Tia Ciata

April 23, 1854
April 11, 1924

Hilária Batista de Almeida, known as Tia ("Aunt") Ciata (sometimes written Assiata, Siata, Aciata, or Asseata), became a living icon of Afro-Brazilian culture in Rio de Janeiro, then the nation's capital, during a time of accelerating urban growth and cultural ferment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a cook, entrepreneur, spiritual leader, and matriarch within the city's African-descended community, she made her home into the headquarters of the section of Rio de Janeiro known as "Little Africa."

Ciata, never a slave, was born in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern province of Bahia. In 1874, she and her daughter Isabel became part of a massive flow of Brazilians of African descent from the country's northeast southward to Rio de Janeiro. Estranged from the father of her daughter, Ciata married João Batista da Silva, a fellow Bahian who was well situated in Rio's Afro-Brazilian community. She eventually rented a house at 117 Visconde de Itaúna Street in the neighborhood called Cidade Nova, near Praça Onze (de Junho). Here, Ciata settled within a thriving Afro-Brazilian colony populated by former slaves from Bahia and elsewhere in the northeast, free people of color, and (until abolition) slaves from Rio. Praça Onze served as the unofficial "capital" of Little Africa.

Rio's Afro-Brazilian community maintained its vibrant culture largely through religious practice, and Tia Ciata's prominence derived partly from her active participation in Afro-Brazilian religion (Candomblé), a practice in which she had already been initiated in Bahia. Once in Rio, Ciata associated herself with the terreiro (religious community) of the African-born João Alabá. She became mãe-pequena —literally "little mother" (or Iyá Kekerê)—the second highest position in the Candomblé hierarchy. Among Rio's numerous Bahian matriarchs affectionately called "Tia" at the time, Ciata was the most famous.

A skilled confectioner, Tia Ciata made sweets and other Bahian delicacies in her home and sold them on the street. She also started a successful business renting out the traditional white festive costumes of her native Bahia for carnival and theatrical events, and she set up a food stand at the Festa da Penha, an annual religious festival. This traditionally Portuguese event attracted a diverse crowd of devotees and spectators, and it slowly became Africanized throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as proto-samba associations (ranchos ) and costumed groups competed for space with the penitent pilgrims. Here, Ciata became an important catalyst for the advancement of the nascent musical genre of samba, as she made her market stall into a meeting place for musicians, composers, and interested audiences.

As other Bahian "tias" did, Tia Ciata threw parties in her home on Visconde de Itaúna Street that served both spiritual and entertainment purposes. Her charisma, famous cooking, and exciting parties drew politicians, literary figures, musicians, composers, fellow devotees of Candomblé, and others. Popular memory holds her house as the birthplace of samba, a music and dance style descended from African-derived lundu and maxixe, European waltzes and polkas (which were then circulating in Rio de Janeiro), and the Portuguese-Brazilian modinha. Ciata united the most important popular musicians and composers of her time, such as Donga, Sinhô, Pixinguinha, Hilário Jovino Ferreira, João da Baiana, and Heitor dos Prazeres. Her distinctive manner of bringing together samba musicians may have influenced the genre's typically collective composition and performance style in Rio de Janeiro. In addition, some have speculated that Tia Ciata managed to avoid police interference at her parties because of her husband's position on the staff of the chief of police.

Participants in one of the sessions at Ciata's house collectively authored the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the telephone"), which a group called Banda Odeon recorded in 1917, a song later recorded by Donga and Mauro de Almeida and registered with the Brazilian National Library under Donga's name. While not the first recorded samba rhythm, as commonly believed, "Pelo telefone" was indeed the first one to enjoy enormous success. The song's controversial theme parodied police persecution of—and involvement in—illicit gambling.

Rio's belle époque is often understood as characterized by a stark separation between elite and popular culture, and by elite attempts to extinguish African culture in the name of modernity. Yet historians have pointed to Tia Ciata's house as an example of the cultural mixing that also occurred. Bahian immigrants, of which Tia Ciata was among the most active, productive, and famous, were enormously important in bringing Bahian culture to the capital, thus making such forms of Afro-Brazilian expression as samba so central to Brazilian national culture, a process that really only began in earnest in the late 1920s and 1930s, after the end of Tia Ciata's life.

Upon her death in 1924, Tia Ciata was survived by her fifteen children. Her legendary house at 117 Visconde de Itaúna Street no longer stands, a sacrifice to the demolitions that tore down whole blocks of the Cidade Nova in the middle of the twentieth century. The Escola Municipal Tia Ciata, an experimental public school near the site where her famous house stood, bears her name.

See also Candomblé; Samba

Bibliography

Lopes, Antonio Herculano, ed. Entre Europa e África: A invenção do carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, Topbooks, 2000.

Moura, Roberto. Tia Ciata e a Pequena África no Rio de Janeiro, 2d ed. Rio de Janeiro: Coleção Biblioteca Carioca, 1995.

Sandroni, Carlos. Feitiço Decente: Transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917–1933). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001.

Silva, Eduardo. Prince of the People: The Life and Times of a Brazilian Free Man of Color, translated by Moyra Ashford. New York: Verso, 1993.

Vianna, Hermano. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. Edited and translated by John Charles Chasteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

amy chazkel (2005)