The article demonstrates, through an ethnographic study of Chicago Samba, a Brazilian musical ensemble, that samba and the Brazilians who reconstruct it, circulate within Chicago repeating old narratives tangled in new webs of meanings, paradoxically creating new spaces of sociability and cooperation between normally separate and distant social groups. They build ‘corners of the world’ that temporarily break down borders of all types. In the effort to give life to the narratives that open the market to their products, they recreate them and, in the process, create dialogues and sociabilities that subvert them: kinds of niches of resistance to the dominant narratives regarding their own and their host culture. Even though the entry and vibrant v.8 n.1 bernadete beserra departure from these niches signal temporary abandonment as well as return to the dominant codes, these encounters, no matter how brief, leave in those who venture into them vestiges of and desires for metamorphosis.
Chicago Samba; Brazilians in the United States; Brazilian cultural assets; images of Brazil; reinventions of Brazil