 While members of the "afoxés" brought their Afro-Brazilian religious cosmology to the Carnaval procession by maintaining their African roots with the "puxada do ijexá" (a rhythm played in honor of the orixás or Afro-Brazilian deities), the flourishing middle-class "blocos" mostly relied on carnaval music styled on Rio de Janeiro's samba-enrredos.Then the Afro-blocos emerged with an aesthetical proposal extrapolated from the Indian blocos, introducing some fundamental innovations in the process