LITMIR.BIZ

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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 me photo collages hung in their small museum. Sets of matching outfits established the timeline of the group. The first photos, from the mid-1990s, featured an off-white pattern with large, ornate orange and brown blossoms on camp shirts and long, old-fashioned dresses. Later they settled on a lime green and yellow floral print.

      Talking to the Calixtos, I began to glimpse the complex network of individuals and institutions, from local to international, that supported this family so revered as bearers of tradition. I asked about a newspaper clipping on the wall about a jazz drummer from Chicago named Andrew Potter, and Assis turned on a boom box to play Potter’s instrumental version of Assis’s song “Balanço da canoa” (The sway of the canoe). It began with a drum solo that riffed on variations of the two rhythmic cells upon which Coco Raízes’s songs are based: the 3+3+2 timeline of samba de coco and a fast-paced duple meter of foguetes de roda. Soon the other musicians joined in: an electrified upright bass carried the melody, while the chords were filled in on an electric piano. As we listened, Assis sang his lead part, and his nieces, Iuma and Iram, sang their response, which mimicked the sound of waves lapping against a canoe. They clapped along and coaxed his three-year-old nephew Luizinho to demonstrate his prowess at dancing coco. Assis pulled a coin from his pocket to sweeten the deal, and the boy hammed it up, stomping remarkably well for one his age.

      Meanwhile Iram sat down, irritated by an unproductive meeting about T-shirt designs, muttering something about contracts and verbal commitments that had fallen through. She had the abrupt manner of a businessperson in high demand. Iram was used to interviews, but I was not asking the questions that she usually fielded. This made her impatient. I struggled to come up with a question for her regarding the group’s state sponsorship. I had thought that it would take at least a few weeks to become acquainted before launching into my research questions. My position as a long-term visitor would end up being a bit baffling for the musicians to locate. They were unsure whether to treat me as a tourist, a journalist, or just another local attendee of their parties.

      Iram’s attitude toward her neighborhood during this encounter stood in stark contrast to the reverent manner in which the neighborhood was treated by fans and in the lyrics of Coco Raízes’s songs. As I tried to ask another question, a woman on the street walked by with anger in her eyes. She glared at Iram and spat out an insult I did not understand. Initially unruffled by the incident, Iram dismissed it with a wave of her hand, adding, “She’s just jealous of us, and our success.” Her annoyance grew, however,

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