In practice, however, social inequalities remained intact. In the 1930s, the cultural policies of Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorship enthroned samba as Brazilian national music and official prosecution ended. Engendered in the suburbs of big cities as the mixture of both African and European music traditions at the end of the nineteenth century, it was first considered a synonym of vagrancy and marginality and its practitioners were prosecuted for immorality. In his recent, well-documented book devoted to the origins of samba, historian Lira Neto describes the gradual recognition of this music genre as a national symbol of the Brazilian Republic. Documentary Shooting and Samba: Technology and Mediation in Leon Hirszman’s Partido alto Albert Elduque
