Help Identify A Martial Art

[Zhang Yong Chun]

This is something that has bothered me for years. With the advent of the internet, perhaps someone knows the answer.

My Grandfather was born in Puerto Rico in the 1800's. I don't know the exact date, but he grew up near the capital, San Juan, and in his youth was quite a fighter.

He knew nothing about China, Japan, or Korea, but practiced some kind of system involving machetes, knives, and bamboo sticks. It sounds like a form of filipino martial arts to me, but machetes and bamboo are common enough in the Caribbean that all sorts of people could have come up a martial arts that use them.

From the little I've seen of it, I would say my Dad received 25% of what my Grandfather knew and I have 10% of what my father learned.

Grandfather was the village champion. He was known for fighting off assorted bandits and ne'er-do-wells, but never formally taught anyone nor did he leave behind any clues as to where he learned his skills or who his "successor" was.

The question is: what art did he practice? The only clues I have are: it was a family system, it is or was an indigenous martial art to Puerto Rico in the 1800's, and that it used machetes and sticks as the primary weapon.

Any clues?

[SimonM]

Nameless carribean fighting system.

Seriously, a lot of people who learned how to fight, even if they were part of a tradition, didn't necessarily have a name, successors, or the other trappings of formal martial arts. You learned how to fight. Maybe you had one teacher, maybe you learned a little from each of several sources.

Sadly this makes them difficult at times to reconstruct... short of going into the bush and beating off bandits with a machette.

[mawali]

oye jibarito!

Many of the Caribbean systems of personal defense have no name and are perhaps a hybrid of African, indigena and Spanish. It is difficult to tell exactly origin but with indio origins, the Caribs were far more fierce thatn the Arawaks (supposedly less warlike? The combination of survival, skill and luck does much to create an art which on the surface seems out of place in an environment but when you look at it, it is part of the societal structure. Just like arnis de mano was influenced by the Spanish use of weapons with the native Filipino silat and their aboriginal system

Pedro Navaja was good with a knife until he met someone better!