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Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:
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Samba: Mass Culture from the Bottom Up Although the instruments of the new mass media originated in Europe and North America and were more widely dispersed in these societies, African, Asian, and Latin American audiences also gained access to them. Radio especially helped to diffuse distinctly regional cultural products throughout Latin America. The evolution and dissemination of the musical and dance form known as samba in Brazil illustrates the ways in which mass culture could emerge in poorer societies and then spread upward to elite consumers and outward across national borders. Samba originated in Rio de Janeiro’s shantytowns as a mixture of popular Spanish fandangos and the 2/4 meter of slave songs. Samba’s lyrics extolled the freeing of the slaves in 1888 and the benevolence of the old monarchs. But mostly samba celebrated the idea that life was not all squalor, despite the dreadful conditions of the shantytowns. Samba was not high culture (though many in the elite had joined the audiences and even the dance troupes by the 1920s), and it was not the culture of any race or ethnic group (though it had African roots). Nor was it simply popular culture. Rather, it became a mass culture uniting the people of Rio de Janeiro and soon thereafter other parts of Brazil, and eventually it found an international audience as well. What transformed the samba musical form from a local into a national and then international mass cultural phenomenon was the invention of the phonograph and longplaying records. These allowed samba to be broadcast on the new medium, radio. In Brazil, the phenomenally popular Casé Program on radio was exclusively dedicated to broadcasting popular music. In 1936, the national Hour of Brazil radio program featured the songs of the greatest samba school, Mangueira, in a special broadcast to Germany. The movie house, too, aided in the dissemination of samba. Brazilian samba musical films brought fame to a Portuguese-born dancer, Carmen Miranda, whose fruit-decorated hats made her a household symbol of the tropics in the United States. Records and radio also spread the tango of Argentina, boleros of Mexico, and salsa, the New York musical creation of Cuban and Puerto Rican emigrés that became a mass phenomenon in the Spanish Caribbean by the 1930s. The content and influence of musical mass culture were internationalized, but music and dance were also instrumental in fostering "national" cultures in Latin America. Songs and artists transcended physical barriers and regional accents, and as such, they did the work of nation-building, creating cultural links between disparate people. Samba took on new political implications during the 1920s when dance organizations began to create "schools" to instruct neighbors and to raise funds to help with public works in the face of the Brazilian state’s neglect. By the 1930s, samba schools were often the largest benefactors of schools, roads, and utilities in Rio de Janeiro. They also became patronage machines for local political bosses competing for the support of clienteles. For many years, the Brazilian government banned these organizations as potentially subversive, although they continued to operate illegally. But President Getúlio Vargas, aware that prohibition was politically costly and eager to induct the schools into his own political network, legalized the schools in 1935 and allowed them to occupy an ever more prominent place in the capital’s cultural landscape. Thereafter, the annual festival of Mardi Gras evolved from a boisterous parade and religious celebration to an occasion for Rio’s proliferating samba schools to strut their colorful and highly choreographed stuff. The belated efforts by the authorities to harness samba for their own purposes demonstrated its power as a mass culture from and for the people.
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