto Gil, the world-renowned musician and Minister of Culture of Brazil, who supports affirmative action measures while emphasiz- ing the need to account for social class as well as race. In his inaugural speech of January 2003, he affirmed that Brazil is "a mestio country that, in terms of social inequalities, seems scandalous to the rest of the world," going on to argue that "mesticagem does not exclude diversity, conflict, contradiction, and even antagonism." Peter Wade has recently outlined a similar position in a recent essay that draws on examples from Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Wade recognizes the ideological uses of mestizaje, but also argues for understanding it as a "lived" "embodied" experience involving kinship relation- ships and the "maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference along side spaces of sameness and homogeneity" (239-40). It is still too early to tell if "multicultural mesticagem" can meaningfully and successfully negotiate often conflicting interests of an insurgent Afro-Diasporic discourse around blackness and the equally impassioned calls for defending racial mixture and ambiguity.

By way of conclusion, I'd like to refer to recent and highly publicized incidents in New Orleans and Salvador that cast light on some of the contradictions of both cities in relation to their black culture. In March 2005, the New Orleans police broke up the traditional Mardi Gras Indian parade on St. Joseph's Day. This incident led to one of the most poignant moments in the history of black cultural resistance in New Orleans when Allison "Tootie" Montana, the most revered Mardi Gras Indian chief of the twentieth century, collapsed and died on June 27, 2005 in City Hall while delivering testimony against official harassment of Mardi Gras Indians. A little more than two years later, on October 1 2007, the police broke up and arrested musicians performing in a traditional jazz funeral in Treme, the historic center of black cultural life in the city. The police alleged that the musicians and mourners, who were honoring a recently deceased local musician, had not secured permission to parade, despite the fact that spontaneous tributes of this kind had occurred for generations in New Orleans without need for official authorization. Two

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prominent musicians were arrested and charged with "disturbing the peace by tumultu- ous manner" (Reckdahl).

The conflict in Treme coincided with a comparable event in a neighborhood of Salvador that has led to widespread protests in that city. On September 16, 2007, the lead singer of the oldest and most prestigious bloco afro, Ile Aiye, was dragged from his home by a police officer and beaten in street, apparently having been mistaken for a criminal. A committee composed of the blocos afro and other black activist organizations released a statement via the internet denouncing "a repeating pattern that victimizes the populational majority of Salvador, a city that benefits from our cultural capital, but still maintains us in a subaltern position." The protests explicitly denounced this act of repression in light of Salvador's historic association with black culture, which has brought incalculable economic benefits to the city.

Although the two incidents are different-one involving a coordinated effort of police repression and the other involving an action by a single officer-both indicate a pattern of abuse directed against black citizens. More to the point, both incidents involved attacks on iconic figures of black culture in cities that are internationally renowned as urban centers of the Afro-Atlantic World. The difference between the two events resides "in the details," but the proverbial "devil" presides over both.

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