From Chains to Chants: The Black and Red Streets of Laranjeiras

While the rest of the world drowns in pumpkin spice and polyester costumes, Brazil has something far more visceral. No skeletons, no fake blood. Just real people — their skin covered in black and red paint — marching, laughing, drumming, and shouting through the streets in a centuries-old act of remembrance and defiance. It’s called Festa dos Lambe-Sujos e Caboclinhos, and it’s everything Halloween wishes it could be: collective, chaotic, and charged with history.

Every second Sunday of October, the small city of Laranjeiras, in the northeastern state of Sergipe, transforms into an open-air theatre. Children, teenagers, and elders paint themselves head to toe — some in soot-black, others in blood-red — and take to the streets. The noise is physical: tambourines, cuícas, and drums pounding from every corner. The smell of sweat, earth, and molasses fills the air. It’s a ritual that began with freed Black communities in the 19th century, and it still feels revolutionary.

The story behind it is layered. The Lambe-Sujos represent enslaved Africans and quilombolas — the people who fought for freedom in the backlands, surviving through cunning and collective strength. The Caboclinhos stand for the Indigenous groups who were forced by colonial masters to hunt down those same fugitives. In this performance, the two groups reenact a symbolic “battle” — but what’s being fought isn’t each other. It’s memory against erasure.

This is what resistance looks like when it dances. The Lambe-Sujos smear themselves with a mix of oil, soot, and syrup, recalling how enslaved people once used the same materials to camouflage their skin during escape. The Caboclinhos wear feathered headdresses and red paint — a representation both of Indigenous presence and of the complicated alliances colonial Brazil forced upon them. Together, they turn the city into a living map of trauma and survival.

Photographer Eduardo Zappia captured this with precision and tenderness. His images show bodies that gleam like obsidian under the sun, faces fierce and playful, hands gripping drums as if holding onto history itself. You can almost hear the rhythm pulsing through the frame. This isn’t nostalgia — it’s alive resistance.

Before the parade, both groups are blessed in two very different but connected places: the Terreiro Nagô Santa Bárbara, a Candomblé temple, and the Igreja Matriz, the Catholic church at the town’s heart. It’s a ritual crossroads where African and Christian faiths meet — a choreography of spiritual survival that defines Brazil far more deeply than imported ghosts or superheroes ever could.

“It’s the African faith and the Christian faith walking together,” locals say. “Like the people of Brazil always have.”

In the imaginary of this celebration, the figure of Saci-Pererê — the one-legged, pipe-smoking trickster of Afro-Indigenous myth — hovers invisibly among the crowd. He’s part rebel, part jester, part ghost of the plantation. Folklorists say runaway slaves invoked Saci’s spirit to confuse their pursuers in the forest, using soot as camouflage. You can see that lineage here — in every grin, every drumbeat, every flash of red and black.

So while brands push imported pumpkins and plastic horror masks, the people of Laranjeiras reclaim something far more profound: a collective body that refuses to forget. The Festa dos Lambe-Sujos e Caboclinhos isn’t an escape from reality — it’s a confrontation with it. It says that Brazil’s history of enslavement, resistance, and syncretic faith is not dead, not buried, not sanitised for export. It’s right here, sweating, laughing, drumming, alive.

This isn’t cosplay. It’s continuity.