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.
Ainda no tin imágen ni vidio pa e suseso aki.
Eventonan Relashoná
What did the 1750 Treaty of Madrid do?
The treaty reassigned inhabited Indigenous territories as imperial possessions.
The Treaty of Madrid treated Indigenous homelands as territory to be exchanged between empires.
The treaty reassigned Guarani mission lands without Indigenous consent.