This essay by Sebastião Uchoa Leite is an attempt to shed light on the term “popular culture” in relation to theory and praxis and in terms of historical conditions of time and space. The author places emphasis on activities bound to the practice and communication of “the popular” in two key years, 1963 and 1964, in a cultural process interrupted, symptomatically, by the military coup. What had once been called “culture that comes from the people” took on a political character due to the Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC), which upheld artistic production at the service of political education, that is, production “made for the people and in the name of the people.” Uchoa Leite addresses two figures close to the CPC who made use of those concepts in their thinking: poet Ferreira Gullar and sociologist Carlos Estevam Martins. Both objected to those who continued to study popular art from the perspective of folklore, that is, as something unchanging that must be preserved wholesale. The divide between (progressive) “popular culture” and (reactionary) “elite culture” was operative until the mid-sixties. A different point of view was embraced by playwright Ariano Suassuna, for whom the people’s art, in all its “uncultivated roughness,” is potentially the source of “a great national art.” The author concludes that the common element in these opposing theories on popular art attests to a reductionist longing for a possible vision of “the Brazilian.”

In this article, poet and translator Sebastião Uchoa Leite (1935–2003) maps out a theory of the different meanings that the term “popular culture” has assumed in Brazil, particularly in the early sixties. He identifies the ideology at play in the polarization between “progressive” and “reactionary” readings, a confrontation heightened by the Centros Populares de Cultura (CPCs). Despite their opposing approaches, the two artistic positions shared, in Uchoa Leite’s view, the longing to have an impact on the country’s reality.

The first Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC) started in Rio de Janeiro as part of the União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE). It opened in 1961, at the beginning of the brief term of President João Goulart (1961-64). The CPC was a gathering place for artists and intellectuals working in theater, dance, film, literature, and the visual arts who were dedicated to social transformation through socially committed art bound to the people. Though short-lived because of the CIA-backed military coup that took place in 1964, the original CPC inspired the creation of similar organizations throughout Brazil; the pedagogical aims of those organizations included the popularization of artistic practices and production.

On this topic, see as well Carlos Estevam Martins’s “Anteprojeto do Manifesto do Centro Popular de Cultura” (doc. no. 1110413) and Ferreira Gullar’s “Cultura posta em questão” (doc. no. 1110364).