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Mestre Bimba and the capoeira that was forbidden

Capoeira was a crime under the 1890 Penal Code. Mestre Bimba created the Regional style, opened a school in Salvador and, in 1937, got it licensed.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Manoel dos Reis Machado, Mestre Bimba, was born in Salvador, Bahia, on November 23, 1899 or 1900; sources disagree on the year. He started capoeira as a boy, at a time when practicing it could land you in jail.

The no

The no, for capoeira, was written into law. The Penal Code of 1890, the Republic's first, punished in article 402 anyone who performed in streets and squares "exercises of agility and bodily dexterity known by the name of capoeiragem". Capoeira, born among enslaved Africans and their descendants, was treated as a police matter.

It wasn't only the law. It was prejudice: capoeira was seen as something for troublemakers, dangerous people, the street.

What they did

Bimba answered with method. Around 1928 and 1929, he developed his own style, which he called Luta Regional Baiana, later known as capoeira Regional. The name avoided the forbidden word. He created a teaching sequence, rules of conduct for students and a way of training that brought capoeira inside a school.

In 1932, he founded the Centro de Cultura Física Regional in Salvador. In 1937, according to the Mestre Bimba Foundation, the school was the first capoeira academy to obtain an operating license. In the 1930s, Bimba and his students performed for the federal administrator of Bahia, Juracy Magalhães, and in 1953, according to the same foundation, for President Getúlio Vargas, who is said to have called capoeira the only truly national sport.

Bimba died on February 5, 1974, in Goiânia. Forty years later, in 2014, the capoeira circle was recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Capoeira, once a crime, became the world's heritage.

What this has to do with Bairo

This is the most personal bridge in the story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. Before the language, before the country, came the rhythm of the berimbau. Capoeira was the first thing from Brazil that he, a Colombian boy, learned with his body. Capoeira was the bridge.

What Bairo carries from capoeira is the ginga, the movement that never stops. And what he recognizes in Mestre Bimba is the path of turning a no written into law into a yes recognized by the world: with method, discipline and patience, without denying the origin.

Bairo doesn't call himself a master of anything. He pays tribute to someone who opened the door through which many people, including foreigners like him, arrived in Brazil through the body before arriving through the map.

Read: Capoeira was the bridge · One name, four presences

Sources

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