Culture

Samba and favelas

Samba and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro grew up together. The samba schools that compete in Rio's Carnival — Mangueira, Portela, Salgueiro, Império Serrano, and others — were founded in particular hillside communities by particular families and remain rooted in them.

Origins

Samba as a distinct musical genre consolidated in Rio de Janeiro in the 1910s and 1920s, with origins in the Afro-Brazilian musical traditions brought to Rio by migrants from Bahia and from rural Rio de Janeiro state. The first recorded samba, Pelo Telefone (1916), is credited to Donga (Ernesto Joaquim Maria dos Santos), Mauro de Almeida, and the circle of Afro-Brazilian musicians who gathered at the house of Tia Ciata in the Praça Onze district of central Rio.

The hillside favelas that were forming in central and North Zone Rio during the same decades became one of samba's principal social settings. Working-class Afro-Brazilian musicians and composers, many of them recent migrants or descendants of the Bahian migrants who had built central-Rio's Pequena África district, organized regular musical gatherings (rodas de samba) that became the social institutions out of which the first samba schools emerged.

The samba schools

The Deixa Falar, founded in 1928 in the Estácio de Sá district of central Rio, is generally identified as the first samba school. The Estação Primeira de Mangueira, founded on 28 April 1928 in the Mangueira community, and the Portela (formally founded in 1923 as the Conjunto Oswaldo Cruz, renamed in 1935), based in Madureira, are among the oldest continuously active schools. The first Carnival parade competition was held in 1932.

Through the 1930s and subsequent decades, additional schools were founded across Rio's favelas and adjacent working-class neighborhoods: the Império Serrano in Madureira (1947), the Acadêmicos do Salgueiro in Tijuca (1953), the Beija-Flor de Nilópolis (1948), the Unidos da Tijuca (1931), and others. Each school has roots in a particular community and maintains them through the social, financial, and cultural systems that support its operation.

The Carnival parade

The annual Carnival parade in Rio's Sambadrome (Sambódromo, built in 1984 to a Niemeyer design) is the institutional event around which most contemporary samba-school activity orbits. The Grupo Especial competition draws roughly a dozen top-division schools each year; the parade includes thousands of participants per school, costumed and choreographed around a samba-enredo (theme song) written for the specific year. The competition is judged across multiple categories and is broadcast nationally and internationally.

The Liga Independente das Escolas de Samba do Rio de Janeiro (LIESA) administers the Grupo Especial. Schools in lower divisions are administered by other leagues, and Carnival activities outside Rio proceed under separate institutional arrangements in São Paulo, Salvador, Recife, and other cities.

Key composers and figures

Foundational composers and singers from favela-rooted samba schools include Cartola (Angenor de Oliveira, 1908–1980, Mangueira), Nelson Cavaquinho (Nelson Antônio da Silva, 1910–1986, Mangueira), Paulinho da Viola (Paulo César Batista de Faria, b. 1942, Portela), Candeia (Antônio Candeia Filho, 1935–1978, Portela / Quilombo), Clara Nunes (1942–1983, Portela), Beth Carvalho (1946–2019), Jovelina Pérola Negra (1944–1998), and Zeca Pagodinho (Jessé Gomes da Silva Filho, b. 1959). Mangueira's Jamelão (José Bispo Clementino dos Santos, 1913–2008) was the school's principal singer for over half a century.

Politics and reception

Samba schools' relationship with the city and with the state has been complicated across their history. Through the 1930s the schools were variously banned, regulated, and appropriated by the Getúlio Vargas government, which incorporated samba into a national-popular cultural identity. Through subsequent decades the schools became simultaneously commercial institutions, vehicles of community organizing in their home favelas, and contested sites of cultural politics. The 2019 Mangueira parade with the samba-enredo História para Ninar Gente Grande — which named historical erasures including Marielle Franco's assassination — became a national event for its political content.

Recommended starting points

• Cartola, Cartola (1974), the late-career return after decades out of recording.
• Clara Nunes, O Canto das Três Raças (1976).
• Paulinho da Viola, Foi Um Rio Que Passou em Minha Vida (1970).
• Beth Carvalho, Pra Seu Governo (1976).
• The annual Carnival parades, archived by Globo / Multishow and on the LIESA website.