Performatividade e resistência na trajetória esportiva de Waldemar Santana: interfaces entre educação, esporte, cultura e imprensa. Um estudo comparado entre Rio de Janeiro e Salvador, 1953-1970

Abstract

This thesis presents an analysis of the documentary corpus composed of journalistic sources that narrate the sports trajectory of Waldemar Santana, a prominent Brazilian “vale-tudo” fighter in the 1950s. His history – marked by his migration from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro, his rise in jiu-jitsu, and his emblematic confrontation with Hélio Gracie – reflects the dynamics of power, recognition, and contestation that permeated both the sporting world and a society in transformation. Like football, vale-tudo was a sport frequently covered by sports sections in newspapers of that period. We conducted a documentary survey with the aim of reconstructing Waldemar Santana’s career, drawing on narratives published in sports news between 1953 and 1970. The adopted methodology consisted of a comparative analysis of hemerographic sources organized around two geographical axes: Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. Regarding the Rio de Janeiro newspapers, the investigation was carried out using the collections of the National Library through the Brazilian Digital Newspaper Archive (Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira). Relevant records were identified in the following publications: A Noite, Correio da Manhã, Diário Carioca, Diário da Noite, Diário de Notícias, Jornal do Brasil, Jornal do Commercio, Jornal dos Sports, Luta Democrática, Manchete Esportiva, Manchete, O Globo, O Jornal, Revista do Esporte, Revista do Rádio, Tribuna da Imprensa, Última Hora, among others. For the Salvador context, the research focused on local institutions of historical preservation, particularly the Ruy Barbosa Library, affiliated with the Geographic and Historical Institute of Bahia (GHIB). In these repositories, materials were catalogued from the newspapers A Tarde, Diário da Bahia, Diário de Notícias, Estado da Bahia, Jornal da Bahia, and Tribuna da Bahia. By the end of the research, Waldemar Santana’s trajectory emerges as a privileged locus for analyzing the disputes over symbolic and cultural capital within the “vale-tudo” and martial arts field in Brazil-where victories and defeats matter less as absolute measures of technical efficiency and more as elements of social, racial, and regional distinction. The study repositions Waldemar Santana at the center of the narrative and contributes to destabilizing crystallized beliefs about the history of “vale-tudo” and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, while also revealing the mechanisms that marginalize bodies and trajectories in sports and highlighting the power of the press in producing memory and forgetting.