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A cross in the center of Santo Antônio dos Pretos, at the edge of the Amazon.
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A hundred families harvest a meager living from the palm forests near the village of Santo Antônio dos Pretos. The quilombo was founded by escaped slaves two years before emancipation in 1888.
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Swirling to West African rhythms, residents of the Santa Rosa dos Pretos quilombo celebrate the recovery of a sick neighbor with a tambor de crioula, a “creole drum” festival that mixes African and European traditions.
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Jacey Mendes of Santiago “kills the hunger” with a shot of cachaça, or sugarcane rum. She’s helping clear land to grow cassava root using a slash-and-burn method that some sharecroppers have come to rely on.
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After Brazil’s coastal forests were leveled for sugarcane plantations in the 16th century, millions of slaves were imported from Portuguese Africa. Today farms like this one in the northeast near Rio Formoso produce sugarcane for ethanol, a major export.
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A lone chimney is all that remains of a sugar plantation in Frechal, which was partially deeded to former slaves in 1925. The quilombo applied for, and received, protected status in 1992.
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Maria Tereza Costa removes the husks from rice in typical West African manner—with mortar and pestle—before preparing food for her family in Samucangaua, a quilombo in the state of Maranhão.
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As the sun goes down in Santa Rosa dos Pretos, young Quilombolas gather to dance and socialize. Once a quilombo has title to its lands, it can qualify for credit, invest in equipment, and offer young people jobs and opportunity.
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Feeling for fins, a woman gropes for catfish to feed her family from the Codòzinho river, near quilombo Santo Antônio dos Pretos. Mostly poor and remote, quilombos leave a lighter footprint on the land than the large, industrial farms that surround them.
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Net worth is measured in fish for Juvenildo Serejo, who lives in a coastal quilombo called Itapera and earns his living with a gill net. A few years ago he tried his hand at city life, in São Paulo, but it didn’t suit him and he soon returned to his roots.
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A villager dressed as a bull parades through northeastern Brazil during the festival of Bumba-Meu-Boi (loose translation: “Shake it, ox!”), when virtually every quilombo, and every village and town, celebrates the hero of a Brazilian folktale. In the story a bull is killed by a slave eager to appease his pregnant wife’s craving for bull tongue, and then is magically restored to life.
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Terecô priest Pedro de Souza is “channeling” a menacing female spirit: A client has hired him to cast spells on her unfaithful husband. Terecô is one of the quilombos’ many hybrid religions, interweaving African and Christian beliefs with native practices.
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Trailed by his brother, Roney Mafra totes the head of a bull slaughtered by a relative in Soledade. The meat will feed attendees of Bumba-Meu-Boi.
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