Antônio Corró

Antônio Corró was born in 1870, during the final decades of slavery in Brazil. He was an enslaved person who gained freedom either through manumission or the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) of 1888, when he would have been eighteen years old. He was illiterate, as was common for the enslaved population denied access to education.

Corró worked as a cart driver (carroceiro) at the Cais Dourado in Salvador—a location that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was legendary as a gathering point for capoeiristas. The Cais Dourado and the surrounding Pilar district were zones of commerce, maritime labor, and notoriously, capoeira. Stevedores, dock workers, and saveiristas congregated there, and the area witnessed frequent clashes between capoeiristas and police under the persecution of figures like José Alvaro Cova.

In 1932, when Corró was sixty-two years old, he began teaching capoeira to young Oswaldo Lisboa dos Santos—later known as Mestre Paraná—in the Alto das Pombas neighborhood, in the Federação district of Salvador. This places Corró among the last generation of capoeiristas who had been born into slavery and who transmitted the art to what would become the modern era.

Corró's fate after the early 1930s is undocumented. When Mestre Paraná left Salvador for Rio de Janeiro in February 1945, Corró would have been seventy-five years old, if still alive. No record of his death has been found.

Though Corró left almost no historical trace beyond the testimony of his student, his legacy endures through Mestre Paraná, who became one of the four founding lineages of Contemporary Capoeira in Rio de Janeiro. Through Paraná, Corró's lineage extends to Grupo Muzenza and countless practitioners worldwide. He represents the anonymous layer of African and Afro-Brazilian ancestors who preserved and transmitted capoeira through the era of criminalization and persecution.