Transposing whiteness: The makings of a mestiça

Clara Nunes was born Clara Francisca Gonçalves in 1942 in Paraopeba, Minas Gerais. By age five, she had lost her parents and was subsequently raised by her five older siblings. Growing up in a devout Catholic home, she worked in a textile mill as a child before moving to Belo Horizonte with one of her sisters. There, she became a weaver and modeled garments in local advertisements, attended Spiritist meetings with her sister, and found early success singing on local radio. After winning several statewide song competitions, she moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1965 to pursue a national singing career.

Nunes’s move to Rio in 1965 came amid growing repression under the military dictatorship, which had seized power in 1964. While narratives of mestiçagem had shaped Brazil since the 1930s, the dictatorship of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s amplified these as the foundation of Brazil’s supposed racial democracy. Citizens were urged to identify as a blend of European, African, and indigenous Brazilian heritage, even as whiteness remained privileged in politics and culture. The state favored cultural productions, like Clara Nunes’s music, that upheld these revisionist myths, allowing artists who appeared white to evoke race mixture through style or even appearance.

In personal photographs and local media from Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro in the mid- to late 1960s, Clara appears with long, flowing brown hair and pale skin. Demure in genre and glamour, her first LPs feature mostly melodramatic bolero love songs while she is presented as an ingénue. The title track for her second studio album, Você Passa e Eu Acho Graça (1969), was Nunes’s first recorded samba, yet it features her still singing in a bolero style, her soprano warble floating over histrionic strings and brass. The album art for this LP and others early on shows Nunes with her hair streaming over her shoulders or sitting in a 1960s-style beehive (Figure 1). Her light skin, long-sleeved blouses, parted lips, and gaze project a respectable white womanhood, like the sound of her voice, including in her brief venture into samba at this early stage. In a 1980 television interview, Nunes commented on the discouragement to sing samba de raiz, or traditional “roots” samba, in the 1960s by the music industry. As a woman, she had been urged to sing more romantic songs like boleros, all the while competing with foreign music coming from the US, UK, and, to a lesser extent, France: “The 1960s was a time of invasion by music imported [to Brazil]. And I felt that problem firsthand…. I recorded my first samba in 1968 and the radio stations didn’t play samba during the day. Brazilian music was played only after 10, 8 at night… [And later, with samba] I broke the taboo that ‘women don’t sell records.’”Footnote ⁴ Yet with bolero’s waning popularity, and the rise of bossa nova and yé-yé pop at home and abroad, sales of Nunes’s first albums were modest at best.

Figure 1.

Album covers from Clara Nunes’s first three albums, A Voz Adorável de Clara Nunes (Reference Nunes1966), Você Passa e Eu Acho Graça (1968), and A Beleza Que Canta (1969). Album covers courtesy of Odeon.

Following a frustrating debut, Nunes decided to dedicate herself entirely to samba. She released her first full samba album in 1971, simply titled Clara Nunes, marking her musical rebirth. However, at this point, samba had shifted from its black, subaltern origins in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and the plantations of the Bahian Recôncavo to a mainstream genre often fronted by white performers. In the early 1900s, elites derided samba as “too black” for its ties to Afro-Brazilian religions and perceived association with debauchery and licentious behavior. Despite its earlier prohibitions, by the 1930s, populist dictator Getúlio Vargas saw samba’s potential with its humble black origins to transform Carioca popular culture into a national Brazilian sound across class and racial barriers, now centralized in the nation’s capital of Rio de Janeiro (McCann Reference McCann2004, 42). As Hermano Vianna (Reference Vianna1999, 78, 90) argues, the Vargas regime “colonized” Carioca samba in the 1930s as a national rhythm to foster loyalty, requiring samba schools to “dramatize historical, didactic, or patriotic themes” for annual carnival competitions. By the 1940s and 1950s, radio stations in Rio de Janeiro transmitted samba across Brazil, preferring white stars, as they were thought to be more affable to the broader public (McCann Reference McCann2004). The few singers of color given access to the airwaves were predominantly mixed-race women, like Dalva de Oliveira, Ângela Maria, and Emilinha Borba, and two standout black women, Elizeth Cardoso and Carmen Costa. Clara Nunes idolized Cardoso and Costa in her youth and later sought to emulate their sound (Fernandes Reference Fernandes2007, 101). No one, however, had a greater effect on samba—and Clara Nunes—than the Luso-Brazilian performer Carmen Miranda.

Performing at the Urca Casino in Rio in the 1930s, Carmen Miranda would become renowned for an audiovisual caricature of blackness transposed onto her white body. Her flashy image of tight-fitting skirts, excessive jewelry, and tutti-frutti hats glamorized and riffed off the everyday white, flowing garments of Baianas, black women who have sold fruit and African-derived foods like acarajé in the streets of Salvador, Bahia, from slavery to this day. With Miranda’s bouncy voice, famous for its pointed diction and tongue twisters, her unique interpretations of popular sambas made her white feminine body simultaneously bawdy and silly (Bishop-Sanchez Reference Bishop-Sanchez2016). Miranda’s flamboyance in color and sound fashioned a transracial performance popular among gay white men who reproduced in drag “Miranda’s own appropriation of the Baiana, that is, the imitation of an imitation.” James Green (Reference Green1999, 204–205) states, however, that such queer mimicry “usually end[ed] up erasing the Afro-Brazilian elements in the performance” that had already been diluted by Miranda herself. Miranda’s sudden death in 1955 at age forty-six made her queer cachet skyrocket as her performances of Afro-Brazilian culture on the national and international stage left a vacuum. While Clara Nunes was entering the national music scene, these “Miranda interpretations on stage and screen, regardless of the sex of the performer, exploded the gender divide, often playing off one another as they cemented a Miranda drag vogue” in the mid-twentieth century (Bishop-Sanchez Reference Bishop-Sanchez2016, 171). To tap into the memory of Miranda, queered by her ostentatious theatricality in Brazilian and Hollywood films and the regular drag impersonations of a twice-watered-down Baiana, Nunes herself would activate an archive founded in racial, gender, and sexual ambiguities.

The nationally syndicated Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Globo predicted that Brazilian popular music and its nods to black folklore would disappear after Miranda’s passing (Bishop-Sanchez Reference Bishop-Sanchez2016, 206). As Clara Nunes had failed to gain much national attention, her new management under the popular radio producer and then boyfriend Adelzon Alves in the early 1970s directly addressed the void left by Carmen Miranda’s death. In several interviews, Alves remarked that no other female artist had attempted to fill Miranda’s shoes by building a career based on Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions. For Clara Nunes to benefit, she would have to transform herself, figuratively and literally. For that, Alves took advantage of her exposure to the rhythms in Umbanda ritual music and Afro-Brazilian spirituality (Fernandes Reference Fernandes2007, 118). He explained, as quoted by Rachel Bakke (Reference Bakke2007, 87):

In 1971, the same year that Nunes launched her first samba album, she quite publicly converted to the religion of Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion that mixes West African Ifá, with Spiritist, Catholic, and indigenous Brazilian faith practices. Vovó Maria Joana Rezadeira served as one of her spiritual mothers, and Candeia’s influence on Clara cannot be understated. As Steven Bocskay (Reference Bocskay2017) discusses, Candeia’s black militancy through samba was informed by his purist interpretations of the genre. His introduction of Nunes to samba was steeped in the material stakes of music making during the dictatorship, particularly for black musicians and performers. While Nunes began to build her image and sound on Miranda’s legacy as a Baiana and the influence of figures like Vovó Maria Joana Rezadeira, Pai Edu, and Candeia, it would ultimately be under the terms of her own experiences in Umbanda and its interpolation of her identity as a Brazilian woman.

The pursuit of a sonic and visual authenticity remained at the forefront of Clara Nunes’s career to expose Brazilian culture to the rest of the world. In 1973, she recorded a New Year’s Eve special in Stockholm for Swedish television, on which she told a reporter for O Globo: “I don’t intend to confine my style to just Brazil. I want to have my place well-established in my country and then show everyone here abroad what we convey through music. I’m not Elizeth Cardoso, nor Gal [Costa], nor [Maria] Bethânia…. I want to achieve a different, profoundly Brazilian form, straight from our roots, for my repertoire. Hence, the folklore … that has been missing since Carmen Miranda. I think I’m on the right track.”Footnote ⁵ While Nunes and drag queens galvanized Miranda’s legacy, brief snippets in newspaper celebrity sightings mention Nunes occasionally frequenting drag shows at gay nightclubs in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Figure 2). One report equated Nunes’s “extravagant dresses,” which she explained referenced her faith, to those of the transformistas on stage.Footnote ⁶ Following the racialized excess of Miranda’s performance, Nunes’s own flamboyant staging of Afro-Brazilian folklore and spirituality facilitated her acquiescence to the military dictatorship’s censors and its racial rhetoric. However, Nunes’s performance of these cultural tropes as a nonblack woman who refused to engage in outwardly political, problack discourse during the dictatorship also challenges the fantasies we hold about her in memory as a defender of allegedly subversive cultural practices, like those in Afro-Brazilian religions or even drag.Footnote ⁷

Figure 2.

Clara Nunes (right) with drag performer Angela Davis after the latter’s performance at Medieval, a gay nightclub in São Paulo, in 1973. Elisa Mascaro and Fernando Simões Collection.

Given the aesthetic choices Nunes made in her life and those who have emulated her since, I pull from the language of drag performance to posit that Clara Nunes, as a nonlack woman, choreographed her body using folkloric gestures of mixed-race womanhood and sexual desire integral to Brazilian national identity. A queer reading here of Nunes’s performance of race, gender, and religion as a mélange of gestures akin to drag illudes, and still alludes to, the Brazilian nation’s possibilities within a single body. While drag is traditionally thought to reinforce yet transgress the gender binary through excess and artifice, it is the racialization of this excess as black and its indispensability to a refined mestiçagem via Clara Nunes that reconciles her to be the pinnacle of brasilidade. Through her body and voice, Nunes staged a vivid audiovisual representation of racial democracy, transposing cultural and racial performance into a shared national identity.

Reading Nunes through the queer lens of drag prompts a reconsideration of the racial and sexual undertones of performing mixed-race identity. When examining Clara Nunes’s self-presentation in nationalist aesthetics of mestiçagem, the language of drag affords possible critiques of racism, misogyny, and, in her case, discrimination against Afro-Brazilian religions. Yet following Judith Butler (Reference Butler1993, 125), drag also risks the reification of “the regimes of power by which one is constituted and … opposes.” Although some have interpreted Nunes as apolitical, like her biographer Vagner Fernandes (Reference Fernandes2007), the potential of subversions and inversions within her performance indeed can create possibilities. As we consider Nunes through the analytic of drag, her actions might not appear as simply appropriative, but rather, to borrow from José Esteban Muñoz, as a disidentification with racial democracy, especially during Brazil’s most brutal years of authoritarianism. That is, perhaps, she “neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather [her] disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology” (Muñoz Reference Muñoz1999, 11–12). By doing so, Nunes actively nudges the Brazilian public, and in particular, practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions, to dream together toward the utopian possibilities of racial democracy.

Performing mestiçagem in spirit, sound, and gesture

Since the nineteenth century, the Brazilian state and society have denigrated African-derived religions as threats to Christian morality and Brazilian modernity, with practitioners facing harassment, discrimination, and violence to this day (Cantave Reference Cantave2024). Candomblé, particularly by the 1930s, often sought discourses of African purity and, for that, received the brunt of state repression. Meanwhile Umbanda’s beginnings from predominantly white Kardecian Spiritist dissidents in the 1920s to a gradual incorporation of indigenous Brazilian and Afro-diasporic beliefs into a spiritual mestiçagem over time offered it some protection (Capone Reference Capone2010). As the Catholic Church became a refuge for the political left during the dictatorship, Umbanda became more legitimized, especially as many in the military were counted among its members (Capone Reference Capone2010, 104–105). Roger Bastide, however, a gay white French anthropologist and practitioner of Candomblé in Bahia, famously described Umbanda in the cities of the Southeast like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo as “cultural mulattoism,” corrupted by poor whites. He derided their “cultural disorganization” or “degeneration” while praising the resistance of Bahian Candomblé’s ‘purely’ African traditions that, instead, turned whites—like him—into Africans (Bastide Reference Bastide and Sebba1978, 300–303). Despite such critiques, both religions have long provided spaces of resistance and belonging for black women and queer Brazilians of all ethno-racial backgrounds. With her 1971 conversion, Nunes embraced and elevated Afro-Brazilian religious influence in popular music.

Clara Nunes’s career balanced itself at what was an uneasy crossroads. The dictatorship’s investments in racial democracy rhetoric prohibited most Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices while they also allowed for Nunes to don these aesthetics as a light-skinned mestiça. Her ability to sing, wear sanctified Umbanda garments, and discuss her faith illustrates the selective application of authoritarian laws around blackness and religion. These contradictions, especially around racialized women’s bodies, were a hallmark of the dictatorship’s cultural politics. Antiobscenity laws that conflated perceived immorality and “subversive” ideology were often not enforced against sexual representations of mixed-race women on screen and in advertisements, as Jasmine Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2020) and Erica Williams (Reference Williams2013) show. Mixed-race women’s bodies were ideals hewn of flesh meant to promote racial democracy. The sale of black and mixed-race women’s sexuality on the national and international stage could translate into a profitable reputation of Brazil as a racial paradise. As Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2020, 49) notes, the mixed-race woman both contained blackness and embodied abject desire, her commodification and exotification eroticizing mestiçagem while upholding white heteropatriarchy. Nunes’s self-fashioning as a mestiça thus affirmed racial democracy’s utopian potential while simultaneously performing racial-sexual tropes embedded in the national imaginary.

As a color classification, mestiça operated in the 1970s almost as a philosophical category of self-identification. The military dictatorship had removed color as a question of racial identity on the 1970 census, arguing that Brazil’s racial democracy in which everyone could claim mestiçagem made race inconsequential.Footnote ⁸ A now-infamous 1976 survey of over eighty thousand Brazilians conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed that 135 unique color descriptors were used by respondents to self-identify; yet Edward Telles saliently points out that over 95 percent of those surveyed only used six terms: branca (white), morena, morena clara (light morena), parda (brown), preta (black), and negra (black). A fraction of a percentage identified their color as mestiça, a phenomenon that would repeat itself when a similar national survey was conducted in 1995 (Telles Reference Telles2004, 82–85). Nunes’s self-identification, then, as a mestiça is at once unique and self-actualizing, both for herself as a racially ambiguous subject and the nation as a whole through her music. Further, her religious self-fashioning was inseparable from the racialized and gendered logics of the dictatorship. Her turn to Umbanda not only redefined her music but also positioned her body and image at the nexus of competing state narratives of repression, mestiçagem, and cultural permissiveness.

Nunes’s conversion to Umbanda led Brazilian and international media to describe her as mixed race. However, she was not the first nonblack musician to use Afro-Brazilian spiritual symbolisms in her repertoire. In 1966, Vinícius de Moraes and Baden Powell famously recorded a bossa nova and samba album, Os Afro-sambas, that integrated Candomblé and Umbanda rhythms and references to the orixás, or Yoruba-derived deities. Meanwhile, it was still rare at the time for an artist to repeatedly declare themselves a practitioner of Afro-Brazilian religions publicly before they were decriminalized in 1974, to experience them as religion and belief rather than merely folklore and art, as did Clara Nunes.

As Clara Nunes rose to fame in samba, the mystique of her identity emerged from both her visual aesthetic and the grain of her voice, defined by Barthes (Reference Barthes and Heath1977, 182) as “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.” The corporality of Nunes’s voice emerges as a gesture to her newfound musical identity as a samba singer and proud umbandista. Starting with her first samba album in 1971, Clara Nunes, her voice began to take on the assertiveness of the liturgical chants of her black Umbanda priestesses, like Vovó Maria Joana Rezadeira. The timbre of her voice deepened, acquired a rasp, and descended several registers. With the help of black spiritual guidance, this grain unearthed from within Nunes’s body offered a deeper sense of authenticity to Brazil’s popular musical traditions than her previous albums of boleros.

Despite being a Mineira (i.e., from the state of Minas Gerais), Nunes’s renaissance album caused confusion over her origin, especially with the popular song “Ê Baiana” and her new appearance. Because the state of Bahia symbolized the cradle of Africanity and Afro-Brazilian spirituality in the Brazilian national imaginary, Nunes was often mistaken as hailing from there. One paper commented in 1975: “Her taste for necklaces and balangandãs comes from afar and it makes many people assume that Clara Nunes is a Baiana. But she is a Mineira.”Footnote ⁹ A year earlier at Cannes, Manchete noted the striking resemblance between her all-white wardrobe and head wraps and the liturgical clothing of Candomblé and Umbanda mães-de-santo, or priestesses.Footnote ¹⁰ Amid this confusion, the press joked whether she was herself a mãe-de-santo (Fernandes Reference Fernandes2007, 124). The ambiguity deepened when Nunes recorded her successful cover of Dorival Caymmi’s “O que é que a baiana tem?” (What is it that the Baiana has?) on her 1974 album Alvorecer—a song made famous by Carmen Miranda’s on-screen debut dressed as a Baiana in the 1939 film Banana-da-terra. These associations tied Nunes’s Bahian persona and Umbanda faith to an image of a woman who looked closer to whiteness but, in her soul, sounded black.

The inconsistencies of mestiçagem as an ideology fueled confusion around Nunes’s performances of blackness and, by extension, her identity. Peter Wade (Reference Wade2005, 245) argues that Latin American narratives of race mixture often “recreate the very things that are supposed to disappear in the progress of the mestizaje they are celebrating. Mestizo-ness is not simply opposed to blackness and indigenousness; rather blackness and indigenousness are actively reconstructed by mestizo-ness.” In Brazil, mestiçagem encouraged such reconstructions through its homogenization of regional and historical specificities. For Nunes, the volatility of her transposed mestiça-ness across time, space, and embodiment created sensations of suspension and opacity while also granting her license to draw from national folklore. In keeping with Butler (Reference Butler1993) and Wade (Reference Wade2005), the cultural processes of mestiçagem took hold in her body and became her lived reality in spirit and song.

As Clara Nunes’s acclaim grew, she became a regular fixture on national television. In a 1973 Rede Bandeirantes performance of her song “Tributo aos Orixás” (Tribute to the Orixás), we hear the transposed grain of her blackened voice in deeper, exclamatory, almost speech-like contralto utterances. Chanting in Yoruba, accompanied by the tamborim’s perpetual beating and high picks of the cavaquinho’s strings in F minor, she invokes Exu, the messenger orixá, at the start to open up the path for mortals to commune with the divine (Nunes Reference Nunes1972). Wearing multiple yellow guias that shimmy with her hips, the singer dances her afoxé, a Bahian rhythm rooted in Candomblé and Umbanda ceremonies. She whirls and rocks back and forth, singing as her hair falls over her face. She supplicates the orixás in cadenced song as her body lurches, wrapping the microphone cord around herself while she uses her right hand to greet each orixá with a specific gesture and salutation in Yoruba. She disobeys the camera as her sways and swoops almost dodge its focus, her eyes closed for much of the performance. Singing of how the enslaved carried these orixás with them to Brazil, their suffering is timeless and is funneled through the gestures of her voice and body.

Surrounded by her band, Nosso Samba, mostly—and later, entirely—black men, Clara’s positioning and gestures mark her mediation as a mixed-race woman. Like her 1978 anthem, “Guerreira,” this rarely cited performance of “Tributo aos Orixás” evokes spiritual possession in Afro-Brazilian religions, as if an orixá had mounted her, using her body as an oracle to bend the past into future prophecy. Following Juana María Rodríguez’s (Reference Rodríguez2014, 4) call to read gesture as exceeding fixed identities, especially under the heteronormative narratives of mestiçagem, Nunes’s unruly performance and scopic disobedience seduce the viewer with unpredictability. As Melissa Borelli (Reference Borelli2016, 10) notes of the mulata in Cuban visual culture, Nunes’s dancing could “still be coded as dark and underclass,” but it “gained a certain respectability when performed by a lighter skinned body, accentuating the erotics of the mulata while diluting or rendering impotent the perceived overt sexual antics of black bodies.” This “mulataness” in the case of Clara Nunes adds to the multiple readings of her then and now as a performer of the mixed-race nation, not as any resolution of the blackness of her performances vis-à-vis an essentialist Africanity. If anything, the “coding” of Nunes as soulfully—and sometimes physically—black in national memory through the gestures of mestiçagem entices us to read this as another version of drag.

My reading of this performance by Nunes echoes Nadia Ellis’s (Reference Ellis2015) queer diasporic, which fuses Stuart Hall’s black “diasporic elsewhere” with José Esteban Muñoz’s “queer utopia” (2009). Ellis, via Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, frames the nonfulfillment of queer utopia as a radical possibility for queers of color beyond the limits of race, sexuality, and nation. For Nunes, the pleasure of mestiçagem lies in her flirtations with and obfuscations of these limits. Her visual metamorphosis reveals this transposition as a formulaic performance designed to evoke collective pleasure in brasilidade. Situated between material and imagined, her work seeks resolution of this suspension by laying claims to African authenticity. Yet the very nature of “Tributo aos Orixás,” that is, the diasporic hauntings of the transatlantic slave trade, creates a dissonance that never quite resolves or reaches completion.

Only when singing of the enslaved in the live performance of “Tributo aos Orixás” does Nunes look into the camera. She smiles strikingly while recounting historical trauma, transforming it into a festive tribute as the music shifts to a cheerful E major. This performance of pleasure through pain voiced national racial formations even as it glossed over historical nuance. By reengineering the past, Nunes encouraged Brazil to see itself through her rendering of history. Her Afro-diasporic gestures of racial ambiguity mapped the metalanguage of racial democracy onto her body while displacing actual black bodies in time. Thus, her mestiçagem appears manufactured, even absurd in its excess, yet captivating. The articulation of Afro-Brazilian folklore as history by way of Nunes, in effect, arouses possible routes toward mestiçagem as national ethos. Ultimately, her own spiritual mestiçagem, as a product of Luso-Afro-Atlantic history, proves how one can potentially exceed the boundaries of race and nation.

Transposing African roots and routes into a transatlantic tradition

By the launch of her album Brasil Mestiço in Reference Nunes1980, Clara Nunes almost exclusively appeared on stage and in the press with kinky hair. According to her biographer, Nunes’s makeup artist and hairstylist, Guilherme Pereira, suggested a tighter perm to give her a more defined black appearance (Fernandes Reference Fernandes2007, 224). However, it was not until after a trip to Angola in May 1980 with singer-songwriter Chico Buarque in the company of sixty-two other Brazilian musicians that Clara would make this final shift in self-presentation that remains her enduring image in national memory.

Clara’s first visit to Angola in 1971—still a Portuguese colony at the time—helped spur her conversion to Umbanda. Ten years later, she arrived in a newly independent Angola embroiled in a civil war between the communist Angolan People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anticommunist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Although she had already settled on her album’s repertoire, Nunes was inspired by local cultural performances she witnessed in Benguela province and asked Chico Buarque to compose a song honoring their time there. “I asked that he make it very authentic,” she said after her album, Brasil Mestiço, debuted in August 1980.Footnote ¹¹ Enamored with Buarque’s ijexá, “Morena de Angola” (Morena from Angola) became the opening track and, soon after, a new nickname for Nunes.Footnote ¹² As a morena, Clara maintained her racial ambiguity, the term dating to the nearly eight-hundred-year Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula that could describe a woman as anywhere from brunette to black. Embodying the morena de Angola through selective Lusophone African cultural practices, her performance signaled an eroticism in race mixture and Africanity foundational to Brazilian national identity.

With its back-and-forth wordplay, “Morena de Angola” asks what the morena can do while wearing her chocalhos, rattles tied to the shins or ankles for traditional dance. The ijexá, however, makes the instrument an extension of her body, wondering whether she jangles while cooking, working, and making love. Buarque’s lyrics also politicize her, imagining her jangling on the warfront as an MPLA combatant. The morena’s intrinsic rhythm and fearlessness, tied to her sexuality, reflect the long-standing folklorization of African womanhood in Nunes’s songbook. With this link between blackness and hypersexuality, Buarque’s composition and Clara’s performance render the morena—both African and Brazilian—a warrior whose rattling rhythm is excessively indulgent. Extravagant in its bouncy tone and lyrics, the song centers the morena’s desirability as a source of pleasure in transnational exchange and conflict.

Recorded in a Brazilian sugarcane field, the music video for “Morena de Angola” opens with black women walking down a beaten clay road wearing colorful panos and multiple strands of guias. Their ankle-bound chocalhos clack to the rhythm of the band’s own chocalho and double-bass. Often set on the ground, the camera looks up from a low angle on these women’s bell-laden ankles, cutting between their feet and Clara’s body as she struts, dances her afoxé, and sings in the canebrake. In other shots, the camera pans from the black women’s feet to their hips, then faces as they samba. A long shot from below shows them holding decorated sticks, spinning, and feigning battle. Clara stands out as a divine force, wearing an off-the-shoulder white dress with long braided ropes, guias of wood and bone, her emblematic metal bangles, and a white contraegum on her arm to ward off spirits.

The Afro-Bahian ijexá portrays an essentialized Angola casting out colonialism with sensuous joy, a palimpsest of Luso-Atlantic empire revealing its appropriations through transculturation. While the use of chocalhos is customary to some traditional dances in Benguela province, the morena’s dance here is, in fact, not particularly Angolan. Rather, it blends with the moçambique, often called a congada, whose interchangeable names recall the Portuguese colonial histories of Congo, Angola, and Mozambique and the trafficking of African captives to Brazil. Originating in black Catholic brotherhoods of free and enslaved men in Bahia, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo, the congada or moçambique are, to this day, mostly all-male processions of bands and dancers that sing in unison with bells tied to their ankles and simulate battle with wooden swords and sticks in celebration of two black saints, St. Benedict the Moor and Our Lady of the Black People’s Rosary (Mello e Souza Reference Mello e Souza2002).Footnote ¹³ By blending Brazilian congadas with morenas de Angola dancing moçambique, Nunes creates new traditions made to look timeless, reorienting national discourse and its liberation from colonialism around a celebratory song dedicated to the women of the MPLA.

Claims of authenticity made over black popular culture in the Atlantic world remain contested. As Paul Gilroy (Reference Gilroy1991, 126) notes, “new ‘traditions’ are invented in the jaws of modern experience, and new conceptions of modernity are produced in the long shadow of our enduring traditions.” Fragile in its essentialisms, Clara’s appeal to African authenticity seeks to legitimize mestiçagem and, by extension, Brazilian modernity. This was fashionable, as many white samba composers and singers in Rio touted Pan-Africanism to substantiate black authenticity through mestiçagem and racial democracy. Yet as Bocskay (Reference Bocskay2017) demonstrates, many black samba musicians rejected Pan-Africanist influences, especially U.S. black soul music, favoring a strictly black Carioca sound. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy (Reference Gilroy1993, 191) unpacks these debates over black “tradition” within Western modernity. He writes: “Tradition thus becomes the means to demonstrate the contiguity of selected contemporary phenomena with an African past that shaped them but which they no longer recognise and only slightly resemble.” Perhaps because of the limits of an imagined tradition, Clara’s performances can be read as gestures that, while attuned to transnational colonial histories, create other possibilities.

In the video, the contrast between Nunes’s appearance and the black women’s dancing feet reaches its peak through her erotic command of the camera.Footnote ¹⁴ Nunes uses her hair and religious accessories in various shots to convey the sensuality and spiritual essence of African womanhood, even in the middle of a civil war. She wags her kinky hair from side to side and lets it fall over her face. In one shot, she takes noticeable pleasure in running her hands through its fresh perm as she beams with the sunlight flushing her face heavy with bronzer. Becoming the morena de Angola, Clara’s seduction of the viewer commands our gaze when she sings that the woman’s swinging hips distract the enemy soldier on guard, bewitching him into dance. War is eroticized as she lets out a buoyant “oo-ee oo-ee” four times, and the band syncopates a clap on the track. With each interjection, the camera cuts between the black women’s stomping feet and hyperspeed zooms on Clara’s face, her hair jostling over her intense stare. According to Nunes, making this sound is a common Angolan practice, commenting in an interview, “When they are dancing merengue [semba], they take a few steps and scream, ‘Ui, ui.’ … I included it in the song because I thought it was sensational.”Footnote ¹⁵ Clara claims cultural authenticity and erotic authority through her performance of Africanness, using the idea of being in touch with her roots to recast diaspora in her own image. Reorienting the discourse of anticolonial Angolan nationalism through a Luso-Atlantic mestiçagem, her song routes the MPLA women’s war-hardened black Africanness through her light-skinned body, softening it for palatable consumption. Her pursuit of authenticity, as Brazilian and Angolan, renders mestiçagem illusory, an artifice akin to drag that destabilizes racial and gender norms.

Clara’s portrayal as the morena de Angola cemented her place in Brazilian popular culture as a preserver of African and diasporic traditions by transposing them into her own register. Reflecting on the influence of her trip on her show Clara Mestiça, Nunes remarked: “I am very African, and I enjoyed seeing this huge [shared] identity that exists between us. Everything came from them. On my trips, I was very pleased to be able to verify that we preserved many of the original aspects.”Footnote ¹⁶ Her divine warrior aesthetic was memorialized in photographs for her Brasil Mestiço album, featuring her contraegun, bangles, and a fan of trimmed galinha d’Angola feathers and cowrie shells (Figure 3).Footnote ¹⁷ With a crown of seashells over her kinky dark hair and a necklace that descends into her cleavage, the marine accessories signal Clara’s incarnation as Iemanjá, the orixá of the sea that connects Brazil and Africa. As both the mestiça do Brasil and the morena de Angola, as one newspaper article put it, Clara Nunes traversed an Atlantic Ocean of symbolisms as she embodied several entities, mortal and divine, in the attempt to recapture Afro-diasporic traditions.Footnote ¹⁸ From her white appearance singing boleros to her transposition in Umbanda, samba, and other black musical genres across the Luso-Atlantic, Clara Nunes’s embodiment of the mestiça offered a living, breathing subjectivity through which Brazil projected itself to the outside world.

Figure 3.

A promotional photo of Nunes for her album, Brasil Mestiço (1980). Photo courtesy of Wilton Montenegro.

Divine glamour: Clara Nunes’s black queer legacy

In March 1983, Clara Nunes went for a minor surgical procedure to remove varicose veins. As a result of an unknown allergy to anesthesia, she went into anaphylactic shock. Clara spent a month in a coma before she died in the early hours of April 2, 1983, at age forty. Over fifty thousand people attended her funeral in Rio de Janeiro at the Portela Samba School, and the wake of her death saw the pouring in of tributes, many continuing to this day with each anniversary of her death. Numerous posthumous collections released by Odeon, her lifelong record label, as well as television specials, musical plays, sambas, and cover albums, mostly by black women singers, dedicated to her career have contributed to the collective memory of Clara Nunes as the embodiment of mestiçagem in Brazilian popular culture unlike any other artist.

In 1983 and 1984, Odeon released two posthumous albums compiling Clara Nunes’s greatest hits, selling together nearly one million copies. The success of these commemorative collections sealed Nunes as a national treasure in memoriam. Alongside tributes on vinyl and film, posthumous performances of Nunes’s music most prominently by black women singers and black drag queens have effectively repositioned public memory of the singer from a mestiça to a negra, or black woman. The first collection, Clara Morena (1983), riffs on her 1980 song “Morena de Angola,” gesturing simultaneously to her light skin and the inextricable nature of racial mixture. The second, Clara Nunes: A Deusa dos Orixás (Goddess of the Orixás, Reference Nunes1984), resignifies her 1975 song title in reference to her Umbanda faith. With Clara’s untimely death at the height of her career, Silvia Brügger (Reference Brügger2010, 115) notes, “her dimension of holiness was enhanced and became more explicit. If she envisioned her work and her career as a mission and gave the image of a mãe-de-santo on stage, after her death, it can be said that she went through a process of ‘popular beatification.’” Both album covers emphasize this: in Clara Morena, she wears a crown of wildflowers and daisies; in A Deusa dos Orixás, it is her well-remembered crown of seashells (Figure 4). Beyond the darkening of her skin and the bright, red-painted lip on both albums covers, the ever-changing mystery of her hair denotes African roots, or at least their chemical creation. Following what we might call clara morena aesthetics, her hair sits in undulated waves under the flower crown while; for Deusa, her hair, now kinky, fans out behind the Afro-diasporic spiritual assemblage of conchs and cowries.

Figure 4.

Two posthumous compilation albums of Clara Nunes’s greatest hits, Clara Morena (1983) and Clara Nunes: A Deusa dos Orixás (The Goddess of the Orixás, 1984). Album covers courtesy of Odeon.

Dying at the peak of her career, the flamboyance and syntheticness of Nunes’s aesthetic primed her for drag impersonation, much like the legacy of Carmen Miranda. Black drag queens, especially from Brazil’s Northeast, continue to use Clara Nunes’s silhouettes and gestures to make political statements and claim pleasure. Her death triggered a collective mourning of the Brazilian nation, transforming her into a mystical, almost divine figure to be replayed on loop. Recitations and careful embellishments have amplified her star power, shaping how Brazilians remember her, particularly as a vessel for black queer belonging. As a canonical diva in the Brazilian drag archive, Nunes’s early death underscores the precarity of queerness in Brazil, while the desire to see and hear her again becomes a sacred terrain cultivated through performance.

The longing for Nunes and the promise of mestiçagem exemplify what Hiram Perez (Reference Perez2008, 118, 123) calls “nostalgia as queer temporality,” or a “camping of trauma” through which black queer people may gain self-awareness by overidentifying with spectacular divas whose race, gender, and sexuality remain in dispute. For black queer Brazilians, Nunes’s legacy and the trauma surrounding her early death create a space to imagine collective futures both within and against national projects like mestiçagem and racial democracy. As Kara Keeling (Reference Keeling2019) argues, black media—like Nunes’s music has since come to be categorized—produces collective knowledge and spaces for queer black belonging beyond the nation through a longing for the future. Despite the persistent violence marking blackness and queerness in Brazil, Nunes’s memorialization through drag has served as a conduit for black queer futurity grounded in collective mourning and celebration.

In 2003, the Twenty-Seventh Annual Miss Brasil Gay beauty pageant honored Clara Nunes, marking twenty years since her death, with transformistas celebrating her career while representing their home states. Whereby transformista etymologically designates one’s professional capacity to transform beyond the strictures of identity, it is apt to consider Nunes herself a kind of transformista in her various transpositions. Nunes’s career reiterates Marcia Ochoa’s (Reference Ochoa2014, 6) discussion of both mainstream and queer/trans beauty pageants in Venezuela as cultural phenomena used to “negotiate power and marginality” against antiblackness, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia under the guise of local and national pride. For example, in the Thirtieth Miss Brasil Gay in 2006, Layla Ken, a black trans woman transformista representing Bahia, emerged on the runway as a voluptuous Tupinambá shaman to the tune of Nunes’s “Morena de Angola.” Blending black and indigenous feminine performance, Ken invoked colonial miscegenation narratives while rooting blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. With a feather headdress and staff indicative of the Northeast’s indigenous healers, Ken marked her blackness as indigenous to Brazil and, through Nunes’s song, African, ultimately winning the pageant.Footnote ¹⁹ Events like Miss Brasil Gay, which stir up patriotism and critique systemic prejudice and violence, demonstrate how drag interpretations of Nunes bring queerness and blackness from the margins to the center of Brazil’s modernity.

To embody glamour through Clara Nunes’s legacy serves as a foundational gesture to drag queens’ legitimacy as arbiters of beauty and feminine performance in Brazil. Following Ochoa (Reference Ochoa2014, 88), “glamour as a way of reordering space and time—if temporarily—around one’s self for the purposes of enchanting” is applied to resuscitate Nunes, bringing the past to the present to create queer futures amid the life-or-death violence of homophobia, transphobia, and antiblackness. Drag queens like Andrezza Lamarck and Scarleth Sangalo from Bahia, and Isis Nunes from Pernambuco, have revived Clara Nunes’s extravagant look from her “Morena de Angola” days while recasting her as a hybrid Baiana. They wear billowing lace skirts, white shawls, guias, bangles, balangandãs, and a crown of shells or flowers under a kinked-out wig brimming with hairspray. Contrary to the common drag imperative of high heels, these transformistas often dance barefoot to draw focus to a more “authentic” samba de roda step that is firmly planted in the samba traditions of Bahia, not Rio de Janeiro. Whether performing in nightclubs, LGBTQ+ pride parades, or recording lip-sync videos on YouTube, these impersonations slightly diverge from Nunes’s aesthetic. Nevertheless, all appear to require reference to and serious reverence for her faith, even amidst the excess and caricature that are foundational to drag.

The short documentary A Tal Guerreira (That Certain Warrior Woman, 2013), directed by Marcelo Caetano, links Afro-Brazilian religions with queer performances of glamour and excess in Nunes’s memory. The film alternates between two storylines: devotion to Clara at an Umbanda temple in São Paulo led by pai-de-santo, or priest, Marco de Oxum, and interviews and performances by Michelly Summer, a mixed-race trans woman from Pernambuco who has long performed as Nunes in drag. Both seek to honor Clara Nunes in lavish ways, often driven by the lasting image of Nunes as an opulent goddess. “When you talk about Clara Nunes, you think of a spectacular wardrobe, don’t you?” Summer notes, commenting on Nunes’s fealty to glamour. Meanwhile, Marco de Oxum sits in front of a pantheon of Umbanda statuettes and images of Clara. A small television set on the altar loops her music videos. “For us in Umbanda, Clara is an orixá,” he says, describing how many he knew fell into trance under Clara’s spirit a year after her death. Meanwhile, Summer transforms into a Baiana-like Clara, wearing a white lace hoop skirt and a crown of white roses, later emerging on the nightclub stage, throwing her arms into the air as she salutes each orixá in her performance to Nunes’s song “Guerreira.” Male go-go dancers dressed as the orixás Oxalá, Oxum, Ogum, and Iansã surround her while overlaid sounds from Marco’s congregation praying at Nunes’s grave site in Rio converge into a euphoric spectacle. This utopian confluence of the divine and the profane celebrates the joyful legacy of Clara Nunes for queer Brazilians and practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions.

Black and mixed-race drag performers continue to draw on Nunes’s archive to imagine a Brazilian national project beyond whiteness and heteronormativity, often with a telos rooted in the divine. Beyond Nunes’s glamour, as Michelly Summer reveals through her interviews and performance, her music offers an avenue to confront prejudice against Afro-Brazilian religions, often manifesting as anti-blackness and homophobia. Andrezza Lamarck, a prominent drag queen from Salvador, Bahia, was lauded for “resurrecting among us [gays] the immortal figure of Clara Nunes” and came to be nicknamed “The Clara Nunes of Bahia” (Figure 5).Footnote ²⁰ When asked what Nunes meant to her, Andrezza replied, “Clara Nunes represents a living page of our history … a sort of teacher who I seek guidance from, in terms of culture, in terms of belief and faith,” mentioning also a pride in blackness.Footnote ²¹ Her performances as Clara gesture toward racial and sexual belonging through the singer’s reincarnation, as a quintessence of black and queer Brazilian possibility. Following Rodríguez (Reference Rodríguez2014, 6), who echoes Muñoz, the queer gestures of Clara Nunes drag impersonation risk “producing an absence of understood intention, and an excess of ascribed significance” that may disappoint when utopia fails. While Nunes’s image is wielded as a tool of resistance that can diversify and reshape folkloric representations of blackness and mestiçagem, these performances also risk reifying Afro-Brazilian culture in her likeness. Her shifts across Brazil’s racial ambiguities, anchored in her spiritual beliefs, let us view her through lenses of fantasy and perceived possibilities for breaking normative cultural boundaries.

Figure 5.

Drag performer Andrezza Lamarck, “The Clara Nunes of Bahia.” Photo courtesy of Grupo Gay da Bahia.

Clara Nunes’s audiovisual performances allow otherwise marginalized subjects to imagine a space of legitimacy and belonging within Brazil. Nevertheless, I remain wary. As Ochoa (Reference Ochoa2014, 92) attests, “Glamour is not redemptive; it will not save you.” In early May 2015, Andrezza Lamarck was shot and killed outside of a bar in Salvador. She was forty-six. Her obituary noted that friends “would call her ‘diva’” for her performances that brought Nunes back to life.Footnote ²² Although her murder was not ruled a hate crime, the evidence suggests she was specifically targeted. While her passing ultimately echoes the early death of Clara Nunes—and, by extension, Carmen Miranda—the violence toward Andrezza forces us to reckon with the material limits of Clara’s legacy. It does not shield against everyday racial, gendered, and sexual violence in Brazil, particularly against black, queer, and trans people. Reinterpretations of Nunes celebrate her artistry but also reveal the instability in her performances of Afro-Brazilian folklore, even when informed by her faith. Her audiovisual transition—from white to mixed-race in life, and then, in death, to a black cultural reference in national memory, in short, her transposition of mestiçagem—elucidates the privileges and pleasures of whiteness in shaping racial identity within Brazilian racial democracy. As the ideal mestiça, Clara Nunes embodied exotic, resilient, and joyous womanhood through a nostalgic language of Brazil’s collective claim to blackness.

In the wake of Nunes’s death, representation has remained a volatile site of contestation over who has the right to blackness. As black intellectuals and activists in Brazil like Lélia Gonzalez (Reference Gonzalez, Rios and Lima2020) and Abdias do Nascimento (Reference Nascimento1989) noted over forty years ago, blackness and African heritage in Brazil are often treated as commodities, made attainable through discourses of mestiçagem and racial democracy. Clara Nunes exemplifies how race-making processes can be reconsidered in Brazilian popular culture. More broadly, her aesthetic transformation, in life and death, exposes the artifice and excess of Brazilian mestiçagem while opening possibilities for queer readings and queer belonging. The staging of these narratives by Nunes and her successors turns race, gender, and sexuality into a spectacle whose pleasures carry memory and radical potential.