On 3 March 1741, Portugal issued an alvará ordering that Black people found living in quilombos be branded with an “F”; if already branded, an ear was to be cut off. The language reveals a state strategy that turned maroon refuge into a criminal condition and used bodily violence to deter flight. Quilombos were communities of self-emancipated people and their descendants, not merely hideouts. This record documents colonial repression rather than the scale or internal life of those communities, which surviving official archives often describe through the authorities’ hostile gaze.
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