I'll Samba Someplace Else
A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity, and Displacement in São Paulo

Andrew G. Britt (Author)

9781478029373

Hardback, published 24 March 2026

406 pages, 62 illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.712 kg

“I’ll Samba Someplace Else is an outstanding book that offers a fresh perspective on the ways in which race and ethnicity have been inscribed into the urban geography, shaping vast inequalities in São Paulo over the past century.”—Bryan McCann, author of, Hard Times in the Marvelous City

"Britt’s project is a uniquely comprehensive retracing of the destruction left by municipal building projects and the spaces that Black Paulistanos have continued to make despite attempts at erasure. . . . [I’ll Samba Someplace Else] offers a valuable blueprint for mapping racism through critical geography and serves as a model for students and educators interested in using digital humanities tools to map urban ethnoracial spaces."—Amy Richards, NACLA

In I’ll Samba Someplace Else, Andrew G. Britt maps the interwoven histories of three of the city of São Paulo’s most iconic ethnoracialized neighborhoods, popularly known as “African” Brasilãndia, “Japanese” Liberdade, and “Italian” Bexiga. Following these spaces over the mid-twentieth century through inventive methods of spatial history, archival research, and sustained engagement with African-descendent cultural organizations, Britt shows that these ethnoracialized neighborhoods did not accrue naturally over time. Instead, they were planned, produced, and contested by an array of individuals, from powerful urbanist-politicians and neighborhood businessowners to celebrated samba composers and historic preservationists. The ethnoracialization of these neighborhoods, Britt argues, served paradoxical ends: it reproduced consequential racialized inequities while, simultaneously, bolstering discourses of multicultural harmony. By untangling the paradoxes of ethnoracial space in Brazil’s most populous, diverse, and unequal city, I’ll Samba Someplace Else elucidates how popular ideologies of multiculturalism endure despite persistently high levels of racialized inequity and anti-Black violence in both Brazil and beyond.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space 1
1. Avenues and the Afterlives of Slavery 34
2. Spatial Projects of Forgetting 81
3. Neighborhoods of Mixture and Massacre 148
4. Belonging-as-Being: BrasilÂ
ndia as “
Little Africa”
199
5. Producing Ethnoracial Infrastructures: Making “
Japanese”
Liberdade and “
Italian”
Bexiga 241
Epilogue. Early 1970s: “
Asphalt Has Today Covered Our Ground”
288
Notes 299
Bibliography 349
Index 377