Carmen Miranda: How Portuguese Star Became Brazil's Greatest International Symbol

The death of Carmen Miranda 70 years ago, in the early hours of August 5, 1955, precipitated a solemn, out-of-season Carnival in the Rio de Janeiro she loved so much.

No sooner had the news reached Brazil, and Radio Nacional broadcast it to the country through Repórter Esso, than all Brazilian stations began playing hits immortalized by the singer and actress known as "The Little Notable." "There, They said I came back Americanized," "What's wrong with the Bahian woman?"—so joyful and carnivalesque, they communicated the sadness permeating the nation.

The story is told by journalist Ruy Castro, in the most complete and detailed biography about this woman who, born in Portugal and raised to international stardom in the United States, where she died, ended up becoming the greatest global symbol of Brazilian culture, the Brazilian Bombshell .

In "Carmen - The Life of Carmen Miranda, the most famous Brazilian of the 20th century" (Companhia das Letras, 2005), Castro states that Carmen's songs, brought to the surface again that month, functioned as "a kind of password for a carnival in August".

According to Carmen Miranda's wishes, she was buried in Rio, at the São João Batista cemetery. According to "Carmen Miranda went to Washington" (Record, 1999), written by journalist Ana Rita Mendonça, 12 churches in Rio celebrated a seventh-day mass in memory of the artist.

The coffin arrived in the country only the following week and, on the night of August 12th to 13th, there was an open wake in the City Council.

"Some were shocked by the fact that Carmen was dressed in red, with her hair and makeup done; others were enchanted by it - in Hollywood, even death was in Technicolor!", writes Castro.

"Throughout the night of August 12th to 13th, Rio de Janeiro paraded in silence before Carmen. And people from other cities, using all available means of transportation, came to say goodbye to her."

"Not even the cold of dawn scared away his worshippers," the writer emphasizes.

Members of the Old Guard, such as Pixinguinha, Donga, João da Baiana, and other comrades, tried to touch Taí to salute her one last time, standing on the steps of the City Council. They were unsuccessful.

"Throats closed, the saxophone and flute made no sound, the emotion was so intense," Castro describes. The march ended up being sung by a choir of over 50,000 voices.

At one point, the procession to the cemetery, in a fire engine, was followed by a sound truck playing Carmen's records. The star's final journey, then, was just as her fans liked to see her: with music , lots of music.

An ascending career

Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha was born in Marco de Canaveses, Portugal, in February 1909. Her family had already decided to emigrate to Brazil. Carmen Miranda arrived in Rio de Janeiro when she was less than a year old.

Sister of five others, the girl studied at a convent school and, at 14, had her first job. She worked in a tie shop and then in a hat shop.

She was a girl who already loved to sing and was praised for it. In 1928, she was introduced to Rádio Sociedade Professor Roquete Pinto and began performing there. The following year, she recorded her first song, the samba "Não Vá Sim'bora," composed by Josué de Barros.

From then on, it was all about ascension. In 1930, Carmen Miranda recorded the march-song "Pra Você Gostar de Mim," also known as "Taí." The album sold 35,000 copies in its first year of release—a record that earned the young singer acclaimed as "the best in Brazil."

Carmen became one of the stars of the so-called "golden age" of radio in Brazil and, at the same time, began to lend her body and voice to the beginning of the film industry in Brazil - especially in musicals.

After shy appearances in previous productions, such as the 1935 musical Alô, Alô, Brasil, she gained the space of a popular star of the first magnitude.

Carmen Miranda spent years lining up one project after another. It was a period of films whose plots were simply used as a pretext for stringing together musical numbers.

Author of an academic study on Carmen Miranda, researcher Renata Couto, a professor at Unigranrio Afya University, believes there's a prejudice surrounding the artist's relevance. "Many people make very hasty judgments about her," she tells BBC News Brasil.

"Part of it is because she is a woman. The other part is because of the consecrated figure of Carmen, who embodies this stylized Bahian woman, almost a caricature of what Brazil would be."

The stylized Bahian woman conquers the USA

In 1939, the film "Banana da Terra" presented the most iconic version of Carmen Miranda: she wearing a stylized version of a costume representing a traditional Bahian woman.

In the number, she sang O que é que a bahiana tem?, by Dorival Caymmi - and many point out that the success of this film ended up boosting the career and prestige of the composer and singer.

The fact is that Carmen, a Portuguese woman raised in Rio de Janeiro, incorporated this caricatured image of the Bahian woman into her performances from then on. This was her costume when, shortly before Carnival in 1939, she performed at the popular Cassino da Urca and caught the attention of American producer Lee Shubert, who was in the audience.

Shubert owned the company that managed half of the theaters on Broadway—an American entertainment mogul, that is. He hired the artist to perform there, and in May of that year, she set off for New York.

In the United States, Carmen Miranda became a hit with her stylized outfits and fruit headdress. Brazilian intellectuals frowned: they considered this a stereotypical and erroneous view of Brazil.

"Carmen was one of the first artists to represent Brazil abroad in an iconic way, even before Pelé or bossa nova," Gisele Jordão, coordinator of the Cinema and Audiovisual course at the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM), told BBC News Brasil.

"The image of Brazil as a joyful, exotic, and musical country is largely due to the mark she left. This projection was absorbed by advertising, tourism, and cultural diplomacy, creating an 'export-grade Brazil' that still shapes the international imagination today."

Soft power

With the Second World War, the so-called good neighbor policy between the United States and Latin America ended up favoring an artist like Carmen Miranda.

Or it may have been the other way around. As Ruy Castro documents, it was already an unquestionable success before the policy of rapprochement was implemented.

"She had already had about ten years of success here in Brazil when she came to the United States. Clearly, she conquered the world with her artistic verve, her communicative ability, and her extroversion. She was a remarkable woman in terms of expression," musicologist Alberto Tsuyoshi Ikeda, a retired professor at São Paulo State University and former collaborating professor at ECA-USP, told BBC News Brasil.

As soon as the star began performing in the United States, film projects began to emerge for her, which would soon gain international recognition.

"There is no denying Carmen Miranda's omnipresence in the 1930s and, especially, the 1940s. Her gigantism and exuberance marked and still mark the world of theater, music and cinema," says Ikeda.

In this sense, Castro explains that the good neighbor policy may even have taken advantage of Carmen's brilliance - and her convenient characterization as Brazilian, albeit a stereotypical characterization.

Gisele Jordão sees a "total" alignment between Carmen Miranda and the US government's soft power project. "Her presence in Hollywood is not only the result of her talent, but also a geopolitical project," the professor emphasizes.

"During World War II, the United States sought to strengthen ties with Latin America to contain European influences and secure hemispheric support. Carmen fit perfectly into this strategy: she was Latina, but manageable; exotic, but fun; an informal cultural ambassador," he highlights.

"His body and his voice were mobilized as symbolic instruments of a friendly and cooperative Brazil."

But for Ikeda, however, "what cannot be attributed to Carmen Miranda is [the intention] of her being an instrument of this political and artistic projection of the United States in the world."

Her peak in cinema was during the years of World War II - she starred in 8 of her 14 films in the first half of the 1940s. Her characters were not identified as Brazilian, but rather Latin American, in a generic and undefined way.

By this time, she had already settled in the United States. As befitted a star, she lived in Beverly Hills, California. She spent 14 years without setting foot in Brazil, where she returned for vacation in December 1954.

During a consultation, her doctor diagnosed her as a drug addict—she was abusing barbiturates and alcohol—and placed her in a four-month treatment program in a suite at the Copacabana Palace Hotel. She only returned to the United States in April 1955.

She would also tour Las Vegas and Cuba and receive an offer from CBS for a weekly television show. On August 4, 1955, she appeared on Jimmy Durante's NBC show. She was found dead in the hallway of her home the following morning, the victim of a heart attack.

Symbol of Brazilianness?

For Jordão, Carmen became a symbol of Brazilianness because she embodied, in a "performative and media" way, a Brazil "that Brazil itself was trying to understand and sell."

Renata Couto emphasizes that one cannot ignore Carmen Miranda's role as an "extremely revolutionary woman, who had pioneering behavior" in her time: "She did not fit into the traditional and expected standards of what it was to be a woman in the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil."

Jordão emphasizes that, although she was born in Portugal, the artist grew up in Brazil and had her artistic identity forged on the radio, in musical theaters and at the beginning of the national recording industry.

"By adopting elements of popular culture, especially Afro-Brazilian music and the costumes of Bahian women, it became a possible, albeit stylized, translation of what was intended to be projected as the 'Brazilian soul.' It is a classic case of a Brazilianness constructed more by the way it is seen than by the reality it represents."

"This image was built by many hands. It involves radio, the cultural industry, the Estado Novo, Hollywood cinema, and also the context of the Good Neighbor policy with the United States," says Jordão.

"Carmen shaped her persona based on recognizable codes: tropicality, sensuality, the rhythm of samba, but always with an amplified, almost caricatured aesthetic."

It was a Brazil of revue theater. Playful, upbeat, popular, and festive. "It wasn't a direct representation of real Brazil, but rather a performed Brazil, one that could tour internationally," says Jordão.

"His visual image, with turbans, fruits and exuberant fabrics, is the result of aesthetic choices that dialogued with both the external imagination and the internal visual culture," he continues.

For Couto, however, Carmen Miranda was selling not an idea of Brazil, but of Latin America: "She was a Latin woman, she represented Latinity. This image of Carmen as a type of export of Brazil, I would say, is a very recent thing."

Dorival Caymmi is also credited with creating the character of Carmen Miranda. The author of "O que é que a bahiana tem?" (What Does a Bahiana Have?), even guided the singer's gestures for the 1939 film. For Jordão, their relationship was one of "a dynamic of performative translation."

"She enhanced the lyrics, exaggerating the colors. But the song already described this tropical Brazil, this Bahian woman who shakes her hips well, those things," Ikeda points out.

Jordão agrees. "While Caymmi constructed a musicalized Bahia with traces of melancholy, spirituality, and black identity, Carmen returned this image through the lens of the show: colorful, exaggerated, theatrical," he comments.

"She wasn't exactly an alter ego, but a stylized amplification of the universe that Caymmi evoked. In this amplification, media power is gained, but some of the symbolic density is lost."

For the expert, this is yet another example of the ambiguity of her trajectory. After all, Carmen was what is called "a woman ahead of her time, charismatic, irreverent, and a pioneer."

"But also a body at the service of stereotypes and geopolitical interests. By playing the Bahian woman in Hollywood, she transformed a symbol of black resistance into an emblem of an exportable Brazilianness, palatable to foreign tastes, but distanced from her Afro-Brazilian roots."

This text was originally published here .