Black Is Beautiful, Bahia Style: Inside Brazil’s First All-Black Carnival Bloco
A traveler heading to Brazil for Carnival skips the mainstream Rio spectacle for Salvador da Bahia and falls in with IlÃĒ AiyÃĒ, the pioneering "bloco afro" founded in 1974 in the Liberdade neighborhood as an explicitly Black-pride carnival group. Fifty years later, its founding story, its once-controversial Black-members-only parade policy, and its annual African-nation tributes still reshape how Brazil sees its own Blackness.
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