After the Monument: Dois de Julho Commemorations in Early Twentieth-Century Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

The 1895 inauguration of the monument commemorating the 2 July 1823 expulsion of Portuguese troops from the city of Salvador marked the occasion for significant changes in the annual commemoration of Dois de Julho – the elaborate festival of Bahian patriotism and provincial or state identity. The Indianist allegorical figures – the male and female caboclos that had gained significance in Afro-Brazilian religion – were excluded from the official celebrations around the monument and confined to the popular festivals in poorer neighborhoods. Considerable tension, in fact, existed between the popular festivals and the official rituals on this day. By the end of the 1910s, the elite Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia had succeeded in confining these symbols to their pantheon, a museum for what its members considered relics of the past, unworthy of presentation in a modernizing Bahia. Conservative and Catholic civic associations sought literally to regiment the populace through civic parades to present an orderly image of the nation. Nevertheless, as a careful reading of the press coverage of Dois de Julho reveals, popular celebrations continued, often until well into July and August in distant neighborhoods, and these festivities reveal the endurance of very different understandings of what it meant to be Bahian among the populace.