José Lourenço was born on 22 January 1872 at Pilões de Dentro, in Paraíba, to Lourenço Gomes da Silva and Teresa Maria da Conceição - both formerly enslaved people who had been granted their freedom. Slavery itself would not end in Brazil until 1888, when their son was sixteen. At about twenty he went to Juazeiro do Norte to rejoin family who had migrated ahead of him looking for farm work, and there he came into the orbit of Padre Cícero, the priest whose following had turned Juazeiro into the great pilgrimage city of the Northeast. Zé Lourenço never learned to read. What he had instead was organisation. From the mid-1890s he rented ground at Sítio Baixa Dantas and drew pilgrims and drought refugees around him, handing out the day's tasks, teaching planting, teaching the folk medicine of the sertão.

In 1926 the owner of Baixa Dantas sold the land out from under them, and the people who had worked it were paid nothing. Padre Cícero moved the whole community onto a large property in Crato known as Caldeirão dos Jesuítas, and there they started again. Each family had a house. Orphans became Zé Lourenço's godchildren. The residents built a church and laid out a cemetery. Labour was collective and the harvest was divided in equal shares; what was left over was sold, and the money went for medicine and kerosene. By the great drought of 1932, when the sertão emptied itself toward anywhere with food, Caldeirão held more than a thousand people. Religion set the calendar - pilgrimages, litanies, Mass on Sundays and holy days. Cooperation set the economy. When Padre Cícero died in 1934, much of the Northeast began looking to the illiterate farmer from Paraíba as his successor.

That was the problem. Caldeirão worked, and it worked without landlords. Labourers were leaving hard estates for a settlement where the crop was split evenly, and the men who owned those estates noticed what that implied. With Padre Cícero dead, the protection his name had given was gone too. In September 1936 the fazenda was invaded and destroyed by forces of Getúlio Vargas's government, on the accusation that justified nearly anything in Brazil that year: communism. Survivors regrouped elsewhere and began a third time. Meanwhile the authorities in Crato and the Ceará press started reporting that fanatics were massing to march on the city, kill its people and burn it. It was a rumour, and it travelled.

A detachment was sent to watch the new settlement - Captain José Bezerra and eleven police soldiers out of Juazeiro do Norte. The peasants found them first. In the confrontation that followed, Captain Bezerra was killed along with three of his soldiers and five of the community. Now the rumour had a body count attached to it. It reached Menezes Pimentel, governor of Ceará, who asked the Minister of War, Eurico Gaspar Dutra, for support; Dutra authorised the commander of the 7th Military Region to provide whatever assistance was required. On 10 May 1937 the settlement was attacked by ground forces and by military aircraft. The official death toll was four hundred. Other estimates run past a thousand, and one account puts the figure near seven hundred. Nobody can be certain, because nobody has ever been shown the grave.

Zé Lourenço got away west into Pernambuco and lived nine more years at Exu, dying of bubonic plague on 12 February 1946 at seventy-four. A crowd carried his body back across the plateau to Juazeiro do Norte and buried him in the Socorro cemetery. The Brazilian Army and the Ceará Military Police have never disclosed where the dead of Caldeirão were put; the mass grave is believed to lie at Caldeirão itself or at a place called Mata dos Cavalos. In 2008 the NGO SOS Direitos Humanos sued the state of Ceará and the Army to have the site revealed, the bodies exhumed, the survivors and families compensated, and the massacre written into the official record. The 16th Federal Court in Juazeiro do Norte dismissed the case without ruling on its merits. The following year the group took Brazil before the Organization of American States for forced disappearance. What stands on the ground today is a chapel, the ruins of the cemetery and a cross. In 2022 Ceará turned the site into a state park and the romaria returned to Crato; thirty-seven kilometres away, forty-seven families farm a settlement they named 10 de Abril.