Tourism as Civic Ritual: The “Know Brazil” Campaign of 1972

In celebrating the sesquicentennial of independence in 1972, the Brazilian state undertook a number of initiatives designed to legitimize military rule, an approach exemplified in the ritualized repatriation and interment of the remains of the country’s independence leader, the emperor Pedro I. The state also understood the occasion as a unique opportunity to promote the development of the tourism industry, overseeing the expansion of the sector and the renovation of its infrastructure. In particular, the national tourism agency, Embratur, focused on growing domestic tourism as it launched its “Conheça o Brasil” (Know Brazil) campaign, partnering with airlines, local
agencies, and hotels to offer Brazilians opportunities to travel throughout the country: to Iguaçu and Amazonia, to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador, and to mark the sesquicentennial, to sites of national heritage like the colonial mining town of Ouro Preto and places where the independence story unfolded. This paper demonstrates that the program aimed to make of tourism a civic ritual, encouraging Brazilians to accept the proposition that the proper way to prove their patriotism and honor the nation was to know it more intimately and more fully. Further, it shows that as it was constituted of carefully planned itineraries and subsidized travel and aimed primarily at introducing middle-class Brazilians in the metropolitan Southeast to other parts of the country, Conheça o Brasil also tended to reinforce existing power dynamics and to legitimize the state which sponsored it, tourism helping to fortify dictatorship.