Maria Izabel

Maria Izabel's name survives in a single newspaper record: on December 2, 1914, the Gazeta do Povo of Salvador reported her arrest for street disorder while carrying a knife.

She is one of hundreds of women whose stories were uncovered by historian Paula Juliana Foltran during her doctoral research at the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia. Foltran's thesis, "Mulheres incorrigíveis: capoeiragem, desordem e valentia nas ladeiras da Bahia (1900-1920)" (2019), identified countless women like Maria Izabel - arrested for fighting in the streets, carrying weapons, and refusing to submit to the social order that sought to control them.

These women navigated the same urban geography as male capoeiristas: the streets, the markets, the docks, the ladeiras (hillside streets) of Salvador. They carried the same weapons - navalha (razor), faca (knife), canivete (penknife) - and engaged in the same culture of valentia (bravery/toughness) that defined the capoeiragem of their era.

Maria Izabel's profile in this genealogy serves as a memorial to these hundreds of anonymous women. While figures like Angélica Endiabrada, Salomé, and Maria Doze Homens achieved legendary status through oral tradition and literatura de cordel, most women who fought in the streets of old Bahia left only traces in police records and newspaper crime reports.

Foltran's research demonstrates that the erasure of these women from capoeira history was not due to their absence, but to the systematic way their participation was dismissed. When men fought in the streets, it was valentia; when women did the same, it was merely desordem (disorder). The same acts that built the reputations of male valentões were used to criminalize and forget the women who stood beside them.

Maria Izabel's 1914 arrest record proves she was there. Her inclusion here honors not just her, but all the unnamed women of her generation who helped forge the culture of capoeiragem in the ladeiras da Bahia.