The title Hello Brazil plays off the title of the 1979 movie classic, Bye Bye Brazil, a light-hearted and yet influential movie. It goes beyond current truisms that modernity has proven far less monolithic than the film suggests and that the terms “folk” and “popular” are multi-faceted inventions to examine the specific place or places of the seemingly archaic in 21st Latin America. To this end, it focuses on a part of the Northeast Brazilian interior called the Cariri after its original Indian inhabitants. This region’s richness of “traditional” expressive forms has often caused it to be hailed as the “true” Brazil.

The summer apprentice worked intensively with Professor Slater in preparation for this book project in both California and in Northeast Brazil, and with the Lira Nordestina, a cordel press in Juazeiro do Norte.