Mestre Caiçara's Birthday

Mestre Caiçara was born today, back in 1924, in the city of Cachoeira in São Felix. Mestre Caiçara was famous for his singing, and no capoiera music collection is complete without his Academia Capoeira de Angola São Jorge dos Irmãos Unidos do Mestre Caiçara.

Writer André Luis Lacé Lopez shares some of his memories of the great capoeira mestre and singer:

Many decades back, preoccupied with the growing requests to compare Capoeira to other martial arts, I took advantage of one of my many trips to Salvador to run the dilemma by Mestre Caiçara.

“Each in its own place,” he retorted genially, quickly turning the problem into a non-issue.

A little later, in São Paulo, there occurred another, even better, moment. Invited by an ex-student of his to do a “volta do mundo”, Caiçara noted that the “boy was playing with a certain daring”, this was enough for the mestre to give him a disconcerting cabeçada, knocking his ex-student out of the roda, he took the opportunity to once again profess:

“The clothes of a man aren’t suitable for a boy. These boys today, they barely know how to spell and they think that they know how to read.”

Ha ha! Viva Caiçara!