Yemanjá Day: visibility, tourism, and the thin line between recognition and commodification

Yemanjá Day: visibility, tourism, and the thin line between recognition and commodification

February 2nd, Yemanjá Day, is one of the most powerful celebrations of Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil. Rooted in Candomblé and in the ancestral relationship between faith, nature, and territory, the date has for decades occupied public space in Salvador—especially in Rio Vermelho—as a religious, cultural, and political expression.

In recent years, however, this celebration has also been shaped by another movement: the intensification of tourism, media coverage, and the symbolic consumption of the festival. Fully booked hotels, parallel parties, brands associating their image with the event, and a growing audience coming from outside the city,largely white, middle- and upper-class, especially from Brazil’s Southeast, have transformed February 2nd into a “must-see” event on the Brazilian cultural calendar.

This shift is not neutral.

Scholarship on culture, religion, and urban space shows that processes of heritagization, touristification, and symbolic gentrification often produce ambiguous effects. While they can expand public visibility and reduce certain historical stigmas, they also tend to displace the center of celebration: from religious experience to spectacle; from the community of faith to cultural consumption; from lived territory to profitable territory.

In the case of Yemanjá Day, the central question is not whether people from outside “can” participate, the very logic of Afro-Brazilian religions is marked by openness, circulation, and exchange. The issue lies elsewhere: who defines the meanings of the celebration when it becomes a tourist product? Who profits from this visibility? And who remains exposed to religious intolerance in everyday life, while their faith is celebrated as an exotic landscape for a single day?

There is an evident paradox. While February 2nd is celebrated by brands, influencers, and travel itineraries, terreiros continue to be targets of violence, criminalization, and delegitimization in various regions of the country. The faith that becomes a summer “hype” is the same faith that faces religious racism throughout the rest of the year.

In this sense, the growing presence of external audiences, especially white and higher-income, is not a problem in itself, but becomes a symptom when it occurs without recognition of the racial, economic, and historical asymmetries that shape the celebration. The risk is not mixture; it is erasure. Not circulation, but the conversion of faith into scenery, offerings into aesthetics, rituals into Instagrammable experiences.

Yemanjá Day thus reveals a central tension in contemporary Brazilian culture: how far we can expand public recognition of Afro-Brazilian religions without reproducing colonial logics of symbolic exploitation. Visibility, when not accompanied by a redistribution of power, income, and respect, can become just another sophisticated form of appropriation.

Questioning does not diminish the celebration. On the contrary: it is a way of taking it seriously.