Performing the “Class of Color” in c. 1920 São Paulo, Brazil

At the turn of the twentieth century, São Paulo dizzyingly transformed from an isolated regional capital to a bustling metropolis. With hundreds of thousands of immigrants and migrants pouring into the city, new buildings sprouted by the day while older edifices took on new forms. Streets and squares teemed with life, and electric streetcars and automobiles more easily moved that life to and from São Paulo’s peripheries. In the context of this rapidly changing landscape, many groups worked to define their space and, in turn, their place within an equally rapidly changing society.

This paper explains how Paulistanos created loyalties within this emerging mass society by examining the activity of one set of associations: those linked to São Paulo’s burgeoning “black press” in the 1910s and early 1920s. I analyze how literate Afro-Paulistanos took advantage of new indoor spaces of sociability—theaters and dance halls—to unite and shape a community. What impact did organizers hope that these new spaces would have on the behaviors and goals of their group’s constituents? How did the performances enacted in these spaces—whether professional or amateur, scripted or improvised, staged or lived—affect the ways in which São Paulo’s “class of color” defined itself and its position in Paulistano society? What, ultimately, was the function of performance, either alongside or in opposition to the written word, in forging racial loyalty in the face of a diversifying population? By answering these questions, the paper illuminates the perceived overlap between embodied and social mobility in the nascent metropolis.