Hidden meanings: the mocambo in Recife

In colonial Brazil, the Quimbundo word mocambo referred to free African settlements, commonly known as quilombos. Since the early 20th century, though, while the original sense remained confined to a purely historical and linguistic context, sanitary and social representations of urban growth vested the term with a totally different meaning. Henceforth it started to appear, not only to experts and political authorities but to ordinary people in general, as a regional equivalent of “slums”. In an old colonial city of the Nordeste like Recife, where, after the abolition of slavery, mocambos used to connote decay, the modern sense of the word helped to legitimate technical discourses on city planning and the whole idea of a housing policy. Symbol of poverty and backwardness, however, the world of mocambos, from the 1920s on, also appealed to local sensibilities in search of elements of cultural identity. As one of the most characteristic features of vernacular architecture in Brazil, the mocambo became, for a regionalist perspective, the object of anthropological, sociological and artistic imagination. This article tries to examine these contemporary, conflicting acceptations of the word in order to understand how the city came to see and to name itself over the first half of the century.