As a key figure of national and transnational desire, the mulata was famed for her corporal functionsâsex and dance. Beginning in the 1970s, Brazilian governmental tourism agencies utilized the image of the sexually available mulata for the promotion of Brazil as a tourist destination. From the 1970s to the 1990s, white Rio de Janeiro businessman Oswaldo Sargentelli, a self-described mulatĂłlogo (mulata expert), presented samba spectacles of scantily clad dancing women to the Brazilian elite and tourists alike. With the branding of brasilidade as a sexual paradise of mulatas, the archetype of the sensual sexually available mulata who dances with abandon became a thematic fixture memorialized in popular Brazilian cultural politics and in the international imagination.
Jasmine Mitchell, âSensual Not Beautiful: The Mulata as Erotic Spectacle,â ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Spring 2017. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/sensual-not-beautiful.
Tags: Jasmine Mitchell, Oswaldo Sargentelli, ReVista, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America