“A Healthy Terror”: Police Repression of Capoeiras in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
O N the night of December 28, 1836, Rio de Janeiro police arrested Graciano, a Mina slave, born in West Africa. He had run afoul of the law before, for disrespect to authority, possession of illegal weapons, and engaging in capoeira. Beyond the gymnastic fighting technique still associated with the term in Brazil today, in the nineteenth century it was used to denote groups or gangs that police authorities in Rio de Janeiro considered a scourge of the city, an activity notorious among young male slaves and the free lower classes. Graciano also had a reputation as a sneak thief, and was in the habit of carrying a blade, with which he had once tried to attack the cashier in his owner's business. Furthermore, he had brazenly declared at various times that he was bent on taking away the willfulness of the whites.' Police brought Graciano before Luis da Costa Franco e Almeida, the justice of the peace in charge of police activity in Sacramento parish, who remanded the slave to the custody of his owner, Jacomo Rombo, resident on Conde Street (now Visconde do Rio Branco) in downtown Rio. Rombo had owned Graciano only six months, but the Mina slave had already tried to escape three times. Rombo decided it was time to teach him a lesson.