Quinzinho

Joaquim Felix de Souza, known as Quinzinho, was a feared malandro of the favelas around Central do Brasil station in Rio de Janeiro. He already had a criminal record for murder and had served time in the Colônia Penal before he ever met his most famous student. Heir to the violent capoeira gangs that had terrorized Rio in the 19th century, he represented the last generation of practitioners who still fought in the old style - tiririca, capoeira without berimbau, without music, without the codified traditions that Bahian masters like Bimba and Pastinha were developing in Salvador.

Around 1950 or 1951, the young Demerval Lopes de Lacerda - later known as Mestre Leopoldina - encountered Quinzinho. Leopoldina was eighteen years old, recently released from the SAM (child care service), making a living selling newspapers around Central Station. One day he saw a man "leaping from left to right, standing on his feet and next on his hands". From the next day on, he came every day at seven to train in front of Quinzinho's house.

The training was brutal. Quinzinho would show a movement and tell his student to imitate it. He used no names for the movements - those formal codifications hadn't reached Rio's street fighters. When they sparred, it was with full contact. As Leopoldina later recalled, students in 1950s Rio "learned capoeira taking beatings to 'get smart.'" Yet despite the harsh methods, or perhaps because of them, Quinzinho had "an impeccable work ethic" as a teacher.

Within three or four months, Leopoldina could hold his own, and he became the only person who could truly play with Quinzinho. He joined in his master's fame among the malandros of Rio.

A few years later, Quinzinho was arrested again. This time, he was murdered inside the prison - the Colônia Penal where he had served before. The killing was likely related to his criminal past, part of the endless vendettas that connected Rio's underworld. After his death, Leopoldina disappeared from the streets, fearing retaliation from Quinzinho's enemies.

When Leopoldina resurfaced, he learned that Valdemar Santana, a famous fighter, had brought a Bahian capoeirista named Artur Emídio to Rio. Around 1954, Leopoldina became Artur Emídio's student, learning the Bahian capoeira played to the berimbau - a completely different world from what Quinzinho had taught him.

Quinzinho was part of a generation that managed to transmit something to modern capoeira despite the repression and marginalization. He appears alongside figures like Madame Satã in accounts of this "premodern" Rio lineage. The writer and physician Drauzio Varella mentions him in his book "Estação Carandiru" (1999, p. 270), among the legendary bandits of old Rio.