Qualla: Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto

Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ox was called Mansinho - the gentle one. Delmiro Gouveia gave him to Padre Cícero in 1921, and Padre Cícero handed him on to José Lourenço Gomes da Silva, the lay holy man everyone in the Cariri called Beato Zé Lourenço, to look after. That should have been the end of it. Instead the priest's enemies put out word that the peasants around Zé Lourenço were worshipping the animal as a god. The ox was killed. Zé Lourenço was arrested at the urging of Floro Bartolomeu, and released a few days later through Padre Cícero's influence. The accusation had found its shape, though, and it would be used again. Sixteen years later the community he built on the Chapada do Araripe was attacked from the air by its own government.

Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto: Born to Freed Parents

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. A...

Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto: Caldeirão dos Jesuítas

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. O...

Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto: The Word They Chose Was Communism

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto: The Tenth of May

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. ...

Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto: The Grave Nobody Will Name

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...