Xoco

The Xocó, also recorded as Shocó, Chocó or Ceocose, were an Indigenous people of the lower São Francisco River whose villages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ranged from Sergipe north to southern Ceará. They lived largely itinerant lives, repeatedly slipping away from the mission settlements where the Portuguese tried to concentrate them.

In the late seventeenth century Capuchin friars founded the missions of São Pedro de Porto da Folha and Caiçara in Sergipe, gathering the Xocó together with other peoples, and in 1700 the Portuguese Crown granted the mission Indians a square league of land. At São Pedro, the Xocó kept their Toré ritual alive in secret after the missionaries forbade it.