Black or national? The process of ethnicization of the samba

Samba's identification with the Brazilian black ethnicity figurates as somewhat immediate and
unquestionable, as if it existed since the "origins" of this musical genre. What is ignored, however, is
that such representation concerns a process constituted circa the 1970s. Operating amidst a favorable
figuration, bearing in mind the surge of Civil Rights movements in the US and the imposition of an
agenda of valorization of that ethnicity in Brazil, some artisans favored the aforementioned process,
actualizing the symbolic construction in the period that turned Samba into the expression of a black
cultural "purity". I analyze the conditioning elements of the path followed by agents engaged in the
making of this argument, such as Candeia and Nei Lopes, which still holds ground and is fashionable to
this very day.