José Bidel

José Bidel dos Santos was a crabber from São Francisco do Conde in the Recôncavo Baiano. He made his living harvesting crabs from the mangrove estuaries of the Recôncavo, hard work that required intimate knowledge of the tides and marshlands. Like many working men of his generation in the Recôncavo, José Bidel practiced capoeira.

Along with his brother Dendê, José Bidel belonged to the network of capoeiristas connected to Besouro Mangangá and his companions in Santo Amaro. The two brothers associated with some of the most renowned capoeiristas of the early 20th century Recôncavo—Siri de Mangue, who worked as a saveirista (boatman) on the rivers, and Neco Canário Pardo, who taught machete fighting as well as capoeira. According to José Bidel's son Mário, Besouro himself even visited their house, though this would have been before Mário was born, as Besouro was killed in 1924.

What we know of José Bidel comes primarily from the testimony of his son, Mário dos Santos, who would become known as Mestre Mário Buscapé. Mário describes learning capoeira beginning at age eight in improvised rodas in their family's backyard. His uncle Dendê was his first teacher, but his father José Bidel also trained him in the art. The lineage that Mário learned—passed down from Besouro through his companions to Dendê and José Bidel—would eventually reach Rio de Janeiro, where Mário would become one of four founding figures of contemporary capoeira in that city.

José Bidel represents a critical link in capoeira history: a Layer Zero figure from the generation that knew Besouro's companions directly, who preserved the traditional capoeira of the Recôncavo and transmitted it to the next generation before the formal codification of styles. Through his son's teaching and the founding of Grupo Bonfim in 1953, the knowledge José Bidel carried forward from the working-class capoeiristas of São Francisco do Conde became part of the foundation of modern capoeira in Rio de Janeiro.

His life exemplifies the social reality of capoeira in the early 20th century Recôncavo—practiced by working men like crabbers, boatmen, and dock workers, passed informally through families and communities, existing in the margins of a society that had only recently abolished slavery and still treated its Afro-Brazilian population with systematic violence and exploitation.