In 2012, an article in the Spanish national dailynewspaper El Paísentitled ‘They Are Not Immigrants, They AreTourists’ (Vidales and Barón 2012) reported thatmany Brazilians living in Madrid wished todistinguish themselves from less desirable sectorsof the Brazilian community who had arrived later totake up jobs in the construction industry. Among themore affluent Brazilian musicians active on thecity's thriving tourist circuit, angry debates hadbeen circulating for some time about theappropriation of Madrid's centrally located musicvenues by members of the ‘Brazilian ghetto’, and theconsensus was that the culture industry simplywasn't developed enough to move beyond thedisreputable stereotypes held by Spanish andinternational audiences. Anxieties were exacerbatedby a series of diplomatic scuffles resulting in theturning away of a number of newly arrived Braziliansat Madrid's Barajas airport, a development whichthreatened to mar the flourishing cultural andcommercial exchanges between the two countries. Inthe words of a local Brazilian events organizer, aswe sat watching a troupe of scantily clad carnivaldancers take to the stage during a música sertaneja performancein central Madrid, ‘I find this pretty distastefulbut Brazil is a small world in this city.’

Discomfort about what could be described as Brazil'scounterpart to country and Western, música sertaneja and thehyper-sexualized displays that characterize a greatdeal of contemporary Brazilian pop music are justtwo examples of what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld(2005) describes as the many ‘embarrassments’ whichemerge in relation to nation states. Among Brazilianmusicians in Madrid, regionally, racially andsocio-economically diverse compatriots, oncemarginal to Brazil's hegemonic historical narrative,find themselves at close quarters and are urged toconfront their national identity with increasingurgency. It is this predicament, I suggest, thatprovides the overarching conditions for the makingof identities in relation to locality amongBrazilian migrants in the Spanish capital. In thischapter I present ethnographic data collected inMadrid between June 2010 and September 2011, duringwhich time I participated as a performer andaudience member at Brazilian music events. Iconclude that previously under-represented Brazilianmusical styles such as músicasertaneja, forró, pagode and axémusicestablish a foothold in the city'scentrally oriented tourist and student demographicthrough the manipulation of dominant nationalstereotypes, allowing a more direct dialogue withcosmopolitan cultural formations.