Americano

Americano is known primarily through a brief mention in Madame Satã's prison memoirs. Although Madame Satã did not consider himself a capoeira practitioner, in his memoirs he mentions some "capoeira rogues" (malandros capoeiras) who were imprisoned in Dois Rios alongside him, including Sete Coroas (who was from Bahia), Edgar, and Americano.

The Dois Rios Correctional Colony (Colônia Correcional de Dois Rios) on Ilha Grande was established in 1894 to imprison "drunkards, beggars, prostitutes, capoeiras, and vagrants". The colony became notorious for its harsh conditions, earning it the nickname "Ilha da Maldição" (Isle of Damnation).

A potentially significant connection exists: Mestre Celso Carvalho do Nascimento (born 1939), a respected capoeira mestre from Rio de Janeiro, mentioned in an interview that he had a cousin nicknamed "Americano" who was imprisoned at the Colony and knew how to do tiririca. According to Mestre Celso, tiririca involved playing on the ground, throwing leg kicks at someone standing up to make them fall, and delivering headbutts. Practitioners at Ilha Grande avoided calling it capoeira.

Whether Mestre Celso's cousin is the same Americano mentioned by Madame Satã remains unverified. If they are the same person, it would place Americano's imprisonment in a timeframe that overlaps with both Madame Satã and Sete Coroas. If different, the coincidence of the same unusual nickname and the same prison suggests tiririca practitioners at Dois Rios may have formed an identifiable group.

Nothing else is known about Americano—not his full name, origin, the nature of his crimes, or his fate after imprisonment.