individual fights and their immediate motives one grasps a complex web of wider social significance that
the records in the archives do not always reveal.
The classification of the neighbourhoods of the arrested and their victims made by Liberac reveals a
higher proportion coming from the districts of Santo Antônio and Pilar, where, according to other sources,
many capoeiras indeed resided. Conflicts were also frequent in the port district of Conceição da Praia, but
involved mostly people not resident in that area. This matches with the likeliness of fights occurring during
the religious festivals in the waterfront area and suggests that neighbourhood identity played a role in
brawls, as already highlighted by Querino. Criminal records and oral history suggest that invasion of what
was considered one’s own space was responsible for much of capoeira violence. However, if identification
with specific districts of the city certainly was an important aspect of capoeira and tough guys’ identity, no
strong gang culture such as the nineteenth-century maltas in Rio seem to have developed in Salvador.^104
The late Mestre Noronha was, in his youth, part of the group he identifies as the troublemakers or the
‘tough guys from the era of 1922’. In his memoirs he offers a detailed description of places and people he
considered responsible for violence. The capoeira roda at the Pilão sem Tampa hill in the district of São
Lázaro, for instance, is singled out as ‘a place where only desordeiro existed who fought the police all the
time, and that is why the police hated the capoeiristd’.^105 When these tough guys from the shanty towns on
the hills converged on a roda, major street fights were likely to happen, such as the ‘Big brawl’ (barulho) of
1917 at the Curva Grande. On that occasion the police was involved in setting a trap to catch a group of
tough guys. When the sergeant of the military police who was in charge of the roda pushed his revolver, a
capoeira took his weapon and generalized fighting took place between capoeiras and the police. Soon the
place ‘looked like a battle field’.^106 Note that the police sergeant was obviously only able to act in that way
because he was a full fledged capoeira himself, which again shows that capoeiras and police were not
living in entirely separate worlds. For that reason the issue of capoeira repression is usually more complex
than the epic narratives of resistance that present day capoeiristas like to tell.
After abolition and during the first half of the twentieth century two main motives for repression of capoeira
remained: the eradication of African ‘barbarism’ and the control of street violence. In the rural areas and the
smaller towns of the Recôncavo repression seems not to have been particularly efficient, since police forces
were usually very limited. In Salvador, the aim to subdue troublemakers sometimes extended to a more
general repression of any capoeira practice. The crucial character in that respect was Pedro Gordilho. There
is contradictory information about the different posts he held in the Bahian police up to 1930.^107 The period
1920–1926, when he was ‘delegado auxiliar’, seems to be of particular importance. He took drastic steps to
ensure law and order in the city, using for instance the cavalry to end a student demonstration. As we have
seen, he was particularly keen to wipe out Afro-Brazilian traditions. According to oral tradition he also
disrupted many capoeira rodas. Possibly the rhythm Cavalaria, played to warn all participants of the eminent
arrival of the police, finish the roda and disperse safely, originated at that time. Pedrito, as he was
nicknamed, had huge numbers of people arrested in his violent police actions, but I have not been able to
track detention records of this period, and it seems that as a rule no trials followed his intemperate
actions.^108
One should however not assume that repression of capoeira was systematic in Salvador throughout the
First Republic (1889–1930). Another, probably more frequent pattern consisted in a mixture of selective
repression and tolerance. Dr Álvaro Cova, police chief of Salvador from 1912 to 1920, constitutes the best
example for this posture. He protected a selected group of troublemakers, using them for his own purposes.
He was the godfather of two brothers, Escavino and Ducinha, well known in the city and capoeira circles as
tough guys. They served as his electoral assistants (cabo eleitorais), responsible for gathering support
among the electorate.^109 A.Vianna describes how, in the same period, the police even used some capoeiras
118 THE CAPOEIRA SCENE IN BAHIA