In July 1976, the Jornal do Brasil’s Saturday cultural supplement ran four full pages with a troubling subject. Rio de Janeiro was turning “black,” journalist Lena Frias told readers. A wave of dance parties playing soul and funk music from the United States had overtaken recreational clubs in Rio’s subúrbios, the working-class neighborhoods to the north and west of downtown, and was threatening to invade the wealthier (and whiter) neighborhoods of the city’s famed Zona Sul. The article described these soul dances and the hundreds of thousands of young people of color who flocked to them as a cultural space, indeed a place, apart from the city mainstream readers thought they knew.
This parallel city and its inhabitants, who drew apparent inspiration from cultural and racial identities of black North Americans, constituted for Frias “one of the most provocative sociological phenomena” in Brazilian history.1 She...