The article carries out a historical-anthropological reflection on the relationship between the nationalization of the samba, the institutionalization of the Samba Schools Recreational Guilds, and the political constitution of the mestizo national identity in the Vargas Era (1930-1945). The samba is conceptualized as an "heterotopic practice", and is argued that, in its nationalization, the samba's communitarian associations operated as agents of the resignification of the Brazilian racial conflict, providing a dialectical character to Vargas' mestizo identity project.