São Paulo's Department of Culture, 1922-1938 Micah J
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Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations University Graduate School 6-24-2016 The yS mphony of State: São Paulo's Department of Culture, 1922-1938 Micah J. Oelze Florida International University, [email protected] DOI: 10.25148/etd.FIDC000773 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd Part of the Anthropology Commons, Cultural History Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Latin American History Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Social Psychology Commons, and the Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Oelze, Micah J., "The yS mphony of State: São Paulo's Department of Culture, 1922-1938" (2016). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2549. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2549 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Miami, Florida THE SYMPHONY OF STATE: SÃO PAULO’S DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE, 1922-1938 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Micah James Oelze 2016 To: Dean John F. Stack, Jr. Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs This dissertation, written by Micah James Oelze, and entitled The Symphony of State: São Paulo’s Department of Culture, 1922-1938, having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for judgment. We have read this dissertation and recommend that it be approved. ________________________________ David Dolata ________________________________ Marc Hertzman ________________________________ Okezi Otovo ______________________________ Bianca Premo, Co-Major Professor ________________________________ Victor Uribe, Co-Major Professor Date of Defense: June 24, 2016 The dissertation of Micah James Oelze is approved. ________________________________ Dean John F. Stack, Jr. Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs ________________________________ Andrés G. Gil Vice President for Research and Economic Development and Dean of the University Graduate School Florida International University, 2016 ii © Copyright 2016 by Micah James Oelze All rights reserved. iii DEDICATION To my parents, Mark and Zerrin Oelze, for teaching me to listen. A Lali y Hugo Rodriguez, por las historias que compartieron conmigo. In loving memory of Don Cirilo Arteaga. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have racked up debts in graduate school, intellectual and otherwise, but owe the most to my mentors. Bianca Premo and Victor Uribe went exceedingly above and beyond the call of duty as co-directors. They are model scholars and treasured mentors. The three other members of my committee have provided me with an ideal balance of warm support and high expectation. Okezi Otovo has always asked the best questions, David Dolata has provided me his careful eye for music and words, and Marc Hertzman has held me accountable to keep local questions in mind even as I consider national implications. I could not have asked for more. Several institutions generously provided financial resources allowing me to undertake an ambitious project. This began in 2010, when Florida International University awarded me a Presidential Fellowship. Since then my research has been funded by a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) summer fellowship; a Tinker Research Grant; the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship; and in-house funding from Florida International in the form of a SIPA grant, conference travel support, and a Dissertation Year Fellowship. Beyond financial help, the fellowships provided me the time to give sources the attention they deserved. In the year and a half I spent in São Paulo, Brazil, several archivists welcomed me warmly. Most especially, I am thankful for the support of Wilma Martins de Oliveira at the Centro Cultural de São Paulo; Flávia Camargo Toni at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros; the staff at the Arquivo Histórico de São Paulo; the workers and interns at the Centro de Pesquisa e Formação SESC; and Estela Alves Madeira at the Hemeroteca da Biblioteca Mário de Andrade. Everybody generously took time to answer my questions. v Many even searched through catalogs alongside me, looking for materials that could further my project. Professor Marcos Napolitano from the Universidade de São Paulo served as an advisor and reference during my time on the Fulbright-Hays. The insight, suggestions, and texts he lent me are greatly appreciated. In addition to the professors on my dissertation committee, Sherry Johnson, Mark Szuchman, and Kirsten Wood at Florida International University played integral roles in my graduate education. I have also had the rich privilege of befriending amazing Brazilian historians, including Christopher Dunn, Jeffrey Lesser, and Greg Childs. I am thankful for the many coffees, drinks, and conversations I shared with them in Brazil’s hallucinated city. My closest friends deserve my warmest thanks: some pushed me to think harder about my research, others helped me stop thinking about it altogether. John Babb, Leo Falcón, Joe Holbrook, Judith Mansilla, Angelo Santa Lucia, and René Silva have been amazing colleagues. Drew Aichele, Cody Bowers, Cash Forshee, Pepe Grave de Peralta, Natalia Pelaz, and Joanna Gray Robinson have been faithful friends in spite of the distance. Gabriel Godoy-Dalmau has been a brother to me, and his parents Eduardo Godoy and Marta Dalmau made sure I always had a home and warm food in Miami. Marisol Blanco, Edwiges Gonzalez, Carolina Gutierrez, Marcos Nieto, María Paz Rio Frio, and Enrique Vecín have been amazing friends, both in and outside of Miami’s dance studios. Phil Rincón, Ruth and Mike Rivera, and Shauna Exavier have been my loyal cooking partners. In Brazil, Cássia and André Nagib provided me an amazing apartment, while Sergio Bessa, Ana, and Arthur Rodrigues de Menezes acted as dearly-loved host family vi on two separate occasions. The long cafés de manhã with them and Madalena Fernandez Mattua taught me—more than any textbook could—how important history is in shaping how we see ourselves. My closest friends in Brazil helped me rediscover the importance of music and of having faith in the world. My deepest gratitude goes out to Rafael Acerbi, David Azevedo, Pedro Feris, Sergio Luz, Isis Carol Miranda, Jefferson Motta, Raquel and Fernando, Catia, Daisy, and Priscila. São Paulo was never an easy city for me, but the music there always kept me going. Most significant were the shows, evenings, and conversations with the group As Bahias e a Cozinha Mineira. Their tunes played as soundtrack to my time there, and Rafael Acerbi and Assucena Assucena, especially, have been role models in using music to call society to a higher ethical standard. I close with a heartfelt thank you to my family. My four sisters always lift me up when I lose faith. They believe in me more than I believe in myself. They have brought so much joy into my life. I have been blessed with not one but two sets of parents. Lali and Hugo Rodriguez have nurtured me with affection, wisdom, and hot coffee. Their influence in the course of my life would be hard to overstate. My parents, Mark and Zerrin Oelze, have long been my greatest role models. Anything I have done right in life I owe completely to them. Thank you. vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION THE SYMPHONY OF STATE: SAO PAULO’S DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE, 1922-1938 by Micah James Oelze Florida International University, 2016 Miami, Florida Professor Bianca Premo, Co-Major Professor Professor Victor Uribe, Co-Major Professor In 1920s-30s São Paulo, Brazil, leaders of the vanguard artistic movement known as modernism began to argue that national identity came not from shared values or even cultural practices but rather by a shared way of thinking, which they variously designated as Brazil’s racial psychology, folkloric unconscious, and national psychology. Building on turn-of-the-century psychological and anthropological theories, the group diagnosed Brazil’s national mind as characterized by primitivity and in need of a program of psychological development. The group rose to political power in the 1930s, placing the artists in a position to undertake such a project. The Symphony of State charts this previously unexamined intellectual project and explains why elite leaders believed music to be the most-promising strategy for developing the national mind beyond primitivity. In 1935, they founded the São Paulo Department of Culture and Recreation in order to fund music education, train ethnomusicologists, commission symphonies, and host performances across the city. Until now, historians of twentieth-century Brazil have praised music as a critical site for marginalized groups to sound out political protest. But viii The Symphony of State shows the reverse has also been true: elite groups used music as a top-down civilizing project designed to naturalize racial hierarchies and justify class difference. The intellectual history portion of the dissertation turns on archival sources, newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, modernist literature, and the period’s scholarly journals. The examination of literary form, discourse analysis, and marginalia lends depth to