Who was Maria Quitéria?

A war in the Recôncavo

Maria Quitéria de Jesus was born around 1792 near Feira de Santana, in the interior of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, the daughter of a smallholder. She grew up on the land, far from the port city of Salvador and its politics. In 1822 the politics came to her.

That year, even before the cry of Ipiranga, Bahia was already at war. Portuguese troops under General Madeira de Melo held Salvador. The answer came from the Recôncavo, the farm country around the Bay of All Saints: planters, farmhands, freedmen, enslaved men and Indigenous fighters formed an army to besiege the city. That wider war is in Was Brazil’s independence peaceful?.

Soldier Medeiros

Women could not enlist. Maria Quitéria left home in 1822, put on men’s clothes and signed up under her brother-in-law’s surname, Medeiros. To the army she was Soldier Medeiros.

The disguise did not last. Found out, she did not go home: she stayed in the ranks and fought on through the campaign that tightened the ring around Salvador, until the Portuguese sailed away on July 2, 1823. Bahia still celebrates that day as its own independence day, the Dois de Julho, and she is one of its heroines.

She was not the only woman in that war. The abbess Joana Angélica was killed in February 1822 trying to keep Portuguese soldiers out of her convent in Salvador. On the island of Itaparica, oral tradition keeps the name of Maria Felipa, whose story has no written record from the time.

A medal from the emperor

In 1823 Maria Quitéria traveled to Rio de Janeiro. Pedro I, now emperor, gave her the insignia of a knight of the Imperial Order of the Southern Cross, the order he had created for his coronation in December 1822. A countrywoman from Bahia, decorated as a soldier, at court.

In Rio she also met the English writer Maria Graham, who was traveling in Brazil and described her in her Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, published in London in 1824. That meeting is one of the best windows we have on her life, because Graham set down what she saw and heard from Maria Quitéria herself.

How she is remembered

Maria Quitéria died in Salvador in 1853, far from fame. The twentieth century brought her back. The uniformed portrait that appears in Brazilian schoolbooks was painted by Domenico Failutti in 1920, long after her death. Since 1996 she has been patron of the Brazilian Army’s Complementary Officer Corps. Another woman who shaped 1822, from a palace rather than a battlefield, is in Did Maria Leopoldina sign Brazil’s independence?.