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Article Summary

In Itacare town and Bahia state, affinities to a region in the Brazilian Northeast from the more industrial and developed southeast are connected with class and racial identities. The Northeast is known as a place of banditry, famine, and desperate poverty. Tourism leads to reverse migration where the Southeasterners move to Northeast leading to poverty, violence, cultural authenticity, untamed nature into Edenic paradise, and sensuality. With a growing body of work on regionalism, this work emphasizes the economic, ideological, and political history of regionalism rather than impacting the social relationships and identity. Visitors came to Itacare to see the waterfalls and beaches. The homes they made became new ways of interacting with the environment. Marcos was an architect who moved to the town to build and design houses as a result of the tourism boom. The architect linked the different ways in which the locals and outsiders built their homes and viewed their environment based on their own economic, historic, and cultural differences.

It is important to understand people from Itacare town did not see things in the same perspective as other people would. They lived in a jungle and saw themselves indifferent to the jungle. People from outside Itacare came to enjoy their jungle including the beaches and all the nature of Itacare. Therefore, Marcos was able to connect the indifferences of the locals and those of the outsiders’ enjoyment in the environment. This was in terms of the kind of houses that were being constructed. Homes are human habitats and they reconcile the environmental human relationship in several ways. The houses are constructed by the residents according to their unconscious perspectives, aesthetic tastes and ideals. The relationship of humans with nature is made visible via architectural styles and is viewed via the dichotomies of rural urban identities and negotiations between the groups.

Itacare residents use a variety of terms to show their identity that give the place of birth, race, social class, relationship to sea and land, regional identity, time in Itacare, and relationship with the other towns. The residents use such terms to show their right to a particular place as they are determined by tourism based development and the rise of migration from outside. However, the way that the residents use the terms are situational and complex. There are distinctions that are mostly co-constructed with class-based or racial-based institutions.  People in this case use place-based terms in relation to states, towns, or even regions when talking about their identity. Moreover, there is a historic style of architecture known as Northeastern Art Deco which is mostly smaller homes that are constructed as a result of decline of cacao shipping in the start of tourism. The architecture is important in preservation of architecture that existed earlier with facades and bandas directly on the street.

Given the relationship between townhouses and the urban elite ones, the adoption of this kind of aesthetic in the rural towns can be viewed as a way of reproducing, urban, modern homes that are also high-class. Although many tourist developers value houses that are older for traditional aesthetics, they renovate these older models into predictable models that show changing values in the society in relationship to the economy in tourism. Standard remodeling of the houses entail such things as using bright paints, fixing glass windows and porches, and orienting the houses in a way that they face towards water. Originally, houses in the town were built facing the inland and towards the town and the inside. The slaves, products, and servants entered the town via the back. When carrying out the research at Itacare one can be surprised by the debates that plan to meet different architectural styles.