![]() My anxiety spiked the next morning on the two-hour drive toward rural Americana. At night I drank caipirinhas on the sidewalk, where the dancing spills into the road and stops traffic: in the corner bar I’d stopped in, quaint but urban, a man played a violin while women waltzed. I’d flown to São Paulo the day before and spent the afternoon foxing around Vila Madalena in a black and white checkered top and kitten heels, feeling very mod concrete poetry meets lugubrious banana plants. It was the spring of 2019 Jair Bolsonaro, “Trump of the Tropics,” had recently been elected, and I was living in Rio. ![]() Increasingly, curious journalists, too, drive into the cane fields to query the festa’s Brazilian belles and local hawkers of Lynyrd Skynyrd covers, fried chicken and biscuits, and Confederate flag miscellany (keychains, flip-flops) available for purchase only with faux Confederate dollars. The Festa Confederada’s beating heart, its real crowd-pleaser, is an enactment of antebellum-era “folkloric” dances by men and boys in rebel uniforms and women and girls, some just babies, in frothy dresses that take months to sew. Civil War host a picnic in a graveyard of their forefathers in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo with a motley crew of local dance moms, Freemasons and biker gangs. Each spring, descendants of the Confederates who defected to Brazil at the close of the U.S. ![]()
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