Bryan Castle has been a practitioner of the Brazilian martial artform of capoeira for 22 years, studying throughout North America and Brazil with teachers such as the late Contramestre Dondi “Enxu” in Tucson. Castle teaches capoeira at Movement Culture, Casa de Cultura, and leads Capoeira Quilombolas in Tucson, where he works to preserve the traditional dances and music of Brazil by supporting and honoring aging mentors and nurturing new and emerging artists. He is a 2021 recipient of an SFA Master-Apprentice Artist Award. He spoke with BorderLore about his own history with the practice and its historical and current significance.

While some may know you as Bryan Castle, others know you by another name. Could you introduce that self?

Within the Capoeira world I’m known as Contra Mestre Besouro Preto Manganga. Besouro Preto Manganga means “wicked black beetle.” I have a giant tattoo of a beetle on my back, and I’d just got it when my master came. He named me that. That’s indicative of Capoeira – the names are used to hide your identity, because the bourgeoisie of the times decided capoeira should be illegal for many decades. Because who was doing Capoeira at that time? Enslaved people, dark-skinned people, Indigenous people. They were using it to free themselves. One way to keep enslaved people – or people you consider lower class – down is to not let them have an art of resistance, not let them fight you back. So if you got caught and sent to jail, they’d tell you to write your name in the ledger tally – boom. So now you want to go get a job at the wood mills or over at the cane fields, that plantation owner or that sugar cane manager will go to the local law enforcement and say, “Hey, I’m getting ready to hire this guy. Seems like a good worker but he’s black, he’s brown. I want to make sure that he’s not a troublemaker. So do you have any record on him?” They look in the records and there’s a couple of black guys in here, but it says Besouro Preto, Chapeu de Couro or the “Leather Hat.” They thought that the enslaved people were named stuff like that; they didn’t question it. Because again, they thought they were lower class people so, you know, they used those names to hide their identity. It’s part of that malicia or that trickery, street hustling you learn to get by.

As for my title, Contramestre, “mestre” does not mean master, and you can understand why we don’t use master in the Capoeira context – because of the past and the history of it. Mestre means teacher just like in other Latino languages and vernaculars. Contramestre means navigator, the person assisting the mestre. Mestre is like grande mestre, the great teacher. And contramestre is the one working for and aspiring to be that, working up through society and serving his community.