João de Souza Lima is from Pernambuco, from São José, Egypt, living in Paulo Afonso, Bahia, since 1970. As a cangaço researcher, he achieved a career as a freelance writer, writing more than twenty books. Dedicating himself to the theme of cangaço for decades, Lima visited the village of Malhada da Caiçara, today part of the municipality of Paulo Afonso, in Bahia, where Maria Gomes was born. There he carried out countless interviews with great-nephews, brothers and acquaintances, contemporaries of the cangaço. From this interaction, the “Casa de Maria Bonita” museum project was born, which operates in the restored residence that housed the bandit’s family. The book in question has 265 pages and is divided into 27 chapters.

In the first chapter, the author seeks a description of the rustic setting in which contemporary country people lived, searching for a more poetic language, a somewhat romanticized vision of the land and climate, treated here as a central element. Considering the reduced dimensions of each segment of the book, I analyze in blocks chapters 2, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 that are dedicated to describing the personality of biographed, reporting facts that show a character sculpted by the harshness of the environment and social circumstances. Starting with the description of the village of Malhada da Caiçara, where Maria Bonita and her family lived until her entry into the cangaço, the author highlights the fact that she was the first woman accepted into a group of cangaceiros after falling in love with the supreme leader. He also describes the relationships between the residents, the bossiness of the colonels and the tense environment, about to explode into physical violence, including banditry, fights, raids, firm attitudes, the relationship with her husband and companions. The author also refers to the passive attitude of most of the cangaço women who did not take a stand in the battles with the police squadrons, the construction of a myth around this country woman and, finally, the Grota do Angico massacre, in 28 July 1938.

The third chapter is dedicated to demonstrating that Maria Gomes de Oliveira was born and lived most of her life in Paulo Afonso-BA. I consider the introduction of this chapter to be a synthetic filler, a common place among most writers on the cangaço theme, since the theme addressed here clashes with the rest of the text.

In the fifth chapter, the author problematizes the place of women in the ruin of the gangs. It argues that the mobility of cangaceiros was affected with issues related to female physiology, maternity, such as pregnancy, childbirth and delivery of children to coiters and the muscle disadvantage of cangaceira women in relation to men, which delayed the marches and escapes in times of extreme difficulty.

In the sixth chapter, the agreements between cangaceiros and colonels, very common throughout the Northeast, that guaranteed protection, ammunition and weapons for the first and protection and safe conduct for seconds and their people are treated. To illustrate, he cites the agreement made between Lampião and Colonel João Miguel, agent of the border region of Bahia with Sergipe.

In the seventh chapter, he inserts the reports of the violent actions of the second man in the hierarchy of cangaço, Corisco, who committed atrocities in the vicinity of the settlement where Maria Bonita was born, which led to disagreements between the two brave, since Lampião wanted that safe area and For this peace and security were essential. This chapter follows the same logic of chapter 3, moving from the central object of the work.

Chapters 10 and 11 can also be classified as divergent from the central theme. Here, the author reports a baptized in a region relatively close to the town Malhada da Caiçara in which he participated Lampião and other group chiefs. The party ended in rush and shooting due to the arrival of the police. The chapter also tells another fight between Lampião and a police group in the place called Vargem Grande.

In chapter 16, finally, the author reports betrayal stories by coiters and “landscapes”, as the non -combatants who were not part of the cangaceiros help network were called. These are stories of revenge, with refinement of cruelty, narrated in detail by the author, in a appealing way.

This tone and the language used, as we see, is a negative point of the work. Another disability is the excessive romanticization of the events reported by the interviewees. This romantization does not materialize at times when the author himself, in the first person, discusses in a perfunctory way on the social issues that afflicted the region at the time. As for the social context, the reader will realize that the work is missing a more consistent analysis of misery and the absence of the state and its implications in the country’s life and the phenomenon of cangaço.

The positive points of the work, on the other hand, reside in the survey with oral, documentary sources and the literature review. It was a task that requested years of prospecting for travel to the villages where the descendants of the Queen of Cangaço reside. In this regard, two brothers of Maria Gomes, cousins, sisters -in -law and known, contemporaries or children of people who lived the late 1920s, a temporal landmark of their decision to accompany Virgulino Ferreira da Silva as his wife, were interviewed. The author has created such a strong bond with the community that today is an almost member between the caboclos of Malhada da Caiçara and Sítio do Tará.

Regarding the central objective of the work, the author then partially fulfilled the task of portraying the personality of the biographed and identifying the causes that led it to cangaço. The book is of great value for scholars in the history of the region, mainly because the information collected could be lost by the fluidity of memory. They added a lot about what was known about Maria Bonita, knowledge generated by renowned writers such as Antonio Amauri. When flipping through the book in question, the feeling that the reader has is to experience the actions and tragedies of the cangaceirism that plagued the Brazilian Northeast for decades, given the author’s narrative narrative.

Summary of A trajetória guerreira de Maria Bonita, a rainha do cangaço: sua biografia