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CHAPTER TWO

Museums

When Lula Calixto died on November 15, 1999, his death triggered a social earthquake, shifting the tectonic plates of the samba de coco families in Arcoverde. Almost immediately friction emerged between the Calixto and Gomes families on one side and the Lopes sisters on the other.

Lula Calixto’s Death and a Feud Fought through Museums

The strain on the relationship among the three families was evident as early as Lula’s funeral. Assis lent me a videotape of the memorial service, which took place at the gymnasium of the SESC. In the middle of the gym floor, the casket was open, and Lula’s body was completely covered by a layer of daisies. Only his face was visible, and his trademark leather hat was placed on the flowers. Padim Batista’s pífano band stood around the coffin and played mournful waltzes on fife and percussion. Mayor Rosa Barros, Lirinha and Clayton from Cordel, union leaders, people holding flags from the MST, teachers, and students came to pay their respects. Up above on a balcony stood students holding a banner, which read: “The Carlos Rios school mourns their good friend ‘Lula Calixto,’ even knowing that the artist doesn’t die.” Down below union members held a banner that read: “Lula Calixto. Symbol of struggle and resistance for his roots. Sintepe [the union’s name].” Onlookers stepped back as clowns on stilts paid tribute to Lula by precariously circling the open coffin. A priest led prayers and songs, the mayor spoke, and around Lula’s body the samba de coco group, dressed to perform, did a somber rendition of the normally ebullient dance.

All thirty or so members of the group at the time were dressed to perform in matching floral print shirts and dresses. All members except Se verina Lopes, that is, who came to the funeral not in a floral dress, but in a plaid vest and pants. Damião Calixto interpreted this choice as an act of defiance, which triggered the ensuing power struggle. To members of the Calixto family, Severina setting herself apart from the rest of the group and wearing a vest—one of Lula’s trademark clothing choices—was her signal to the rest of the group that she was claiming control of the group, which at the time bore her brother Ivo Lopes’s name.¹

Severina remembered the sequence of events differently. To her, the first indication that the group would splinter surfaced a few days later, at a live interview on a local radio station regarding Lula’s legacy and the future of the group. In her version of the story, Damião Calixto asserted his power in response to the DJ’s question about what would happen to samba de coco in Arcoverde after Lula’s death. Damião said: “The coco now is mine. It belongs to my daughter [Iram], to my wife [Dona Lourdes] and to my brother [Assis].” Severina kept a cassette copy of the broadcast as evidence. It was devastating to her, she explained, not only because of this declaration, but because he went on to say, on the radio, that he was taking over the coco because he claimed the sisters weren’t strong singers and dancers.

Lula’s death was followed by a surge of media coverage in Arcoverde and Recife, depicting him as a beloved hero of popular culture. Lula’s status vaulted from town eccentric and street vendor to artist and local figure of cultural resistance. His family, who had previously been ambivalent about his passion for samba de coco, perceived that both the music and the Calixto name were valuable currencies.

Soon after Lula’s death a van paid for by the municipal government came to pick up the musicians and take them to a recording studio. According to Severina’s version of events, there was space in the van for ten people, but thirteen people were present. Damião rebuffed the Lopes sisters by ushering some of his younger children into the van and then telling the sisters that there were no seats left. Being shut out of the recording process was the breaking point that formalized the rift between the Lopes and Calixto families. The Gomes family, who had played samba de coco with the Lopes family since the early 1960s, were caught in the middle and ended up siding with the Calixtos.

Damião’s harsh assessment of the Lopes sisters’ musical abilities offers an entry into a cluster of issues regarding musical professionalism, cultural patrimony, and authorship rights that converged around Lula’s death. The conflict between the families centered on claims to the title of Arcoverde’s samba de coco tradition. The clash over these competing claims to tradition and authenticity was also a conflict over the criteria used to judge which family deserved its crown. The Calixto and Gomes families, committed to professionalizing, insisted on frequent rehearsals to hone their vocal harmonies, choreography, and percussion skills. The Lopes sisters balked at so much rehearsal, arguing that they knew the repertoire because they had been playing it for years in their late brother Ivo Lopes’s group. For the Lopes sisters, their claim to the title was based on the fact that their brother had been playing samba de coco in Arcoverde since the early 1950s. They considered the honor to be a patrimony of their family, and believed that no amount of rehearsal could change that immutable truth.

The Calixto family could stake their claim on the fact that they had danced samba de coco privately at family gatherings and had attended events throughout their lives. They did not, however, have a samba de coco group with a long history of public performances as Ivo Lopes had. Despite this lack, a curious thing happened: the increased attention paid to Lula Calixto by Fundarpe, the municipal government, and subsequently Cordel, forged the association between the Calixto family name and the samba de coco tradition. His death only served to consecrate this link further in the eyes of the public. Although the other Calixtos had begun to dance and play samba de coco in an organized fashion only after Lula Calixto and Fundarpe’s Dona Amélia brought the group together in the mid-1990s, they became emblematic of the unbroken transmission of tradition in Arcoverde from generation to generation.

In addition to conflicts over professionalism and patrimony, race was a largely unspoken factor underlying the public’s anointing of the Calixtos as the public representatives of Arcoverde’s living folk traditions. Although all three families are mixed race, like the majority of families in Northeast Brazil, the Calixtos are darker skinned and perceived as phenotypically Afro-Brazilian, while the Lopes family is lighter skinned and considered mestiço. In the 1990s, unlike in the 1950s through early 1970s, which were the heyday of Ivo Lopes’s group, samba de coco in Arcoverde struck a chord with Recifenses and other outsiders in part because of its distinctive Afro-Brazilian feel in the midst of the mestiço cowboy culture dominant in the sertão. At performances I often heard comments that the Calixto family must have originally come to the sertão as part of a quilombo community of escaped slaves, highlighting the fact that the Calixtos’ skin tone was dark enough by sertão standards to be deemed worthy of remark.² A local Afrocentric newspaper, Abibiman, frequently highlighted the story of samba de coco in its pages, featuring articles on a local example of Afro-Brazilian culture that deserved to be celebrated.

After the prospect of making a career out of coco began to appear viable, the Calixto family pushed to professionalize the group. The popularity of Cordel was on the rise throughout Pernambuco, raising the samba de coco musicians’ expectations of their prospects. The samba de coco group, then called A Caravana de Ivo Lopes, had recently participated in a Recife-based compilation CD. Lula’s dream of recording a CD was about to be realized, since Arcoverde’s mayor, Rosa Barros, had agreed to provide financial support and transportation to Recife for the recording. At the last group meeting that Lula attended, Severina Lopes had signed documents authorizing the group to record several of her brother’s songs.

The feud deepened when the first pressing of CDs arrived and Severina Lopes was contacted to sign a release form. In the bureaucratic paperwork establishing the group as an official association, which was necessary to receive government support, Severina Lopes was still listed as the group’s leader. Now estranged from the current group and in the process of establishing her own rival group, she vehemently refused to sign off on a recording that included four songs she claimed were written by her brother Ivo. In his account of the feud, Ciço Gomes, the lead singer of the Calixto/Gomes group that had changed their name to Coco Raízes, countered that some of the songs actually predated Ivo Lopes’s group, and that others had been written collaboratively when he sang in Ivo’s group years before. Ciço also questioned what constituted authorship in a genre in which improvisation played such a prominent role. Severina held her ground, and the CDs were withheld from the market until three thousand more were printed without the songs in question, reducing the track count from sixteen to twelve.