I’ll Samba Someplace Else: A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity and Displacement in São Paulo (Review)

Gerardo Filme, the Black samba composer, wrote the lyrics “Eu vou-me embora/Vou sambar n’outro lugar” (I’m out of here / I’ll samba someplace else), in response to the 1958 demolition of the Largo da Banana, where Black sambistas in São Paulo had long gathered. The Largo da Banana was one of the many sites of Black social life that were erased by municipal building projects in 20th-century São Paulo. Historian Andrew Britt’s book, I’ll Samba Someplace Else, reveals how asphalt and concrete covered up Black communities after they were dispossessed. Like the maps that Britt layers over one another in search of stories of displacement and erasure, his arguments intersect around physical spaces, many of which were never featured or can no longer be found on maps of the city.

São Paulo, the southern and western hemisphere’s largest city, is often described as multiethnic and immigrant, a characterization that often translates to the erasure of Black and Indigenous histories and communities. The “immigrant city,” Britt argues, denies its historic role as a provincial capital of racial chattel slavery in the Americas. Britt shows how the myth of “racial democracy,” which argues that Brazil is a multiracial society in which racism doesn’t exist, helped inform policy decisions that repeatedly displaced African descendants and the spaces of belonging they created.

In Britt’s account, a key protagonist of expropriation, displacement, and erasure was urban planner and later Mayor Francisco Prestes Maia, the author of the Avenues Plan, which served as a blueprint for São Paulo’s spatial development from the 1930s to the 1960s. Britt argues that Prestes Maia’s plan helped advance branqueamento (whitening) in Brazil, which projected the nonexistence of African descendants through absorption and the introduction of white European immigrants to the gene pool. Prestes Maia would claim to be a great modernizer by demolishing multiethnic cortiços (tenements) and sites of Black resistance, paving wide avenues through communities and reproducing racialized inequalities. Residents of cortiços were often subject to repeated displacement, forced out of their homes by one expropriation and relocated to other precarious housing, only to be evicted later on. Britt connects Prestes Maia’s fixation on progress through road construction to the bandeirantes of the 16th to 18th centuries, who conducted expeditions from São Paulo to the interior, to capture and enslave indigenous people. Throughout the 20th century in São Paulo, bandeirantes have often been memorialized as “brave explorers,” with little mention of their enslavement of Indigenous people, their continued celebration linking modernity to whiteness.

While Britt uses samba schools, musicians, and lyrics to illustrate Black place-making in São Paulo, one of the book’s principal threads is roads, particularly the demolition and construction of infrastructure that displaces and divides while also creating enclaves. Britt’s unique approach to piecing together erasure across sites of Black residence and resistance is based on historical mapping methods—newspapers, land-use archives, and oral histories. Britt makes extensive use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping technology, GeoSampa, OpenStreetMap, Esri Community Maps, and Pauliceia 2.0, a collaborative mapping project for São Paulo from 1870 to 1940.

In addition to the Largo da Banana, Britt documents the erasure of Congo Road, the Navio Negreiro (Slave Ship) tenement in Bela Vista, and leaves us in front of the Igreja dos Remedios, Church of the Remedies, in the Liberdade neighborhood, before it was reduced to rubble in 1943. The church was a site of Black liberation: forty-five enslaved Africans were granted manumission there in 1883. It was also the meeting place for the caifazes, a collective of freed and enslaved people, immigrants, journalists, and laborers, who gathered and printed the journal A Redempcão, an important voice in the antislavery campaign that supported the forced freeing of enslaved people. The Remedies Brotherhood was considered a site of São Paulo’s Underground Railroad, which publicly condemned enslavers while memorializing the enslaved in a museum, a material archive of slavery that included the iron instruments of slave torture and confinement.

When the church was identified as a demolition site by Prestes Maia and his Avenues Plan, it met resistance from the Brotherhood, church members, and even Mario de Andrade, the famous Brazilian modernist, who advocated for its preservation as a historic site of patrimony. Not only did Prestes Maia find the church to be in the way of his vast avenues network, but he also described the Remedies as “of debatable historical and artistic value,” an appraisal that evidences anti-Black motivation. Despite widespread opposition to the demolition, the church was razed in 1943.

Britt employs the term “spatial praxis of belonging-as-being,” linking survival to “belonging in and to place” in a city where “anti-Black nonbelonging and nonbeing” often constitute the official discourse. Britt uses Brasilândia, a subdistrict of São Paulo that became known as “Little Africa” in the 1960s and 1970s, as an example of Black belonging-as-being and self-determination. While anti-Black racist media portrayals of Brasilândia were the norm in this period, Brasilândia residents built their own spaces of belonging, transforming it into Gerardo Filme’s Someplace Else, when they founded the championship samba school Rosas de Ouro. Rousas de Ouro members stored their instruments in the Catimbó, home to a large concentration of African descendants in Brasilândia, although the neighborhood never appeared on official São Paulo maps. Challenging municipal disinvestment in infrastructure, Brasilândia’s residents organized to build and pave roads collectively.

Britt asserts that systematic disinvestment in districts like Brasilândia contrasts with the creation of ethnic enclaves “Japanese” Liberdade and “Italian” Bexiga (Bela Vista). Both neighborhoods were multiethnic before municipal and local political projects shaped these communities into ethnic enclaves, through the erasure of Black histories and the building of “ethnoracial infrastructure”. Beginning in 1969, Liberdade, where the Remedies church had once been a site of Black liberation and where Gerardo Filme’s samba school had once lived, was slated by municipal leaders as São Paulo’s “Oriental neighborhood”. Its infrastructure would include cherry blossom lamps, Japanese-themed sidewalks, and Japanese-language signs, including the renaming of the metro to Japão-Liberdade. The scarcity of streetlights, sidewalks, and public parks in other neighborhoods would exacerbate inequalities, argues Britt, just as it erased the other ethnicities that had called it home throughout the city’s history. “Italian” Bexiga’s formation in the Paulistano imagination was coupled with xenophobia against racialized northeasterners, as well as the argument that demolitions caused “traditional (Italian) families” to be displaced, and the European buildings they built should be preserved.

Britt ends by highlighting the Vai-Vai samba school’s long history in Bela Vista, which has remained in the neighborhood despite repeated displacement. While the school was forced to relocate again in recent years, displaced by the construction of the São Paulo metro Orange Line, excavations for metro construction have uncovered evidence of the quilombo (maroon community) that existed there over two centuries ago, a reminder of the long-covered-up histories of the resistance of and place-making by African descendants in São Paulo.

Britt’s project is a uniquely comprehensive retracing of the destruction left by municipal building projects and the spaces that Black Paulistanos have continued to make despite attempts at erasure. I’ll Samba Somplace Else, which is available in open access, offers a valuable blueprint for mapping racism through critical geography and serves as a model for students and educators interested in using digital humanities tools to map urban ethnoracial spaces.

Amy Richards is an educator and master’s candidate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, whose research focuses on the Serviço Social do Comércio (Sesc) in São Paulo.