Sources, Methodology and Critique

This article tightens its focus on the racially conflictual dramas that constitute nearly 40 per cent (13) of a larger evidentiary base of 34 live puppet shows. Elite cultural entrepreneurs transcribed and published their accounts over a 40-year period. This untapped body of transcriptions partially illuminates the repertoire of 17 puppet artists who resided in three north-eastern states (Paraíba, Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte). Classifying the extant works by instances of physical altercations, verbal slights, racist stereotyping and Black characters’ responses to racial aggressions illuminated this pause-worthy vein of commentary. The penultimate section examines the motifs and substance of this smaller subset of plays alongside improvised sung ‘duels’ (desafios or pelejas). It shows that racially charged speech-acts also characterised this adjacent – and indeed intertextual – form of expressive culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The fact that analysis draws on textual transcriptions of spontaneous performances requires further explanation. University-educated men (letrados) transfigured the orality of plebeian culture into a script, consequently disaggregating a practice in which movement and sound, including speech and music, were complementary. Thus, our evidentiary base is incomplete and unable to divulge, for instance, how puppets spoke or how they communicated non-verbally. These texts are also snapshots of shows that were performed before a singular audience. We will later see that spectators determined the outcome of play by consenting to the puppet artist's programme or by demanding closer adherence to their distinctive tastes. Performers were doubly pressed to satisfy the expectations of elite scriveners who thirsted for ‘typical’ or ‘emblematic’ episodes at this fountainhead of the ‘people's culture’ (cultura do povo). Finally, hundreds of thousands of performances eluded the written record. One can only speculate as to the kinds of sagas that went unchronicled – racially conflictual and otherwise.

Mythopoetic Origins and Puppet Artists

The mythopoetic origins of north-eastern puppet play interested early scholars. The accounts of two practitioners and a folklorist – published in 1966, 1971 and 1978, respectively – contended that mamulengo emerged in the crucible of plantation slavery.Footnote ¹³ However, the variant stories collected by folklorist Altimar de Alencar Pimentel (1936–2008) and dramatist Hermilo Borba Filho (1917–76) claimed the honour for two different states. Pimentel's source, a puppet artist from Paraíba, alleged that mamulengo originated on a plantation in Bahia's rural interior. However, the famed recifense performer Mestre Ginu (Januário de Oliveira, 1910–77) told Borba it was rural Pernambuco. The competing origin stories also diverged over the artistic progenitor's sex. Ginu held that the first performer was an enslaved man named Tião (a shortened form of the name Sebastião) while Pimentel's informant claimed it was an old Black woman.Footnote ¹⁴ Whatever their location and identity, both accounts agreed that puppet play had a sanctioned space within structures of power. The artist furtively sculpted figurines of humans and animals and used them to rehash scenes of enslavers abusing their human chattel. Rather than punishing the culprit (as his wife wished in Ginu's account), the plantation owner authorised the ‘small diversion’ (pequena diversão).Footnote ¹⁵

The first cohort of learned observers and enthusiasts debated mamulengo's genealogy vis-à-vis the Old World. Borba argued that puppet play was a direct descendant of the European commedia dell'arte.Footnote ¹⁶ The noted folklorist João Emídio de Lucena (1912–86), more commonly known as ‘Lieutenant’ (Tenente) Lucena, acknowledged that mamulengo drew together puppet traditions from Europe and Africa, but he maintained that mamulengo was quintessentially Brazilian because the practice was forged in slavery.Footnote ¹⁷ Izabela Brochado, who authored the most detailed study of mamulengo in English, hopes that scholars will take the African connection seriously, particularly given remarkable similarities in form and function as well as content, technique and construction. These ‘possible links’, as Brochado presents them, will certainly deepen and enrich our understanding of the manifold ensembles of ‘performing’ objects dispersed across the African diaspora.Footnote ¹⁸

In the mid- to late twentieth century, north-eastern puppet artists went by many different names. They were variously termed ‘puppeteers’ (mamulengeiros, calungueiros or titeriteiros), ‘players’ (brincantes) and ‘masters’ (mestres). Hailing from poor families in the countryside and suburbs, boys and young men sometimes contracted what two artists from rural Pernambuco called the lifelong ‘passion’ or ‘vice’ (vício) of puppet play.Footnote ¹⁹ Spellbound and gape-mouthed, they marvelled at the thrashings inflicted by and upon the diminutive beings in this enchanted play world. For many, what occurred in small booths and behind makeshift curtains mimicked reality. As a young man, Mestre Solon, born Solon Alves de Mendonça (1920–87), remembered being both ‘enthusiastic and astonished’ and deeply ‘horrified [by] how [the puppets] killed each other’. For him ‘everything was alive’.Footnote ²⁰

At some point during what might be likened to an apprenticeship, the master puppeteer invited their student to perform solo. The occasion must have been as nerve-wracking as it was exhilarating. Most of them holders of daytime jobs – such as truck drivers, carpenters and fieldhandsFootnote ²¹ – neophytes and seasoned artists alike undoubtedly spent countless nights thinking up and refining their routines. It is easy to imagine them carving, repairing and clothing their dolls as well as envisaging new storylines to try with audiences. The night (or day) before a performance could be daunting, but it seems to have also been auspicious for creative energies. Pacing about one's small plot of land or perhaps dreaming beneath the stars, time for contemplation and introspection was generative, even magical, to the point that it seems to have been a kind of ritual for many performers.Footnote ²² On the evening of a performance, taking liberal gulps of sugarcane-based spirits perhaps quelled artists’ nerves and offered a spirited push through several hours of continuous play, sometimes as many as eight.Footnote ²³ The most reserved puppet artists like Antônio Biló and José Petronilo Dutra drew energy from the electric atmosphere of a mamulengo show. Both underwent what Borba and puppet artist and researcher Fernando Augusto Gonçalves Santos (1947–2022) judged a complete ‘transfiguration’ (transfiguração).Footnote ²⁴ It was as if a spirit had taken hold of them.

Novices began coming into their own once they secured their own puppet. The requisite object itself was costly, however. Mestre Zé de Vina spent three years working alongside another master to save enough money to purchase a puppet. Ginu borrowed 5,000 réis to purchase a female doll from his deceased teacher and mentor.Footnote ²⁵ Some puppeteers who produced their own dolls attained fame as sculptors. Mestre Luiz da Serra, who resided in a smaller city located 46 kilometres to the west of Recife, supplied puppet artists with incalculable numbers of dolls. In the late 1970s, he estimated producing somewhere around 1,000 puppets during his lifetime. However, Santos observed that Luiz da Serra would have been more famous as a sculptor of saints (santeiro).Footnote ²⁶

Since they could be used in small acts of hustling such as ventriloquism, it comes as no surprise that some puppets were acquired in duplicitous ways. Manuel Amendoim, whose nickname evoked his peanut-like physique, told Borba he acquired a mamulengo – and presumably its puppets – after ‘subduing’ (abafando, literally smothering or suppressing) a partner for whom he initially worked as an assistant.Footnote ²⁷ Perhaps intending to try their hand at puppetry (or merely wanting to sell it), someone stole a puppet belonging to Ginu, twentieth-century Recife's most famous mamulengueiro. In an exchange with fellow puppet artist and researcher Santos, Ginu alleged that the thief returned the doll because he thought it caused him to get sick.Footnote ²⁸

Ginu revealed much about the public persona of a renowned puppet artist. Borba admiringly characterised this one-eyed performer as a ‘pernicious, talkative […] teller of rough tales’.Footnote ²⁹ A brazen philanderer (mulherengo), Ginu estimated that he had ‘somewhere’ between 45 and 62 children resulting from liaisons with some 47 women. Perhaps to exaggerate the shrinking supply of available women, he told Santos that one of his partners, a beautiful ‘Brown’ woman (morena), turned out to be one of his daughters.Footnote ³⁰ Luiz da Serra also admitted that he could not give an accurate count of how many children he had but suspected that he fathered around 46.Footnote ³¹

It is not unthinkable that puppet artists fathered legions of children throughout the North-East. Their primary occupations followed the ebbs and flows of inter- and intra-regional migration. Even so, the testimonies of Ginu and Luiz da Serra capture the hyperbolic exuberance of artists who lived their lives in the spirit of their puppets. Invoking musician Luiz Gonzaga's (1912–89) renown as the ‘King of the Baião’, a rural music and dance genre, Ginu often anointed himself ‘King of the North-Eastern Mamulengo’ as well as its ‘artistic director’. Despite his showy eponym, as Borba pointed out, this sovereign of puppet play gave modest shows. In lieu of a decorated stage, Ginu used a sheet affixed to wire or string.Footnote ³² Technical sophistication did not guarantee renown just as celebrity did not mean that artists would not die in poverty, as Ginu did in 1977, overcome by poor health and abandoned by Brazil's cultural organs.Footnote ³³

Social Condition and Colour in a ‘Theatre of Laughter’

Mamulengo is a ‘theatre of laughter’ comprised of broadly legible social types.Footnote ³⁴ Historical photographs and retired puppet specimens exhibited at cultural institutions such as Pernambuco's Museu do Mamulengo present a lurid coterie of such figures. These include landowners, industrialists, politicians, physicians, attorneys, musicians, debutantes, fieldhands, flirts and the mentally ill. Brochado has shown how mamulengo puppets communicate through a system of ‘figurative codes’, which denote figures’ social locations through colour, size, clothing, gestures and sounds.Footnote ³⁵ Obstinate Black male heroes, typically named Baltazar or Benedito, sometimes wore the simple clothing of a rural labourer (peão). Like all social subordinates, they were also physically smaller than their social superiors who, like landowners, were usually much larger. For Pimentel, the predictable victories of these tiny but quick-witted and intrepid underlings recalled the biblical encounter between David and Goliath.Footnote ³⁶

When contemplating mamulengo puppets, one is immediately struck by a discernible grotesqueness. Figures’ heads dwarf their petite trunks, and their arms are appreciably shorter than one would expect given their exaggerated slenderness. Because their bodies are so small, the eyes are drawn to their heads and faces, which often exhibit protruding noses, missing (and sometimes golden) teeth, elongated eyes, serious brows and unnaturally broad mouths. During a play performed in Paraíba in 1968, one puppet named Mr (Seu) Fuá addressed his strange appearance. He explained that a rough ride in the ‘parrot's perch’ – a flatbed truck used to transport migrant workers in the rural interior – left him with disproportionate facial features.Footnote ³⁷ While erudite observers variously typified them as ‘rustic’, ‘primitive’ and even ‘figurative’, artists clarified that their puppets were intentionally ‘ugly’.Footnote ³⁸ As Ginu once put it, in mamulengo there was ‘no use in being a cute doll’ as beauty did not appeal to the audience. Puppets that were ‘really ugly’ (feio mesmo) succeeded at making the ‘most serious spectator’ laugh.Footnote ³⁹

Our understanding of puppets’ skin colour lags far behind their assembly and kinetics. At first glance, surviving puppets seem to mirror Brazil's radical racial fluidity by capturing hues that range from beige and paper white to earthen and even purple colours.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nonetheless, Baltazars’ and Beneditos’ mono-pigmentary and unmixed palette – ‘dark black’ (preto mesmo, preto preto or preto retinto) in colloquial Portuguese – produces a visually restricted grammar of Blackness (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Detail of the Puppet Benedito, Produced by Mestre Luiz da Serra of Vitória de Santo Antão, Pernambuco

Source: Museu do Mamulengo – Espaço Tiridá. Olinda, Pernambuco. Photograph by the author.

This more inclusive non-Blackness and more restrictive sort of Blackness might be explained in two ways. First, the exaggerated darkness of characters who enacted colour-based stereotypes likely helped non-White audiences distinguish themselves from the boisterous protagonists. Put differently, Black and ‘Brown’ spectators might concede that while they were ‘not White’, they were certainly not ‘Black’ – both in terms of conduct and their physiognomies – like Baltazar or Benedito. This hypothesis is supported by the notion that a significant number of Brazilians historically self-identified as ‘pardo’ rather than ‘preto’, a pattern that continues well into the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁴¹ Second, one might speculate that black puppets functioned as masks that enabled artists and audiences alike to flee the vicissitudes of everyday life. Pimentel hypothesised that Paraíban puppet artists employed Baltazars and Beneditos as ‘alter-egos’ to exact ‘revenge’ against the violent tenets of the dominant classes.Footnote ⁴²

Before turning to the racially conflictual dramas that form the analytical backbone of this article, readers must imagine what it would have been like to bear witness to a mamulengo show. A recifense journalist cautioned that north-eastern puppet play differed substantially from bourgeois theatre. Plebeian audiences did not merely ‘watch’ mamulengo; they vigorously ‘live[d] it’.Footnote ⁴³ Inbuilt notions of interactivity and improvisation make mamulengo, in the anthropologist and folklorist Frank Proschan's useful terms, a rich site of ‘co-creation’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This fecund but potentially volatile dialectic between performer and audience made puppet play unruly. Alcohol flowed abundantly and spectators shouted at the miniscule beings on stage. This required performers to be deft in their handling of interventions so a basic degree of artistic control could be maintained. Artists also had to satisfy the public's expectations. We have already seen that ugliness was a requisite part of puppets’ visual characteristics. De Vina, founder of the group Happiness of the People (Alegria do Povo), in 1979 shared that improvised plots needed to encompass lively ‘stories of fighting … [and] of struggle’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Humiliating interpersonal violence – both physical and psychic – is perhaps the most prosaic element of puppet shows. To be sure, across the 34 episodes analysed here, 45 characters were beaten, flogged and stabbed. Female characters were spared from being murdered (unlike seven men) but were targets of thrashing and whipping.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Fool Who Deceives: Crashing Captain Redondo's Party

After a musical prelude or jokes, Redondo announced the protagonist's arrival: ‘Now I am going to call the puppet that everyone likes most, [in terms of his] funniness and struggle, the Black man, Baltazar.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Bearing vague marks of ruralness – such as a straw or leather hat – yet often lacking a specified occupation, the dark-black protagonists arrived with much whooping and laughter. As representatives of the ‘inferior strata’ (camadas inferiores), their names may vary but their character attributes and flaws remain the same. Whether called Baltazar, Benedito or even Gregório, the pint-sized figure was a fool (bobo) and troublemaker (desordeiro).

The Black protagonist assumed the role of a clown or fool in six of our transcribed episodes.Footnote ⁴⁸ Simple-minded and sometimes crass, the bobo frequently gave literal and suggestive answers to riddles and tested more ‘serious’ characters’ patience. Liêdo Maranhão de Souza, the long-time observer of life around Recife's São José Public Market, wrote down an exchange between a performer named Inaldinho and Benedito in November 1975. The mischievous puppet amused nearby sex workers and street vendors with his nonsensical answers to a series of questions posed by his human manipulator. Inaldinho asked where Benedito had been born, and the puppet replied, ‘in the bed’. The performer enquired about the puppet's geographic origins (natural), which Benedito understood as a question about how he liked his water (‘natural’ as in still water). The headliner finally revealed that he had been born in the state of Bahia but later rattled off a sequence of confused demonyms, declaring that someone from the northern state of Piauí was a piolhento (someone infested with lice), someone from Pará was a paralítico (a paralysed person), and someone from China was a chinelo (slipper).Footnote ⁴⁹

As we shall see below, the bobo did not exist independently of the troublemaker. A string of ten episodes documented by the folklorist Deífilo Gurgel (1926–2012) in 1970s Rio Grande do Norte suggested that both images were two sides of the same coin. The first episode featured Redondo poking fun at Baltazar's simple-mindedness. The protagonist shared a rambling story about being lost in the rural interior. As in Inaldinho's routine in Recife, Baltazar confused common words and could not distinguish between a train station (estação) and dental ‘extraction’ (estração). Amused, but perhaps also moved by pity, the captain acknowledged that Baltazar's naïveté was characteristic of a broader – and, surprisingly, unraced – class of country people (matutos) who he believed ‘never sp[oke] correctly’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Elsewhere in the multipart spectacle, Baltazar tested the patience of authority figures, beginning with a serious-minded teacher from Rio de Janeiro who arrived to teach poor people how to read. Baltazar agreed to study with ‘Professor Master’ Guedes but delivered insults and sexual jokes during his lessons.Footnote ⁵¹ Baltazar later visited a priest because he decided he wanted to get married, a common plot. Although he confessed to knowing nothing about religion, Baltazar saw an opportunity to pose humorous riddles. The exchange culminated with Baltazar asking the cleric why old men ‘smelled bad’. Initially taken aback by the question, the priest explained that elderly people were sometimes too infirm to take a bath. Baltazar corrected him, explaining that they ‘carr[ied] two fetid balls and a dead dick’.Footnote ⁵²

In the preceding examples, Black protagonists enacted stereotypes of ignorance and vulgarity. Yet their antics were strategic acts of playing the fool rather than being one. This act of subterfuge (trapaça) was perhaps appealing because it prevented Baltazars and Beneditos from being treated disapprovingly. To be sure, their behaviour confirmed what Brazilians already knew to be ‘true’ about Black actors. The act thus comes into view as a defensive strategy that plebeian spectators certainly used at various points in their lives, perhaps to diminish the rage of a plantation or factory foreman or even a police officer. Feigning stupidity was far safer than adopting the tactics of the next avatar, the troublemaker (desordeiro), whose belligerence and daring was suicidal for all but the most audacious of the povo.

Ten transcribed performances revolve around the figure of the troublemaker. This hot-blooded bully refused to act deferentially and often had a thirst for vengeance. In half of these vignettes, the initial conflict involved the Black protagonist being blocked from attending dances hosted and overseen by Redondo. The exclusion mirrored the racist belief that, if admitted, Black men would pick fights and cause a general disturbance.Footnote ⁵³ As we shall see, this prohibition tracks deeper concerns about contact between White females and Black men.

Predictably, Baltazars and Beneditos invited themselves to communal gatherings, thus generating the conflict essential for dramatic storytelling. In an undated performance by Amendoim (also known as Babau) in rural Pernambuco, Benedito instigated a sequence of conflicts by first threatening a swaggering philanderer named Girls’ Joe (Zé das Moças). Zé told a young woman that she should only dance with White men like himself. A fuming Benedito beat and eventually killed his rival.Footnote ⁵⁴ A cycle of assaults began anew after another partygoer – a plantation owner from Lapa – reprimanded Benedito for kissing his daughter. The audience dared the protagonist to kiss the young woman again, which he did without hesitation. The father warned his daughter to ‘join a White man, but never a …’, stopping midsentence, seemingly unable to utter the word ‘Black’ (negro). At a spectator's urging, Benedito beat him, too.Footnote ⁵⁵

In mid-century Brazil, the topic of interracial sociability, including romance, was also grist for the scholarly mill. In his 1956 study of race relations in Recife, the anthropologist René Ribeiro (1914–90) drew the curtains on the gossip, polite affability and socio-economic restrictions that oversaw interactions across lines of colour and class. He discredited the common, if ‘vulgarised’, belief that Black men were dangerously infatuated with White women.Footnote ⁵⁶ Surveying high-school and university students, invariably upper class, presented clear evidence of racist attitudes in his majority non-White city. While Ribeiro's subjects insisted that they were amenable to having Black friends and neighbours, they were reluctant, if not outright opposed, to having Black relatives by marriage.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ribeiro noted that female interviewees were significantly less tolerant of Black and mixed-race people. One 17-year-old girl divulged that she feared Black men ‘because of the complex they have … and the harm they do’. She added that she would expel Black and mixed-race Brazilians if given the opportunity.Footnote ⁵⁸

Ribeiro similarly broached the topic of Brazil's customary – rather than legal – segregation. Non-White persons were historically barred from associations and clubs, some public spaces, and other establishments owing to an alleged propensity for poor conduct. Ribeiro acknowledged that this pattern of exclusion was camouflaged because one could argue that actors’ improper dress code, level of culture, and general comportment – rather than their colour – justified their non-admittance.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the case of public and private dances, Black recifenses shared how they went to great lengths to ‘avoid unpleasant incidents’, particularly while in the company of White women. They reportedly approached them only if they had been properly introduced.Footnote ⁶⁰

The Black heroes of mamulengo presented a striking contrast to the level of prudence observed by Ribeiro. These impetuous beings aggressively defied convention and attacked restrictions on their freedom. Several manifestations of these characters struck pre-emptively against public authorities and representatives of the captain, although not usually the master of ceremonies himself. Hot-headed and eager to demonstrate their strength and stubbornness (teimosidade), Baltazars and Beneditos made emphatic declarations of their violent predispositions in laudatory prologues (loas). Banned from the captain's dance, one Benedito warned Redondo that ‘Blacks (nêgos) [were] a good group’ because they did not ‘promise anything … they [gave] it right away’.Footnote ⁶¹ In an undated show performed in Paraíba, Benedito swooped in and stole ‘Doctor’ Mané Relojo's dance partner. The enraged reveller struck Benedito after calling him a ‘Black thief’ (nêgo bandido) and a ‘Black disgrace’ (nêgo desgraçado). The protagonist demanded ‘respect’ and did not object to being called a thief, but a Black thief.Footnote ⁶² Benedito ultimately killed his challenger and, after trying to frame a musician for the crime, accepted his fate. Professing Blackness on his own terms, he mused that ‘Black men only [had] one word … a hand on the ear and a knife in the stomach’. Benedito then tried to ‘sell’ the corpse as fresh meat to the audience.Footnote ⁶³

In December 1963, Benedito killed a tyrannical officer of the law in Paraíba. Sergeant Joe Fincão (Cabo Zé Fincão) shut down the dance just as Benedito arrived. He explained that Black men were banned from dancing at the venue.Footnote ⁶⁴ An enraged Benedito countered that he was ‘in charge … Me! Benedito de Lima, ladies’ clove and girls’ rosemary!’ Benedito dared Fincão to shoot him with his oversized revolver before wresting the gun away from the officer and thrusting a large knife into him.Footnote ⁶⁵ The episode culminated with the hero offering to serve Redondo as a ‘criminal’ (criminoso) for hire. Having observed the murder from a safe distance, the landowner shook his head and complained that ‘Black men [were] really wrong’. Benedito accepted being ‘really wrong’ but also ‘resilient’, boasting that he ‘won the war’ by killing the officer.Footnote ⁶⁶

Baltazar antagonised the sergeant, but did not kill him, in a confrontation that occurred over a decade later, in 1979. In this version of the encounter, the protagonist squared off with Fincão not because he was barred from attending the dance, but because the owner of the performance venue failed to obtain the proper ‘authorisation’ from the police.Footnote ⁶⁷ Speaking in the informal second person, Baltazar warned the officer not to ‘play’ with him. Fincão ordered the ‘boy’ (moleque) to surrender (render-se). Baltazar the aggressor revealed his inner fool by interposing a joke in an otherwise tense moment. Thinking the officer was referring to a physically deformed person (rendido), he shared that he had once taken pity on a ‘herniated’ Black man (negro rendido).Footnote ⁶⁸ Fincão's insults became more unequivocally racial after Baltazar attacked him. He warned the ‘bothersome Black man’ (nêgo da mulesta) that he would ‘teach him a lesson’ if he only had his knife. Ever defiant, Baltazar countered that Fincão had no authority at the dance before beating the sergeant and running him off the stage.Footnote ⁶⁹

Black desordeiros’ belligerent manoeuvring suggests that these characters identified with, and perhaps aimed to displace, more powerful figures. In two instances, these protagonists engaged in a revealing game of mimicry where they parroted – but also mixed up – their superiors’ words for humorous effect. In Manuel Francisco da Silva's 1963 episode ‘The Death of Zé Fincão’, Benedito and Redondo delivered virtually identical self-introductions. Appearing first, the landowner boasted that he was a ‘beast that never die[d]’ and did not fear mortals. He warned of gratuitous violence by invoking a club to the head, ‘phlegm running, and these kids with swollen bellies licking’ their wounds. Benedito delivered the same impassioned preamble twice, but he included a small personal touch the second time. Instead of mentioning ill children (swollen stomachs are classic symptoms of parasites), he said that he would force his enemies to swallow their phlegm.Footnote ⁷⁰

In August 1964, Benedito and Redondo engaged in a striking power struggle. The protagonist daringly mocked the landowner after he tried to expel Benedito from the dance venue. Redondo ordered the human musician to remove Benedito. Mocking the captain's order, the troublemaking attendee turned to the musician and told him to send the captain away. The outraged captain demanded to know if Benedito was mocking him (‘nêgo você tá me arremando é?’). Like the fools examined above, Benedito humorously confused the words for imitation (arremendando) and mending or patching (remendando). Consequently, he asked the captain whether he was ‘patching [him] up’. Redondo repeated his claim that any ‘place where Blacks play[ed]’ was ‘no good’.Footnote ⁷¹ Benedito head-butted the landowner and threatened to break everything if Redondo's dance proceeded as planned. The enraged captain then flung humiliating racist maxims at the protagonist to break his resolve.Footnote ⁷²

This particularly confrontational incarnation of Benedito exhibited the same level of aggression toward a partially deaf man who appeared at a dance. This stranger, named Mané Braz, answered Benedito's increasingly hostile questioning with nonsensical statements. When Benedito demanded to know his name (nome), Braz answered that he was not hungry (com fome). The protagonist reproduced the humiliation he experienced as a Black man by telling Braz he was not welcome at the dance and then beating him.Footnote ⁷³ Benedito's treatment of Braz revealed that, in a world where authority and violence were coterminous, the ‘big’ abused the ‘small’ on all rungs of the social ladder.

Cunning, Deceit and the Price Paid for Black–White Marriages

We have already seen that Black male protagonists were excluded from White dances to prevent romantic relationships. Two episodes stand out for their creative imaginings of how a Baltazar or Benedito could win over not just any White woman, but Redondo's daughter, as well as what this marriage would look like. In the first instance, performed in Rio Grande do Norte in the 1940s, Baltazar de Sousa Miguel decided that he wanted to marry Minervina de Morais.Footnote ⁷⁴ In line with many other plays, the protagonist was arrested at the captain's dance. Rather than resisting or otherwise escalating conflict, Baltazar conferred with an attorney (implying that he had money) to secure his release. Ever more determined to woo Minervina, Baltazar hatched a plan and implored the captain's second-in-command to tell her that he was ‘not Black’ and in fact had a ‘stable colour’ (cor segura). Minervina learned that a wealthy ‘brunette’ or ‘tan’ man (moreno) arrived from the South to find beautiful women in the North-East. Probably assuming the visitor would be lighter in complexion, she agreed to meet him. Baltazar assured the captain's daughter that he was indeed a ‘Brown man of colour’ (moreno de cor) but ‘free and unimpeded’ (livre e desimpedido), implying that his wealth made him at least non-Black.Footnote ⁷⁵ While Minervina agreed to marry Baltazar, she said she could only do so in secret as her father, Redondo, would certainly object. The couple found a priest to perform the ceremony in exchange for a turkey wing.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a surprise ending, the secret nuptials did not throw the captain into a fit of rage. His new son-in-law apologised for the ‘ungratefulness’ that stemmed from his extreme ‘youth’ (mocidade). The captain accepted Baltazar's apology and welcomed him into the family.Footnote ⁷⁷

The meanings of this unusual play are open-ended. It is uncertain whether Baltazar was who he said he was (i.e. a wealthy, non-Black southerner). It is also unclear whether Redondo and his daughter were supposed to be deceived by the ruse or if father and daughter merely ‘played along’ given the promise of wealth. Buoyed by his sense of cunning (malícia), Baltazar surely recognised that wealth overrode (or at least mitigated) the stigma of his colour. The play explored the malleability of Blackness, but it also implied that the captain's family was in dire financial straits. Thus, Baltazar's claim to wealth guaranteed the captain's approval, since he probably saw the marriage as a means of elevating or recuperating his family's status. Finally, the notion that Baltazar identified as a southerner cast doubt on a regional claim to Whiteness.

A second play, performed in Paraíba in 1968, imagined the marriage between the Black protagonist and the captain's daughter after the dust from their nuptial merrymaking had settled. If Baltazar was in his prime in Sebastião Severino Dantas’ work, Luís Barbosa dos Santos presented an older version of the hero.Footnote ⁷⁸ This Baltazar was a shiftless drunkard (cachaceiro) and a self-declared follower of Satan who left his wife and young daughter to pursue a lifestyle of drinking and gambling. When Baltazar demanded that his wife give him money, she cried out that her father, Redondo, was correct about ‘never trusting Black men’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Baltazar spent 12 years drinking heavily and gambling but eventually reassessed his situation. He implored male spectators to respect their families because ‘otherwise you are on the path to Hell like I am already stuck inside Hell’.Footnote ⁸⁰

The protagonist-turned-villain roamed the streets asking for pocket change. One day, he encountered his estranged wife and daughter. Baltazar did not initially recognise them, and mother and daughter did not recognise Baltazar. Perhaps to lighten the mood of the dispiriting episode, Baltazar's wife described her predicament in the form of a riddle. She explained that she was neither married nor widowed, later divulging that her husband had abandoned her. The young girl then revealed herself to be Xandoquinha Redondo, Baltazar's daughter and the captain's granddaughter. Overjoyed to be reunited with his family, Baltazar implored his wife to forgive him. She acceded only after Baltazar, still malevolent at the core, threatened to kill her.Footnote ⁸¹

Vice was at the core of Barbosa dos Santos’ morality play, but the superseding conflict stemmed from the mismatch between Black husbands and their White wives. Many interracial marriages were often subjects of gossip, if not outright disregard, in North-East Brazil until at least the late 1960s. Ribeiro found significant opposition to what he called ‘extremely unequal’ marriages regardless of social class unless these arrangements brought improvements in status and wealth.Footnote ⁸² One of the anthropologist's subjects, a man with many years of ‘experience and observation’, opined that White women and Black men ‘always live[d] in disharmony’. He further added that the wife usually betrayed her husband, thus reinforcing Black husbands’ pattern of ‘criminal conduct’.Footnote ⁸³ Another informant, identified as a poor Black man who married a poor White woman, told Ribeiro that his future mother-in-law did everything in her power to thwart the relationship. The couple eloped and the woman continued to warn that the Black husband would ‘unleash his colour’ on her daughter during their first quarrel. The informant reported that the White wife eventually left her husband to ‘live maritally’ (amasiando-se) with a mixed-race (mulato) man.Footnote ⁸⁴

While Baltazar trounced the stereotype of the evil husband in Dantas’ playlet, he revealed his ‘true’ nature after marrying and having a daughter. Seemingly extraneous to the plotline, his devotion to Satan is significant. The character's remarks about his ‘father’ and ‘protector’ appealed to the enduring belief that Black men were children of evil, a myth linked to Brazil's slaveholding past.Footnote ⁸⁵ Traces of these historical associations are found in an immense body of popular expressions collected by multiple generations of folklorists. Several of the most common sayings ranked racial groups in descending order of their moral standing. According to these expressions, Whites were devoted children of God while Black Brazilians were sorcerers (feiticeiros) and sons of Satan who were condemned to Hell.Footnote ⁸⁶ Baltazar's wife, who transcriber Pimentel characterised as ‘pure, correct, exemplary [and] a victim’, suffered tremendously at the hands of her ‘perverse’ and ‘bad-natured’ husband, who was above all a ‘rebel against God’.Footnote ⁸⁷

The 1968 performance stands out for its sobering portrayal of Baltazar. In our larger archive of puppet plays, the Black troublemaker was not bound to conventional notions of right and wrong. However, Baltazar the abusive husband could not exploit the ambiguity of his actions, revealing that the world of play had its moral limits. Barbosa dos Santos’ minidrama thus offered a troubling reassessment of the hero. It conceivably even held a mirror to male spectators who also struggled with addiction or engaged in domestic abuse. These weighty subjects likely caused the enchanted world of play to fold.

Two Games of Racial Acrobatics: Mamulengo and Verbal Duelling (Desafios)

Transcriber Pimentel granted that a particularly strong tinge of ‘reactionary racism’ (racismo reacionário) coloured ‘The Punishment of Baltazar’.Footnote ⁸⁸ He also hinted that Barbosa dos Santos’ dramatic admonition was a failure not because it vilified Black masculinity, but because the performer evidently broke the ‘rules’ of the game. Omitting verbal contests and paroxysms of violence deviated from the conventions that linked variant forms of plebeian oral culture, including North-East Brazil's legendary sung poetic duels (desafios or pelejas). These ‘stylized exchange[s] of personal insult’, as Linda Lewin helpfully defines them, are better known than their puppet cousins.Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, contests between famous competitors are immortalised in the region's legendary chapbook literature (literatura de cordel), a genre that historically enjoyed a higher cultural standing among Brazilian intellectuals.Footnote ⁹⁰

Transcriptions of desafios that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries disclose that race was a standard target. Examining desafios and puppet shows in tandem reveals that both improvisational practices adhered closely to a logic of racial ‘acrobatics’. Human and puppet contenders took turns launching and responding to racial attacks in this lively pas de deux, where common rejoinders included evasions, partial affirmations and even bold, uncompromising assertions of one's Blackness. In our body of transcribed puppet plays, Black protagonists sometimes eluded their rivals’ assaults. However, the absence of verbalised responses should not be mistaken for silence. Indeed, Black protagonists’ physical retaliation was a response, albeit one that confirmed the stereotypes of aggressors and troublemakers.Footnote ⁹¹

In both mamulengo and desafios, the most common response to racial aggression entailed partial affirmation. These statements of ‘Black but’ involved the target of macroaggressions simultaneously upholding and exempting themselves from the ‘truths’ cited in verbal slights. The Pernambucan and Alagoan folklorists Francisco Augusto Pereira da Costa (1851–1923) and Théo Brandão (1907–81) documented striking examples of these retorts in desafios. Pereira observed a match-up between two men incarcerated in Recife's detention house (casa de detenção) in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The White competitor, a washerman, doggedly pursued his rival, a Black nurse's servant. The washerman declared that Black and White Brazilians were not cut from the ‘same cloth’ and mocked two of Brazil's most important abolitionists, Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910) and José Mariano (1850–1912). Wagering that his rival would likely associate his skin colour with filth and a bad odour, the servant conceded that he was Black but pointed out that he was at least ‘fragrant’.Footnote ⁹²

Brandão observed a similar tactic in a contest involving two musicians, one Black and the other of European and Indigenous (caboclo) ancestry. The Black contestant, also on the defensive, asserted that he was a ‘unique Black man’ who was ‘sweeter than sugarcane [and] smell[ed] just like the rain’. Intriguingly, the caboclo only targeted his rival's colour when he bragged that young ladies (moças) found him attractive. The caboclo opined that no respectable woman would kiss a Black man, leaving him with cod and Black women (nêgas), which he granted were ‘two sides of the same coin’.Footnote ⁹³ Statements of ‘Black but’ are also plentiful in our puppet plays. Ever eager to find a romantic partner, the Black protagonist, this time named Gregório, danced with Redondo's mother in January 1964. She continued to call him ‘Black’ (nêgo) despite his objections. Perhaps stunned by her junior partner's rebuke, she likened his skin colour to ‘pencil lead’ (miolo de lápis). Benedito countered that he at least ‘wrote well’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Frontal assaults on Whiteness are one of the more striking aspects of desafios. In the example of the contest held at Recife's prison, the Black interlocutor lambasted his foe as a ‘dishevelled White man’ who needed to take a proper bath.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the legendary 1874 encounter between the ‘Grande Romano’ (circa 1840–91) and the enslaved Black poet Inácio de Catingueira (1845–79), the latter belied the former's claim to Whiteness. Although the documentary record is incomplete, Catingueira's rejoinders show that Romano boasted that he was a White slaveowner. ‘For someone supposed to be White’, Catingueira countered, his rival's kinky hair and skin tone – what he likened to the ‘colour of roasted coffee beans’ – was equivalent to his own. Although the Black poet erroneously surmised that Romano's grandfather had been enslaved, exposing his false claim to Whiteness facilitated Romano's shocking defeat in Paraíba.Footnote ⁹⁶

Apparently common enough in the realm of desafios, direct attacks on Whiteness do not surface in transcriptions of puppet plays produced between 1940 and 1980. Growing the evidentiary base might yield examples of Baltazars and Beneditos debasing antagonists as filthy Whites or aspiring to a false Whiteness. Nonetheless, the extant documentation could be representative given that social asymmetry is a defining animus of puppet plays. While desafios seemed to entail assumptions of reciprocity – predicated upon equivalent retaliation between co-equals, or at least rivals of lesser social distance – the Black heroes of mamulengo seem keenly aware that their retaliation is never equal in power to the initial assault. While the literal silence of Whiteness could signify its uncontested power, it is more likely that this silence bifurcates a world into non-Black and Black, thus unsettling the fiction of racial purity albeit more discreetly than the contest between Catingueira and Romano.

A Settling of Accounts: Tackling Gendered and Racial Oppression in Mamulengo

This article has examined a form of puppet play deeply intertwined with the culture and mythos of North-East Brazil. Although the meanings of this ludic universe reside in multiple domains – such as the movements and outlandish physiognomies of puppets and their suggestive double-entendres – we have looked most closely at the racially conflictual dramas that surge through a body of exceedingly rare transcriptions of improvised shows. Collected by a small group of male litterateurs from the 1940s to the late 1970s, these crucial traces have not been appreciated as worthwhile objects of study. Barring a spate of fine ethnographies conducted over the last 20 years, historical studies of mamulengo are lacking. This paucity might well indicate scholars’ unease with a practice historically rooted in humiliating physical and psychic violence.

Clear instances of racial violence in puppet play might surprise those who were once convinced that Brazil is ‘less racist’ than other post-slavery societies in the Americas. Some might quibble over whether it is correct to racialise mamulengo, perhaps countering that it is at best an example of ‘recreational racism’, a term that legal scholar Adilson Moreira has coined to address what has been called the ‘subtleness’ of racism in Brazilian humour.Footnote ⁹⁷ Mamulengo rejects all notions of subtlety by centring and normalising racial animosities – particularly racist aphorisms – that scholars of the twentieth century reckoned to be ‘folkloric’ in nature.Footnote ⁹⁸ Thus, this powerful site of race-making ‘from below’ contradicts elite fantasies of an eminently ‘peaceful people’ (povo pacífico) elaborated by such figures as Gilberto Freyre (1900–87).Footnote ⁹⁹ While mamulengo rejects nationalist and regionalist mythmaking vis-à-vis Brazil's supposed racial lubricity, it is also detached from a different kind of political elite: Afro-Brazilian social movements. Black characters seldom invoke a language of dignity and respectability. In fact, the Baltazars and Beneditos found in our transcripts do accuse their rivals of racial prejudice, revealing that affirming and explicitly anti-racist discourse takes time to punctuate a largely oral universe.

Although it appears less firmly redemptive than other forms of Black cultural expression, mamulengo is a facet of Brazil's anti-racist struggle and affirming Blackness.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Expressions of protest draw on discursive universes that are finite and historically circumscribed. It is unsurprising, therefore, that racial degradation and gratuitous violence reigned supreme even in the world of play in a region where nearly 360 years of slavery powerfully shaped understandings of power and the exercise of authority. We saw that Baltazars and Beneditos eagerly accepted the base ‘rules’ of the social ‘game’ by aspiring to the petty despotism wielded by the Redondos of the world.

Protagonists’ tactics of racial acrobatics – as we termed the evasions and half pronouncements of their colour – were also expected given both the denigration of Blackness and the broader appeal of Brazil's ‘virtual’ Whiteness.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It has also been suggested that plebeian audiences simultaneously identified with the Black heroes of mamulengo and found themselves safely distant from the kind of Blackness exhibited for amusement. Indeed, puppet play of the mid- to late twentieth century explicates north-easterners’ reluctance to identify as ‘Black’ (negro or preto) and a broader inclination to find refuge in the racially indeterminate category of ‘Brown’ and ‘mixed’ (pardo and mulato), a tendency that has ebbed and flowed over the last half-century.

Baltazars’ and Beneditos’ elusions or stereotype-centred statements of their Blackness (‘Black but’) in the 1940s through to the late 1970s cleared the way for uncompromising affirmations of Black agency and dignity (‘Black and’). In the twenty-first century, the cumulative effects of mobilisation around Black dignity and anti-racism are reflected in mamulengo. Puppet play appears to be experiencing a particularly major settling of accounts regarding its historical undertows of racism, misogyny and homophobia. Scholars and scholar-practitioners have started to unpack the ‘racist and unacceptable’ depictions of Black protagonists while remaining open to the anti-racist promise of puppet play.Footnote ¹⁰² Anthropologist Zildalte Ramos de Macêdo has investigated a ‘modernised’ form of mamulengo conceived by a university-educated performer in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. Taking potential charges of racism seriously, Heraldo Lins (born 1962) presents both ‘traditional’ and what he styles ‘politically correct’ (politicamente correto) versions of his craft. The conventional variety employs a dark-black Benedito puppet while the star of ‘contemporary’ shows, primarily used for government patrons, is light brown (pardo) rather than dark black.Footnote ¹⁰³

A new generation of female artists has also challenged the chauvinist ethos of mamulengo. At the age of 50, the late Dadi (Maria Ieda da Silva Medeiros, 1938–2021) of Rio Grande do Norte purportedly became Brazil's first documented female puppet artist. While some of her storylines seem to have been predicated on racial conflict, Dadi's incursions into mamulengo have inspired girls and young women to lend their voices to the brincadeira.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Having successfully carved out space in the male-dominated craft, female puppet artists in Glória do Goitá, Pernambuco, have set out to ‘break taboos’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Five puppeteers interviewed by performing-arts scholar Barbara Duarte Benatti have signalled that Brazilians’ growing consciousness of race and gender make ‘traditional’ mamulengo increasingly objectionable. These artists work hard to satisfy rural audiences’ hunger for traditional mamulengo while making incremental but decisive ‘adaptations to jokes grounded in gendered – and racial – oppression’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In contemporary mamulengo, a tug-of-war between the traditional and modern is unlikely to abate in the immediate future. When extricated from the historical logic of racial domination and White supremacy, tenacious Black protagonists who do what they wish rather than what they are told can effect change in the conventions of the art form and the society writ large. Introducing himself in self-laudatory speech, the hero declared that the ‘little Black Baltazar has arrived, who fights in the barn and by any means, head on and in a gang. I am a little Black man above all the rules.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷