had an impact on the capoeira universe. As a result, the social and ethnic background of capoeiras in Rio
underwent substantial change during the second half of the nineteenth century. Since slaves and blacks were
always more exposed to police attention, one needs to take into account that the identity of the arrested
capoeiras might not be entirely representative. The change of pattern is nevertheless clear. The proportion of
creole slaves rose continuously among those arrested. In the 1850s, about one third of detained slave
capoeiras were already born in Brazil.^59 The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by the Brazilian
government in 1850 meant that young Africans were no longer disembarked on the shores of the city, and
as a consequence, not only the proportion of Africans within the capoeiras dropped further, but their overall
age also tended to increase.
The number of free practitioners of the art also increased substantially. In 1881, 60 per cent of the
arrested capoeiras were free, against 40 per cent slaves.^60 Slaves still were over represented among the
arrested, since their overall proportion of the population by then was only 17 per cent. The ratio of capoeira
bondsmen, however, dropped even further thereafter, reflecting the fact that slavery, as an institution, was
on the verge of collapse. Urban slave labour had been declining for decades. One reason for this
development was that the coffee plantations—the most dynamic sector of the Brazilian economy in the
second half of the nineteenth century—needed growing numbers of labourers and offered good money for
young slaves. This resulted in an internal, inter-provincial slave trade substituting the transatlantic one after
- Substantial numbers of slaves of productive age from the Northeast and the cities were purchased by
coffee planters from the interior of Rio and São Paulo provinces. Free workers in all professions
increasingly replaced urban slaves. The majority of the free capoeiras that appear in the police files worked
in trades or in the streets as pedlars or porters. Mello Moraes, for instance, illustrated his work with the
photo of a black ‘capoeira taylor’.^61
Increasingly the Portuguese immigrant figured prominently among the free workers in Rio. Not that there
was an absolute lack of Brazilian free labour. Most of the native work force was however of African or at
least mixed ancestry. ‘Scientific’ theories, which became dominant in Europe at the time, proclaimed the
inferiority of non-white ‘races’. Brazilian elites eagerly adopted these notions, which reinforced earlier
racial stereotypes and prejudices. Accordingly, government and elites were all too happy to accept a
massive influx of white European immigrants, which promised to ‘whiten’ the country. Migrants came usually
from impoverished rural and urban backgrounds, and hoped to improve their lives in Brazil. Most immigrants
to Rio came from the overpopulated Atlantic islands (Azores and Madeira), northern Portugal, and some
Spanish provinces, such as Galicia. In 1872, almost 56,000 Portuguese nationals resided in Rio de Janeiro,
representing over a fifth of the city’s population; that proportion remained unchanged until the 1890s.^62
Immigrants were usually young single males, who had to compete with coloured poor Brazilian men for
jobs, housing and even women. No wonder strong animosity against the ‘Galicians’ (galego) often
developed among the native Cariocan population, resulting in a strong stereotype of the clog-wearing, mean
and stupid immigrant, who only socialized with his fellow compatriots.^63 The reality was however more
complex. The Portuguese not only substituted slaves in many skilled jobs, toiling side by side with coloured
or black Brazilians, and enduring similar exploitation (to the point they were called ‘white slaves’). They
also lived in the same squalid accommodation, the cortiços. Since there was no residential segregation,
inevitably many of them ended up assimilating the surrounding popular, and more specifically Afro-
Brazilian, culture.
This is why in the 1860s a growing number of Portuguese were detained for capoeiragem, 64 reflecting
their massive presence in the city, and also their low social status. Among the free capoeiras, black and
increasingly coloured men (classified as pardos) still constituted the majority, but whites—up to the 1850s
rather an exception—came to represent a significant group. In 1885, whites represented at least 22 per cent
80 CAPOEIRAGEM IN RIO DE JANEIRO