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Tropical Babylon
Copacabana and the poetics of nostalgia and decadence
Jaguaribe, Beatriz

Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life through the Eyes of the City (CRESC) (p. 133). Taylor and Francis. Ed. do Kindle.

Copacabana […] is a kind of neighborhood purgatory and in its buildings and streets
there can be found the most contrasting and extravagant human fauna: the existentially
shipwrecked with no social prospects, discretely rich people, polyglot street kids, genetic
vandals, chronically disgraced souls, sub people in general, terrified members of the
consumerist sect of the debunked middle classes cringing under the tough deal of heavy taxes
and social-economic decadence, scientific street vendors, tasty transvestites. Extravagant
contrast of a human fauna doing things in buildings or circulating outside them bombarded
by the visual excess of the streets. An ideal place for the proliferation of sub-worlds. 2
Postcards of excess Focused through the lens of excess, the neighborhood of Copacabana
offers a surplus of people, nature, machines, poverty, richness, crowds, loneliness, and fame.
Copacabana’s excess is tensioned by its contrasting extremes. More than any other urban
space in Brazil, the neighborhood has been both celebrated and disparaged as a site of
glamorous tropical hedonism and also as a zone of social rupture, prostitution, and disastrous
overcrowding. In the 1940s– 50s it was hailed as the glamorous “Princess of the Sea,”
according to the famous song that became its unofficial hymn. 3 This was the Copacabana
extolled by the tourist industry, the movies, and the jet-set high society as a haven of tropical
glamour. By the early 1970s, the neighborhood was readily associated with decadence. 4
Copacabana’s decadenceCopacabana’s decadence was signaled not onlythrough the demise
of former bourgeois ideals of elegant urbanization but also it was gleaned in emerging urban
phenomenon such as the boom of cheap sex trade outlets, greedy real estate speculation,
overpriced tourist traps, and glaring social contrasts. Although the disparity between the rich
and poor is a constant feature of Brazil and of Rio de Janeiro itself, in Copacabana, the
juxtaposition between luxury and squalidness was and continues to be overtly cast. Social
contrasts are signaled by the gap between the rich inhabiting the luxurious apartment
buildings on Avenida Atlântica facing the beach and the multitudes of kitchenettes, the shacks
of favelas dwellers perched on the hills, and the clusters of street dwellers and street children
lying on the sidewalks or roaming through the streets. Although its population decreased and
it no longer has one of the world’s greatest urban densities as it did in the 1970s when the
neighborhood at 31,000 inhabitants per kilometer was surpassed only by Hong Kong (32,000)
and Manila (37,000), it is still a crowded place comprised of “100 street blocks, seventy eight
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streets, five avenues, six alleys, three hills in an area of 7,84km2” (O’Donnell 2013: 13). 5
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Copacabana is the Brazilian neighborhood that has the largest percentage of elderly
inhabitants. Dwellers who are 60 years old or older number 43,431 and they represent almost
a third of the entire population of the neighborhood. Similar to most neighborhoods in Rio de
Janeiro, Copacabana also has its favelas, Pavão-Pavãozinho, Morro dos Cabritos, Chapéu
Mangueira, and Babilônia, but they are relatively small in size and have recently been
subjected to the new policy of security occupation by the forces of the UPP (Unidade de Polícia
Pacificadora [Police Pacification Units]). Copacabana still continues to have a population of
street dwellers although due to the upcoming mega events, a considerable number of beggars
and street children seem to have been displaced. The neighborhood has the highest number
of hotels in the city, and it also has a considerable range of nightclubs and prostitution zones.
Yet above all, its resilient mystique is largely fomented by one of the most famous urban
beaches in the world. In its dystopian extreme, Copacabana has the congested, polluted, and
depressingly seedy atmosphere of urban places that are tottering at the edge of their ultimate
decay. The neighborhood’s main avenue, the Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana has—
since the late 1960s— lost its former appeal as a chic commercial center where illuminated
shop windows in the 1940s and 50s displayed refined goods for well-heeled pedestrians. In
the year 2012, variegated multitudes jostle past shops that range from boutiques of fashion
labels to lesser stores stuffed with bric-a-brac, souvenirs, or a confusing assemblage of
hardware and computer goods. The remaining art deco buildings that once were a signature
of the neighborhood and the eclectically styled buildings of the 1950s are hemmed by
featureless high-rise buildings defaced by billboards, debris, and cheap joints. But due to the
upcoming mega events of the World Cup and the Olympics, the rise in real estate prices of
Rio’s South Zone has also reached Copacabana. In an attemptto invent anew the former
Copacabana chic, new restaurants, bars, and sophisticated bakeries often bearing French
names have been recently inaugurated in the much maligned Avenida Nossa Senhora de
Copacabana. In December, the soaring temperatures of the Rio summer give the bustling
street commerce a surreal touch as men decked out as Santa Claus swing little bells while
drenching with sweat their red felt garments and fake cotton beards. An incessant flow of
people enter the cheap high-rise buildings because, aside from its commercial activities,
Copacabana also has a formidable concentration of kitchenettes built in the real estate boom
of the 1960s– 70s when the inhabitants of the poorer and more proletarian North Zone of Rio
flocked to the neighborhood in search of beach culture and modern glamour (Rangel 2003:
44). As depicted in Eduardo Coutinho’s documentary Edifício Master (2002) that is woven by
filmed interviews with the residents of a building where roughly 500 people lived in minuscule
studio apartments, Copacabana’s edifices have thousands of untold stories given the amazing
diversity of people jammed together in its streets, bars, nightclubs, offices, beach, and
apartment buildings. At night, in the scruffy streets next to the Avenida Nossa Senhora de
Copacabana, street people shuffle about looking for bits in trash cans. Street children lie
curled inside cardboard boxes next to the lighted shop windows, legless beggars on
skateboards surf the pavement jingling their paltry winnings, while prostitutes stalk their
prospective clients. Wandering in the wee hours of the night is a dangerous practice in
Copacabana. But the dangers facing the solitary pedestrian are merely one in a plethora of
violent confrontations. Until the entrance of the UPPs (Police Pacification Units— Unidades
de Polícia Pacificadora) in 2010 and 2011, the four main favelas of Copacabana, Pavão-
Pavãozinho, Morro dos Cabritos, Chapéu Mangueira and Babilônia were often caught in the
crossfire between drug dealers and the police or between rival drug gangs. If urban violence
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is well represented in Copacabana, there are other less threatening aspects that often make
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the neighborhood dismaying. At times, the smells ofCopacabana are revolting. For decades,
at the glamorous Avenida Altântica near the street Almirante Gonçalves, pedestrians strolling
on the famous black and white promenade of Portuguese stones representing waves were
assaulted by the putrid stench of sewage. 6 The volume of traffic and the pitch of noise also
contribute to the bombardment of the senses. But in its dream wish version, the
neighborhood justifies its appealing claim to fame. Copacabana is also the fabulous crescent-
shaped beach where millions assemble peacefully for the New Year’s celebration and where
thousands of people socialize in multi-class and multi-racial gatherings.

Its fabled black and white mosaic pavement near the sea and Burle Marx’s
extraordinary pagination of the sidewalk pavement interspersed by vegetation on the Avenida
Atlântica continue to elicit awed contemplation. Copacabana is arguably the most democratic
of Rio de Janeiro’s neighborhoods because it congregates all aspects of the city and a plurality
of different classes and peoples in its densely packed urban web. 7 It has often been
designated as a city within the city because it is a fully commercial, business, recreational, and
residential neighborhood. One can live and die without having to leave the premises of the
neighborhood. Rather, one can actually die in Copacabana but one has to be buried elsewhere
because in keeping with its mystique of a joyous modernity there are no cemeteries in
Copacabana.

The exuberant beauty of the beach, the liveliness of the streets, the diversity of people,
and the myriad options of entertainment all make Copacabana an icon of tropical urban
hedonism. Decadent and glamorous, Copacabana is the ambivalent, frayed, and renewed
postcard of Rio de Janeiro itself.

COPACABANA MYTHOLOGIES
Copacabana’s montage of urban imaginaries, experiences, and representations reveal
mythologies of urban living that range from its initial consolidation as a chic neighborhood
inspired by a French cosmopolitan seaside joie de vivre in the 1920s, to the “golden age” of
tropical glamour in the 1940s and 50s; to its demise in the 1970s as a congested space of urban
decay, and finally, the neighborhood is being gentrified as part of the branding strategies of
Rio for the upcoming mega events of the World Cup and the Olympics. By the 1950s, the
glamorized picture of Copacabana was already tinged by the inexorable expanse of high-rises,
the tumult of excessive vehicles, the conflicts of juvenile middle-class street gangs, and the
expansion of its favelas. Conversely, at the height of its negative imagery in the 1970s, the
neighborhood also was extolled as a tropical wonderland by the tourist industry, the Avenida
Atlântica underwent a major reform and was substantially enlarged, and the New Year’s
celebration on Copacabana beach with firework displays and offerings to the deities of the
Umbanda and Candomblé achieved unprecedented fame.

8From the 1920s until the year 2013, at the time of the writing of this chapter, the
neighborhood has been overlaid by differing inscriptions of the dream life by the tropical Los
Angeles famously analyzed by Mike Davis (1990), Copacabana was created not under the sign
of “sunshine and noir” but of “sunshine and chic modernity.” The invention of the beach and
the promise of an “aristocratic” cosmopolitan life style ranked foremost in the repertoire of
the “tropical chic.” In her book, A invenção de Copacabana (2013), Julia O’Donnell details how
the neighborhood was promoted by the municipality and private entrepreneurs as an elite
project centered on creating elegant forms of socialization and life styles by the beach for the
upper classes. Thus, initially extolled in the early years of the twentieth century for its
medicinal qualities, the pure air, and the invigorating dip in the sea, Copacabana was soon
readily advertised by the tramway company of Jardim Botânico, the real estate market, and
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the municipality as a celebration of a cosmopolitan, modern, and refined mode of urban living
(O’Donnell 2013: 38). Copacabana’s representations and extraordinary topography are
enmeshed because the symbolic landscape and the material one become inseparable icons of
its fame. Aside from a vast assortment of lyrics, narratives, photographs, films, and even a
major soap opera (Paraíso Tropical 2007) that have the neighborhood as their subject matter,
Copacabana has also been the subject of a number of sociological and anthropological studies.

9 As a site of tropical hedonism, miscegenation, and social diversity, the neighborhood has
often been considered a synecdoche of Rio de Janeiro and its attributes evoke congealed
notions of national identity forged back in the 1930s. Conversely, its chaotic urbanization,
social violence and dereliction have also been constantly cast as an example to be avoided
or as a signal of the demise of Brazilian cities through the negative effects of
“copacabanization.”

10 In this chapter, I want to explore the urban imaginaries of Copacabana through a selective
reading of aesthetic repertoires that have defined the neighborhood. In narratives and
images gleaned from the media, artistic imaginaries, and architectural forms, I interpret the
mythology of Copacabana as shaped by a cluster of concepts such as “modern tropical
hedonism,” “glamour,” “nostalgia,” and “decadence.” These concepts overlap in different
time frames as they shape the neighborhood’s symbolic trajectory. In the 1920s,
Copacabana was built and inspired by elite aspirations that sought a modern French version
of a cosmopolitan lifestyle by the beach. In the 1940s, urban modernity at the beach was
increasingly shaped by the burgeoning influence of the “American lifestyle” as sold through
Hollywood and consumer goods. French cultural aspirations and American consumer goods
were also enmeshed with the invention of a singularly modern Brazilian Copacabana that
emerged in the 1930s– 50s from the experiences of an artistic bohemia that created new
musical rhythms, narratives, and images of the neighborhood and of the city itself.
Copacabana’s glamour soured with the “decadence” of the 1970s where the influx of poor
inhabitants dramatically changed the configuration of what had once been the haven of the
upper middle classes. These distinct configurations of Copacabana not only reveal shifts in
cultural influences but also changing patterns of socialization shaped by the visibility and the
role given to different classes. In the elitist version of the Copacabana of the 1920s, the poor—
comprised of fisherman and laborers— were excluded from the advertising efforts and the
real estate speculation promoting the neighborhood (O’Donnell 2013: 64). From the 1930s
until the 1950s, the chic tropical glamour of Copacabana also incorporated the aspirations of
middle-class residents, and the growing favela enclaves were ambiguously celebrated as the
birthplace of authentic popular Brazilian culture and also disparaged as sites of poverty and
backwardness. In the 1940s, the mayor Henrique Dodsworth demolished churches and
buildings in the popular neighborhood of Cidade Nova to make way for the huge avenue
Presidente Vargas. The material topography and the symbolic mapping of the region were
reshaped as former enclaves of bohemian life were displaced.

11 Also in the 1940s, police repression attempted to close down the brothels in the
Bohemian neighborhood of Lapa. Lapa was then the transgressive bohemian zone of Rio de
Janeiro famed for its nightlife, ruffians, prostitutes, and live music. O film copa me engana
mostra que é pra lá que vagabundo corria pra zoar

12 Copacabana and its numerous nightclubs and music joints arose as an alternative to the
popular bohemia of the Lapa. In all these instances, the ruling ethos of Copacabana was the
promise of novelty and modernity in the guise of a new cosmopolitanism, as a new middle-
class form of life, or as a new bohemia that mingled ingredients of popular and middle-class
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culture. In my analysis of Copacabana’s mythology, I use the notion of “myth” not entirely
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in accordance to Barthes’ sense of term because I combine his critique of myth as a
naturalized cliché with Benjamin’s notion of myth as a collective dream wish.

13 In his pioneering study of the late 1950s, Barthes perceives the modern myth as a
language system that disguises its social construction through embedded social practices.
For Barthes, the modern myth was at the service of capitalist status quo, state supremacy,
class divisions, institutional mores, and imperial legitimacy. Although Benjamin would not
negate the embedded ideology concealed in mythic formulations, he posits myths not only
as modes of desire but also as expressions of longing for better worlds that geminate within
collective imaginaries.

14 I suggest, therefore, that the critique of the modern secular myth as an ideological tool
that fosters the maintenance of modern status quo systems becomes insufficient because it
neglects the slippages of consumer response, subjective inscriptions and counter-myths that
destabilize petrified mythical narratives and images. Furthermore, as contemporary societies
become increasingly globalized, complex, and fraught, myths are both enhanced by the
widespread circulation of the media and they are also questioned by a plurality of dissonant
narratives. Similar to the images and narratives of consumer advertising, the mythical image
and narrative congeals desires, expectations, sentiments, and belongings but it does so by
making use of embedded social imaginaries. Myths reveal modes of perceiving the world and
forms of engaging with it. If mythical imaginaries tend to reduce complexity through synthetic
icons— if they frequently offer inscriptions of preordained meanings— they also can be
infused with the quality of reenchantment that provides a kind of poetics of release from toil,
utilitarian reasoning, or pragmatic gains. Unlike the artistic imagination that entices aesthetic
defamiliarization, the mythical imaginary, in this sense, can rely on the already processed as
Barthes has claimed. But that in itself suffers change through parody, irony, satire, or
inversions. Thus, the chic tropical Copacabana invented in the 1930s– 40s was also remade by
the equally “mythical” noir aspect of Copacabana gleaned not only from the direct experience
of the mean streets but also from the imaginaries wrought by literature, cinema, photography,
and journalistic reportage. Urban mythologies provide a symbolic legibility that arrests the
flux of ephemeral events. Allegories, myths, symbols, and tropes also recover experiences as
an act of the imagination. What interests me in this chapter and what also constitutes the
overall thrust of this entire book is the imaginary aspect of urban living— how social and
individual imagination fabricates realities, dreams, aspirations, myths, and how these are
directly linked to lived experiences. Urban mythologies and allegorical motifs change with
time not only because they age or are surpassed by new configurations but also because the
labeling of periods is often invented afterwards. Copacabana’s mystique was initially framed
by a glorified nostalgia for the 1950s. The fabrication of the “Anos Dourados” or “The Golden
Years” was not just achieved posthumously. As mentioned before, similar to the city of Los
Angeles, Copacabana was also fabricated under the sign of modernity fomented by new
transport system, advertising, and real estate speculation exhibited in the glossy pages of the
illustrated magazines, most notably the popular magazine O Cruzeiro (1928– 1975).

15 Copacabana’s mythology of urban living was linked to new mass media such as the
cinema, the radio, and the chronicles of writers who narrated in urban vignettes the
glamour and pathos of the neighborhood. There was a deliberate intent in the promotion of
the neighborhood and the advertisements, images, and narrations evoked from that period
reveal wonderment with the beach scenario of arresting beauty and bronzed bodies, the
enticement of the tropical glamour of modern ways and consumption, and the excitement
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with the new musical rhythms of Bossa Nova. But they also depict the despondency with
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blatant social discrepancies, the provincialism of the meager middle classes, and the
precariousness of infra-structure where water and light shortages were constantly marring
the newly acclaimed “Copacabana Way of Life.”

The nostalgia for the 1950s and the longing for Copacabana’s lost glamour is a sentiment that
was cultivated in the late 1960s up until 2000. The nostalgia for the 1950s not only coincides
with the pre military coup of 1964, but it is also enveloped by a mythology of social amiability.
In 1965, 1 year after the military coup, Rio de Janeiro commemorated its 400th anniversary.
Two major modernist poets residing in Rio but coming from different states, Manuel Bandeira
(1886– 1968) from the northeastern state of Pernambuco and Carlos Drummond de Andrade
(1902– 1987) from Minas Gerais were the editors of a bulky volume celebrating the city. Amid
the assemblage of chronicles, letters from voyagers, poems, short stories, drawings,
caricatures, and images, there is a full-page display of Vera Lucia Coutinho elected as Miss
Guanabara (then the state of Rio de Janeiro was called the state of Guanabara). The novelty
here is not the beauty contest itself, an event that was hugely popular at the time, the novelty
was the racial configuration of the elected Miss Guanabara. Vera Lucia Coutinho was
celebrated as the first mulata to become a Miss in a beauty contest. Although the figure of
the mulata has a lengthy trajectory in Brazilian literature, visual arts, and popular music, most
specifically in samba where the dancing mulatas were and still are featured as the crucial body
that symbolizes the festivity, the election of a non-white Miss in a beauty contest was a
statement. In the 1950s and the early 1960s the notion of “racial democracy” was both
endorsed and disparaged as a “myth.” The body of the beautiful mulata was a key component
in the configuration of this foundational motif as the celebration of miscegenation and the
mestizo nation offered a compensation for the legacy of slavery and ongoing discrimination.

16 Despite inflated nationalist sentiments, the burgeoning revolutionary aspirations of

students, and the ideological struggles of the cold war period fraught between American
liberal capitalist expansion and Soviet communism, Rio de Janeiro, in the 1950s, was a city
that maintained its hierarchical divisions of class, race, and gender. The 1950s were also the
moment where the urbanized middle and upper classes of the South Zone of the city,
particularly Copacabana, were given unprecedented visibility. By the time of the military
coup in 1964, the beaches of Ipanema and Leblon were already just as renowned as
Copacabana and Bossa Nova itself with the famous song “The Girl from Ipanema” (1962)
became more identified with that neighborhood than with its original birthplace,
Copacabana. But the nostalgic patina encapsulating the contours of Copacabana are
wrought by the wish-dreams of middle-class glamour and modernity at the beach.

Tropical chic: The invention of the beach

The beach and modernity were not readily equated until the first decades of the twentieth
century. Throughout the twentieth century, the city of Rio de Janeiro expanded along its
ocean front towards the west. As constructions dotted the beachfront, the bodies of Rio’s
inhabitants progressively shed their clothing. Colonial Rio de Janeiro was clustered around the
port and its adjacent beaches. Aside from the barefoot slaves who wore rough cotton clothes,
the elite members and even modest tradesmen and working class women were swathed in
heavy Iberian garments.

17 Women were locked behind latticed wooden windows and if they ventured into the streets
they were covered by heavy shawls. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Iberian garb with its
profusion of heavy mantilhas had been cast away and by the end of the nineteenth century
French fashion for women and English cashmere outfits for men prevailed despite the
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scorching temperatures of the tropical city. Downtown Rio de Janeiro featured colonial
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squares, baroque churches, narrow streets, and, after the reform of Pereira Passos (1902–
1906), it also had grand avenues filled with imposing buildings of eclectic architecture. The
elegant neighborhoods of the nineteenth century such as Botafogo and Flamengo were
located relatively close to the downtown area. But the custom of sea bathing was not widely
practiced in the beaches of Botafogo and Flamengo until the beginnings of the twentieth
century. Instead, the beaches close to the downtown area such as Boqueirão and Santa Luzia
were frequented by a multitude of people that ranged from small tradesmen and workers to
more prominent business men (Correa and Gaspar 2004: 87).
Sea bathing in downtown Rio involved elaborate ritualistic procedures. Workers and trades
people arrived at the beach very early fully clothed; the wealthier bathers arrived later and
changed into bathing outfits inside the wooden cabins. Bodies were fully covered and the
notion of basking in the sun itself was practically inexistent (Correa and Gaspar 2004: 89– 92).
By the time Copacabana began to be explored at the beginnings of the twentieth century, the
custom of sea bathing had been fully absorbed. Both high-class and popular European seaside
resorts extolled sea bathing not only as a traditional cure for melancholia but they also
promoted entertainment, excitement, and a moreexpansive and freer relation to the body.
Yet even after the opening of its first tunnel in 1892, Copacabana was still an outpost. In the
early twentieth century, Copacabana was a terrain without a symbolic imaginary. It was
primarily an arresting landscape: a wild, unpolluted glorious expanse of tropical beach with
booming surf; its white sands surrounded by trees bearing the small red acidic pitanga berry.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the local residents were fishermen, laborers, and
a handful of bourgeois families that had their summer homes in the remote beach. The area
of Copacabana known as Leme and also the Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana existed
prior to the opening of the tunnel, but before the construction of the Avenida Atlântica the
sparse houses of the bourgeoisie were located inwards with their backyards facing the beach
(O’Donnell 2013: 54– 55). When the mayor Pereira Passos inaugurated the Avenida Atlântica
directly in front of the breathtaking expanse of the beach, new houses were built in varied
eclectic architectural style. French cultural sophistication dictated the prevailing norm and the
magnificent mansions facing the beach were inspired by French models and the luxury of the
Riviera. But the beach itself had still to translate its architectural imprint because in 1910 it
was largely conceived as a place of hygienic purification and medicinal powers. By the 1920s,
the Riviera lifestyle, the sophistication of the seaside resorts, the allure of the “civilized”
beach, and the new attitude towards the bronzed, lean, and athletic body had become an
utmost item of fashion and high class aspiration. The symbolic occupation of the beach as a
place of socialization, pleasure, aesthetic beauty, and modernity was still in the making in the
early years of the twentieth century. Julia O’Donnell (2013) quotes a journalistic piece of 1913
published in the newspaper Atlântico, where the reporter laments that:
Here in Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by the most beautiful beaches in the world, we don’t know
the pleasures of the beach. For the local inhabitant of Rio, the dip in the sea has no season, it
is medicinal for the anemic and sickly girls, it is a sport for rowers […] Even Copacabana itself
is not a beach for bathing; now-a-days it is simply an eccentric and chic neighborhood of the
city. There are more automobiles in the Avenida Atlântica than bathers in the sands of the
beach. 18 By the 1920s, the beach was crowned as a place of sports activity, socialization, and
leisure. But even more relevantly, Copacabana was extolled as the iconic neighborhood of a
new form of chic modernity. According to Julia O’Donnell, the illustrated publication Beira-
Mar founded in 1922 by the Portuguese immigrant Manuel de Sá became the foremost vehicle
of the invention of an early Copacabana style premised on aristocratic French models of
elegance and consumption (O’Donnell 2013: 84). In 1923, the magnificent Copacabana Palace
was inaugurated by the wealthy entrepreneur Otávio Guinle.
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Figure 5.8 Copacabana Palace, 2012. Photograph by the author. As a foremost member of the
Brazilian elite, Guinle had been personally commissioned by the President of the Republic,
Epitácio Pessoa, to undertake the erection of the fabulous hotel for the commemorations of
the Centenary of the Brazilian Independence in 1922.19 The hotel was only inaugurated in
1923 but its architect, the Frenchman Joseph Gire, had imprinted his signature on the city as
one of the architects of the most magnificent family residence of the Guinles in Rio de Janeiro,
the Palácio Laranjeiras (1913) conceived together with the architect Armando da Silva Telles.
Gire had also established his credentials as the architect of the Hotel Glória, builtfor the 1922
Exhibit. The Copacabana Palace was not just a hotel but a veritable monument to an aspired
lifestyle. It was the architectural emblem of an elite project of cosmopolitan sophistication; a
dream palace of luxury in a peripheral city; a mirage of modernity in the capital of a still largely
rural nation beset by poverty, shadowed by a lengthy legacy of slavery and rampant social
inequality. The Copacabana Palace was an architectural project endowed with a highly
charged symbolic vocabulary that spelled the enactment of an aristocratic existence of
European finesse in the tropics. As Boechat comments on the history of the hotel: “From 1923,
practically all noteworthy events, especially those of a controversial nature, either took place
in the hotel or were intensely felt in its salons” (Boechat 1999: 41). The “controversial nature”
of the events that took place in the Copacabana Palace were not linked to progressive political
agendas but were related to the enticing transgression of social strictures. With its multiple
salons, restaurants, auditoriums, casino, and 230 apartments furnished with imported items
of utmost luxury, the Copacabana Palace promised a definite break from the staid customs of
the nineteenth century. The hotel was a center of political exchange, entertainment, business,
artistic enterprises, and social interactions. But, even more significantly, it was the mirrored
palace where a tropical elite sought to refashion its features in accordance to a model of
civility based on the French cultural norms of the grand monde and on British notions of
service. The hotel’s modernity as evinced by its facilities, installations, and entertainments
was coupled to the management’s allegiance to the hierarchies of class and privilege. From its
very inauguration employees at the Copacabana Palace were trained to follow the 18 items
of professional and personal conduct elaborated by Otávio Guinle, which stipulated strict
norms of conduct for the staff so as to enhance the status and the privilege of the paying
guests (Boechat 1999: 35– 36). Photographs from the 1920s reveal the Copacabana Palace in
majestic splendor amid the sprinkling of mansions that faced the beach on Avenida Atlântica.
The Hollywood production film “Flying Down to Rio” (1933) features the Copacabana Palace
prominently. Indeed, the entire thin plot of the movie spun around the love triangle between
Belinha, the ravishing Brazilian beauty interpreted by the Mexican film star Dolores del Rio,
her fiancé, the insipid Júlio Ribeiro, and the gallant American musician who would eventually
marry the Brazilian beauty had as its backdrop the Copacabana Palace. The hotel was not only
a key visual reference but it was also part of the plot because the love triangle unfolds
alongside the struggle of Belinha’s father to open the grand hotel against the wishes of corrupt
local bosses. Whereas Copacabana beach doesn’t even feature in the film as the landscape
shots were filmed in Malibu and all other footage were studio made, the only images of the
“real” Copacabana are aerial views of the Copacabana Palace.

20 Hollywood aside, the hotel’s presence and the persistent efforts of real estate, transport,
and commercial entrepreneurs soon catapulted the remote outpost of Copacabana into a full
neighborhood by the 1930s. A bastion of European finesse and cosmopolitanism, the
Copacabana Palace held undeniable prestige but the former large houses of eclectic
architecture soon gave way to high-rise buildings that represented a new modern way of living
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largely influenced by the American lifestyle. As the birthplace of the Bossa Nova, the
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neighborhood also changed social mores and allowed youngsters a new rapport with their
bodies, sexuality, and the imaginaries of the cinema.

The “Copacabana Way of Life”

An imaginary archeology of the sands in Copacabana would uncover not the ancient artifacts
of bygone civilizations, nor the remains of funerary monuments, but rather fossilized pieces
of cloth that revealed the inventions of beach costumes throughout the twentieth century.
Sifting through the sands, one could unearth different layers of clothing from distinct modern
periods. From the puffy billowing clothes, frilled caps, and stockings of the beginning of the
twentieth century, to the daring bathing suit (maillot) of the late 1920s, to the explosion of
the bikini in the 1940s, and finally in the revelation of the tanga and men’s sunga in the 1970s,
the sands of Copacabana are allegorically strewn with the imprint of the increasingly denuded
body.

21 The clichéd touristic postcard images that circulated widely in the 1970s and 80s of bronzed
beauties exhibiting their rounded, bared buttocks in the glaring sun have an embedded
explicit trajectory of the modern tropical invention of the social body. Throughout the 1920s,
the magazines Beira-Mar, Para Todos, Fon-Fon!, Careta, and, finally, the richly illustrated
Cruzeiro founded in 1928 advertised through sketches, chronicles, reportage, and
photographs the marvels of the beach and the allure of the new lithe, athletic, and elegant
body. The revolution in beach attire had, evidently, also been tested by the transformation of
street clothes, where the ban of the corset, the fashion of bobbed hair, and the androgynous
look of the slender flapper matched the shock of the modernist architectural skyscrapers.
Indeed, the illustrated magazine Cruzeiro, which would have such a crucial role in extolling
the modern way of living of Copacabana, emphasized in its first edition of 1928: Copacabana
Palace. At its inauguration, the building of A Noite was extolled as an engineering feat due to
its massive employment of reinforced concrete and it remained for decades the largest
building in South America. But if the skyscraper craze was still in the making in the 1920s, the
new minimalist elegance of the slender athletic body had as its essential parading ground the
tropical beach. The fabrication of the modern body on the beach was seen as a crucial
component in the new era of the automobile, the skyscraper, and the cinema. In an article
published in Beira-Mar in 1926, Alfredo Sade disparages: In all the civilized cities that have
beaches the bathing suit (maillot) reigns supreme except here. […] Now we must agree that
Rio de Janeiro is not a provincial town. We are weary of this false and fake civilizatory morale
created by our grandparents. It is quite frankly ludicrous that in the twentieth century we
should shape our norms of living according to the archaic and dusty mirrors of 1830. […] In
Rio, we have the most beautiful beach in the world: Copacabana. And women in the streets
with a delicious perversity show us their stockings, even their gaiters, and yet they appear in
the beach with bathing clothes that seem to be disputing with the municipal brooms of public
cleaning. […] Let the bathing suits arrive.

22 The campaign extolling the “maillot” was imbued as a civilizing modern mission and the
uncovering of the body became not only a sign of modernity, well being, health, and beauty
but also a eugenic statement because according to one commentator writing in 1924: Figure
5.10 The Sirens of Copacabana wearing the maillot in 1934, Beira Mar, Rio de Janeiro, 1934.
9
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Bathing in the sea is proof of good visual qualities. There we can choose a wife without fearing
any unseemly protuberances or asymmetrical fleshiness concealed by an aptly cut dress. Also
a husband in this century of eugenics should be examined at the beach. It is true that
everything depends on the beach. It was the beach that gave value to the terrain. It was the
beach that erected the skyscraper. The beach created that sun tanned young girl with dark
sunglasses that speaks a language that you from the Tijuca or from Madureira can’t
understand.

24 By the 1930s– 40s, Copacabana was a developed neighborhood and the utmost symbol of
modern living was extolled as the high-rise apartment (Rangel 2003: 37). The illustrated
magazines of the period were adamant in their promotion of the novelty of high-rise living. In
a city beset by a veritable shortage of popular housing, in a city where prior to the reforms of
Pereira Passos the poor had largely gathered in crumbling colonial houses or derelict buildings
of tenement housing, the appeal of living assembled in a collective building was overcast by
the fear of contagion, the repulsion of sharing common spaces, and the dread of promiscuous
contacts that demolished social barriers. While the favelas spread exponentially throughout
the South Zone and in Copacabana itself, the real estate market entrepreneurs attempted to
convey the new experience of the modern apartment building filled with the amenities of
modern hygienic standards, cosmopolitan allure, and the appeal of an unencumbered
lifestyle. The impact of exchanges in the tumultuous street congested by people and
machines, the glamour of the silver screen with its mythic divas, and the novelty of apartment
living are illustrated in Benjamin Costallat’s novels. Largely unread today, Costallat was a
bestseller writer of the 1920s. His most famous book Mademoiselle Cinema (1923) was
centered on the amorous adventures of a frivolous young flapper whose lifestyle was
fashioned by the silver screen.

25 While ascertaining the ascendancy of the high-rise building in Copacabana in the 1930s,
Julia O’Donnell quotes Costallat’s emblematic book, The Skyscraper (1929) where he dictated:
Life now-a-days is in the street. In contact with strangers. The family has disappeared. The
home, the love of our love that is a vague notion […] The epoch is of the skyscrapers. One on
top of the other. Jammed together and in promiscuity. Mixture and confusion. The Babel of
all moralities. But where everybody understands each other. We understand each other
because we speak the same language of selfishness. Each one to himself. Each one taking care
of themselves.

26 As a largely residential neighborhood that still had an incipient commerce, Copacabana

was not the privileged symbolic space of government intervention, nor was it the scenario of
the dispute of state sponsored architectural symbolism. Rather, it was during the decades of
the 1930s and 40s that the neighborhood achieved its status as the new modern tropical
scenario of a glamorous “Copacabana Way of Life” that would culminate in the 1950s.

27 Nevertheless, the 1930s evinced a rupture with the social ambiance of the upper classes in
Rio de Janeiro. New nationalist sentiments extolling Brazilianess, cultural identity, the
valorization of the mestizo, and popular culture mitigated the prestige of the former
emulation of upper-class European models. Moreover, the cinema, the radio, and illustrated
magazines revealed middle-class consumer aspirations and life styles. By the 1940s, the
promotion of the “good neighbor policy” and the active engagement of the Office of Inter-
10

American Affairs commanded by Nelson Rockefeller expanded exponentially the cultural

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influence of the United States. Conversely, the exportation of Carmen Miranda to Hollywood
as the exotic Brazilian bombshell fueled the stereotypes of “latinidad” and the scenario of
Copacabana as a wonderland of talking parrots, giant fruits, hip swaying mulatas, and summer
living gained currency through a variety of Hollywood films. If for foreign eyes, Copacabana
was being packaged as a site that combined exotic tropical allure with modern amenities,
internally, the neighborhood represented the novelty of a less restricted, less conservative
way of life symbolized by its youth culture. In Peregrino Junior’s evocation of 1952: Everybody
in Rio wants to live in Copacabana. And Copacabana bristling with skyscrapers is a
neighborhood of advanced customs and ultramodern physiognomy. […] It has its slang. It has
its fashion: the girls walk about in shorts or slacks, without socks and without ceremony and
the boys have abolished the hat, the suit, the tie, good manners and the rest. […] People’s
clothes even outside the beach are synthetic, brief and audacious. At the sea what one sights
is a unanimous pseudonym of nudism. The bars and the nightclubs, the grand cinemas and
the small theaters, the jewelers, the banks, the luxurious fashion stores, all give a measure of
the importance of this authentic city embedded in the city, of this metropolis living inside the
metropolis […] And the upper crust people of Copacabana don’t go downtown because they
don’t need to.

28 In the 1950s Copacabana was the most thrilling neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. The
neighborhood was chic but it had lost some of its former European aristocratic pretentions.
According to the news coverage of the magazine Manchete, published in 1953, one year after
Peregrino Junior’s emphasis on the desirability of the neighborhood, the reporter exclaims:
There are people who say that Copacabana is the true Rio. God help us if this should not be
anything but the most outrageous lie. Copacabana is not and cannot be strictly considered a
posh neighborhood. The really posh people, the frequenters of the gran monde have
definitely left it. What proliferates in that extension of earth and sea is a coca-cola generation,
people who fake elegance, and placid bourgeois types. The types that compose these three
classes are universal. The prevalent one in Copacabana is this coca-cola generation, a colorful
fauna, curious and sometimes abject.

29 New forms of Americanization introduced by consumer goods such as coca-cola, make-up,

fast food, and dance tunes were popularized also by the cinema and Hollywood glamour. If
during the 1920s the magazine Beira-Mar had fabricated the neighborhood in its illustrated
pages, in the 1940s– 50s the Revista de Copacabana set the tone of the new Copacabana.
Protesting against the police repression of the sea bathing costumes worn by the Copacabana
beauties, Lucia Benedetti pontificated in an article of 1949: Consider our difference […] We
have a body every day. We don’t give it a break. To practice gymnastics is as banal as drinking
coffee in the morning. Bicycle riding is an obligation when some unexpected layers of flab are
revealed in inconvenient places. To show one’s body doesn’t scandalize it is an imperative.

30 In the 1940s and 50s, the “Copacabana Way of Life” was premised on the consumption of
modern goods, modern transport symbolized by the automobile, high-rise apartment
housing, and entertainment that included not only forms of socialization at the beach,
nightclubs, bars, and private homes but also the absorption of the images and narratives of
modern glamour propagated by illustrated magazines, the cinema, and the radio. Yet what
made Copacabana’s modernity singular was the urbanized appropriation of the tropical
scenario of the beach by new forms of socialization and aestheticization of the body that
blended different cultural repertoires ranging from the samba of the favelas to new American
11

musical expressions. The emergence of the bronzed girls from Copacabana did not necessarily
entail an explicit valorization of the mestizo body. The mestizo body of the mulata as a national
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symbol was reserved for the carnival events and the samba because the idealized body of
Copacabana was the juvenile body of the tanned yet white modern youth. The transformation
of the female silhouette in the 1920s and 30s— the emergence of the “modern girl” attuned
to fashion and consumption— was a global phenomenon. In Brazil, the “modern girl” made
her dainty appearance in the illustrations of the talented J. Carlos who invented the carioca
flapper called the melindrosa. In the 1920s and 30s, J. Carlos provided a profusion of
illustrations of the melindrosa in the magazines Careta, Para Todos, Fon-Fon!, and O Cruzeiro.
In the figure of the melindrosa, the potentially transgressive flirtatious mien and provocative
attire were attenuated by her doll-like unreality. The historian Isabel Lustosa describes J.
Carlos’ melindrosa: His female figures that in the 1920s and 30s found their more elaborate
form have a delicate and naive sensuality that is frankly seductive. The scant summer clothing
revealed well proportioned little bodies, well designed shapes. But also the clothes
themselves, the small details of the toilette, the scarf, the hat, the gloves, the tiny waist, the
Chanel model, painted eyes, a mouth shaped by lipstick, in sum, the fashion of the time, of
the various times in which he drew […] They are young girls at the beach, the kiss between
the girl and her boyfriend, the graceful dolls moving together in groups or embellishing a page.
They were the charming and silly woman, almost a dragonfly like Tinkerbell of Walt Disney’s
cartoon that peopled the imagination of the men of the time.

31

At the beach, J. Carlos’ melindrosa was a pale flapper with bobbed hair, an audacious bathing
suit, and shiny red lipstick. But in 1938, the illustrator Alceu Penna published in O Cruzeiro his
first drawings of the Garotas, the “Girls” that were later to be known as the Garotas do Alceu,
“Alceu’s Girls” (Junior 2011: 90). The first illustration of the Garotas was a beach sketch where
they appear stylish, slender, tanned and some of them even wearing a dashing two piece
bathing suit, the precursor of the famous bikini. From 1938 until 1964, Alceu Penna published
his weekly drawings of the “girls.” In the 1950s at the height of the popularity of the magazine
O Cruzeiro, Alceu’s girls helped to sell 730,000 weekly issues at a time when the population of
Brazil was roughly of 50 million and compromised of vast numbers of poor and illiterate
people (Campos 2010: 27). According to Gonçalo Junior, the editor of the Cruzeiro: […]
discovered also that sun and sea bathing in Copacabana, especially in the summer began to
be a habit in the city, could be interesting for the magazine’s readers not only because of the
therapeutic aspects but also aesthetically— it was a space to show off beautiful, albeit, well
behaved bathing suits. 32 Together with the make-up powder Angel Face, the renowned soap
Palmolive, the hair product Brylcream for men, the suntan powder made by Colgate
advertised as “Morena Jambo: inspired by the color of the carioca girls,” the toothpaste Gessy,
and numerous other articles of beautification and hygiene, the garotas of Alceu signaled not
only ideals of fashion, beauty, and allure but they also were icons of the new middle-class
consumer market and the evidence of Brazil’s entrance in the 1940s and 50s into a modern
mass media consumption society. 33 But it is symptomatic that the consumer aspects of this
entrance into modernity were not forcefully matched by a social agenda of rights and equality.
The propaganda of the “Copacabana Way of Life” was premised on the joys of beach culture,
the new freedom given to the fashionable suntanned sportive body, the consumption of
consumer goods, and the novelty of apartment living (Pereira 1991). But in its extolment of
the hedonistic tropical modernity, the “Copacabana Way of Life” promoted by the real estate
market, illustrated magazines, and advertisements was premised on gender differences, racial
12

inequality, class divisions, and the maintenance of the status quo. The golden tanned youth
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of Copacabana were white middle-class members and not poor, black, or mestizo youth. 34
Yet the “Copacabana Way of Life” was a gloss, a slogan, and a wish-dream contradicted by the
multiple realities of a complex neighborhood of a city in transformation. Omitted from the
postcard scenario of the neighborhood were not only its favelas but also the ideological
disputes, the urban disrepair, and the toll of real estate speculation that had, by the 1950s,
transformed the neighborhood into a veritable jumble of high-rise buildings. Moreover, the
new celebratory relevance of the middle-class teenager consuming and participating in the
life of the city was also shadowed by the media fueled image of the “rebel” youths who were
disrespectful, violent, frivolous, and dangerous (Pereira 1991: 60– 72). By the 1960s, the
media images of the upper-class and middle-class youths who were engaged in a self-serving
dolce vita were no longer in focus as the new figures of the “rebels with a cause,” the guerrilla
insurgents who opposed the military coup arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s and
theybecame the target of the press. Of the many literary homages, diatribes, celebrations,
and disparagements of Copacabana, Rubem Braga (1913– 1990), the journalist who became
revered for his lyrical chronicles, wrote the most apocalyptic indictment of the neighborhood.
In his prose poem Ai de ti, Copacabana, (Be woe you Copacabana— 1958), Braga evokes with
prophetic ire the downfall of the “Princess of the Sea” besmirched by her many vanities, sins,
and ambitions. Divided into 22 apocalyptic stanzas, the prose poem’s prophetic symbolist
nineteenth-century tone is countered by the prosaic mention of real estate speculation, the
ironic use of actual places, and the modernist prose devoid of ornamentation. Metaphorized
as the ultimate whore on the brink of an abyss, a modern version of the whore of Babylon,
Copacabana would become an underwater Atlantis and her terrain— avidly coveted by real
estate speculation— would be home to fish and debris. Braga’s poetic diatribe directs the
threat of doomsday on actually existing places and people in the neighborhood such as Petit
Club, the streets of Leme, the actual buildings such as Olinda, and the club of Marimbás. Thus:
2. Be woe you, Copacabana, because they called you the Princess of the Sea and they marked
your forehead with a wreath of lies; and your drunken and empty laughter filled the breast of
the night. 6. And dark fish will swim through your streets and the fetid swell of the tides will
cover your face; and the centurion will hurl waves of fuming foam like fleeing panicked sheep
over you until they bite the edge of your hills; and all the walls will crumble. 8. Then who will
speculate over the square meter of your terrain? For in truth there will no longer be any
terrain. 16. Before losing you, I will aggravate your dementia— woe to you, Copacabana! The
people from your hills will descend hollering over you […] 18. In the Petit Club crabs will eat
the heads of men fried in their shells; and Sasha, the frog-man, will play a submarine piano for
the ghosts of silent and green women whose names featured several years in social columns
in a time when there existed columns and commentators. 22. Paint yourself like a streetwalker
and put on all your jewels, polish the paint on your nails and sing your last sinful song because
in truth it is too late for prayers; and shudder your fine body filled with stains because from
the building Olinda to the club of the Marimbás, my fury will descend over you and it will
destroy you. Sing your lastsong, Copacabana! 35 Despite its satirical and ironic undercurrent,
Braga’s prose poem repeats the worn theme of the city of vice and evils. A theme that had
often been employed by the decadentist prose of João do Rio in the first decades of the
twentieth century.

The Biblical prophetic tone in modernist prose was unusual and the urban poems written by
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Vinicius de Moraes, and others display irony, nostalgia,
discontent, the plight of loneliness, the fragility of meaning, and the contradictions of the
13

tropical city; but the moralizing tone is absent or nuanced by perplexity and ambiguity.
Although Braga aims his disparagement at the frivolity of the upper and middle classes, he
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also casts the favela dwellers (the folks on your hills) as the hollering multitude that will finally
descend claiming the neighborhood. Through menacing biblical metaphors his words tapped
into the prevailing anxieties of the elite and middle-class members of Copacabana that were
witnessing, in the late 1950s, the neighborhood’s unchecked growth, the spread of juvenile
middle-class street gangs, and the transformation of traditional values. Shaped prior to and
during the 1950s itself, the myth of Copacabana as glamorous tropical modernity was
evidently not fully endorsed. Among the dissonant voices was the critical view of the American
poet Elizabeth Bishop who resided in Brazil for more than 20 years. In Rio, Bishop lived at the
Leme, at one of the extremities of Copacabana beach. Upon her arrival in December of 1951
she stays at the home of Lota Macedo Soares who was later to become her companion and
lover. In a letter to Alfred Kazin, Bishop offers her take on Rio: I sit surrounded by Calders,
Copacabana, Cariocans, Coffee, etc.—& of course a dysentery drug, which also begins with C.
[…] Pearl has been awfully nice to me […] I don’t think she likes Rio much. I don’t think I do
either, but it’s hard to say— it’s such a mess— Mexico City and Miami combined is about the
closest I can come to it; and men in bathing trunks kicking footballs all over the place. They
begin on the beach at 7 every morning— and keep it up apparently at their places of business
all over town, all day long. It is enervating, completely relaxed (in spite of the terrific coffee),
corrupt.

36 Initially programmed to last a couple of days, Bishop’s sojourn in Rio was transformed into
more than two decades of life in Brazil. Her poems on Rio stress social disparity, the
ambivalences of intimacy and distance with servants, and the depressing glimpses of
Copacabana. In a poem written in the 1960s, “Going to the Bakery,” the Copacabana scenario
is already one of sickly degradation (Bishop 1993). Bishop’s Copacabana with its seedy
bakeries, degraded street people, and stray street kids continues to be strikingly familiar to
the contemporary inhabitants of Rio who cross its avenues and streets. What is not so usual
is the evocative imagery that Bishop’s prose conjures through seemingly descriptive words
that become analytic metaphors of the unease that permeates the gaze of the poetic observer
as she records the plight of the derelict street people.

The sordid, derelict, and degraded aspects of Copacabana also surface in the realistic prose of
João Maria in the 1970s. But contrary to Bishop’s distanced unease and ironic mastery, João
Maria’s narration relies on the construction of urban typologies that are mostly devoid of
poetic nuance or psychological depth. In his prose, the dispossessed, the strewn in the gutter
people, the marginal characters, and the comical figures of the street are narrated through
the gritty lens of a realism that is emulative of the lived speech of the mean streets. By
contrast, in Fausto Fawcett’s delirious baroque trash prose written in the 1990s, Copacabana
is a globalized, convulsive, crazed scenario of underground people and sub-worlds. In his
imaginative pop filmic take on the neighborhood, Fawcett veers away from the overt realist
naturalism of João Maria because he also dynamites any moralizing undertone or any
verisimilitude. Fausto Fawcett’s Copacabana is an overdose of metaphors.

A Copacabana noir of mysterious crimes and dark dealings also is the subject of Luiz Alfredo
Garcia Roza’s bestseller detective novels. In the series of novels that have the neighborhood
as their background, the map of Copacabana is bloodied by potential crimes that the pensive
inspector Espinoza must unravel in his investigations. Similar to Simenon’s novels that feature
the famous inspector Maigret, the novels of Garcia Roza are more concerned with the social
14

configuration of the neighborhood, the contrasts between classes, perspectives, habits, and
the expectations of the characters than with suspenseful mystery. Whether through
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metaphors of poetic irony, the prose of gritty realism, the overdose of baroque pop or the
adrenaline drenched plots of the detective noir, the literary portraits of Copacabana from the
1970s onward stress diversity, loneliness, violence, estrangement, and decadence. The
neighborhood’s demise is countered by artistic representations that attempt to overcome the
banality of urban disrepair and the mere sordidness of overcrowding, violence, and
prostitution though an aesthetic rendition of decadence endowed by pathos. It is this pathos,
this life on the edge, this evocation of the “shock of the real,” and the dark epiphany of reality
that constitute a form of estranged urban experience— an experience that is too quotidian to
be magnified as the sublime but is also too intense to be packaged as the numbed routine of
daily life.

37 If the 1970s signaled Copacabana’s decadence, the 1980s and 90s were turbulent decades
for all of Rio de Janeiro. The escalating violence of the drug trade, the political disputes
concerning new democratic agendas, rampant economic inflation, successive economic
recovery plans, and political and administrative mismanagement of the city led to an overall
image of decline. From the arrastão— the muggings of beach goers by youth gangs from the
peripheries and the favelas in 1992— to the murder of sleeping street children by hired
gunmen in front one of Rio’s iconic cathedrals in the downtown area in 1993, to the massacre
of civilians and entire families by revengeful police forces in the favela of Vigário Geral also in
1993, the image of Rio de Janeiro as an explosive unfeasible city was widely advertised. In a
book dedicated to uncovering the massacre of Vigário Geral and its aftermath, the journalist
Zuenir Ventura entitled his book, The Divided City (Ventura 1994). His rubric became
widespread and enthroned as an apt description of Rio de Janeiro’s social segregation. Yet as
Ventura’s reportage itself reveals, the notion of the “divided city” is somewhat fallacious
because it does not take into account the multiple relations between the favelas and the
“normative” city that are gleaned through unequal yet constant exchanges of labor, cultural
programs, fashions, and consumption. However, the endorsement of his epithet signaled the
demise of the city in the 1990s and the mythologization of the 1950s. In his words: The wave
of disenchantment that followed the arrival of the 90s in Brazil created a tendency to idealize
the past as a golden age. In the light of a hostile and violent present, the suggestion is to look
backwards and sigh, with or without reason: “Great times those were!” More than an
affectionate, proustian, involuntary memory, what began to work was a selective memory,
the kind that likes to choose the best. And many people believe that the best of Rio happened
around the 50s, the golden years. (Ventura 1994: 17, my translation) Although Ventura traces
the origins of the divided city as a constant feature of Rio de Janeiro’s uneven and unequal
urbanization (Ventura 1994: 13) and despite his attempt to modify the mythic aura of the
1950s, he himself endorses that: In truth, there already existed then “two cities” or a divided
city, but amiable socialization, civil obedience, the lack of class antagonisms, and the disregard
towards social problems often didn’t allow the perception that there was a serpent’s egg
being hatched in paradise. (Ventura 1994: 11, my translation) Although he attempts to instill
a critical edge to the idealized reading of the 1950s, Ventura’s stance endorses some of the
nostalgic apprehension of the 1950s as he portrays the “lack of social antagonisms” that
characterized the period. Yet this perceived lack of social antagonism— a perception that can
be contested by multiple discourses and facts— relies on the lived experience of having been
a middle-class resident of the city when there prevailed, despite increasing contestation, a
naturalized social hierarchy. As I have argued before, the 1950s were particularly glorified in
15

the 1990s because, among other factors, they were projected as the safe haven of the middle
classes who were then the protagonists of the city. Thus, the nostalgic memoirs, films, and
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images of the 1950s produced during the 1990s pay tribute to the mythology of the “golden
years” in counterpoint to the decadence of the present as seen in the 1990s and the early
years of 2000.38

Nostalgia, saudade, and bohemian invention

As commodity products in the shape of souvenirs, commemorative cards, and saccharine

musical lyrics, nostalgia relies on tested structures of feeling. Certain modalities of nostalgia
sell because the past— filtered through the selective lens of personal and collective
remembrances— is coated by a sentimentalist revival that provides comforting flashbacks of
untroubled times.

39 But even in pasteurized versions, nostalgia addresses the pathos of loss, the sentiment of
melancholia, and the perception of the impossibility of retrieving a lost time. In retro fashions,
the loss of nostalgia is obliterated by a cocooned revival of the past in the present. Rather
than stressing the unrepeatability of time that is so crucial to the formulation of nostalgia as
a hankering for a lived or mythic past, the nostalgic revivalist mode offers a comfort zone of
dwelling in the past without memories, scars, or conflicts precisely because it is not truly
evoking a past or a remembrance; rather it celebrates a remake of aesthetics. As of the year
2013, there were no thematic Copacabana bars in the city or shops selling specifically retro
Copacabana fashions. This is not to say that Rio is immune to pastiche or nostalgic revivalism;
in fact, the outpouring of photography books and memoirs about the city has become a
veritable industry. Yet despite remodeling and the steep rise in real estate market prices, the
urban scenario of Copacabana is chaotic. The signature of the past endures in old decadent
buildings that have not yet been fully re-gentrified. Svetlana Boym (2001) has persuasively
argued that “reflective nostalgia” becomes a means of recovering a dialogue with the past.

40 It can be a mode of questioning the fascination with novelties as it evokes the validity,
richness, and variety of the past. It can be a form of curtailing the ideologies of progress and
the provincialism of the contemporary. But in the Portuguese language, nostalgia is
contrasted to another sentiment that speaks of a sense of loss and estrangement. That
sentiment is expressed by the word saudade. The poetics of saudade has a very lengthy and
rich repertoire in Portugal but it has a more muted presence in Brazil. 41 To be possessed by
the sentiment of saudade entails that one is acutely missing a person, a time, and an event
that is not necessarily a part of the past. One can mourn and pine from saudades of loved ones
that are far away, estranged or misplaced but not necessarily dead. Saudade also implies a
form of longing that presupposes a prior experience of what one is missing. One usually has
saudades of what one has personally experienced. By contrast, the word nostalgia in the
Portuguese language implies a longing for the past but not necessarily for something that one
experienced. Both saudade and nostalgia are sentiments, forms of seeing, and modes of
rhetoric that are imbued by longing but saudade is often attributed a more authentic patina
because it is perceived as a legitimate form of missing rooted by experience; whereas
nostalgia is often dismissed as a fabricated longing, as a desire for an invented past
dreamworld, as an estranged mode of desiring. The cultivation of saudade is one of the
trademarks of Portuguese culture. The explanations of such a cultural phenomenon are
complex and vary according to different historical periods, aesthetic practices, and political
conditions. One of the attributes of this longing is the perception that Portugal— formerly one
of the leading world powers in the Renaissance— suffered an irreversible demise over the
16

nextcenturies. By contrast, the cultivation of saudades in Brazil is rarely related to the longing
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for a former national past of glory because there was none. Rather the prevailing mode of the
Brazilian cultural sentiment in regards to its national mythology is the temporality of
becoming. As Stefan Zweig surmised in his book of 1941, Brazil, Land of the Future, the future
and the modern were the mythical words that shaped the project of Brazil throughout the
twentieth century. In the re-reading of Copacabana as the “Princess of the Sea” in the 1950s,
the rhetoric and sentiments of saudade and nostalgia are closely entwined. The nostalgia for
a former glamour of Copacabana is expressed in soap operas, books, TV series, and memoirs.
But what nourishes the nostalgia and saudades of the “golden years of Copacabana”? There
is a nostalgia for a form of artistic bohemianism that no longer exists and there is a saudade
for a past moment when Rio de Janeiro was perceived to be less violent, more middle class,
more cultivated, and socially amiable. In both cases, the nostalgia/ saudade phenomenon is
voiced by writers, intellectuals, journalists, and artists from the middle classes. As I mentioned
earlier in regards to the evocation of the 1950s traced by Ventura, the nostalgia, and the
saudades for a former Copacabana of the 1950s is a longing for a period in Rio de Janeiro’s
urban culture where the upper and middle classes were cast not only as the protagonists of
the city but were also given the role of cultural arbiters. The upper and middle classes were
the visible presence in Copacabana beach; they frequented the neighborhood’s cinemas,
nightclubs, restaurants, and shops. They strolled through the streets with the confident gait
of ownership. In the medley of cultural influences of the 1950s, the increasing impact of
American media culture did not displace the foremost prestige given to French cultural mores,
art, intellectual ideas, and notions of elegance. The late modernist agenda of the 1950s not
only embraced previously consolidated modernist aesthetics shaped by avant-garde
experimentalism but also welcomed popular culture and media manifestations. But whether
in their invention of Bossa Nova in the early 1960s, in their embrace of the popular samba, or
in their appraisal of media culture, it was the members of the “lettered city” that established
the measuring rod of cultural validity. As public intellectuals, bohemian artists, or liberal
professionals, the lettered city artists and intellectuals circulated in all walks of society.
Popular samba composers were revered and musicians such as Pixinguinha (1897– 1973) were
recognized as major talents. Radio divas such as Emelinha and Marlene galvanized audiences.
Football stars were mythologized. But they lacked the symbolic prestige of those that were
engaged in erudite art or intellectual endeavors. Moreover, artists of popular class origins had
limited access to the upper circles of the city whereas upper-class and middle-class artists had
unbarred access to popular balls and working class gatherings. Brazilian modernist literature
of the 1950s was energized by the talents of major writers such as Carlos Drummond de
Andrade (1902– 1987), Manuel Bandeira (1886– 1968), Marques Rebelo (1907– 1973), Cecilia
Meirelles (1901– 1964), Nelson Rodrigues (1912– 1980), and Rachel de Queiroz (1910– 2003),
just to mention the most obvious exponents who were living and writing in the city in that
decade. As in previous periods of the twentieth century, the “city of letters” composed of
writers was also closely twinned to the world of the press. Almost all the major writers
collaborated with the press and the dividing line between journalism and literature was
particularly blurred in the case of writers and professional journalists such as Sérgio Porto
(1923– 1968), Rubem Braga (1913– 1990), Otto Lara Resende (1922– 1992), Millôr Fernandes
(1923– 2012), and manyothers. The influence of American journalism and its novel journalistic
language combined with the financial back-up of modern advertisement practically
reinvented Brazilian journalism in the 1950s. 42 An increasing professionalization of the press
and an enlargement of the still modest publication industry allowed some writers to live
exclusively by their writing. Although these writers and journalists were not necessarily
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engaged in the invention of the “Copacabana Way of Life”— indeed, some were directly
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critical of the real estate speculation, the fetish of consumer desires, and the glamorized
promotion of a “golden middle class youth culture”— they were, nevertheless, producing
narratives, poems, and chronicles that contributed to the symbolic cartography of the city
at large and also of Copacabana. Yet more significantly, Copacabana with its bars and music
joints was the crucial setting for a musical bohemia that was to revolutionize and greatly
influence Brazilian music. Not only was the neighborhood the birthplace of the Bossa Nova in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, but throughout the decade Copacabana was the launching
ground of musical talents of varied kinds. For the journalist Ruy Castro, the symbol of
Copacabana in the 1950s was rendered by the work, life, and figure of Antonio Maria (1921–
1964), the journalist, song writer, bohemian, avid drinker, and protagonist of passionate
amorous dramas. Castro ponders that: “The first half of the 50s decade in Rio were the years
of Antonio Maria.”

43 A tall, bulky, and temperamental man, Maria was also a mythical bohemian, a man of the
night, and a renowned music composer. His prose was realistic in sordid detail, journalistic in
observation, deeply melancholic in its themes of amorous dejection and ultimate loneliness,
and relatively unimaginative in nuance and plot. Aside from his figure du role, Maria’s
relevance is heightened because in the midst of the consumption of the myth of Copacabana,
in the very “golden fifties” his prose revealed— prior to the demise of the neighborhood—
the rotting fishtail of the mermaid of the sea. Street kids, hookers, penurious migrants, and
petty people in all walks of life were the protagonists of his prose. Of the famous Copacabana
night, Maria wrote: And poor dangerous Copacabana, lacking police protection suffers from
the “trottoir” of dispossessed women and brings to the doors of its bars: pederasts, marijuana
drug dealers and rowdy people of the worse sort […] One of these early mornings coming out
of the Vogue (famous nightclub) I came upon a lamentable scene at the door of the Tasca. A
ruffian was beating a demented person right in front of a policeman that instead of
intervening toothpicked his teeth and gave peels of bestial laughter. 44 As mentioned in
regards to the writings of Antonio Maria, Fausto Fawcett, and others, the sordid aspects of
this nightly Copacabana is portrayed but the protagonists of Copacabana’s dangerous
decadence in the 1990s are not the maligned “pederasts” of the 1950s, nor mere marijuana
drug dealers, but a more varied and globalized assortment of people and traffickers.
Furthermore, the shift in social mores and customs destabilized the boundaries between the
bourgeois middle-class norm and transgressive attitudes. Conversely, the nostalgic nuance
that animates books such as Castro’s Chega de Saudade (1990), his history of the Bossa Nova,
the journalistic memoir of Jair Ferreira dos Santos 1968, the Year that Should Not Have Ended
(1997), or the film Copacabana (2001) by Carla Camurati— just to mention the most widely
known productions— provide a reappraisal of forms of bohemia, artistic invention, and
subjective sentiment that are increasingly on the wane in the competitive urban environment
of liberal market economy. Moreover, the urban spaces of bohemia have been displaced by
the rise in real estate prices and the increasing gentrification of urban spaces. The anti
bourgeois ethos of bohemian living as espoused by different groups of artists in the 1950s
that promoted passionate subjective engagement, irreverence towards institutional norms
and values, the cultivation of limit situations, spontaneity, and many alcohol-drenched nights
in multiple bars no longer has the same significance. The musicians, artists, journalists, and
writers who gathered in the nights of Copacabana came from a variety of social backgrounds.
They were not avant-garde experimentalists, nor were they necessarily just youthful aspiring
artists who would soon welcome institutionalization.
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45 They were a variegated assemblage of people intent on creating new musical modalities,
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in expressing the lyrical poetics of the city in the form of the popular newspaper chronicle,
and they were also popular artists from proletarian origins that were obtaining a spot in the
limelight due to the increasing value given to popular musical culture and the impact of the
radio and phonographic industry. Vinicius de Moraes, a mythical bohemian already in his life-
time writes a letter to his diseased friend Antonio Maria establishing the difference between
the bohemian ethos of the 1950s and the post military coup of the late 1960s: I don’t know if
you would like to be alive now, my Maria, after 1964. Everything is a lot worse, the
government, my character, music. Now they only compose for Festivals and that good and
free creativity of the 1950s is gone. Everybody makes music with a goal: to buy an apartment,
get a car, become popular, double one’s earnings, win the Festival, date girls, spin yarn. This
doesn’t mean that the guys aren’t excellent composers: they are. But everything is done in a
spirit of give and take, everyone for himself and God for everybody. For me this way is just not
fun. It’s not their fault. Absolutely not. It is the “scheme,” as it has now become fashionable
to say. They have to be part of the jig or else there is no apartment, no car, no payment, no
Festival, the conversation wilts and the girls say no. It can be said that they become
marginalized and then not even “Globo” or “Record” want anything to do with these unhappy
guys. In short, my Maria, music has not been lost; dignity has.

46 The terrains of bohemia shifted and there has been in recent years a major revival of the
old bohemian neighborhood of Lapa that was once a legendary zone of bohemia, prostitution,
and musical invention in the 1920s– 1940s and now is currently repackaged as the “new
bohemian” terrain in Rio de Janeiro. But whether in Lapa that attracts multitudes of people
looking for musical entertainment or even in Copacabana itself, bohemia is no longer an ethos
but a form of cultural consumption and creation attuned to alternative ways of producing and
consuming art that are, nevertheless, closely tied to new strategies of capitalist enterprise. As
Elizabeth Wilson suggests: “A second expansion of bohemian ideas and ways of life came
about in the 1960s when international youth movements provided further mass markets for
consumer culture.”

47 If bohemian values and mentalities became widely popularized through different

modalities of youth culture and consumption, this implies that the critical estrangement of
the bohemian condition has lost its cutting edge. But again, the ethos of bohemia was always
intrinsically tied to its nostalgia for its own myth of rebellion. As stated by Wilson: One of the
most striking expressions of the impossibility of the bohemian is the persistent nostalgia that
surrounds the bohemian way of life. “Bohemia is always yesterday” wrote Malcolm Cowley of
Greenwich Village in the 1920s. Successive generations of bohemians elegiacally recalled a
golden age of authenticity when Bohemia had been untainted by commercialism and tourists.
Bohemians always believed that they were the last of the real bohemians, and that Bohemia
had been killed, either by the rapacious commercialism of contemporary entertainment,
which had destroyed real art, or because Bohemia had been too successful in eroding
bourgeois morality. (Wilson 2000: 9) In the case of the Copacabana bohemia of the 1950s that
I am sketching here, the self-conscious preoccupation in delimitating who was the real
bohemian, the deliberate fabrication of an alternative lifestyle, and the flouting of
conventional norms was not really the prerogative of the inventions of the Bossa Nova, of
modernist writing, of the compositions of popular composers and working class singers, and
it was also not the central concern of the new journalistic prose being undertaken. In a city of
vibrant popular culture marked by the carnivalesque and the figure of the malandro, as a
popular rogue type that refuses to submit to a rigid work ethic, the experience of bohemia
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was part of the festive nature of the city itself. Moreover, the term bohemia encompassed a
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wide variety of popular and middle-class artists but few of these lived entirely according to
the alternative lifestyle of bohemian mores. Samba composers were bohemians at night but
often worked long hours daily as porters, wall painters, vendors, and in an array of underpaid
trades. On the other side of the class scale, the poet Vinicius de Moraes renowned for his
amorous passions, musical compositions, drinking habits, and nocturnal socializing was also
formally a career diplomat. Maysa, the mythical singer whose performances of heartbreak
songs galvanized spectators in her shows in the nightclubs of Copacabana, came from an elite
São Paulo family and prior to her singing career had been married to one of the wealthiest
members of a famous family of industrialists of São Paulo (Castro 1990: 109).

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