The carnival parades of the samba schools of Rio de Janeiro, on many occasions, hide dense messages of political and social criticism behind their spectacular visual packaging.
This is the case of Salgueiro, a troupe that on Sunday night brought to the Sambódromo the struggle of the Yanomami indigenous people, who in recent years have survived harassed by illegal mining, disease and hunger.
Proving that the carnival does not avoid thorny issues, in the parade there were characters dressed as garimpeiros (poached gold miners) with rifles emitting sparks, a bulldozer devouring the jungle, skulls with military berets or a float with the statue of an indigenous man who was dyed of blood.
There was also a discreet tribute in the form of a flag to the journalist Dom Philips and the indigenous activist Bruno Pereira, murdered two years ago in the Yavarí valley, in the Brazilian Amazon.
Minutes before the samba school entered the Sambódromo, its carnival artist (a kind of artistic director), Edson Pereira, held his nerves while putting the finishing touches on the costumes and the monumental floats, some up to 20 meters high: “Talking about the Yanomami is talking about a debt that we have had for 524 years [in reference to the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500].
What I want is for them to feel represented, with all the beauty, with all the culture, but without taking away the seriousness of this moment we are experiencing, which is a moment of emergency,” he said.
One of the dancers who pays tribute to the Yanomami culture. ALEX FERRO (Riotur)
A little over a year ago, the Brazilian Government launched an emergency operation to expel more than 20,000 garimpeiros from the Yanomami territory, north of the Brazilian Amazon, on the border with Venezuela.
Shortly after, the school set out to tell the story of these indigenous people at the 2024 carnival. The carnival artist and his team came into contact with the spiritual leader and shaman of the Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa, who approved the tribute and asked that The parade will not only show the environmental and social tragedy of its people, but also the richness of its mythology and its strength.
Kopenawa seemed satisfied with the result: he paraded down the samba catwalk accompanied by other indigenous leaders and humming the song that structured the parade (each school composes one
specifically
for each edition of the carnival).
The lyrics include verses such as “we do not want your order or your progress,” in reference to the motto printed on the Brazilian flag, and a chorus in his native language that repeated
Ya temi xoá
(I am still alive).
It was one of the most sung of the night by the more than 70,000 spectators in the Sambódromo stands.
The pedagogical role of samba schools is one of the pillars of their reason for being.
A few days before the carnival, the actor Leonardo Di Caprio, a supporter of the indigenous and environmental cause, shared Salgueiro's samba on his networks, celebrating that moment of visibility for the Yanomami.
Salgueiro was not the only school to hold a combative parade.
On Monday night, 16 mothers who lost their children, mostly victims of police violence (a particularly serious phenomenon in Rio), paraded with Portela, showing their children's faces printed on T-shirts.
This school captured in its parade the best-selling book
Um defeito de cor
(A color defect), by the writer Ana Maria Gonçalves, which narrates the saga of the black heroine Luiza Mahin from the time she was kidnapped in Africa until she led the revolt of the Malês in the city of Salvador in 1835. The current Minister of Human Rights, Silvio Almeida, played the son of the revolutionary heroine, Luiz Gama, one of the main abolitionists of slavery in Brazil.
“Without the samba schools and everything that Brazil gave me, I would not be what I am: the citizen, the lawyer, the teacher, the minister of President Lula,” he confessed on his social networks shortly before stepping into the Sambadrome.
Troupes of the Yanomami culture cross the Sambódromo, on February 12 during the Rio Carnival.Riotur
Another troupe, Paraíso do Tuiuti, dedicated the show to the figure of João Candido, a sailor who in 1910 led a revolution against physical punishment of the Navy troops, mostly black.
He was represented on a float by Max Angelo dos Santos, a young black food delivery man who last year was whipped in the street with a dog leash by a white neighbor from an upper-class neighborhood in Rio and became a symbol of persistence of racism in the 21st century.
The protest parades have strengthened in recent years, but the activist and didactic vocation carnival of the samba schools has always been there, since their birth a century ago as tools of resistance for Afro-Brazilians and the poorest inhabitants of Rio.
During the military dictatorship (1964-1985), its composers performed tricks to place references to freedom in the verses of their songs.
Already in democracy, in 1988, the year of the approval of the Basic Law and the centenary of the abolition of slavery, the samba schools maintained the critical spirit.
The samba of Vila Isabel praised the rhythms of Angola, singing that
kizomba
(a rhythm from that country) was its Constitution, and Mangueira wondered if freedom had really arrived for blacks a hundred years later: “Ask the creator who painted that watercolor ;
free from the scourge of the slave quarters, imprisoned in the misery of the favela.”
Like many others, they are songs and parades that remain in the popular memory of Brazilians and survive generations.
In recent years, the Mangueira parade is especially remembered, which won the competition in 2019. The traditional troupe vindicated the heroes forgotten by official history and paid tribute, among others, to councilor Marielle Franco, murdered the previous year.
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