Cecília Meireles and ‘Travel in Brazil’: two religious festivities in Rio de Janeiro - Santo Antônio and Nossa Senhora da Penha

Abstract

This paper intends to analyze two illustrated articles, published in the magazine Travel in Brazil (1941-1942), edited by Cecília Meireles: “A very strange Colonel” and “Penha”. Both deal with the publicizing of religious festivities in Rio de Janeiro to the North-American public, in the context of the Brazilian “Estado Novo”. The aims of the analysis are to verify the authorship of the articles on the basis of their writing style, to compare the versions of religious legends they report with those from other sources, to discuss what kind of tourist or traveler they targeted and to relate the photographic images to the verbal texts in the context of the modernizing ideology of the Vargas Government.