Between Black Roots and Asphalt: Quilombola Land Struggles in Brazil

By marina dadico amâncio de souza, Ph.D. Student in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC-Santa Cruz

Between Black Roots and Asphalt: My Research and the Fieldwork

Brazil is globally recognized for its significant Black population and vibrant Black culture. Against this backdrop, scholars concerned with the African diaspora have become increasingly interested in the land struggles of quilombos—often defined as Afro-Brazilian communities formed by descendants of fugitive enslaved Africans. Communities like the Brazilian quilombos have been present across the Américas since the introduction of the slave trade and have been known by various names, like cumbes, palenques, cimarrónes, marrons, businenge, and maroons in the English language. Special interest in the Brazilian case is tied to the successful demand of Black social movements for the recognition of the territorial rights of Black communities in the country’s current Federal Constitution in 1988. While these activists had initially demanded that the government should allocate lands to Black rural populations, they had to settle for a constitutional clause that granted territorial rights to communities descending from early quilombos (Bledsoe 2017). On the one hand, this process represented a significant milestone for Black communities in their struggle for collective rights in Brazil. On the other hand, quilombolas—members of these quilombo communities—were now faced with the need to “prove” their legitimacy. Within this context, social science research, and anthropology in particular, became especially instrumental in centering academic discussions about quilombos on the juridical aspects of their struggles for land tenure and debates about the authenticity of their identity claims. 

Notably, such debates have been the stage of intense disagreements about what constitutes contemporary quilombos. Among some of the enduring assumptions about them, early literature helped craft narratives that almost solely imagined these communities in rural settings. It also supported the popular perception that quilombos were formed exclusively by fugitive slaves, leaving out the massive participation of free and freed Africans and their descendants, as well as the incorporation of Indigenous and European members. Much of the scholarship that first recovered colonial-era quilombos as a symbol of Afro-Brazilian resistance also overrepresented male leaders like Ganga Zumba and Zumbi dos Palmares while framing their practices through a masculinist grammar of virile leadership and military strategy. Narratives like these inadvertently supported assumptions that obscured the dynamic and multi-dimensional nature of contemporary quilombos, limiting our understanding of them as living, breathing communities that actively shape cultural, social, and political practices beyond rigid temporal and spatial frames. 

Similarly, these narratives contributed to a research landscape where urban quilombos and the mobilization practices of quilombola women in these contexts have often been overlooked or understudied. Beyond disrupting notions about gender and urbanity, contemporary women-led quilombos in the country’s southernmost metropolis, Porto Alegre, also challenge traditional historiographies about the Brazilian South. These productions have privileged whiteness as a source of regional exceptionalism while downplaying the memory of Blackness, and thus quilombos, to devise a regional identity. This discourse has not only made the notion of quilombos existing in the region seem counterintuitive, but it also fed into the spatial organization of cities like Porto Alegre, where 20th-century urbanization displaced Black communities to the peripheries to make space for local elites and European immigrants who arrived via state-sponsored whitening policies (Leite 1996; Bonetto 2019; Oliveira 2022). As wealthy districts were built, the few Black families that remained were squeezed between the emerging luxury condominiums and formed the quilombos that exist in the city today. 

Within this context, quilombola women leaders in Porto Alegre confront unique challenges compelling them to create spaces that both support their land claims and enable them to mobilize their communities. These practices include performing Afro-Indigenous religious rituals, building community gardens and kitchens, holding sexual education and consent workshops, preserving quilombola dance and soundscapes, hosting meetings with leaders from other quilombos, Indigenous communities, and neighborhood associations, and devising responses to environmental degradation. As such, these leaders navigate not only land tenure law, police violence, state surveillance, and general spatial exclusion but also craft spaces to practice freedom in a particularly white-coded region. 

While my larger doctoral project focuses on quilombola women’s mobilization practices toward land rights in the Brazilian Urban South, I hope to establish critical dialogues with other contexts to think about broader struggles toward Black liberation. As such, in the summer of 2023, I traveled to Porto Alegre and West Pará to engage in pre-dissertation fieldwork on quilombola mobilizations. My interest in this trip was rooted in scholarship suggesting that, following the enactment of the current Federal Constitution in 1988, political alliances among different quilombos were first formed in the Brazilian North, particularly in the present-day states of Pará and Maranhão. By studying the history of these alliances and the ongoing struggles of the communities that articulated them, I aimed to deepen my understanding of contemporary quilombola mobilizations and the formation of solidarity networks, a political practice I was already familiar with from my time working with quilombos in Porto Alegre.

My trip was comprised of visits to Porto Alegre and three cities in West Pará: Oriximiná, Óbidos, and Belém. In Porto Alegre, I examined archival documents that revealed a history of dispossession and urban segregation among Black communities. Present-day quilombola leaders in this city formed a local alliance of quilombola leaders called Frente Quilombola do Rio Grande do Sul (FQRS), or Quilombola Front of Rio Grande do Sul, and drew from their shared histories of oppression to organize their struggles against ongoing urban renewal projects that threaten to displace their communities today. In West Pará, I reviewed archival documents and engaged in informal conversations with community leaders to investigate the historical trajectory of quilombola mobilizations in the region, particularly related to the “Black Roots Encounter,” or Encontro Raízes Negras. First held in 1988, this event laid the foundation for the emergence of one of the first quilombola networks to join different communities cross-regionally in Brazil in 1989, Associação das Comunidades Remanescentes de Quilombos do Município de Oriximiná (ARQMO), or Association of the Remnant Communities of Quilombos of the Municipality of Oriximiná. 

By drawing connections between ARQMO and FQRS as two distinct yet similar groups, I sought to consolidate the goals of my doctoral research further and determine critical contexts and communities for my dissertation research. In both rural and urban quilombos that I visited or familiarized myself with, I noticed how women played a crucial role in quilombola land mobilizations, especially in archiving collective strategies of struggle and occupying leadership positions. I also realized the need for further exploration of the urban/rural distinction and how that might shape my project moving forward. Ultimately, the primary contribution from this fieldwork was identifying gender and space as some of the central analytical dimensions of my investigation into quilombos and their ongoing struggles and mobilization practices toward land tenure.

Ultimately, this experience consolidated my determination to develop a transnational approach to marronage and quilombola mobilizations, drawing connections with other Afro-diasporic movements across the Américas and beyond. I was encouraged to think more critically about the global dimensions of Black resistance and how my local investigations are indicative of broader struggles toward Black liberation. As I focus on the specific practices of resistance to anti-Black spatial exclusion within women-led urban quilombos in the Brazilian South, I seek to offer new insights into community-based responses to how race and gender are inscribed into narratives of regional identity and spatial organization in the context of urban segregation. Additionally, while land-based communities have been increasingly threatened by the rise of neo-conservative forces and climate crises worldwide, Brazil has been reported to be the most murderous country for land and environmental defenders (Global Witness 2023). Within this context, the gendered nature of land struggles has also raised global concerns for the specific patterns of violence that impact women land defenders. My dissertation expands research on these interactions by following maroon women leaders and their strategies to resist the specifically urban expressions of gender-based and socioterritorial violence that threaten their communities and themselves. In this sense, I contribute to a larger body of literature that theorizes about Black women-led mobilizations, the intersection between gender, race, and socioterritorial conflicts, and urban land-based struggles in the Black diaspora.