Bahia awaits you for its daily festival … Do you hear? It is the insistent call of the atabaques in the mysterious night … Young girl, Bahia awaits you and I will be your guide through its streets and its mysteries.Footnote 1
As a young novelist who would later become one of Brazil's most translated and most widely sold authors, Jorge Amado embarked on a different literary task in the last years of World War II.Footnote 2 Casting aside his recent experimentation with depictions of Bahia's violent cacao culture, Amado instead penned a much more prosaic work: a tourist guide to Bahia's capital city of Salvador. Written in Portuguese, and published with the Brazilian publisher Editora Martins, the guide proved a surprising hit, despite its decidedly idiosyncratic format. In his meandering text Amado sought simultaneously to attract new visitors to a romanticised, festive ‘black city’, and also to denounce the city's social problems.Footnote 3 Veering between the practical and the literary, with vivid evocations of African drums permeating the night, Amado's guide led the way in billing blackness as one of Salvador's chief attractions in both his text and its illustrations.Footnote 4
Though Amado was the first to celebrate Salvador's blackness within a domestic tourist guide, he became but one of many cultural brokers in Salvador writing similar guides in the 1950s. Such a focus broke dramatically from official depictions of the city, yet drew upon a rich array of precedents. Ideas of Salvador as a black city had long been in circulation, whether in traveller accounts, sambas, within local Afro-Bahian populations, or the writings of foreign anthropologists, but they had not yet garnered full recognition or endorsement by Salvador's white elite. Drawing upon regional ideas of race, as well as a new national racial climate, the tourist guides of the late 1940s and 1950s reveal the distinctly modern anxieties of Brazilians as they struggled to come to terms with themselves and define their role in the world.
These struggles reflected international pressures, as well as Latin American concerns with nation building; however, they were most centrally concerned with the symbiotic space between region and nation, an arena where race proved critical. Historians across Latin America have highlighted the ways that ideas of nation, region and race have been inextricably entwined, and this was especially true for Bahia.Footnote 5 Although elite Bahians began the twentieth century seeking to downplay popular culture or African connections, this framework became renegotiated during the populist regime under Getúlio Vargas (1930–45).
By the 1950s, as Scott Ickes, Patricia Pinho, Antônio Risério, Anadelia Romo and others have shown, the question of regional identity in Salvador was hotly contested and in flux.Footnote 6 New ideas about race drove much of this thinking.Footnote 7 As Patricia Pinho emphasises, black bodies became central to ideas about the city over this period.Footnote 8 Yet despite confronting often racist and discriminatory attitudes, the Afro-Brazilian population in Salvador mobilised a highly effective movement for cultural inclusion through these years. This was perhaps most in evidence in the public sphere of celebrations, as Ickes uncovers, as well as in increased tolerance toward Candomblé.Footnote 9 In fact, as Roger Sansi has proposed, Candomblé in Salvador was transformed from a practice often viewed with suspicion to being seen as the heart of Bahian culture itself.Footnote 10 By the 1960s and 1970s such manifestations had become key to official tourist promotions as well as to new counter-cultural tourism as hippies and leftists flocked to Salvador for a vanishing ‘authentic’ or ‘primitive’ culture within Brazil.Footnote 11 As institutions of historical preservation expanded their purview during this period and beyond, the largely black population of the historic centre came to be viewed (and to view itself) as essential to Bahia's historical patrimony as its colonial buildings.Footnote 12 By the late twentieth century this region of the city – known as Pelourinho for the slave whipping post once housed in its streets – had become a UNESCO heritage site, famed equally for its colonial preservation and its role as the cultural capital of Brazil's African diaspora. As pseudo-scientific ideas of inferiority lost ground in international circles, as the national sphere embraced an idea of a multi-racial Brazil, and as local actors reconfigured understandings of race and space, blackness became the centre-piece of Bahian identity.
Yet Salvador's story cannot be seen as a victory for racial harmony and inclusion, as many of its boosters over the years would insist. Though there has been much evidence of cultural inclusion in some spheres, ideas of race in Salvador have also proven the foundation for a variety of far-reaching urban reforms in the last half of the twentieth century. In the context of such reforms, the black urban populations of the city have been represented as dangerous while black habitation of the city's central zones has been presented as an obstacle to sanitation and modernisation. As scholars Kim Butler, Keisha-Khan Perry and John Collins show, these racial tropes have had deep, often devastating impacts on the city's black inhabitants. Furthermore, as anthropologist Christen Smith highlights, Salvador's black population has been subject to exceptional levels of racialised police violence in recent years, despite the billing of the city as a veritable ‘Afro-Paradise’.Footnote 13
This article intends to contribute to this rich scholarship on modern Salvador with new attention to texts, primarily tourist guides, which have been pivotal for Brazilian conceptions of race and region, but have not earned sustained attention. It further seeks to probe the way that such texts have influenced the growth of tourism and the commodification of culture, which have proven often problematic for Salvador's black majority. As a whole, these tourist guides form an important source base for understanding the changing dynamics of race and space in Salvador, arguably the Atlantic's most critical site for the African diaspora. In addition, they shed new light on the birth of domestic tourism in Brazil, a transformative process with its roots in the post-war era. This article first establishes the particular regional context of Bahia in the early twentieth century, and examines national trends in travel for the post-war era that both fuelled and reinforced the interest in such guides. It then turns to analysis of three of the most important intellectuals who penned guides during this period: Jorge Amado, Odorico Tavares and José Valladares. The tourist guides of the early 1940s and 50s not only provided a foundational site for the crafting of a regional identity, but further established early links between a commodified black culture and tourism in ways that would prove exceptionally long-lasting. As I highlight, the impact of these works proved influential not only for the city's racial identity but also for the development of a very particular type of cultural tourism.
Space and Place in Bahia
As Brazil's first colonial capital, Salvador had early wielded significant political, religious, and economic power, most of which had dissipated by the late nineteenth century. The northeastern state of Bahia and its capital had once been central to the colonial economy, with a sugar economy, a bustling port, and a heavy reliance on the Atlantic slave trade. With global competition in sugar production, and the expansion of Brazil's south and southeast, however, this position began to slip. After the shift of the colony's capital to Rio de Janeiro in 1763 Bahia suffered continued decline both in its economy and in its prestige. Industrialisation, dawning slowly in Brazil's southeast at the turn of the twentieth century, largely by-passed Bahia, which continued to rely on primary exports.
Perhaps just as damming as Bahia's underdeveloped economy was the pessimistic assessment of Salvador within early-twentieth-century racial science. Whites, who made up only 30 per cent of the city's population but monopolised most of its wealth and power, fretted about how best to divert attention from (and repress) the continued, undeniable presence of the city's large black population.Footnote 14 These calculations began to shift in the 1930s and 1940s as Brazil as a whole began to privilege official celebrations of racial mixing and Brazil's African roots; Bahia joined, if sometimes reluctantly, in these trends.Footnote 15
These changing ideas of race played a central role in altering ideas of the city itself. Early promoters in fact had tried to stress Bahia's modernity; visitor guides of the 1920s and 1930s portrayed Salvador as a modern city of progress with pointed silence on the composition of its population.Footnote 16 Salvador's beaches received scant mention throughout this early period; likewise, its tropical landscape gained little attention until the new interest of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture in escaping to nature.Footnote 17 The city's colonial churches and its architecture, particularly the cobblestone streets of the old colonial centre, were never neglected altogether, but their priority ebbed and flowed depending on whether one wanted to emphasise modernity, colonial heritage, or African roots. In sum, the city's demographic balance of black and white altered little over time, but varying assessments of Salvador's modernity and its population meant that the city's sense of place developed in many different forms over the twentieth century.Footnote 18
The process of shaping Salvador's identity around Africa or blackness had its origins in a variety of sources and groups. Perhaps the earliest of these actors were located in the black community itself, and particularly within the leadership of Candomblé, where ideas of African roots and ideas of purity were often prioritised.Footnote 19 By the 1930s academics further endorsed this view. One important event that combined both intellectuals and the Candomblé community was the 1937 Afro-Brazilian Congress. Held in Salvador, and organised by local intellectuals such as Édison Carneiro, the Congress showcased the supposed purity of Salvador's black religions, and stressed that Bahia was the most important centre for black life in Brazil.Footnote 20 Meanwhile, foreign anthropologists reinforced this process, with such figures as Roger Bastide, Ruth Landes and Melville Herskovits weighing in to declare Bahia a pre-eminent source of black culture and African continuities.Footnote 21
Such ideas also fit well with the uniquely Brazilian form of racial harmony promoted by intellectual and writer Gilberto Freyre. Freyre too had taken an early role in promoting Salvador, controversially, with a lascivious poem of 1926 praising the city's tropical nature and ‘sensuous’ mulatas. His regionalist movement of the 1920s emphasised that the northeast of Brazil had a pivotal role to play as the preserve for authentic national traditions.Footnote 22 Most famously, his work in the 1930s stressed that Brazilian race relations, based on fusion between African, Portuguese and Native Americans, made for a particularly harmonious society. Though Freyre did not emphasise blackness per se in this vision (and indeed, the central role given to mestiçagem generally discouraged such a priority), he did attempt to bring attention to Brazil's African roots, and thus offered a new space for Bahians to define themselves.
Ideals of an inclusionary culture were important for the nation-building of Brazil's Vargas era, and they remained critical for UNESCO researchers in the early 1950s, who came to Bahia looking for Brazil's last preserve of racial harmony.Footnote 23 Meanwhile, popular culture and the arts from Salvador witnessed similar trends, but gave growing attention to black life, whether in the novels of Jorge Amado or in the sambas of composers like Dorival Caymmi. In the local and national press, modernist intellectuals, most notably Odorico Tavares, further promoted an Afro-Bahian aesthetic.Footnote 24 Perhaps most visibly, popular festivals, embraced and promoted by many across the black working class, gained greater freedom and status over the course of the 1950s.Footnote 25 Within the art world too, this Afro-Bahian aesthetic was developing, and rapidly becoming commodified.Footnote 26 Salvador gradually consolidated its role as central to the nation for its race relations, and as a privileged site for both African-based and popular culture.
As all of these forces converged, officials interested in patrimony and preservation in Brazil's Vargas era were exceptionally open to expressions of this culture as a key element in national identity. In a 1927 exchange between two of the foundational figures in Brazilian heritage organisations, Manuel Bandeira mused to Mario de Andrade that the people of Salvador, as much as the city's decaying colonial buildings, seemed to represent the heart of Brazil. This linking of patrimony and people is traced by John Collins as it re-emerged in the late 1960s and evolved through the 1990s.Footnote 27 As this article shows, there are provocative examples of such thinking in other moments, and by a broader circle of actors. Indeed, the connections made between Bahia's population and national patrimony may be seen clearly in the work of Bahian intellectuals through the 1940s and 1950s, and particularly in the new tourist guides of this era.
Post-War Travel and Tourism in Brazil: The Transformations of the 1950s
While the growth of tourism in Salvador and Brazil was a domestic story, there were larger international forces at work by the 1930s that encouraged travel and exchange across the Americas. To begin with, many nations came to see tourism as a modern tool for development and economic growth. At the same time, diplomatic and strategic concerns promoted an idea of the Americas as a region with common roots and interests, thereby encouraging more intense cooperation and exchange. The Pan-American Union, for example, formed a Travel Division in 1934. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy further encouraged travel to Latin America in the 1940s with the broader goal of building allies, as well the more immediate aim of establishing airports as critical infrastructure for future US bases. As Rebecca Herman Weber's work reveals, Pan Am Airlines used their commercial status as a façade in Brazil to help the US military construct airfields in the early 1940s, particularly in the northeast.Footnote 28 This development not only fostered cultural and diplomatic exchanges, but it would also serve as critical infrastructure for air travel in later years. On the cultural front, the Good Neighbor Policy aimed to encourage greater cultural understanding and exchange across the Americas, with Carmen Miranda serving as an unofficial national ambassador of Brazil in the United States. Walt Disney himself had paid tribute to Brazil, and to Bahia specifically, in his two war-time animated films, Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944). Aimed at cementing improved relations across the Americas, the films played as modern travel boosters in cinematic (and musical) form.Footnote 29
Such forces converged so that international tourist arrivals to Brazil tripled in the 1940s, doubled over the 1950s and then doubled again in the early years of the next decade, as Table 1 reveals. Although Brazil's military coup of 1964 would slow international visits in the mid-1960s, the post-war years were transformative.Footnote 30
Table 1. International Tourist Arrivals in Brazil, by Year
Source: AE 1949, p. 64; AE 1951, p. 54; AE 1960, p. 33; AE 1964, p. 49. Arrivals for 1941 are an average of the years 1941–5.
The figures in Table 1 show tremendous growth for Brazil, but Brazil nonetheless remained far behind the Latin American leaders in tourism, Mexico and Cuba. These nations’ proximity to the United States allowed them to welcome a newly mobile US middle class in the post-war era. In 1950, for example, Mexico welcomed 384,000 international arrivals, and Cuba boasted 194,000, figures that make Brazil's 24,000 pale in comparison.Footnote 31 US arrivals Brazil, small in number, meant that Brazil missed the distinctive pressures from the United States that shaped tourism in Mexico, Cuba and the Caribbean.Footnote 32 However, to focus primarily on international arrivals obscures domestic trends in travel that are much greater in scale but have remained largely unnoticed by historians.
Historical studies of tourism in Brazil thus far have sketched only the barest of outlines for national or regional levels of travel, in part because statistics for domestic tourism are difficult to collect. Yet even so, the post-war years, or the years following the Vargas regime of 1930–45, stand out as a significant departure. As scholar Antonio Diegues notes, the 1940s and 1950s mark the birth of domestic tourism for Brazil. New leisure, rising incomes, nationalism and more efficient transport combined to create a rising middle class suddenly willing and more able to travel.Footnote 33
Perhaps most striking was the stupendous domestic expansion in air travel. Though international carriers gained momentum over the decade, their importance paled in comparison to the remarkable rise in flights offered by domestic airlines. Benefitting from renewed air traffic with the close of the war, and now able to utilise freshly constructed airfields, the post-war period brought about a veritable transportation revolution. The number of Brazilian airlines almost doubled from 1945 to 1949; by the mid-1950s 98 per cent of trips were operated by domestic companies.Footnote 34 More importantly, the number of passengers travelling by plane in Brazil rose from negligible figures after World War II to almost four million by the end of the 1950s. With the vast majority being domestic trips, Salvador benefitted from such trends. In the 1950s the number of air passengers disembarking in Salvador more than doubled, as Table 2 reveals.
Table 2. Air Travel in Brazil and Salvador: Numbers of Passengers
Source: AE 1951, pp. 194–6; AE 1955, p. 224; AE 1958, pp. 152–4. Data is not available for all years.
Although the totals for domestic arrivals in Salvador could not compare to those for cultural and financial centres like Rio and São Paulo, the number of arrivals nonetheless showed significant growth over the decade. Additionally, Salvador did well in comparison with regional rivals in the northeast such as Recife.Footnote 35
Other forms of transport expanded during this time. Automobile use was also on the rise and the completion of a new highway linking Rio and Bahia in 1949 increased traffic from both cars and buses.Footnote 36 New organisations, such as the Touring Club do Brasil, served as a lobbying group for roads and offered services such as guide books and even guided tours.Footnote 37 Yet Brazil's road system remained so precarious, and the automobile so expensive, that road-tripping tourists to Bahia may still have had a limited impact. Instead, the majority of domestic visitors continued to arrive to Bahia by boat, as Lúcia Queiroz has uncovered.Footnote 38 An examination of the limited steamship statistics available reinforces such conclusions and further indicates that prices fell sharply.Footnote 39 Clearly middle-class passengers were newly able to afford ocean travel after the war and probably this continued in later years as well.
While the very first initiatives promoting tourism in Salvador had their origins in the late 1930s, available evidence would seem to support the view that tourism for the city was at low to negligible rates through the 1940s and increased in the 1950s. One early issue was that the city boasted few basic amenities to support a tourist industry.Footnote 40 To give just one example, while the city of Rio in 1950 had 365 hotels and pensions, Salvador had only 52, many of which did not have running water in the rooms.Footnote 41 Local elites recognised such deficits and sought to address them as state officials and private entrepreneurs teamed together to build new hotels in the following years.Footnote 42 Such efforts, combined with the shifting national scene, meant that tourism in Salvador made remarkable gains. My own research has uncovered that over the course of the 1950s the state of Bahia (and, by extension, Salvador) increased its hotel revenue at a rate significantly higher than the national average. In fact, surprisingly, the state of Bahia had higher rates of growth in hotel revenue than the state of Rio de Janeiro, or the city of Rio, itself the premier tourist destination for both domestic and international travellers.Footnote 43 Whether by car, by boat, or even by air, by the end of the 1950s Salvador had a respectable influx of tourists, with about 29,000 arriving annually. Of these, the vast majority, or 87 per cent, were domestic.Footnote 44
Space at the Margins: Regional Autonomy within Brazilian Tourism
What emerges as striking here is the comparatively small role of either national- or-state level entities in guiding such change. Indeed, what makes the rise of tourism across Brazil as a whole particularly interesting is that the state played a comparatively minor role in its development through the first half of the twentieth century. This offers a point of comparison to other Latin American tourism efforts. Scholars of Mexican tourism, for example, have highlighted the centrality and the power of the Mexican state in shaping discourse of national attractions, as well as in fomenting the influx of foreign tourists that came to represent a major source of foreign earnings. Yet while nations such as Mexico and Cuba early organised extensive, often well-funded, bureaucratic frameworks to seize tourism's potential, Brazil had no such central initiative until much later.Footnote 45
In fact, Brazil seemed almost curiously complacent in the midst of a larger pan-American push for the growth of tourism. Even basic statistics of tourist arrivals were shuttled between offices, and ceased to be reported in the government's annual statistical yearbook for most of the 1950s. And Brazil appears to have had no large-scale advertising campaign within the United States in the way that Mexico or Cuba did: US newspapers of the 1940s and 1950s are devoid of significant advertising initiatives coming from government offices or official bureaus.Footnote 46
The lack of a centralised tourism initiative had echoes in Bahia. Government involvement came first at the municipal level in 1934 but faced serious problems of funding and organisation.Footnote 47 Two decades later, the scene looked more promising, with the creation of a tourism tax, a tourism council and a more autonomous and expanded municipal tourist office in 1951. In fact, Bahia would be the first entity in Brazil to fashion a tourism development plan in 1954 (in telling contrast, even an office for tourism development at the federal level came only in 1958). Nonetheless, despite such early efforts, a truly active and fully funded tourist initiative came only with the creation of the state tourism bureau, Bahiatursa, in 1968.Footnote 48
Though Bahiatursa would become a significant player in fomenting Salvador's tourist industry in the later twentieth century, the lack of consistent federal and state support for tourism in the earlier parts of the century had several consequences. On the one hand it surely contributed to the lower levels of international tourism in Brazil. On the other, the lack of a central narrative, imposed from a national tourist board, also opened up tremendous space for regional reconfigurations and for local intellectuals to frame their region on their own terms. National tourist propaganda for US audiences showed a brief uptick in the 1940s but was generally more limited in scope than that for Mexico. Though it too played up folklore and traditional crafts, it granted greater priority to African, rather than indigenous, traditions.Footnote 49 Yet beyond such limited initiatives, which apparently ended with the war, the field of framing the nation for tourists was open, absent a central vision of Brazil's tourist attractions and a national elite that had already ‘written’ and defined Salvador for others. With this lacuna an opportunity emerged: local intellectuals, rather than national planning boards or Rio's cultural elite, proved central in crafting the notion of Salvador's ‘enchantments’.
The flurry of tourist guides that emerged seems to have few if any, parallels within Brazil, or even Latin America more broadly.Footnote 50 On the one hand, the authors and audiences of Salvador's guides bring into question familiar assumptions within travel writings about the exoticising gazes of foreigners,Footnote 51 or of imperialist exploitation stemming from predatory outsiders.Footnote 52 On the other, local guides were also eager to stress the exotic and inevitably appealed to a consumer mentality.
Despite the richness of these local guide books as a source body, they have not yet been analysed as a genre or received focused attention from historians. Several scholars, however, have pointed to select guides in defining the cultural framework of Salvador or have highlighted the potential that such guides might offer. Osmundo Pinho made the early, critical proposition that many of the foundational elements of Bahian identity, or baianidade, were to be found in the works of Amado and in tourist guides spanning the 1940s to the 1960s.Footnote 53 Historian Miriam Riggs’ study of Salvador's colonial centre highlights municipal guides from the early 1950s as key to a cultural politics that viewed blacks primarily as ‘folkloric’ elements.Footnote 54 And Scott Ickes notes that tourist guides revealed a new enthusiasm for African-based rituals and further helped create a broader Afro-Bahian aesthetic, with a particularly active role played by intellectual Odorico Tavares (whom I treat further in this article).Footnote 55 As these authors would all agree, Salvador's native guides revealed a pivotal arena in which race and identity were reconfigured within the city and its elite. Considering them together, as a body of work, allows us to see how deep this impact extended.
Building a Model: Amado's 1945 Guide
When Amado's guide was published in 1945, the tourism project in Salvador seemed quixotic despite the best efforts of earlier boosters. Many Brazilians still looked at Salvador with scorn rather than interest, and one of Brazil's darkest, most poverty-stricken cities was not an obvious choice for tourist escapes by a largely white middle class. Indeed, to fully understand Amado's innovation in identifying the city with black and African roots, it is worth highlighting that another intellectual of Amado's stature, Gilberto Freyre, had penned a guide to his hometown of Recife in 1934, with a second edition only a few years earlier than Amado's, in 1942. As noted previously, Freyre's studies had foregrounded racial fusion and the African contribution to Brazil. Surprisingly, however, Freyre's guide touched very little on such themes. Instead, his dry tour of the city made some mention of local black religious practice, but devoted more time to yacht clubs. His vision of the city privileged a white elite, and was largely devoid of any hints of a popular culture, or the themes his own work had deemed important. The fourth edition was published in 1968, and it has since been reprinted in 2007, but it never had the same impact and legacy as Amado's.Footnote 56 In contrast, Amado's guide proved a success of immense proportions. In fact, the work proved a major best-seller, with three major revisions and 42 editions altogether, in addition to a further reprinting as recently as 2012. Clearly Amado himself believed the work important enough to revise repeatedly and evidently audiences responded to his treatment of Salvador.Footnote 57
Amado's guide emerged at an inopportune moment which would have seemed to spell doom for any domestic guide book: living in the midst of the Estado Novo dictatorship led by Getúlio Vargas, and mired in wartime restrictions, Brazilians of all incomes and backgrounds suffered limited mobility. Indeed, Amado himself was under house arrest in Salvador, which may well have been one incentive for turning attention back to the city.Footnote 58 Amado's role in envisioning the project remains uncertain, however, as available evidence indicates that the editor and owner of his publishing house, Editora Martins, gave initial impetus to the work. In the dedication for his first edition, for example, Amado wrote that the work was ‘dedicated to José de Barros Martins, who led me (me-levou [sic]) to write it’. In a later edition, he wrote that it was a ‘book that was I was charged with’ (que me fora encomendado) and, just as intriguingly, that the illustrator for the guide, São Paulo artist Manuel Martins, ‘came to Bahia, sent by an editor’.Footnote 59 The idea that the press helped shape the work rings true with its character during this time. As Laurence Hallewell notes in his study of Brazilian publishing, José de Barros Martins prioritised high-quality art and took pains to ensure his series had exceptionally high aesthetic values. Furthermore, translations of foreign travel guides were among the most central works of the press in these early years.Footnote 60 Seen from this perspective, Amado's guide may have been imagined by Martins either as a counter-weight to these foreign views, or simply as a diverse offering within a larger list of travel accounts.
It is also true, however, that the guide was well attuned with Amado's own intellectual trajectory. He had published other non-fiction shortly before the writing of his guide.Footnote 61 In addition, it would be inaccurate to see aesthetic concerns as coming exclusively from Martins. Jorge Amado had long taken a vivid interest in the art and book covers accompanying his work in his previous publications with other presses. Given these factors, it may be best to see the origin of Amado's guide as a confluence of interests from both Amado and Martins, two men who maintained a deep sympathy and friendship and surely must have discussed the idea together before Amado embarked on it.
Whatever its origins, Amado's book has rested uneasily with critics of his work more generally, who have typically ignored it, or, instead, have quoted it selectively without dedicated analysis.Footnote 62 Most likely this comes from viewing the work as non-fiction, and thus less representative of his creative effort, or simply because of the often-bewildering divergences of the work itself. Yet I propose it is instead precisely this divided nature that is critical. Generally, critics have viewed Amado's work as split between an early stage in the 1930s, which foregrounded his communist politics, and a later stage beginning in the late 1950s that abandoned his concerns with class oppression for more romanticised depictions of the poor and of Afro-Bahians.Footnote 63 I suggest that in Amado's 1945 guide we see both stages brought together. Instead of such divergent concerns being divided into two different stages across time, however, they instead came together in one very complicated and ambiguous volume.
Amado's book was eclectic in both its structure and its tone. His organisation followed neither the outlines of geography nor a broad division of themes. Instead, it began with an intellectual portrait of the city, moved on to a tour of neighbourhoods organised by class, and then considered festivals, with short essays throughout that pondered diverse topics including the nature of particular streets, Candomblé and Afro-Bahian food.Footnote 64 His narrative voice was also uneven: though his introduction spoke informally and directly to a fictional young woman, this narrative strategy was then largely discarded, only to be taken up again for the last two paragraphs of the book.Footnote 65 Although overall his tone was irreverent and casual, it failed to be consistent. It was abandoned, for instance, in his discussion of the city's churches, where instead he detailed with dull accuracy and a dry voice the dates of the renovations of each church. This section in turn sat awkwardly with his emotional and moving description of disease and infant mortality in the ‘proletarian’ neighbourhoods of the city. And the prose then changed abruptly again when he strangely saw fit to quote extensive tracts on tuberculosis from public health reports of the time.
With these jarring shifts Amado's guide leaves a first impression of somewhat haphazard chaos. Yet within this messy meandering journey of 300 pages, Amado's work did usher in some remarkably long-lasting legacies for future guides as well as for the vision of Salvador that would ultimately consolidate over the next decades. Critical here was a new focus on culture as Salvador's draw, a new ‘insider’ approach to exploring the city and a ground-breaking treatment of the city's black culture as central. These themes would be important in the works of the 1950s, as shown later. They also shaped the rise of the countercultural attraction of Salvador in the 1970s, where Amado predicted, in some form, the appeal of being a bohemian ‘traveller’, rather than a bourgeois tourist.Footnote 66 And they would ultimately dominate the official promotions of Salvador by the state's own tourist office, Bahiatursa, through to today. However, while Amado set the tone for the coming decades of guides, he also set up themes of social problems and racial division that would be cast aside by almost all later authors.
Amado's Legacies
Amado's entreaties to his young female companion to enter into the dark streets of Salvador highlighted the central innovation of his guide. His narrative framed the lived culture, the experience of Salvador, as the focus for the tourist. Casting aside its attractions as a coastal beach city, or a preserved colonial relic, he instead focused on a festive and mysterious city, indelibly marked by the spirt of o povo, the people.Footnote 67 Thus his introduction, entitled ‘An Invitation’ (Convite), billed travel to the city as an invitation to a party, with the call of drums that served to beckon a young girl to the never-ending street festivities of Salvador and to hint at the mysteries of Candomblé.Footnote 68 Amado's greatest legacy was that he sought to define Bahia in terms of its cultural attractions and experiences rather than in terms of its monuments, buildings, or commercial potential.
In addition, this lived experience departed from scheduled events, even scheduled festivities. To be sure Amado's guide, like Brazil's international tourism promotions of the time, included a focus on festivals, inviting visitors to schedule a visit around local celebrations. Yet his description of them was surprisingly dry, and encyclopaedic rather than vivid. Instead, Amado wished his visitor to experience the streets themselves. The pedestrian, lived experience of jostling on the street represented for Amado the true nature of the city. This focus on participating within the informal daily life of Salvador rather than observing more scripted festivals was one important distinction between Amado and his followers.
Once Amado had established this lived experience as the draw of the city, it became clear that no ordinary guide would do. Indeed, Amado cultivated a sense of himself as the ultimate insider, a trope which would prove dominant through the 1950s in other guides as well. His focus on an ‘authentic’ view of the city, peopled by local minor personalities, and his tours of unexpected areas such as the ‘proletarian’ neighbourhoods, showcased his own role as a fitting host to reveal the true ‘popular’ pulse of the city. For Amado, a communist, establishing himself as a friend of ‘o povo’ carried special weight. Indeed, this populist approach meshed in important ways with Brazilian politics of the time, with the populist focus within Amado's own work and with the intellectual climate more broadly. Intellectuals of the Vargas era, from both the Left and the Right, sought to boost connections to ‘o povo’, seen in romantic terms as the true heart of the nation.Footnote 69
The trope of Salvador as mysterious was further critical to Amado's role as an insider: if the city was as it seemed, there would be less need for a guide. Accordingly, Amado titled his work Bahia de Todos os Santos: A Guide to the Streets and Mysteries of the City of Salvador. Repeatedly, his language in the introduction made clear that Salvador would remain incomprehensible without him. In fact, this focus on mystery served to consolidate the major themes of Amado's work. It highlighted the need for a guide to help uncover a city elusive and disorienting to the newly arrived. In addition, it stressed the idea that Bahia's attractions were its very nature and culture, rather than its physical setting, its historical role, or its architecture. And, significantly, the idea of mystery, tied to Amado's emphasis on blackness and darkness more broadly, served to exoticise and racialise the city. Amado wrote evocatively of the mystery of Bahia which ‘dripped like oil’ in the streets.Footnote 70 The city, an ‘other’ that could never be fully known, remained outside the zones of the familiar, and outside the experience of a typical middle-class or lighter-skinned visitor. To gain access to all of this, to begin to understand and enter into this alternate world, one had to follow the path of Amado.
Although blackness may have been exoticised in Amado's work, it was certainly given much more treatment than any previous guide. As he described it, Salvador was the ‘cidade negra por excelência’, ‘the black city par excellence’.Footnote 71 This connection between blackness and Salvador had been developing elsewhere, as discussed earlier. But for the elite of the city it remained a controversial concept, and within the genre of domestic travel guides a focus on blackness was still revolutionary in 1945.Footnote 72 While Amado treated the city as black as a whole, he also developed special treatment of particular elements of black culture such as capoeira, Afro-Bahian cuisine, and especially Candomblé.
Amado showcased Candomblé as an attraction for tourists, going to considerable lengths to make it possible for visitors to visit a terreiro, or site of Candomblé, and observe the religious rituals.Footnote 73 In describing Candomblé, he highlighted his own role as a sponsor, helping to legitimise a religion that many still viewed with suspicion. But he gave much more than a description of what a tourist would see. Instead he provided a ‘behind-the-scenes’ tour of houses and buildings forbidden to visitors. Moreover, in one of the longest sections of the book, he not only engaged in a detailed description of religious rituals, but also compiled the address of 117 terreiros and the name of the head of each, a truly impressive undertaking.
What is fascinating about Amado's meticulous Candomblé database is that it not only shows his own determination to bring visitors in closer contact with Candomblé, but also reinforces that a visitor's circuit on that route already existed. Austrian author Stefan Zweig, for example, wrote of Salvador's Candomblé in 1941 that ‘every foreigner boasts of having seen a “genuine” one with the help of a special friend’. He complained, however, that visits had ‘long ago led to such pseudo-spectacles’ akin to those arranged by tourist companies and that the one he attended ‘was doubtless also faked’.Footnote 74 Along similar lines, Amado reported the ‘constant complaints’ of visitors seeking out a Candomblé ceremony and left disappointed by taxi drivers who instead left them at Spiritist Centres.Footnote 75 His guide intended to remedy the problem by providing concrete addresses and names that a visitor could wield with authority. With this guide Amado played an important role in setting a trip to a Candomblé fully within the path of the casual visitor and establishing Afro-Bahian religion as a both a tourist attraction and a commodity.
The Roads Not Taken
Amado's work is important for the paths he established for other guides, but also for the paths he traced that would be abandoned by later local guides. One of the critical factors that set his guide apart from those of later authors was his interest in Bahia's then-current dynamic and personality. Amado's focus on the lived experience of the streets meant that the immediate surroundings took priority over Bahia's past. Although he made occasional historic references, Amado's guide resisted the temptation to bury Bahia within a colonial context of grandeur. This presentist focus would not be altogether embraced by later authors. Moreover, his critique of slavery may have allowed him to escape from the nostalgia for the past that often permeated later works. As he described it, treading on the stones of the colonial centre, near the Pelourinho zone with its former whipping post, the visitor would hear the echoes of the screams of slaves who had been whipped in earlier eras.Footnote 76 No other guide would address slavery's abuses in such vivid terms.
In addition, Amado's view of Salvador saw it as a city divided, a view abandoned by later authors. He rejected the trope of Salvador as the balance of tradition and modernity that had begun to develop among city and state boosters. Instead, the idea of duality, of a split identity, pervades his portrayal of the city. Thus his vision of Bahia was not only one of a festive city, but also one with disturbing levels of poverty. The same split extended in racial terms, as he described the contrast between black ways of life and those of the elite. As he wrote, ‘Bahia is in a permanent clash from its two sides, its two ways of thinking.’Footnote 77 This idea of a conflictive duality marked a departure from the usual modes of tourist promotion.
Finally, for Amado, poverty dominated the Pelourinho and beyond, a reality left untouched by later authors. His portrait of the historic district highlighted the rats, the stench of overflowing toilets and hunger – as did his tour of the ‘proletarian’ zone of Liberdade (an Afro-Bahian neighbourhood), which he termed ‘instructive’. As he concluded the chapter:
Imagine these worker neighbourhoods that the tourists, enchanted with the surprising and mysterious beauty of Bahia, almost never visit … If you were to have the courage to see the misery, you could go … You would see, with certainty, at least three or four burials of children who died before they even realised what life was.Footnote 78
While Amado wrote passionately, and clearly with empathy, his proposal to view the poor in their misery was never fully developed as a tool for change, and his communist sympathies sat awkwardly with the genre of tour guide. Nonetheless, the poverty he depicted, though central to the lived reality of Salvador, would be abandoned by all later authors.
Amado closed his preface in an unusual way. He cautioned his fictional companion, writing:
if you want to see everything, in anxious hopes of learning and improving … I will show you the streets and the mysteries of Salvador, and you will leave here certain that this world is wrong and that it is necessary to remake it as better. Because it is not just that so much misery is contained within so much beauty.Footnote 79
Such a plea might well have been modulated if Amado had been writing for a foreign audience; the domestic readership made a more honest appraisal of the city possible. Amado perhaps hoped that the city would ultimately be changed and reformed by Brazilian visitors who, unlike locals, had not become accustomed to Salvador's misery.Footnote 80 His plea, however, may well have been lost within the unfocused chaos of his own writing. The ideal of change and reform, however vague, would be set aside for later authors who instead fretted about the corruptions of modernity.
Amado's Followers
In 1949 Salvador celebrated the 400th anniversary of its foundation. Seizing the momentum and their moment in the national spotlight, intellectuals and city officials developed initiatives for the promotion of a Bahian identity in a variety of arenas. Bahia's intellectual stars penned a group of city histories and the Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia hosted its first Bahian history congress in 1949. Bahia held its first art exhibition in the same year, with a new focus on modern art. And in 1951 the newly arrived Argentine artist Carybé, drawing on state support, began publication of a series of stylised sketches and paintings inspired by Bahia, with an Afro-Brazilian focus.Footnote 81 These works would be reprinted in a variety of different tourist guides, including the one penned by Odorico Tavares, treated below.
The next two years continued this momentum with a small flood of tourism publications. Of these, two were particularly significant. Both were penned by prominent local intellectuals, Odorico Tavares and José Valladares. Odorico Tavares was an impressive figure who played a multitude of roles in Bahia's vibrant intellectual scene of the 1950s. He served as a newspaper editor and columnist for two of the city's most important dailies, as well as an art collector and poet. As historian Scott Ickes has shown, his journalism and his tourist guide pursued an aggressive campaign of cultural inclusion for black and popular culture in Bahia, where he took a leading role in the reframing of culture among local elite.Footnote 82 José Valladares, like Tavares, operated as a wide-ranging and influential intellectual in the Salvador of the 1950s. As director of Bahia's State Museum he wielded official authority in showcasing Bahian culture and history. But he was also a broader advocate for the arts, and aimed for a wider audience with an on-going newspaper column that ostensibly covered matters of art, yet also engaged in more general musings on the city of Salvador.Footnote 83 Both men, then, already had considerable interactions with a local public and now came as public intellectuals to the new genre of the domestic tourist guide. In the hands of these interlocutors these guides proved exceptionally successful.
The volume published by Tavares in 1951, Bahia: Imagens da terra e do povo (Bahia: Images of the Land and People), sold out within a month and went to a second edition immediately.Footnote 84 Tavares claimed modestly that this was not due to his own insights so much as to a public that continued, more and more, to be fascinated ‘by everything related to aspects of the Bahian land and povo’. This burgeoning interest helped undoubtedly to account for the rapid second edition, as well as for the later third edition in 1961, which expanded the work with chapters on capoeira and the Pelourinho. Even in the early 1950s, however, Tavares was right to note the explosion in books that mused about the nature of Bahia. Valladares published his work the same year and the decade witnessed an increasing flow of Bahian guides into the market. Amado had established the genre firmly; these authors continued his legacy, but showed some departures.
Tavares described his book as composed of ‘impressions and sensations’, motivated by ‘love for the land of Bahia’.Footnote 85 Indeed, Tavares certainly pushed into the impressionistic realm: though he portrayed himself as a guide to Bahia in his work, and spoke in terms of a fictional visitor and what they should see, he included no practical information whatsoever on hotels, transportation, or the layout of the city. Instead, the volume was dedicated almost exclusively to popular festivals and celebrations of the Bahian povo. Roughly organised by themes of festivals, water, the Canudos rebellion, and ‘other images’, the book brought together eclectic topics united by an earthy emphasis on the ‘povo’ as the most authentic essence of the city.Footnote 86 The accompanying drawings from Carybé, romantic and impressionistic, accorded well with the text.
Tavares was perhaps most clearly Amado's disciple, with an interest in capturing the city's ‘essence’ through lived experience.Footnote 87 He promised the visitor access to the povo, as well as to the ‘magical world of capoeira, samba, of cuisine, of the splendour of Bahian cooking’.Footnote 88 And for Tavares, Salvador's festivals were the best place to immerse oneself in this magical world. As he wrote dramatically, to experience ‘the most beautiful popular festivals of Brazil – arrive in Salvador the last days of November without any pressure to leave’.Footnote 89 Though he covered a wide span of the city's geography in this way, he did not describe a wide array of attractions. For Tavares, the heart of Salvador was its celebrations, not any one physical location; in sum, Bahia's soul, but not its body.
This focus on experiencing the real Bahia meant that Tavares necessarily developed the trope of himself as an insider. Like Amado, his claims to connections with the city's popular pulse showcased himself as a man of the people, able and willing to uncover Salvador's essence. And like Amado, he emphasised his own ability to reach an authentic Bahia not immediately accessible. As he wrote, ‘Bahia has many things that don't reveal themselves at first glance.’ He too reached for the metaphor of mystery to describe Salvador: a city ‘full of mysteries and sensuality’.Footnote 90
Yet the visitor's experience of this mysterious world revealed a delicate balance of observation, and, less often, participation. For Tavares, religious practices represented a moving cultural display, but celebrating the festivals oneself rarely seemed to be seriously considered. Instead Tavares spoke directly to his reader as a shared observer. As he wrote, ‘This povo that we see … shape their sense of life oriented by their own native vital force, disseminated in all of the attractions of this magical and mysterious city.’Footnote 91 The visitor often appeared to be more spectator than member of the party.
It bears emphasis here that the povo’s ‘native vital force’ was a highly romanticised vision, devoid of all of Amado's critiques of poverty. Ostensibly free from misery, disease and hunger, Tavares’ povo instead devoted themselves principally to song, dance, feasts and celebration. His vision of Salvador as a whole, furthermore, was marked by nostalgia for bygone eras, but without reference to the abuses of slavery or Bahia's economic decline. The city's essence, as he described it, distinguished itself from the rest of Brazil because of its ability to sidestep what Tavares cynically referred to as ‘progress’.
This nostalgia hindered an accurate vision of Bahia's past associations with slavery, as seen in Tavares’ chapter ‘Atlas Carries the World’. There he detailed how slaves in Brazil had carried loads on their heads through the streets. He stressed, however, that while modernising cities like Rio and Recife had switched to motorised transport, Salvador was the last place where the practice continued. Here Tavares emphasised blacks in particular, highlighting the burnt copper (cobre queimado) colour of the carriers’ skin, and labelling them as ‘blacks (pretos)’ and ‘mulatos’.Footnote 92 He seemed not to notice, however, that the division of labour, which largely replicated slavery, and split on racial lines, failed to fit his vision of Salvador as idyllic and united. Where Amado might have used the topic to denounce poverty and reliance on black physical labour, or deeper connections to slavery, Tavares did not. Instead, black labour and poverty were romanticised into a sight for the tourist, one linked to a past that had already slipped away in more modern areas of Brazil.
In fact, Tavares seemed often reluctant to link any particular racial identity to Salvador. On the one hand his narrative was ultimately structured around celebrations and practices central to black lives. Yet Tavares billed the city not as the blackest city, but as the truest expression of the Brazilian povo. Thus he sidestepped the question of whether Bahia's racial make-up was central to its identity, instead stressing a colour-blind vision of popular authenticity. With a utopic vision of a city without divisions of class, and a racially fused union of peoples, Tavares allowed little role for critique of poverty, a black racial identity, or an African-based culture.
The third guide, by Valladares, revealed much in common with both Amado and Tavares. Like them, he too gave no emphasis to commerce, trade, or business more generally, nor was he interested in championing Salvador's ‘progress’, a term used sarcastically throughout his narrative. Like Amado and Tavares, he provided a personal, opinionated and idiosyncratic narrative that veered more toward a collection of essays than a practical tourist guide. Most significantly, like those authors, Valladares focused broadly on culture and defining Bahia. He began with an overview of Bahian identity, then moved on to history, a quick agenda for tourists, a chapter on the arts and a chapter on the picturesque.Footnote 93
Valladares’ guide revealed considerable pessimism about the benefits of ‘progress’. Tavares had shown similar tendencies, but they reached their height in Valladares. Throughout, he celebrated the traditions of colonial Salvador and bemoaned the corruption of modern architecture, urban planning and modern life itself. In fact, though all three authors celebrated Bahia's contemporary culture to some degree, Valladares was perhaps the most interested in Bahia's past. His disdain of Bahia's modern attractions was made further explicit in his tour of the city, where he opened with a series of options, asking ‘And now, dear visitor, what do you prefer: the old (antigo), the modern, or tropical nature?’ His own response made the correct answer clear: nature received only passing mention, and as he proclaimed dramatically: ‘If you like the modern, you will have little to see.’Footnote 94
Valladares advocated an approach to sightseeing different from a typical guide. His advice to tourists, for instance, was to simply wander in the colonial centre, in order to fully ‘appreciate a city that has character, and a past’.Footnote 95 Valladares, like Tavares, saw his role as uncovering the spirit of Salvador and immersing the casual visitor in this experience.
Valladares too stayed away from Amado's vision of Salvador as a ‘black’ city and instead celebrated its racial fusion as mestiço, ‘with a white appearance’. As he wrote:
Meanwhile, Rio, São Paulo, New York, Chicago, thanks to racial discrimination, are filling up with big black people (pretalhões) of pure blood. They have to resolve their ‘big’ [in English] problem, one that we know how to resolve. And with what satisfaction!…Footnote 96
For Valladares, like Gilberto Freyre, blackness was a ‘problem’ that Salvador successfully navigated through fusion. Yet this discussion, in his chapter ‘Picturesque Bahia’, revealed some of the core contradictions of Valladares’ approach to race. The chapter detailed ‘Candomblé, [Bahian] cuisine, markets and fairs; traditional fishermen; capoeira; and popular festivals’, largely themes that had been central to Tavares and Amado as well. Valladares was careful to portray these elements as core to Bahia's identity, not just to black identity. In addition, he also spoke out against racism, by taking the highly unpopular stance that colour prejudice existed, thus tempering considerably the rosy view of inclusion put forth by Tavares. These critiques were mediated, however, by the fact that Valladares made the questionable decision to group all discussion of race within his chapter on the picturesque.
In sum, Valladares represented a still contradictory and unresolved middle ground. He incorporated black and popular culture into his guide, but segregated it into the somewhat demeaning category of ‘picturesque’ and seemed to embrace a white, or ‘mestiço’, ideal. Though he too supported popular culture, he was also further distanced from it than was Odorico Tavares. Despite the range of approaches to black and popular culture in Tavares and Valladares, however, they were united by their incorporation of key elements of the Amado model. Most critically, like Amado, they turned away from viewing Salvador as a commercial modern hub and instead framed the city in terms of its cultural attractions aimed at tourist consumption, whether as participant or observer.
Conclusions
The Bahian tourist guides traced here allowed prominent figures to prove their own literary worth as well as establish themselves as cosmopolitan, authoritative, and in touch with popular culture. We might imagine these figures as a later counterpart to the portrait by Hermano Vianna for Rio, where intellectuals began to pride themselves on their connections to the still edgy samba scene.Footnote 97 It is important, however, to note the power dynamics at work: these intellectuals had built themselves up into the arbiters of authenticity and also into essential interlocutors of popular culture. Bahia's conservative political elite, they believed, should no longer control visions of the city that centred almost exclusively on the colonial grandeur populated by their own families. Yet the popular classes themselves were viewed as being similarly incapable of providing suitable orientation: though – and this was central to Amado's view – supposedly representing the city in racially essentialised ways, they apparently lacked the critical distance to provide an introduction into their own life-ways. Using such racist and classist assumptions, these intellectuals fashioned themselves as the most authoritative interpreters of a new Bahia defined by its popular sector, its povo, and its fusion of races and cultures.
Clearly, the inclusiveness of this vision had its limits, and was largely marked by a mix of exoticism, condescension and a general disregard for the conditions of poverty and prejudice that characterised much of daily life for Salvador's black majority. Amado here set himself apart, but his treatment of poverty remained inconsistent and often sat awkwardly with his romantic views of Afro-Bahian life. Tavares seemed eager to bring new appreciation to Afro-Bahian culture, especially its festivals, but he felt less comfortable acknowledging blackness or African roots. Instead, he stressed, relentlessly, the happy nature of the ‘povo’ and its culture (itself a racialised construct). Valladares sounded a critical note by calling attention to racial prejudice at a time when it was decidedly unpopular to do so. Yet though he claimed Afro-Bahian culture was central to Bahian culture, he segregated it as picturesque into one of the smallest sections of his guide, and portrayed blackness as a problem.
Even such limited discussions of race, however, were still radically different from previous generations of local guides to the city, or even from much of the contemporary discourse by Bahia's old sugar elite. Instead, they meshed better within national thinking of the time, and particularly within the mantras of racial harmony and inclusion put forward by Gilberto Freyre and Vargas-era intellectuals more broadly. As Brazil had begun to reshape its national image to incorporate popular and African-based culture, Bahians found new space for their own assertions of national belonging. Recent work by Barbara Weinstein has reminded us that regional identities are crafted not in opposition to national ones, but rather as a part of them.Footnote 98 These regional intellectuals tapped into such national currents to allow their visions of Salvador to have a broader appeal and new relevance.
Intellectuals had moved beyond the idea of Salvador as a modern commercial centre or as a colonial city preserved with historic churches intact. Instead, they had framed Salvador as a cultural attraction, with the architecture of the city as a rich background to a dynamic cultural scene. In the process, they helped commodify black culture, and assert it as a source for Brazil's authentic essence. By the time the state dedicated more serious energy to the promotion of Salvador, in 1968, with the creation of Bahiatursa, the agenda had been set. Bahia's intellectuals had helped reshape Salvador as a wellspring of Brazil's popular and black culture but also side-stepped the issues of poverty and misery that Amado, however haltingly, had decried.
