Gasolina

Gasolina was a capoeirista who moved between two worlds - the rural capoeira circles of Santo Amaro da Purificação in the Recôncavo Baiano and the urban streets of Salvador. His apelido ("gasoline") speaks to the industrial age that was transforming Brazil during his lifetime, though he practiced an art rooted in far older traditions.

In Santo Amaro, Gasolina was among the circle of mestres who trained the legendary Besouro Mangangá's younger cousin, Rafael Alves França, who would become known as Mestre Cobrinha Verde. In an interview, Cobrinha Verde recounted his training: "My true mestre was Besouro, but I learned from many mestres in Santo Amaro. I will give their names one by one: Maitá, Licurí, Joité, Dendê, Gasolina, Siri de Mangue, Doze Homens, Esperidião, Juvêncio Grosso, Espinho Remoso, Neco Canário Pardo". This places Gasolina among the cohort of practitioners who kept capoeira alive in the cane fields and small towns of the Recôncavo.

In Salvador, Gasolina was part of the generation that trained young Cícero Navarro, who would later become Mestre Onça Preta. According to Onça Preta's own testimony, as a boy he "trained with Samuel, Pastinha, Besourinho, Vitor Agaú, Gasolina, Aberrê, and many others who are now dead".

The trajectory of Gasolina's life ended in the brutal police repression of the 1920s. When Pedro de Azevedo Gordilho - the infamous "Pedrito" - became Chief of Police of Bahia in 1920, he launched a systematic campaign to exterminate capoeira practitioners. Mestre Onça Preta remembered the fallen: "Besourinho, Doze Homens, Mãozinha, Antônio Galindéu, Geraldo Chapeleiro, Finado Manteiga, Nagé, Paulo César de Moura, Gasolinha, Juvelino, and many others".

These were not deaths in open combat. Pedrito's cavalry squad would capture capoeiristas and execute them in secret. The bodies would appear days later, thrown into the forest, their backs opened by knife cuts. "Few died of natural causes", Onça Preta said of his teachers' generation. "The majority were assassinated".

With the death of Gasolina and so many others of his generation, an era ended. The knowledge they carried - the undifferentiated capoeira that existed before Bimba's Regional and Pastinha's formalized Angola - passed largely into the memories of their survivors like Cobrinha Verde and Onça Preta, who would become bridges to the documented era of capoeira history.