As ICE violence resurges in the US, the musical history of black Brazil offers lessons in resistance.
Samba first emerged in the plantations of Salvador’s surrounding province of Bahia.(Wikipedia Commons / Brazillian National Archive)
In Salvador, the capital city of Black Brazil, they call it a baculejo. The term is local slang, derived from the Portuguese word for “stick” or “club.” When police stop a person without good reason to question, search, harass them, or worse, that is a baculejo.
One Saturday not long ago, I witnessed a baculejo unfold across the street from the city’s main history museum, the Casa das Historias de Salvador. Submachine guns slung across their chests, five stern-faced policemen in black berets and bulletproof vests surrounded a middle-aged Black man. Hands clasped behind his head, elbows outspread, the man stood absolutely still, his facial expression a mix of worry, exasperation, and resignation to an experience evidently all too familiar.
Pablo Lemos, a curator at the Casa das Historias, watched through the museum’s ground floor windows. A 23-year-old Black man raised by a single mother whose wooden shack perched on stilts above polluted water, Pablo too was very familiar with baculejos. Normally quick to tease and giggle with his colleagues, now he seethed with resentment.
“Look at that man’s shirt,” he said, referencing the Nike knockoff the accosted man was wearing. “It is obvious that man is working. He is not going to rob. He is not selling drugs. And now he has lost his dignity.”
Except for the fact that these police weren’t hiding their faces, much the same scene could have been observed thousands of miles to the north—in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or any other locality where US President Donald Trump’s ICE agents have been targeting people with black or brown skin. Although mass protests in Minneapolis earlier this year forced ICE to retreat, or appear to retreat, the retreat was temporary. By late June, ICE agents across the country were detaining 2,000 people a day in what The New York Times described as “a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates.”
Then, in the space of a week in early July, ICE agents committed two deadly shootings. On July 7, ICE agents in Houston killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican construction worker and father of three who had lived in the United States for more than 30 years without legal status. On July 13, ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, shot and killed Johan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old father who had a work permit and Social Security number issued by the Trump administration.
In the United States as in Brazil, such extralegal violence against people of color has a long history. Critics of ICE’s brutality—horrified to see masked, heavily armed commandos drag people from cars, break down doors, detain 5-year-old children, and murder not only detainers but also suspected white sympathizers—have likened the agency to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo. But to some African American observers, including Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a better parallel was to slave patrols, the vigilantes hired in the US South before and during the Civil War to hunt down enslaved people who had escaped and return them to bondage.
Exhibits in the Casa das Historias de Salvador, whose 5 million documents and artifacts are the largest such collection in South America, illuminate how Black people in Brazil have been subject to all manner of violence from the time slavery first took root there in the early 1500s. The labor of enslaved Africans powered the sugar, cocoa, and other extractive enterprises that for centuries made Portugal one of the richest countries on earth. Salvador became the largest slave market in the Americas: of the estimated 5.5 million enslaved Africans transported to Brazil, more arrived here than in any other location.
The first landing spot was just steps away from where the baculejo Lemos and I witnessed took place. “Historians have identified four or five sites here where enslaved people were unloaded, but this was the first,” Lemos said, pointing across the Placa do Mercado, the main plaza of the Lower City of Salvador. Roughly one in every seven enslaved Africans did not survive the transatlantic voyage, crammed together as they were head to toe with no toilets and little food, water, or ventilation. On land, conditions were scarcely any better. The average enslaved person did not live past 23, a reflection of their meager diet and the exceptional dangers of harvesting and boiling sugar cane into rum, molasses, and other marketable products.
Enslaved men and women who were deemed insufficiently obedient were flogged at Salvador’s notorious Pelourinho, the Whipping Post. For most of its existence, the Whipping Post stood in Largo Terreiro de Jesus, the Jesus Temple Square, inadvertently illustrating the Catholic Church’s deep integration with Portuguese colonialism. Even today, imposing cathedrals stand on three sides of the plaza, their ornate facades and luxurious interiors embodying the riches generated by the slave trade. The Whipping Post was eventually relocated a few blocks away after the Jesuit college at one end of the plaza complained about the shrieks of agony emanating from the post’s victims.
“I get so angry when I think about what white people did to my ancestors,” Lemos said. Pointing across the plaza to a steep cliff separating Salvador’s Lower City from its Upper City, he asked, “Do you see the road that slopes diagonally up the hill? The colonizers gave that road a terrible name: Ladeira da Preguica. It means the Slope of Laziness. Enslaved people had to carry heavy loads up that road, and when they didn’t run, the colonizers called them lazy. But it is not possible to go fast up such a hill with a heavy load. It is not possible!”
Still, Lemos insisted, “You mustn’t hate white people. The white people of today are not the colonizers of the past. You have to hate the system of racism and people who perpetuate that system. My best friend is white, but she recognizes her privilege, and she fights white privilege alongside me.”
One way to fight that system, Lemos added, was to understand and honor the history that led to today’s circumstances. He was proud to work at the Casa das Historias and help people of all backgrounds learn the truth about Salvador’s past. “If people have no memory of the past,” he explained, “they cannot build a better conception of the future.”
Clarindo Silva, the proprietor of a café and community center facing the plaza where the Whipping Post long stood, echoed Lemos’s sentiment. His eyes still bright and voice firm at age 83, Silva wore a white suit and pink tie as he explained a banner on the wall of his café: “Preservar Para Perpetuar.” “We seek,” he told me, “to preserve for future generations the memory of those who were taken from the African continent and enslaved here, and who built the historic center of this city. A people who do not preserve the past cannot live fully in the present and will never be able to build a great future.”
Memory, in other words, is a form of resistance.
So is music, as Lemos and I were reminded when the sound of drumming suddenly boomed across the plaza. On a side street behind the museum a samba band had assembled in a loose semicircle. Eight men in brightly colored shirts banged drums while others swirled shakers or clapped hands. Women in patterned dresses of yellow, red, and black swayed vigorously to the beat. Above them, a green and purple banner announced that the plaza was hosting a “Black Fair” that weekend.
The drums kicked in again, and the sharp staccato beat instantly transported me back to New Orleans. It was the same beat I’d heard countless times in New Orleans while reporting a book describing the city’s history of slavery, music, and second-line parades.
Second-line parades evolved from the burial rites enslaved Africans had brought with them when they began arriving in New Orleans in 1722. Describing second lines in my book Big Red’s Mercy, I wrote: “Propelled by riotously percussive music, hundreds of people take over the streets for four hours of dancing, drinking, eating, flirting, and grooving to the beat. One or more brass bands drive the action, their squealing horns and thumping drums channeling the jaunty rhythms that made New Orleans, in Bruce Springsteen’s words, ‘this great mother city of American music.’ Dancers strut their stuff in flamboyantly colored uniforms accented by plumed fans, feathered hats, and parasols. Surrounding the band and dancers are spectators joining the fun—the parade’s second line.”
The parallels between New Orleans second-line parades and what I was now witnessing in Salvador were uncanny: It was the same beats, the same drumming and dancing, the same clothes and faces, the same shunning of a division between performer and audience in favor of a communal experience where everyone is a performer and everyone is the audience. If New Orleans locals enjoying a second-line parade were magically whisked to a Salvador samba party, or vice versa, my hunch is that both parties would feel right at home.
The similarities were uncanny but not surprising, given the similar histories of the two cities. Just as Salvador was the biggest slave market in South America (though Rio de Janeiro also imported large numbers of enslaved people after replacing Salvador as Brazil’s capital in 1763), so New Orleans was the biggest slave market in North America. Slavery officially ended in the United States in 1865 and in Brazil in 1888. But slavery’s legacies of prejudice, discrimination, violence and inequality have endured to various degrees in both countries, as the baculejo outside Casa das Historias and Trump’s ICE commandos vividly illustrate.
Those legacies are not all bitter, though, for the slavery experience also gave rise to some of the greatest music on earth. New Orleans musicians mixed African rhythms with melodies from Europe to create jazz, a foundation of 20th-century popular music that gave rise to rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, and other genres. In Brazil, where samba first emerged in the plantations of Salvador’s surrounding province of Bahia, the African connection was spelled out in the music’s very name: “samba” differs by only a single letter from “semba,” the music’s name in Angola, where many of Brazil’s enslaved people originated.
“During the slavery period, this music was forbidden,” Pablo told me as we enjoyed the samba band behind his museum. A smile brightened his face as he added, “Now, we use it to celebrate.”
Likewise in New Orleans, second-line parades honor the ancestors whose sacrifices made today’s relative freedom and prosperity possible. “When you’re in a second line, you feel your history,” Joe Maize, a trombone player for To Be Continued, one of the city’s leading brass bands, told me. “It’s coming out in the moves you dance and the way you play your horn. You can feel your ancestors around you.”
As it happens, reverence for ancestors animates one of the most popular Brazilian songs of all time, “Mas Que Nada.” One might not guess that from the cover version Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 made a global Top 10 hit in the 1960s, because its arrangement and vocals were attuned to the white sensibilities of mainstream US pop. The song’s fiery essence comes through better in a Brazilian TV performance by the man who wrote it, Jorge Ben, backed by a smoking hot band featuring future superstar and Salvador native Gilberto Gil.
The song is actually an exuberant prayer of pride and gratitude. The opening line invokes the goddess Oba three times; the song closes by repeating her name over and over. The verses, loosely translated into English, extol samba as an amazing gift from the ancestors that lives on in Black people today:
Hey, look out!You gotta let me goThis samba is so hotAnd I love to dance samba…A samba from the old Black manA samba as black as you
With the Salvador samba band now in high gear, another uncanny New Orleans parallel unfolded. First a pair of 6-year-olds, then a pair of teenagers, and finally a pair of grown men stepped into the center of the semicircle and began to do a series of gymnastic-like dance movements known as “capoeira.” Developed during slavery, capoeira was a form of self-defense disguised as dance to evade detection by the enslavers. Cartwheels alternated with spins and roundabout leg kicks as drums blasted and onlookers clapped.
The uncanny parallel is that the hero of Big Red’s Mercy, local civil rights activist Deborah “Big Red” Cotton, also practiced capoeira. Indeed, she taught it to Black youth in the rough South-Central neighborhood of Los Angeles before moving to New Orleans, where she covered second-line parades for the local music paper.
As I wrote in Big Red’s Mercy, Deborah Cotton and I met by getting shot together. In 2013, Deb and I were two of the 20 victims of the biggest mass shooting in modern times in New Orleans, long one of America’s “murder capitals.” Tragically, the shooting took place at a second-line parade. Two young Black men, targeting a rival drug dealer, fired into a peaceful crowd, nearly all of whom were Black. Deb was the most gravely wounded of the 20 victims; surgeons questioned whether she would live through the night. (I myself suffered only flesh wounds in the leg and hands.)
Somehow, Deb survived long enough to issue a public statement urging mercy and understanding for the two young gunmen. By no means did she regard their violence as acceptable, but she did view it in context. “These young men have been separated from us by so much trauma,” her statement said, alluding to the disadvantages facing many young Black men in New Orleans: absent or impoverished parents, abysmal schools, rampant gang and police violence, few job possibilities behind menial labor or drug dealing. Arguing that “racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger,” Deb said the gunmen “made horrible choices that have ruined [their lives. But they] didn’t do that in a vacuum. This city and this country created that vacuum.”
Lemos expressed a similar view when I asked him a devil’s-advocate question about the baculejo we had witnessed: Four of the five cops were Black, so were their actions still racist?
“If a person doesn’t have a knowledge of their history, they cannot understand their present,” Pablo replied. “In slavery times, there were captains who worked for the Portuguese, oppressing enslaved people, even though they were Black themselves. It is the same with those policemen. They don’t see that they are perpetuating a racist system.”
As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, presided over by an unabashed white supremacist who seeks to deny an accurate account of the nation’s origins, places like Salvador and New Orleans are reminders that the truths of history remain present all around us. The forces of the past still shape individual events such as the baculejo that took place steps from where enslaved Africans first set foot in Brazil and ICE’s murders of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Guerrero in Maine, as well as the larger social systems that give rise to such events. At the same time, Pablo Lemos, Deborah “Big Red” Cotton and other everyday heroes remind us that history is not destiny: History’s course can be changed if enough people act to change it, and memory and music are powerful tools for doing that.
Mark HertsgaardTwitterMark Hertsgaard is the author of eight books that have been translated into a total of 16 languages, including Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and a Story of Race in America and A Day In the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles. He is executive director of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation.