While there seemed to exist a Central African-derived basic structure of these practices in both rural and
urban settings, in Rio de Janeiro batuque and to some extent capoeira also became part of broader, and more
syncretic practices. Capoeiras took advantage of public events for their own purposes. They displayed their
power and exhibited their skills in front of processions and even military parades. Whilst the capoeiras’
attendance at the festival of the Holy Spirit could reflect true devotion, their presence at other venues was
often a mere pretext for sowing disorder or settling pending disputes.^52 The folklorist Mello Moraes
described the intervention of capoeiras in public events around the mid-century:
Sometimes, interrupting the course of a procession, or the pace of a parade, one could hear, jointly
with screams of the ladies fleeing in terror, of negras carrying the young master in their arms, of fathers
seeking refuge for their wife and children, the horrendous ‘Shut down! Shut down’ [Shouted by the
capoeiras to close down the event]. The caxinguelés [adolescent capoeira apprentices] flew at the
front, capoeiragem exploded without restraints, and the mayhem resulted in broken heads, shattered
light posts, stabbings and deaths...^53These descriptions make clear that the capoeiras sought to humiliate public authorities. Yet does it also
mean, as Maya Chvaicer has recently asserted, that the capoeiras always ‘pleased the crowds’ and that ‘the
masses admired and respected the performers’?^54 Whilst friendly games could be part of slave diversions,
the disorder promoted by gangs was less likely to enjoy that kind of unrestricted admiration. Members of
capoeira gangs were, no doubt, admired by many young black or coloured males—free or slave alike—who
eventually joined their ranks. Yet no single source suggests that kind of overall admiration of wider
audiences for the public appearances of capoeiras.^55 As the well-known writer Machado de Assis claimed,
the capoeiras were probably fascinated by the ‘eroticism of publicity’ and genuinely enjoyed displaying
their acrobatic skills rather than worrying about their popularity among the wider population.^56
The social structure of Cariocan society was far too complex and capoeira practice far too ambivalent to
appeal so broadly to undifferentiated urban ‘masses’. Carlos Eugênio Soares has shown that most episodes
in the early police records (1810–1821) are not about conflicts between capoeiras and police, but between
slaves themselves: ‘capoeira, more than an element of slave resistance, was an important piece in the power
game among the slaves, in which freedmen and free had a marginal participation’.^57 And as more ‘coloured’
free males started to learn capoeira, the insertion of the practice into Cariocan society turned out to be
increasingly multifaceted and ambiguous. If one reads capoeira only as a weapon against elite oppression
one cannot understand why, for example, slave revolts failed to materialize in nineteenth-century Rio de
Janeiro. As Luiz Sérgio Dias stated, capoeira in that period cannot be treated simply as ‘the clear expression
of a class conflict or an undisputed manifestation of black consciousness’.^58 And as the city developed
further, capoeira and its social context became even more complex.
The broadening of the social base, 1850–1890
Everybody can learn it [capoeira]
The Army general and also the Doctor
(Capoeira ‘prayer’ as sung by M.Pastinha, Bahia)The demographic changes which affected the Cariocan population over these years—creolization, decrease
of the proportion of slaves, and growing importance of European, mainly Portuguese immigration—also
CAPOEIRAGEM IN RIO DE JANEIRO 79