In 1988 the Brazilian Constitution established that titles of collective land tenure would be granted to quilombos, rural communities that descend from former fugitive slaves.[1] Since then, and in collaboration with many other social movements (grassroots Catholic communities, peasant unions, the Workers’ Party) more than 500 quilombo-descendant communities have come forward to claim their right to collective ownership of land.[2] It is precisely the collective use of land what constitutes the basis of their identity, along with forms of collective work, significant memories about a shared past of slavery and resistance, a considerable degree of endogamy, and other characteristics.
In the following text I am commenting on the main issues related to quilombos in the field of History:
The creation of quilombos or mocambos in Brazil is a process inherent to the existence of slavery. They constituted a form of resistance to this labor regime, although at the same time these groups did not cut all the links with the slave societies. Slavery was considered a monolithically repressive institution, one that caused social death, by a generation of scholars, until some authors pointed out its flexibility and capacity to generate interstices where the slaves could have some control over their lives. Paralleling this change, the conceptual category of quilombo has evolved. If twenty years ago we imagined them following the model of Palmares (permanent armed resistance to the slave regime), at present time these and other books have contributed to change our conceptions about this form of resistance to slavery.
Previous Considerations
Running away from the control of the masters was one of the responses to slavery, perhaps the most typical one (Reis and Gomes: 9). Nonetheless, could lead the slaves to form different types of quilombos. As Flávio Gomes points out, the goal could be forming a stable community with an economy based on agriculture and commercial exchanges (we will discuss these exchanges in the third section of the paper). Alternatively, the fugitive slaves could base their activities in banditry and robbery, or simply run away for a short period of time (what was known in the French Antilles as “petit marronage”). I find this typology very useful to distinguish between different sorts of quilombos (Gomes 34).
Establishing a periodization for the occurrence of quilombos is somewhat more difficult. It seems clear that quilombos existed from the beginning of the plantation system in the Atlantic, before this system reached Brazil. Once there, they were a chronic problem for colonial authorities, although Palmares was a significant watershed. When the economy of Minas Gerais flourished in the eighteenth century, the colonial officials took a series of preventive measures in order to avoid a new Palmares (Lara 85). They had a partial success: no quilombo reached the size of Palmares, although these groupings kept on existing during the entire century. Another time pattern in the emergence of quilombos is the relation to moments of intra-elite conflict. Following the articles from Gomes and Maestri (Gomes 137, Maestri 311) we can state that periods of political, social, or economic turmoil seem to provide more opportunities for slaves to run away and group in quilombos. Moments like the War of Paraguay, the Independence, and the cycle of instability in 1820-40 fostered such a process. Last, it is worth noticing that in the last decades of slavery the quilombos have a marked tendency to establish negotiations with the imperial authorities. More research on this subject during previous centuries is needed, but some cases in Maranhão, Pará, and Bahia lead us to consider this possibility (Funes, Reis 350-358, Vainfas 78, Volpato 226).
The historian comes across a big problem when he intends to study quilombos: the sources. Acknowledged by almost all historians, this limitation imposes a veil on mot internal aspects in quilombos’ history (Reis and Gomes 10, Price 53). What is left? Basically, police, military, and judiciary reports about anti-quilombola activities, sources that, as Richard Price points out, could contain misleading statements (made by captured slaves), partial truths, and observations mediated by cultural assumptions of soldiers and policemen. Nonetheless, researchers have taken the risk of carrying out this analysis.
Internal Aspects of the Quilombos
The defensive strategies of quilombos are one of the most common topics in this field of study. Most authors coincide in that stable communities tend to be located in easily defendable places, although relatively close to nuclei of population. Being not very far away from fazendas, plantations, and towns, allowed these groups to sell their agricultural surplus or mineral goods in exchange for manufactures and other products of interest for them (commercial relations will be further discussed in the next section). In the Amazon these distances increased, but this fact did not disrupt trade because the regatões acted as commercial liaisons (Gomes 37, 83, 157, 264). This relative proximity could be seen as a weakness for quilombos, but we must consider that they did not aspire to confront armed expeditions. Their information networks, and even their alliances to different social sectors, were a valuable resource in foreseeing military expeditions and avoiding capture (Gomes 330, Guimarães 141, Volpato 215, 227, Maestri 300, Funes 487). Slaves in fazendas, merchants, taberneiros, regatões, and even occasionally landowners or state officers were present in such networks. Information went through these networks back and forth, so the communities only had to keep a high degree of spatial mobility so that they could flee rapidly when a punitive expedition was marching to quilombos’ lands. Information, flexibility, mobility, and knowledge of the environment were the most effective defensive resources. Finally, armed resistance was one more defensive tactic, although it appears as the last resort of the communities, given the high price of this tactic.
What was the political structure of quilombos? Several researchers try to unveil the answer to this question using the available, yet scarce, evidence. The influence of Palmares and the observations of those in charge of obliterating the quilombos have led some scholars to hypothesize the existence of kings (Guimarães 148). Nonetheless, building on the example of Palmares, others criticize this idea. This issue remains unclear so far.
The economy of this type of settlements is very interesting. As I said above, some quilombos could rely on banditry as a means of subsistence, although agriculture seems to be the most common way of life. Interestingly enough, we often find some surplus of food that was exchanged by manufactures or expensive products, such as salt, gunpowder, tools, and others. Another prominent activity that yielded marketable products was mining. In Minas Gerais in the 1700s, as in the Turiaçu region in the 1800s, the quilombos exchanged gold for other products, in what constituted for merchants a violation of the “zero tolerance” claimed by state officers (Asunção 451; De Carvalho 417, 420; Funes 482).
Last, two more issues deserve mention in this section about internal feautures. First, not only former slaves inhabited quilombos. Fugitives, poor peasants, and more important, indigenes, also did. Second, the gender imbalance of plantations was usually reproduced in quilombos. That is why quilombolas often went to plantations or made alliances (and wars) with indigenous groups. They were seeking to form families and to reproduce their communities.
The Swamps: External Connections of Quilombos
The social, political, and economic networks of relationships that the quilombos built around them is the main subject in Flávio Gomes’ A Hidra e os Pântanos. If in Liberdade por um Fio the picture of quilombos that are very Brazilian (and not so much African) and very connected to the broader society emerges, here these connections are studied in depth.
One of such relations was that with indigenous groups. Their influence appears in archaeological studies of Palmares, and emerges very clearly in regions where groups of non-assimilated indigenous existed, such as Mato Grosso, Pará, or Maranhão (Funari 46; Funes 482; Karasch 253). In some places, the exchange of knowledge with them constituted a necessity for the quilombos (i.e. the Amazon). Marriages between both groups were also a common phenomenon, whereas conflictive relations were not unheard of by any means. Conflict and collaboration were the two sides of this important relation.
The relation between quilombos and slave revolts is another important external connection. This had already been studied in Caribbean countries, but it constitutes a new approach to the study of slave revolts that can produce new and interesting questions for research (Schwartz 379-380). Moreover, this connection leads us to analyze what Flávio Gomes calls the “campo negro” or black field, a concept that designates the network of relations between slaves in the plantation, freedmen, quilombolas, and, more important, peasants and indigenous as well. Their commercial, informational, political, and material exchanges constitute a thick set of relations that intensely informs the actions of popular sectors wherever slavery was present (Gomes 2005: 271). One of the main virtues of Gomes’ analysis is that he has been able to push this argument even further, and has started discussing the formation of the peasantry from the standpoint of the contributions of Afro-Brazilians. Building again on literature from other nations in the Americas, Gomes has realized that the campos negros have informed the economic, social, and political characteristics of the peasantry in several regions of Brazil (Gomes 1996: 282). I see this as a powerful contribution to the study of the origins of the Brazilian peasantry. The idea that slavery and paternalism had shaped the ideologies of peasants was solidly established by Stuart Schwartz. We also know that indigenous reduced in aldeias had contributed to form the bulk of peasants in many areas, but now the influence of slavery can be considered under the light of these new findings. To what extent did quilombos (and the campos negros in which they participated) informed the political ideas, social formations, and economic activities of the Brazilian peasantry in different regions? After all, perhaps the negotiations of the slaves of the engenho Santana were part of a broader tendency to negotiation and bargain partially inspired by the actions of quilombolas in Bahia and other states. Here we have a new field of research.
Before concluding this section, I would like to highlight the role of regatões, those commercial middlemen typical from the Amazon, in incorporating unassimilated social groups to the nation-state. These commercial agents also appear in studies about indigenes. This is not one of the central points in any of the books, but the peculiarity of commercial middlemen should be researched in depth. How effective were they in transporting ideas back and forth? Didn’t they were a fundamental part in quilombos’ commercial and informational networks? Furthermore, weren’t similar figures very important in the Andes in the 1700s and the 1800s?
Criticisms and Ideas for Further Research
Liberdade por um Fio has the typical problems of a collection of essays, although overall it is effective in conveying the idea that quilombos were a permanent feature of slavery all around Brazil, and that they cannot be reduced to monolithic African enclaves or to heroic fighters against slavery. A Hidra e os Pântanos is equally convincing of the pervasiveness of the quilombos’ networks of relations. It solidly establishes that the swamps were fundamental for quilombos, and that at the local level they were profoundly linked to the broader society. Nonetheless, this book has a little problem: its structure. Brilliant as it is because of the impressive amount of sources and the suggested ideas, the sections about Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Mato Grosso pale when they are compared to those about Pará and Maranhão. I am not sure if with this plan for research the author would have passed the dissertation overview in a demanding department, or if he would have obtained funding in a competitive environment.
One of the questions that come up when these books are read is: what happened to quilombos after abolition of slavery? Gomes recently edited a volume of essays called Quase-Cidadão: Histórias e Antropologias da Pós-Emancipação no Brasil, but there are not too many texts about quilombos on it, and they do not make substantial contributions in terms of new sources or ideas (including Flávio’s and Price’s texts). Another aspect in which the ideas discussed in A Hidra e os Pântanos could be strengthened and developed is testing them at the local level. Gomes himself makes a call to investigate local archives, and it is certainly something we should do if we want to see the ideas of the campo negro and the links to the broader society tested and analyzed in an in-depth local or regional case. Note that despite being very interesting, solidly researched, and broadly focused, the section about Pará in A Hidra sometimes creates the sensation of facing an endless list of examples in an immense region.
Last, I would like to address three areas for further research that I consider of interest. First, religion. Most quilombos were (and their descendants are) catholic. Have we found other religions in quilombos? Why are they catholic? The answer probably lies in the plantation, as Euripedes Funes suggests, but I think that this issue deserves further inquiry. Second: what about ethnicity? If there are clues about the presence of different ethnic groups from Africa in the quilombos, these need to be analyzed. Finally, are there significant differences in the characteristics of quilombos according to the states in which they existed? Or rather, are these differences based on different socio-economic structures of the territories from where they ran away? This could be another interesting path for comparing them and finding new questions and new answers.
[1] Article 68 of the Ato das Disposições Transitórias.
[2] http://www.cpisp.org.br/comunidades/html/menu.html# , visited June 2008; Matilde Ribeiro, “O chamado do quilombo,” Raça Brasil, May 2005; According to some estimates, more than 2,200 such communities could exist in Brazil, Jan Hoffman French, “Buried Alive: Imagining Africa in the Brazilian Northeast,” American Ethnologist vol. 33, No. 3, 340.
WORKS CITED:
1. João José Reis and Flávio Gomes, Liberdade por Um Fio: História dos Quilombos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996)
2. Flávio Gomes, A Hydra e os Pântanos: Mocambos, Quilombos e Comunidades de Fugitivos no Brasil (Séculos XVII-XIX) (São Paulo: Unesp/polis, 2005)
