Close your eyes and imagine Auntie Ciata’s bustling house, the place where the first sambas played in Rio de Janeiro! Hilária Batista de Almeida was born in Santo Amero da Purificação, Bahia, in 1854, and traveled to Rio at age 22, back when Brazil was still an empire. She had already been initiated into the candomblé religion in Salvador, Bahia and was a daughter of the goddess Oxum. Here in Rio, she cooked and sold Bahian food on Sete de Setembro Street, always wearing her white dress, turban, and bracelets in the colors of the orixá deities.
According to historian Cláudio Humberto, Auntie Ciata’s first house was on Barão de São Félix St. Also on that street was the Terreiro João Alabá, where Auntie Ciata was the Iyakekerê, or little mother, the second most important person in the temple.
Every weekend, Auntie Ciata invited workers and recently freed slaves from Bahia over to her house for her famous pagodes, which were parties filled with dance. According to some historians, it was there that the first recorded samba was composed. That samba is “Pelo Telefone” by Donga and Mauro de Almeida and dates back to 1916.
Of course, Auntie Ciata and her group did not create samba on their own. They worked from existing traditions and new influences, like festivities from the royal court. In that sense, as historian Thiago de Melo Gomes points out, the people’s carnival at the end of the 19th century was a broad-based, collective creation.
Auntie Ciata was one of the most influential women in the birth of samba in Rio, and her blessings still reverberate through the streets near the port zone of the city.