After 1930, as Bahia's three elite carnival clubs suffered economically and withdrew from carnival, the emerging batucadas partly filled the vacuum and ritualized the presence of working-class African-Bahian culture and sociability within Carnival. At this point, politicians and especially journalists celebrated both the batucada and samba as central to Carnival, contributing to the consolidation of African-Bahian musical practices as vital elements of what Bahia meant and what "Bahian" had come to mean during the Vargas era. Although the trio elétrico and the revival of the elite clubs after 1950 ended the "Era of the Batucadas," the batucadas had played important roles within the reformulation of baianidade between 1930 and 1950 and provided a bridge of ethnic identification and cultural agency between the afro-centric clubs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on the one hand, and the afoxés and blocos afros of the late twentieth and twenty first century.
Bahia; carnival; batucadas; samba; Vargas era