2025 Archival City Featured Essay
by Renee Simms
Preface: On Visiting the Memorial of the Pretos Novos Cemetery—Before yellow tour buses or African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, before marbled hotel lobbies, big buffets bursting with melancia, before Portuguese, or Brasilia, or “king,” there were Carioca & Guarani & unmapped waters & shores & isn’t it funny how the “past” fails to stay in the past[1] & instead hovers above a thing like marine clouds, like when the sky falls down & kisses the earth & you have to reorient yourself as you walk through fog, as you ask yourself: Where the fuck am I? I mean, I was exiting this church, right, the gold on the ceiling & walls so bright I needed sunglasses, but I was raised better than that, I was raised Midwestern-Middle-Class-Black-Episcopal-Nice, I know not to wear shades in a church, including a Roman Catholic one built in 1561, & so I was tolerating the glare from the gold, tolerating the unmitigated gaudiness as I looked for an exit, & how come nobody ever calls the Catholic Church or royal families hood, ghetto, tacky, a fucking criminal enterprise & it was dark near the church doors when my phone pinged, & I could hardly read this message in the dark & through the glare, but then I saw it: The Foundation. I had begged for money so I could write the story of a 1967 riot set in 1970 & 1982, 1984, 1996, etcetera, etcetera. The Foundation whose founder’s name is Latin for flower, who collected antiques, whose family was in publishing & finance, this foundation sent its regrets for my funding & at that moment as I read the message, the doors of the church flew wide open & a gold orb lit up the blue sky—it was so bright I put on my sunglasses—& our tour guide, Sayuri, whose mama is Japanese & daddy, Black, said, “Surprise!!” as a drumming collective met our tour group in front of the old church on the cobblestone street, & they drummed us as we walked down sloping hills to a restaurant for lunch & we were in Salvador, Bahia, or was it Rio, the time & place indistinguishable in my mind, I mean, did I meet the girl with maps cornrowed into her hair, or did I dream her? Was she in Palmares, or was it the quilombo that’s still around & high up in the mountains, a small community of resisters who make their own food & clothes & homes, who say, Not one of us died here from Covid, & sometimes, death & life are together & everywhere like the skeletons of Africans who emerged from underground in an immaculate town square in Rio that is now a UNESCO site.
When Bones Talk—We left for Brazil from various airports on the morning after the presidential election in 2024. There were twenty-five of us. Most were college professors, cultural workers, or journalists, and each of us had an interest in learning about Black life in Brazil. Our trip had been organized by historian Quintard Taylor through his nonprofit organization BlackPast.org. Although we all knew Dr. Taylor, we did not know one another. That morning, I flew by myself from Seattle to Houston to Rio de Janeiro. In each airport and on each plane, I searched the faces of the travelers around me trying to identify who might be on the same journey. Every now and then, I listened to the election news quickly followed by music. The white nationalist talk of our new president reminded me that “the past fails to stay in the past.[2]”
I saw this trip as an investigation of our settler colonial history and present. I’d met Quintard in 2014 when he was teaching at University of Washington in Seattle. That fall he was a keynote speaker where I worked at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. My academic program had invited Dr. Taylor to our celebration of the twentieth anniversary of African American studies on our campus. Although Black Studies had been adopted by most universities from 1968 through the mid-1970s, our liberal arts college didn’t establish a program until 1994. I liked to remind my students of this fact whenever they flexed about being a student of the field, or about the little radical history that they knew. What I did not know about our program back then was that it was the only one in the state of Washington which offered a major in the field. Dr. Taylor shared that information at the celebration. His research was of the African American presence in the Pacific Northwest. For decades he had recovered the stories of Black life in the region, including westward settlement and resistance to repression.
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At the Rio airport I was relieved to meet the other travelers and to learn that most of them were old like me. One traveler in our group was in her 30s. Everyone else was a decade older or more. Some of us were retired. One person was using a cane. Each of us were at the age when you possess a bird’s eye view of life, when you are able to connect the dots between what happened then, and what’s happening now. I had begun to question many things I’d taken for granted for years. I understood that several stories I’d heard all my life were not as simple as they seemed. That was one reason why I was going to Brazil. I knew that a tour organized by BlackPast.org would identify and name the histories of Brazil that I might miss.
Lately I’d focused my research and writing on Detroit’s history. My latest obsession was the Watts Mozambique Club, a one-story male strip club once located near Fenkell and Wyoming. Back in the day, the venue’s interior was darkly lit with paneled walls and a drop ceiling. The surrounding neighborhood was in parts sketchy, and in parts unsafe. Then in 2015 Watts was destroyed by an arson fire and was never rebuilt. I had distinct memories of the place which were captured in photos I’d taken in 1994. In one of the photos a green-eyed dancer crouched on the walkway near my table. He stuck out his tongue as my friend grinned at him, her fingers splayed on his oily chest. Dollar bills were stuffed inside the G-string along his waist. For years, that photo represented the only information I had about this entertainment venue.
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Once we were all accounted for at Sao Paolo International Airport, we made brief introductions, then boarded a bus to our hotel. Through the windows, the city looked hauntingly similar to urban areas I’d visited in other places, and that was okay. Perhaps my observation was even necessary. As Italo Calvino wrote, “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.[3]” In Rio I saw cars and harried people keeping pace with urban life. I saw unhoused families laying under blankets. Skyscrapers and graffiti. I saw fashionable street people complete with designer eyewear and leashed dogs. There were also miles of the Atlantic shore at Copacabana Beach which I saw as our bus pulled to the curb in front of the Windsor Leme hotel. Near the hotel were rows of vendors who sold any T-shirt, key chain, tote bag, or bracelet you desired.
What remained hidden from many tourists and native-born city dwellers were histories made invisible on purpose. Like the burial site we learned about when we visited the neighborhood known as Little Africa. For 126 years, the cemetery was purposely abandoned and built over until the bones of enslaved Africans began resurfacing through the soil. On the way to the neighborhood, our tour guide Eddie explained how African culture had been surveilled and suppressed in the surrounding favelas where most Black people lived. “Samba was illegal,” he told us. “Capoeira was illegal, too. Santeria was illegal until 1945.” He explained that criminalizing the culture was how the state controlled and disempowered Black people.
“But of course, despite these activities being illegal, the culture still lived with the people,” Eddie said. “If you wanted to learn capoeira, you came to the favela. That’s where the information lived. The information still lived but went underground. For example, if you wanted to know how to get to Palmares[4], people had the maps to the location cornrowed in their hair.”
When we arrived in Little Africa, Eddie took us to what is left of the slave port called Valongo Wharf. On a patchy lawn were large stone slabs that were once a part of the structure. At one time Rio had the world’s largest slave port. Forty-five percent of the enslaved Africans brought to the Americas went to Brazil. Erected around the partial wharf we saw that day were three-foot walls and a haphazard concrete amphitheater which, at the bottom, contained signs with information written in Portuguese and English. These newer structures were there to protect the site and to provide education. Fifty yards from there was an area of bricked pavement that held a metal sculpture of African people and more signs with information. The only thing that hinted that this was an historic place were the signs, especially the ones that read Valongo Wharf Archaeological Site and UNESCO. Around the remains of the wharf stood a normal town comprised of commercial and residential buildings. Behind these buildings were hills that were crammed with houses in the favelas.
All of the “new Blacks” or “pretos novos” who died of illnesses after arriving at Valongo Wharf, or who died on the slave ship, were taken to Cemitério dos Pretos Novos, which was not far from where they disembarked. There, they were incinerated and buried. About 30,000 people were in this mass grave. The majority were children, teenagers, and men between the ages of 18 and 25. The cemetery operated from 1769 until 1870 although the local government began building over the mass grave in 1866 and slavery did not end in Brazil until 1888. But the act of forgetting this history and destroying the archive was in process before the century when the site was no longer used as a burial. Eddie said the area would sometimes flood, exposing bones. I wondered about who in the community could speak to those moments. Who kept the knowledge of the burial site and how was that information passed down to younger generations?
The grave’s existence became a public remembrance in September 1996. That’s when Merced Guimaraes began construction on her home located in the old port neighborhood. Construction workers kept finding bones as they dug in the yard and they assumed that they were animal remains until they came across an intact jawbone with human teeth. Guimaraes notified the police.
“I was confused,” she is reported as saying in an interview[5]. “Why wasn’t this place being taken care of? But the truth is that the authorities built these houses over this cemetery in 1866; it’s a way to forget, to put a lid on it. They had no interest in keeping this memory alive and in the modern day they still don’t.”
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It is not only histories of genocide, enslavement, or other crimes against human rights that are buried from public view. The histories of resistance are forgotten too. On our second day in Brazil, Dr. João José Reis gave our group a lecture on Brazilian slave rebellions with a focus on the state of Bahia. According to Dr. Reis, from 1807-1835, there were more than thirty uprisings in Brazil. I am interested in how cultures of resistance exist over time in objects, language, and practices.
When I began writing about Detroit, I saw how our histories of radicalism and rebellion had been distorted or appropriated by the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no interest in keeping these memories of resistance alive. What interests me about Watts Club Mozambique is how its representation evolved through the decades, how it was perceived in the 1980s compared to the political ideas that likely inspired its founding in 1969. Before the Watts Club was a strip club, it was a venue for live music where entertainers like Peabo Bryson and The O’Jays performed. The owner, Cornelius Watts, created the club after visiting the nation of Mozambique. The club’s original interior design had an African wilderness theme. Like Brazil, Mozambique was a colony of Portugal. Its liberation struggles that resulted in its independence in 1975 began early in the sixties, in 1962 or before. This movement for African decolonization had many supporters in Detroit including Pan Africanists and internationalists like Rev. Albert Cleage, Robert F. Williams, James and Grace Lee Boggs, and others. What was happening in Mozambique, Congo, and Ghana was inspiring the labor organizing and school strikes in Detroit.
But by the time of my photo in 1994, any idea that this venue had been inspired by a radical political consciousness had been erased. The fact that the club was in the hood and had the name of an African nation made it that much more ridiculous to those of us who were young and ignorant at the time. It is similar to an uneducated Gen Z Brazilian listening today to an elder talk about the Yoruban god, Shango, and his symbol of the double machete. Symbols of a political struggle are illegible to later generations when that history has been suppressed, mocked, and made to seem irrelevant.
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Part of the challenge of telling history from the perspective of colonized people is the disparities in resources between our archives and institutions, and the resources of those in power. Colonized people are also reluctant to share how we’ve survived in mixed company. This was apparent on our visit to Bahia. Our tour guide, Sayuri, took us to a Candomblé terreiro to see how Black Brazilians have maintained their spiritual practices, and then to a Roman Catholic church built in 1561, and to the afro-indigenous village of Kianja, which means “far away.”
The day we visited the Candomblé house, it rained. Streets were flooding with rainwater and that slowed our transportation by bus. It also slowed the members of the house from arriving there for our visit. So for an hour or so we circled the block and waited until the members returned. The challenge of getting to the house in the rain was also a worry that Sayuri had for our late-middle-aged group. The house was up in the hills and the only way to reach it from the major street where our bus parked was by dozens of concrete stairs built into the hills. The stairs were uneven, there was foliage all around and we were vulnerable to the elements which included mosquitoes, rain, mud, and stairs that had no railing.
The remote location seemed to be an intentional strategy to protect this sacred place and its practices from a historically hostile ruling culture. When we finally got inside the house and listened to religious leaders tell its history, there were other facts—like the lack of written religious texts—that also seemed part of a strategy to protect the institution. A couple days later we visited a contemporary quilombo which was two hours from the city of Salvador. It too was remote and kept its outside influence to a minimum. By contrast, the church we saw in the center of Salvador had clearly been well-maintained for centuries. At night the outside of the church was lit to enhance its beauty. Its wooden pews were immaculately dusted and oiled, the figurines in the chapel were numerous and ornate. And the gold that was on the ceilings and walls reminded us of the mineral extraction and wealth upon which the church was founded. The church was located in an area surrounded by shops and restaurants catering to tourists. It had hundreds of visitors each day that would not only see the institution but learn about its significance. But the Candomblé house and quilombo were tours that Sayuri arranged for our group in particular. These were not places that everyone got to experience or learn about.
Going to Brazil when I did helped me to navigate the right-wing, reactionary politics once I returned home. This moment was not new. I’d seen examples of how the violence of the past is always present, even if it’s been suppressed for a century. I was reminded that resistance to this violence is also a part of our history, that if we are open to listening and observing we will find that freedom fighters also leave us their evidence.
[1] Sharpe, Christina. Ordinary Notes, p. 29.
[2] Sharpe, Christina. Ordinary Notes, p. 29.
[3] Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities.
[4] Palmares was the biggest Brazilian quilombo, or village created by fugitive, enslaved people. It became an autonomous state in northeastern Brazil from 1605-1694.
[5] Kaiser, Anna Jean. “The Mass Grave in the Garden,” July 25, 2017. https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2017/the-mass-grave-in-the-garden/
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 11 · November 2025
Images by Renee Simms
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