Located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlantic, the port city of Belém do Pará has been an important point of convergence for transnational flows of commodities, people, and culture, including a vast array of up-tempo Caribbean dance genres known locally as lambada. Since the late twentieth century, inhabitants of Belém and surrounding areas have sought to make a virtue of their liminal position between the hegemonic centers of southeastern Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. This article shows how musicians, dancers, listeners, and culture brokers draw on the local history of Caribbean cosmopolitan musicality to articulate an alternative Amazonian regional identity, one characterized by connectedness and proximity to their Caribbean neighbors rather than by isolation and provincialism. In so doing, the article contributes to the remapping of the cultural contours of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and Latin America.
Caribbean identity is informed by the condition of being islands and also by its sociopolitical conditions of colonialism, (e)migration, and pluralism. The uncertainty of not being grounded to the specificity of place is in conflict with generalized notions of nation and cultural identity. As people migrate, they create shifting identities following the process of addition and flux that has characterized the region. Cultural identity and migration are central issues in songs, which play a key role of lending continuity to culture and reconstructing symbols.
