Mauricio Acuña, Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Project Title: Mestre Pastinha: The Transnational Legacies of an Afro-Brazilian Intellectual of Capoeira

Mestre Pastinha was more than a capoeira master — he was a philosopher, a cultural architect, and a major Afro-diasporic intellectual. With IBICL support Acuña will prepare a monograph that recovers that legacy through archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, tracing how Pastinha’s teachings have traveled, transformed, and taken root across the diaspora to shape Black cultural and intellectual traditions far beyond Brazil.