ABSTRACT

In the gallery of national icons, the social invention of Brazil as the land of samba is an image that endures to this day, crossing through time despite all its setbacks in the field of Brazilian popular music. The common denominator of the vaunted Brazilian cultural identity in the segment of music, urban samba had to face a long and bumpy ride to go from being a marginal cultural artifact stigmatized as “something of blacks and bums” to receiving the honors of its consecration as a national symbol. This history, whose starting point can be traced to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was permeated by comings and goings, marches and countermarches, dialectically describing a trajectory that did not follow a uniform or linear path.