aisles of vendors. Stalls display rows of miniature clay figures of accordion and flute players and the legendary bandit Lampião, a figure as notorious as Pancho Villa or Jesse James. Satirical miniature doctor/patient scenes are also popular. One scene features a tiny dentist placing his foot on the chest of a patient for better leverage, and another depicts the delivery of a baby. The figures represent an attempt, through caricature, to contain anxieties about health that are pervasive in a zone of harsh economic disparity.
Beyond Caruaru, the landscape became dotted with cacti and caatinga scrub brush. The BR-232 narrowed from two lanes each way to one each way, pockmarked with deep, harrowing potholes. Driving became more treacherous, as drivers boldly threatened oncoming traffic trying to pass each other. Several towns along the road promoted themselves as part of the Route of Forró, an effort to alert visitors to dance halls and small-town festivals. Forró is a genre label that encompasses several rhythmic variations on dance music and most commonly features accordion as its emblematic instrument. In its various subgenres, including ultrapopular forró estilizado and its more rustic counterpart forró pé-de-serra, it has crystallized as a regional genre promoted as the essence of the white and mestiço Catholic cowboy of the northeastern interior backlands. One aspect of the projected image of Arcoverde that sets it apart from the rest of the Route of Forró is the decision by its municipal government around 2000 to promote sounds strongly associated with coastal Afro-Brazilian-ness in the mestiço backlands.
As I drove through the crest of hills dividing the coast and the interior, I thought of a passage I had read about shrinking driving times, modernity, and change in the northeastern sertão. The passage had come from a seminal text on the sertão called Vaqueiros e Cantadores (Cowboys and Troubadours) by folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo. The book was written in December 1937, a few months before the Mission of Folkloric Research recorded in Arcoverde. I looked up the quotation later, so I could remember the excerpts that bridged the era of the Mission of Folkloric Research and that of Sandroni’s recording project.
Câmara Cascudo’s text betrays an ambivalence toward the passage of time, longing for a past way of life. Wonder, awe, and panic accompany the arrival of modernity in Cascudo’s telling: “I lived in the typical sertão, that has now disappeared. Electric lights hadn’t yet appeared. The gramophone dazzled us. Old João de Holanda … got down on his knees in the middle of the road and confessed all of his sins, blubbering, when he glimpsed, at sunset, his first automobile” (Cascudo 2004, 11).1
In contrast to the city and its ever-novel contraptions, Cascudo idealizes the distant past of his childhood in the sertão. In a key phrase he depicts it as unchanging, arguing that its past was whole in its present, unlike our present, in which the past is fractured and slipping from our grasp. Notice the entanglement of home, past, and childhood, pitched in a register of innocence: “The cooking remained loyal to the eighteenth century. Clothing reminded one of a museum retrospective. The strong prayers, the social habits, the traditional festivals, the way people talked, the superstitions, everything was the inescapable Past, complete, in the present” (ibid.).
Cascudo chronicles the drastically shrinking travel times to and from the sertão as vehicles and roads developed. He takes these dizzying changes as emblematic of broader cultural shifts in the area: “The transformation is subtle and daily. The roadways brought the sertão together with the agreste. Canceling out the distance, they mixed the environments. Today electrical lights, cars, radio, cold drinks, cinema, newspapers are everywhere … everything is close, due to the car. … From Natal to Caicó it used to take six days. Now the trip takes five hours” (ibid.).
At the time, when I was driving to Arcoverde, I recalled only his reflections on travel times. The passage that followed, however, complicated Cascudo’s reflection on the acceleration of modern life in the sertão. He claimed that nostalgia was not much of an issue for those who lived in the sertão, arguing that they constantly picked and chose the aspects of modernity that they wanted to participate in and those they wanted to reject: “The sertão modifies itself quickly. It becomes more uniform, it becomes more banal. Naturally, this criticism doesn’t work for those who live there. Modernized life is better than the old way of going by horse buggy and having to stop and rest all the time. Relatives of mine that refused to eat salads made with lettuce (“You think I’m a leaf-eating lizard, do you?”) conduct business in São Paulo, coming and going by plane” (ibid.). Concluding the passage, he opposes modernity to tradition and praises holdouts who scorn these changes. Troubadours, according to Cascudo, are quixotic bearers of tradition whose audiences remain stubbornly loyal: “The cantador recoils in front of the Radiola, the Victrola, cinema, the illustrated magazine. But he conserves his audience. Restricted, limited, poor but steadfast in their admiration. The cantadores sertanejos still live” (ibid.)
Recording and broadcasting technologies, transportation, and highway infrastructure have intensified the circulation of people, sounds, and money in the arid backlands. The folkloric paradigm that Cascudo helped crystallize has given way to a new period of heritage tourism and commercial pop mutations. Yet certain narratives of folklore have proven durable in the face of new shifts, as tourism emerges that resembles a recording expedition in miniature. The desire to return to the premodern is a recurring and very modern trope, as is the impulse to celebrate the stubborn holdout like the cantador. When I arrived in Arcoverde, sixty-five years after Cascudo wrote Cowboys and Troubadours, I found that Cascudo’s formulation of folklore often served as the script that musicians and audiences used to describe the musical practices performed there.
Arcoverde is nestled in a valley, increasing its rainfall and making it often greener than the semiarid sertão located only a few kilometers farther down the BR-232. As I entered the city, stiltwalkers in street clothes practiced their skills along the side of the highway.
I found a hotel amid downtown storefronts. A nearby ice cream parlor proudly displayed photos of employees posing with Globo television network stars who had recently stayed in Arcoverde while filming a desert-themed prime-time series. A specific kind of cosmopolitan hinterland, Arcoverde is a preferred location for filming footage in a sertão setting, without the actors having to sacrifice too many amenities.
In contrast to how television and film depict the location as a land of tradition and heritage, the home of samba de coco was firmly anchored in a modern, consumerist present. Three-story buildings with ceramic tile façades lined either side of the street. Shoppers were shielded from the blistering sun by overhanging second-story apartments. Young children and teenagers sat in Internet cafes open to the street, their eyes glued to computer screens. Stores displayed DVD players, digital cameras, clothes, shampoo, bicycles, televisions, fabric, and guitars.
The sheer number of stores seemed unlikely. Demand appeared disproportionately large, considering the city’s population. It turned out that this district supplied consumer goods to residents of several nearby small towns and rural areas as well as Arcoverde proper. Compared to nearby cities, Arcoverde felt young, commercial, and modern. The city was located in one of the first regions of Brazil to be colonized five centuries before, yet even the oldest Catholic church was less than one hundred years old. Houses and apartment buildings for the middle and upper classes featured clean lines, flat roofs, and a minimum of ornamentation. Downtown was not overly crowded, but it had a bustle to it that contrasted with the slower pace evident in neighboring Buique or Pedra. The sidewalks were half full of people with places to go, parking spaces were not always easy to find, and stores did a brisk business. Were it not for the long lines of people waiting to receive meager government assistance checks, as a visitor it would be easy to ignore the reality that Arcoverde was located in one of the most socially unequal areas in the world.
I spent most of the afternoon with a few members of the Calixto family outside the bar and cultural space near their cluster of three houses. Assis Calixto, one of the surviving patriarchs of Coco Raízes, was a conscientious host, showing
