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Theaters and the Popular-Elite Divide in São Paulo, Brazil, 1895–1922

Abstract:At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of São Paulo rapidly transformed into an industrial metropolis. As its population grew, so did the number and variety of theaters. This article compares two government-sponsored auditoriums, the Municipal and Colombo Theaters, to explain how theaters helped urban residents rethink the structure of their changing society. Inaugurated within a few years of each other—the Colombo in 1908, the Municipal in 1911—both theaters were founded with the support of the municipality and with the aim of morally and aesthetically educating São Paulo’s diversifying population. Yet, by 1922, the two theaters served distinct functions and distinct publics; while contemporaries frequently used the term “elite” to describe the Municipal’s performances and audience, the Colombo was increasingly characterized as “popular.” Through an examination of each theater’s architecture, urban setting, managerial practices, and repertoire, the essay analyzes how Paulistanos defined and deployed these labels. The article argues that Paulistanos’ juxtaposition of the Colombo’s “popular” with the Municipal’s “elite” relied on the conflation of genre and spectator, that is, the collapsing of aesthetic and social hierarchies and the simplification of both hierarchies to binaries. The article thus builds on the scholarship of cultural hierarchy to demonstrate how it functioned as a social hierarchy and how, through theaters, Paulistanos erected and adjusted both. Theaters, the essay ultimately proposes, cannot be ignored by scholars seeking to elucidate the history of social difference in Latin America.