The Double-Edged Legacy of Carmen Miranda

People have long celebrated Carmen Miranda as a trailblazer—an icon who broke barriers of ethnicity and gender. As the first South American with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, she secured her place in entertainment history. However, 70 years later, a troubling question arises: was she a pioneer or a puppet of Hollywood, reduced to a consumable, exotic stereotype?

Despite her extraordinary talent, Carmen Miranda’s legacy is a double-edged sword. The system thrust her into conformity with Eurocentric ideals, denying her the opportunity to express her cultural truth. Instead, she became a symbol of Latin American identity distorted for Western consumption. Her persona commodified into a “Brazilian Bombshell,” a caricature that stripped away the richness and complexity of her native culture.

The Rise and Fall of Latinxploitation in Hollywood in Good Neighbor Policy

Carmen Miranda’s international career flourished during the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy, a diplomatic initiative aimed at strengthening ties with Latin America during World War II. Although already a beloved figure in Brazil since the 1930s, a muse of the golden era of radio and Brazilian musicals, and a contrast to the demure housewives of the decade. She gained global prominence as Hollywood sought a new cultural symbol to fill the void left by Europe during the war. But instead of portraying Latin America in its full complexity, the U.S. exported a carefully crafted myth: the “exotic Latina.”

This image wasn’t born out of cultural exchange but rather a calculated narrative to serve U.S. imperial interests. Carmen Miranda became an early—and ultimately fleeting—victim of what we can now call Latinxploitation in cinema. As the war ended, so did Hollywood's interest in her, and Miranda disappeared from the silver screen, one of the first casualties of the short-lived trend of Latin culture in mainstream American media.

Hollywood co-opted Latin American culture, reducing it to easily marketable, often demeaning stereotypes.Carmen Miranda’s “Brazilian Bombshell” persona hypersexualized her and confined her to roles as a dancer and comedian. They often typecast her and forced her to perform with a heavy accent, limiting her range as an artist. Despite her attempts to assimilate—learning English and adapting to Hollywood's expectations—she remained shackled by the stereotypes of her identity.

Carmen Miranda: The Face of an "Exotic" and Misunderstood Latin America

The stereotype of the "exotic Latina" has deep roots in colonialism with indigenous women. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Brazil was marketed as a land of sensuality and untamed beauty, a narrative that leveraged the image Hollywood had crafted. These portrayals reinforced harmful, one-dimensional ideals about Latin American women, reducing them to symbols of exoticism and desire—a perception that still lingers today.

The U.S. gaze portrayed Latin America under a monolithic entity. Carmen Miranda was one of the most prominent victims of this homogenized view. Her characters, set in Rio de Janeiro, Havana, and Buenos Aires. She embodied an outdated, almost cartoonish image of Brazil—a “republic of bananas” trapped in time, pre-modern and disconnected from the Brazil of Pelé and bossa nova in the late 1950s.

Carmen Miranda Subverting Stereotypes in Hollywood’s Golden Age

Carmen Miranda’s career blossomed during Hollywood’s Golden Age, a time when studios held immense power and dictated the portrayal of women, especially women of color.Yet, despite the industry's constraints, she remained keenly aware of the stereotypes imposed upon her. Rather than passively accepting these roles, Miranda subtly subverted them through humor and exaggeration. In doing so, she didn’t just entertain—she critiqued the very expectations that sought to define her.

By amplifying the caricature of the “exotic Latina,” Carmen Miranda exposed the absurdity of Hollywood’s stereotypes, turning them into an act of resistance. Though Hollywood confined her to a narrow role as a hypersexualized comedic figure, her wit and self-awareness allowed her to transcend some of these limitations. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she didn’t change her name or undergo cosmetic surgery to fit Hollywood's mold. In her later years, she even made efforts to break free from these constricting roles, seeking to reclaim her cultural authenticity.

Carmen Miranda's Complex Legacy in Brazil

Carmen Miranda’s transformation didn’t start in Hollywood—it began in Brazil, with her role in Banana da Terra (1939). Her public image was influenced by Afro-Brazilian women from Bahia. They were known as baianas, women who worked in Rio’s markets, selling food and goods. These women, descendants of enslaved Africans, played a vital role in the cultural richness of Brazil.

Even after the abolition of slavery in 1888, Black Brazilians remained marginalized. They faced structural inequality, racial violence, and lacked access to education, employment, and civil rights. Their cultural practices, including samba, were criminalized. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, samba was linked to rebellion and disorder, leading authorities to suppress it. Despite this, samba continued to thrive underground, preserved by tias (Afro-Brazilian women from Bahia) and terreiros (Afro-Brazilian religious spaces) until the 1930s. It was only then that Getúlio Vargas embraced samba as a symbol of national identity.

Carmen Miranda persona could be a form of cultural appropriation and whitewashing—a sanitised version of Brazilian identity that stripped away its complexity and marginalised its Afro-Brazilian roots. An attempt to make Afro-Brazilian culture more palatable to prejudiced white people. Not even to mention the racist connotations with bananas and black people. Although the film's intention at the time might have been to promote a unified national identity, the effect of Banana da Terra was to perpetuate racial hierarchies.

The criticism Carmen Miranda received was also in the fact that she was a powerful, independent woman. Her bold, theatrical style and immense financial success challenged the patriarchal norms of both Hollywood and Brazil.

Reclaiming Carmen Miranda

Despite her success, Carmen Miranda faced significant criticism in Brazil for being “too Americanized”  since her peak. Ironically, decades later, in the 1960s, a new generation of artists revisited and reinterpreted her legacy. The Tropicalismo movement adopted a concept of cultural anthropophagy—"cannibalizing" foreign influences to create something uniquely Brazilian. They saw Miranda not as a puppet of Hollywood but as an icon of a "tropical people," capable of digesting and transforming external influences. By re-appropriating her image, the Tropicalists transformed what was once seen as a tacky caricature into a powerful statement of national identity during military dictatorship. This re-evaluation proves that Miranda's legacy is far more complex and enduring than the Hollywood machine had ever intended.

Despite the denial of its supporters, between 1964 and 1985 saw the rise of a 21-year-long military dictatorship characterized by authoritarianism, human rights abuses, political persecution, exile, censorship and an amnesty law erasing the physical harm, psychological trauma, social scars, disappearance, torture, and death. Amid this tumultuous scenario, there was when Tropicalismo was born, with art playing a crucial role in resisting oppression.

Like Tropicalismo, Carmen Miranda’s roles brought hope and joy in difficult and dark times, culture and laughter became an act of resistance. Their legacy transcends and deserves to be honoured in the same way we remember the Latin American soldiers who fought on the battlefield.

Carmen Miranda and Brazil’s Post-Colonial Struggle

Carmen Miranda famously said, “I am Brazilian. I just happened to be born in Portugal.” This statement reveals the deep-seated tension at the heart of her career. Born in Portugal and raised in Brazil from the age of 10 months, she embodied the very struggles of a country long trapped in the shadow of its colonial past. Brazil, once a colony of Portugal, has grappled with defining its national identity in a post-colonial world, where the scars of colonialism remain. Miranda’s career, caught between the imperial gaze of Hollywood and the harsh realities of Brazilian racial and cultural politics, exposes this unresolved tension.

In her career, we see how colonialism doesn't disappear with independence; it lingers, shaping not only national identity but also who gets to define that identity as a white priviliged woman in a Brazil. Despite the criticism of her Americanization, contemporary Brazil still resonates. The country continues to be viewed through a colonial lens, even by its own nationals. One that often fails to recognize its complexity and diversity. This reflects a historical inferiority complex, a long-standing tendency for Brazil to seek validation from Western standards rather than embracing its own rich, multifaceted identity.