There is no official papangu costume, and that is precisely why the tradition has survived. Masks get made from whatever will hold a face: papier-mâché, hollowed coité gourds, mass-produced plastic bought off a shelf. Handmade and factory-made walk the same street without embarrassment. The papangu also belongs to a wider northeastern family of masked figures — the bicho papão, the bogeyman invoked to hurry children to bed, sits somewhere in its ancestry — and a crowd of anonymous faces moving through a small town retains a genuine edge of menace under the celebration. Carnival here dates to the nineteenth century and is counted among the most traditional in Pernambuco. For a municipality of roughly sixty thousand people a hundred kilometres from Recife, being nationally known for masks is no small achievement.

Bezerros is not certain how it got its name, and it keeps three answers ready. One credits the Bezerra family, who held the land. Another points to a spot where cattle were branded. The third is a story: a Bezerra child went missing, a promise was made to São José, the child was found alive on 20 May, and a chapel went up in gratitude. The municipality dates itself to May 1870, and even the record disagrees over whether that was the 18th or the 20th — a small monument to how towns actually remember themselves. Three rivers touch the municipality's 490 square kilometres, the Capibaribe, the Ipojuca and the Una, which in semi-arid country is reason enough for anyone to have stopped here in the first place.

José Francisco Borges was born in Bezerros on 4 August 1935. At twenty-one he decided to write cordel, the pamphlet verse of the northeast sold strung on a line at markets, and he did what beginners do: he hired someone else, Mestre Dila, to cut the woodblock for the cover. Then the money ran out. Borges carved his own instead — a church facade, for a cordel about Frei Damião — and the improvisation became a career. He produced more than two hundred cordéis and grew into the most recognised xylographer Pernambuco has produced. UNESCO awarded him its prize for educational and cultural action; President Fernando Henrique Cardoso decorated him in 1999; he was one of thirteen artists chosen to illustrate the United Nations calendar for 2002, the New York Times profiled him in 2006, and Pernambuco named him a living heritage. His prints hung in Zurich in 1992 and in Santa Fe, and the Museu de Arte do Rio opened a retrospective in January 2022. He died in Bezerros on 26 July 2024, aged eighty-eight, in the town he had spent a lifetime carving.

The town sits at 470 metres, but Serra Negra, the ecological reserve at the municipality's edge, reaches 957 — high enough to catch moisture the surrounding scrub never sees, and green because of it. The Igreja de São Francisco Xavier stands up there, and the camping ground at Sítio Pedra Solta puts visitors within reach of the rock faces. These uplands once grew coffee. That trade has long since faded from the region, and Bezerros now lives on commerce, tourism and agriculture, with tomatoes and cattle doing much of the work. Nearly five hundred square kilometres of territory, one highway through the middle of it, and a wet mountain at the rim of dry country.

Borges was never the only one, and Bezerros has kept the workshops open. J. Miguel cuts woodblocks and writes cordel here as well. Lula Vassoureiro keeps an atelier. The Centro de Artesanato de Pernambuco gives the whole trade a shopfront. So a town best known for a carnival in which everybody hides their face also maintains a durable second identity built on named, signed, individual hands — the poet who cut his own covers, the mask-makers, the block-carvers. Both traditions run on the same materials, when you think about it: a piece of wood, a dried gourd, and somebody willing to shape it.