Brazilian soap operas slowly cast black middle class

RIO DE JANEIRO – Dressed in a fitted white designer shirt, Sílvio Guindane stood beneath a chandelier on a grand wrought iron staircase and smiled confidently. Below, a set of ornate drinking glasses sat next to a collection of spirit bottles. Above, framed monochrome prints and color landscapes adorned the walls.

It is an archetypal image of upper middle class Brazil. And for good reason as this is the set of “Vitória,” one of the country’s ubiquitous novelas, the phenomenally popular soap operas that for more than 50 years have thrived on the country’s major television networks — often by portraying lavish lifestyles beyond the means of most viewers.

There is just one thing that is unusual: Guindane, 31, who plays a successful engineer, is black.

Just over 50 percent of Brazil’s population is black or mixed race, yet for decades such characters have rarely been seen on novelas, which frequently depicted a society that was almost exclusively white. If black Brazilians did land roles, they portrayed maids, thieves or drug dealers – overtly bad characters or marginal ones who disappeared after a few episodes. Now a rising black middle class is helping to change that.

“When I started, about 20 years ago, I was often regarded as the black actor. Today, I am just an actor,” Guindane said. He had finished filming a scene in which his character, Paulo Henrique, confides in his best friend, who is white, about the end of a relationship. The scene would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

Guindane’s debut role, as a 12-year-old, was in the film How Angels Are Born. He played a stereotypical favela kid who becomes involved in the kidnapping of an American. But Brazil has changed, and so too have its soap operas, which at peak times can attract audiences of up to 40 million people per episode.

One rare case of a black screenwriter is Joel Zito Araújo, former president of the Brazilian Filmmakers Association, and the author of the 2004 film Daughters of the Wind, which won many awards in Brazil. In 2000 he co-authored a book with Taís Araújo called The Denial of Brazil: The Negro in Brazilian Novelas.

In researching novelas between 1963 and 1998, Araújo discovered a third of them featured no black actors. In the other two-thirds, the black and minority cast filled subordinate roles. Indigenous Brazilian characters rarely appeared.

“One of the great features of Brazil is that is it is multiracial but the soap operas only represented white history,” he said. “Slavery was never resolved. After it finished, blacks did not progress in our society. The government adopted a policy of bleaching, to follow the first world. They wanted a white Brazil.”

Nowadays, he says black actors often portray middle-class characters. “But it is still rare to see a whole black family represented,” he added.

Araújo said a progressive movement started in the mid-1990s to elevate the image of black Brazilians. He said over many years “a great conceptual change” happened and cited the recent novela “Lado a Lado” (Side by Side), which won an International Emmy Award for the best telenovela in 2013. It depicted a friendship between a rich white woman and a poor black woman in early 20th century Rio de Janeiro, soon after the abolition of slavery.

But even in that novela, he said, only about 30 percent of the cast was black. “Even there blacks were represented as a minority, when they are not,” he said. “Only today are we beginning to recognize the existence of racism in our social relations.”