Caipiras Erotic

The caipira is the countryman of Brazil's south-central interior, the belt running from the highlands of São Paulo into southern Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul and northern Paraná. The population formed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries out of Portuguese settlers and Tupi communities, and for generations its households spoke not Portuguese but the língua geral paulista, a Tupi-based common tongue that held on in the backcountry long after the coast had given it up. Portuguese won in the end, but it came out of that contact changed. The caipira dialect is recognizable in a second: the retroflex r that turns porta and carne into something an American ear finds oddly familiar, along with vowel shifts and a vocabulary thick with Tupi words for plants, animals and places. Life was built around small plots, corn above all, which reaches the table as pamonha, curau and quirera, and around the mutirão, the work party in which neighbors turn out to clear or harvest for one household and are fed, watered and danced into the night in return. Antônio Candido's Os Parceiros do Rio Bonito recorded that arrangement in a São Paulo village just as coffee, cattle and cane were dissolving it.

Religion is Catholic and domestic: home altars, promises made to saints and paid off on foot, benzedeiras who treat the evil eye and ailments no clinic has a name for, and the Folia de Reis, companies of singers who carry a banner house to house between Christmas and Epiphany. Pentecostal churches now hold a large share of the same towns. The music travels furthest. The viola caipira is a ten-string guitar in five doubled courses, and the classic form is the dupla, two voices in close parallel thirds working through a moda de viola. Cornélio Pires paid out of his own pocket to get it onto record in 1929, no label believing there was a market. Commercial sertanejo descends from that, at a distance most viola players will happily measure for you. The catira is danced in two facing lines, its percussion made entirely of hands and boot heels. The word itself still carries a sting. Monteiro Lobato's 1918 sketch of Jeca Tatu, the squatting, useless backwoodsman, fixed a national stereotype, and Lobato spent years afterward taking it back: the man was not lazy, he had hookworm, and what he needed was a latrine and a doctor. Every June, city Brazilians put on straw hats, checked shirts and painted freckles and dress as him. The people the costume refers to are still out there, farming, hauling freight, running small towns.