In this text, Jorge Mautner looks at Brazilian artists working in different disciplines (in the visual arts, music, literature, film, and theater), and the parallels between their past and present work. His thesis is that there is a liberating cultural undercurrent that set in during the twenties with modernism, which [eventually] grew more radical in the late sixties with the eruption of tropicália. The heterogeneous forms of expression that took shape throughout Brazil in the seventies in a sort of “frenetic outpouring” were the fruit of tropicália’s promise of cultural decentralization, of a multiplicity of forms and contents, and of the coexistence of opposing or even contradictory, but never antagonistic, tendencies. To grasp in a single vision a poetics both national and universal, Jorge Mautner mentions Oswald de Andrade (creator of cultural “antropophagy”); Ary Barroso (a popular samba singer-songwriter); Carmen Miranda (a singer who reached Hollywood); João Gilberto (creator of bossa nova); Tarsila do Amaral (painter of the Pau-Brasil and anthropophagy movements); Alfredo Volpi (Concrete painter of popular themes); Dorival Caymmi, Nelson Cavaquinho, and Cartola (singer-songwriters of popular Brazilian music of the fifties); José “Zé” Carioca (Walt Disney parrot character from Rio in the film The Three Caballeros); Hélio Oiticica, Antonio Dias, and Lygia Clark (artists from the fifties and sixties); Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Rogério Sganzerla (filmmakers), and many others. In the author’s view, what might be considered “irrational and mystical” in his text actually forms part of “a scientific phenomenon.”