The places with no place for samba: the clashing of popular songs with the urban transformations in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the 20th century

Abstract

This article discusses the importance of samba as a key to interpret the city of Rio de Janeiro in the first decades of the twentieth century. To do so, we start with two crucial moments of urban transformation in the city: the Passos Reform and the Agache Plan, as exemplary periods of the transformation of the samba from marginal to urban chronicler. The samba will be presented under the following topics: as a representation of the population excluded from the bourgeois discourses of Belle Époque, as a mark of Brazilian cultural hybridity in the intellectuality of the 1920s and 1930s and as a chronicler of urban transformations of the first half of the 20th century.