Rio de Janeiro

Assembled from 11 blocks · 2 evidence · 7 related

1. Story
2. The Brazilian port and former imperial capital that received both ends of this Journey's Atlantic mechanism: it was among the largest disembarkation points in the entire transatlantic trade, and it was the destination of the internal migration from Bahia that carried Afro-Brazilian religious and musical practice south in the decades after abolition in 1888. The two facts compound. A city with a very large population of African descent, an urban geography of hillside and central tenement districts, and a state apparatus that criminalised Afro-Brazilian religion and capoeira while promoting Carnival, produced in Little Africa and the neighbourhoods around Praça Onze the conditions in which samba formed. By the 1930s the same state had inverted its position and was presenting samba as the national music of Brazil, a reversal that a Journey about cultural consequence should not smooth over: the music was made illegal and then made emblematic within the working lifetime of the people who made it.
3. Knowledge
4. Rio de Janeiro
5. Connections
6. The Middle Passage
7. Samba
8. "Pelo Telefone" is registered
9. Evidence
10. Hilária Batista de Almeida (1854–1924) moved from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro in 1876 as part of a large northeastern migration, was a mãe de santo in Candomblé, and hosted at her house near Praça Onze the gatherings from which early samba emerged, offering musicians protection from a police force that treated Afro-Brazilian religion and capoeira as criminal. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary from reference and public-history accounts; none was opened, and no civil, parish or property record was consulted.
11. Roughly 12.5 million people were embarked in Africa for the Americas and about 10.7 million disembarked, across voyages conventionally dated 1501–1866. V55 verification basis: a retrieved search result attributed the figure of 12,520,000 embarked and 10.7 million disembarked explicitly to the database's own Estimates page, which is what this record cites; the database itself was not queried, and its estimates are periodically revised, so a curator should take current figures from it directly.