O que é que a Baiana Tem?: The Cultural Politics of Baianas de Acarajé

Baianas de acarajé are primarily middle-aged, or senior Black women street vendors from the Northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia who wear headwraps, colorful beaded necklaces, and wide skirts, and sell typical Bahian foods with culinary origins in West Africa, most famously acarajé, a fried black-eyed pea fritter that gives them their name. In addition to their ubiquitous presence within the streets and beaches of Salvador, baianas are also highly venerated cultural figures of regional and national Brazilian identity, and considered bearers of African authenticity, frequently cited in popular music, the tourism industry, and present in most street festivals. While scholarship largely examines them as apolitical cultural objects and, in general, omits them as political subjects, Dr. Castaneda’s talk shows how baianas have mastered navigating their mobility in accessing multiple spaces of power, both figuratively and spatially, as political agents of Black feminism for self and collective liberation. In this talk, Dr. Castañeda reveals the ways in which older and gendered cultural agents of the African diaspora in the Global South mobilize essentialized and frozen-in-time tropes of folkloric Black culture in ways that afford them political power. She shows the ways in which baianas—through their profession and grassroots advocacy—unveil the unstable grounds of dismissing such tropes as purely problematic and underscore the political efficacy of their multi-modal, Afro-Brazilian feminist praxis in ways that expand our understandings of cultural politics.

Dr. Vanessa Castañeda is currently the Guarini Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Afro-Latin American Studies housed in the Latin American, Latino, & Caribbean Studies Program at Dartmouth College. In 2021, she earned her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. Her research focuses on notions of authenticity, folklore, and political agency within diasporic Black communities that are foundational to Brazilian national and regional identity formation. Broadly, she interrogates the ways in which discourses of folkloric authenticity related to blackness function as hegemonic narratives of race and gender, and explores how expressive material cultures of Afro-Brazilian groups engage in strategic subversion of these tropes for their own political ends. She draws from interdisciplinary methodologies, including twenty-months of community-based ethnographic fieldwork with the Association of Baianas (ABAM) in Salvador, Brazil. Her research has been supported by the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) Initiative Scholarship, the Tinker Foundation, and the US Fulbright Program. She currently serves as an executive officer for the Southeastern Council for Latin American Studies (SECOLAS). As a first-generation student herself, Vanessa is committed to diversity, inclusion and educational equity. At Tulane University, she was the graduate assistant for the Office of Multicultural Affairs and ender & Sexual Diversity for several years and in 2016, she founded the Undocumented Student Support Committee.