Between Brazil and Bahia: Celebrating Dois de Julho in Nineteenth-Century Salvador

Abstract

Commemorating the expulsion of Portuguese troops from Salvador, Bahia, on 2 July 1823, the Dois de Julho festival represented Bahian society collectively and marked differences of national origin, class, and race. It challenged the Brazilian state's official patriotism by articulating a regional identity, and through its commemoration of the independence-era popular mobilisation, presented a story of Brazil's origins that contradicted the official patriotism which celebrated Emperor Pedro I as Brazil's founder. Dois de Julho's popularity and durability, moreover, suggest a significant and socially-broad engagement with the imperial state, which cannot be considered a remote and alien entity to the urban population.

Festas cívicas na corte regencial

“…Na Bahia, Kraay demonstra a permanência da força do 2 de Julho no Segundo Reinado, quando continuou a ser alvo de disputa da elite política baiana; mas seu êxito, segundo o autor, deve-se ao fato de estar associado à localidade -à experiência de luta e ao patriotismo local. 82 Em Minas Gerais, o memorialista Francisco de Paula Rezende, que registrou o regozijo público dos rituais cívicos da Regência, recordava que, após a revolta mineira de 1842, já não havia mais aquelas "grandes e tão pomposas festas que em outros tempos se faziam". 83 O testemunho é corroborado pelo estudo de Carla Chamon, que verificou um declínio dos festejos realizados na província já a partir do Regresso.…”

III Encuentro de Antropología México-Brasil

“…Para información más detallada, véanse, respectivamente, Querino (1923); Campos (1937). Para una interpretación histórica reciente, véase Kraay (1999).…”

Erecting and Erasing Boundaries: Can We Combine the “Indo” and the “Afro” in Latin American Studies?

“…11 Several elite Brazilian families ostentatiously adopted indigenous surnames in the era of independence, and Hendrik Kraay notes that the "caboclo" (an acculturated Indian or mestizo peasant) was foregrounded as the archetypical Brazilian in Bahian celebrations of 2 de Julho, a regional independence holiday, despite (or perhaps because of) the city's overwhelmingly African/Afro-Brazilian population. 12 "Letrados" who congregated in São Paulo's Instituto Histórico e Geográfico in the early twentieth century assiduously identified genealogical, linguistic, and cultural ties between postcolonial paulista society and the region's indigenous Tupi inhabitants, but denied any influence from the still sizable African-descended population. 13 Assunção, Mattos, and Kraay's work all represent a major shift away from earlier scholarship on post-independence Brazil that tended to emphasize the smooth and peaceful transition to nationhood, the reproduction of the colonial order in the new nation, and explained away the uprisings of the 1830s as an aberrant radical-liberal interlude punctuated by isolated pre-political popular outbursts.…”