queen. Pre-Carnival show in
Caucaia, Ceará, February 2009.
Maracatu cearense is Fortaleza's variant of
maracatu nação. Brought to Fortaleza, Ceará, in 1936,
maracatu cearense has since been cultivated as the city's most distinctive Carnival performance tradition, owing in part to its use of
blackface makeup to enact Afro-Brazilian characters and male-to-female
transvestitism of the important female personages, particularly the queen. Its rhythms are described locally as
cadenciado, "cadenced," which amounts to a less
syncopated, steadier 2/4 meter and a slower
tempo than is found in the
maracatu nação of
Pernambuco, sometimes as slow as 45 beats per minute. In recent decades groups have tended to divide into those that retain the slow tempo (to express the misery of
slavery) and those that speed up their tempos (to express the exuberance of
Carnival), and there is some dispute over which style most authentically expresses the tradition in Ceará. Standard instrumentation is also distinctive. Instead of
alfaia drums, the
cearense tradition uses
surdo or
bombo drums; like
Pernambuco, it uses the ''
, or snare drum. Instead of the gonguê, large single-head bell, maracatu cearense
uses the ferro'', a heavy iron-slab
triangle, to keep its steady duple
rhythm. Individual groups often add to or slightly modify this setup to create their own distinct sound. Every year, different
maracatu cearense nations parade in
Fortaleza's traditional municipal
Carnival competition, normally taking place at Domingos Olímpio Avenue. The oldest nation,
Az de Ouro (Golden Ace), founded in 1936, is still in operation. Other nations include ''Vozes d'África
(Voices of Africa), Nação Fortaleza
, Rei de Paus
, Nação Iracema
, and Maracatu Solar''. The use of
blackface in
maracatu cearense reportedly stems from Fortaleza's mostly white and
caboclo demographic, and its small black population (4.4%) (IGBE 2008), which effects a situation where mostly white and brown people end up performing a traditionally black expression of Brazilian
Carnival. Blackface in this context is intended to pay homage to the African slaves' contribution to Brazilian civilization and is not viewed as a
racist expression (compared, for instance, to the
blackface minstrelsy of the
United States, which parodied black speech and character). In fact, some
maracatu cearense nations are actively involved in racial equality and
black consciousness initiatives in
Ceará. Among these is Nação Iracema, founded in 2002 by Lúcia Simão and William Augusto Pereira, heads of the first black family in Fortaleza to direct a maracatu nation (current ). Lúcia Simão also founded Ceará's first black consciousness movement in the early 1980s. This consciousness of
racial equality operates through
maracatu cearense performance in part as the continuation of Ceará's historical identity as the first region in Brazil to abolish slavery, in May 1884 (the rest of the nation followed suit in 1888). Contrary to the claims of most
maracatu cearense participants, at least one Brazilian scholar sees the development of the tradition in Fortaleza to be intimately tied to a subtle racist
discourse in Ceará that has mythologized itself as a non-black region of Brazil (thus, the justification for blackface), perpetuating Brazil's longstanding racist ideology of skin whitening. ==Further reading==