Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricos from Lisbon to Newark

Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folcloricos From Lisbon to Newark. By Kimberly DaCosta Holton. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press., 2005. Pp. xvi + 296, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, maps, illustrations, tables, musical notation, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper) As a public folklorist in Long Island, I once worked with a Portuguese community in Mineola for whom folk dance was vitally important. Every Wednesday the sounds of accordions, drums, scrapers, and cavaquinhos resounded in their cultural center. As children rehearsed in the ballroom, fathers watched satellite news of Portugal and discussed soccer over vinho in the basement. The adult dancers' commitment was impressive: at their own expense they traveled throughout New England visiting other Portuguese folk dance groups (ranchos folcloricos) and spent months on end learning new repertoire in Portugal. They told me about dances-vira, malhao, shula-and about ranchos by the dozen along the northeastern seaboard. This is great stuff, I thought; someone should write a book about it. At last, someone has. Kimberly DaCosta Holton's book, Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folcloricos From Lisbon to Newark, based on fieldwork among ranchos in Portugal and New Jersey, is flavored by the autiior's own identity as a LusoAmerican. She sets out to discover why in both locales ranchos have continued to proliferate despite their origin under the Estado Novo (1933-1974) regime of dictator Antonio Salazar, when diey were used to keep the laboring classes busy and happy while fostering a fascist national agenda. After the 1974 revolution, the function of Portugal's ranchos changed along with national policy. First the newly created Federation of Portuguese Folklore (FFP) elevated ethnographic research and an enforced standard of "authenticity" (though Holton notes that earlier groups, too, had conducted fieldwork). Where during the Estado Novo years national competitions encouraged increasingly colorful costumes and stylized dances, costume reform and the pruning of repertoire in the post-revolutionary period reflected newly conceptualized regional identities and marked "folklore's move from showmanship to scholarship" (61). Top-down reforms did not always sit well with the ranchos, however. Many dancers resisted the FFP's mandated costuming changes, finding the less-colorful new versions unattractive, while the FFP "Folklore Police" eliminated everything that did not come directly from a rancho's home region. Even women's makeup and eyebrow-plucking were banned. Holton suggests that such post-revolutionary regulations, in making a "spectacle out of ethnographic authenticity" (87), actually constituted a reactionary move to uphold traditional gender roles and guard against the effects of modernization and liberalization. When Portugal joined the European Union and entered the era of globalization, ranchos continued to be important, but for new reasons. Many Portuguese turned to ranchos as an expression of local identity, as a strategy to keep youth away from contemporary social ills, and as a way to strengthen family and community bonds. …