by Lanie Millar, Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages
In August, 2025, I descended from a tour bus into a misty morning on top of the Serra da Barriga, a mountain in Alagoas, Brazil. I was there as part of a tour of the Quilombo dos Palmares Memorial Park, a national heritage site commemorating the largest known community of fugitives from slavery (quilombos) in the Americas, which flourished throughout the 17th century. Before setting off on the tour, our guide, Mestre Gil, sat us in a circle. “How many of you know the story of Palmares? About Brazil’s quilombos?” Almost everyone among our group of about 20—all Brazilians except for me—professed little knowledge of these complex polities, which were key to Black Brazilians’ survival and cultural preservation during the 16th–19th centuries.
Mestre Gil explained that this ignorance was neither rare nor unexpected. Black Brazilians have had a limited presence in Brazil’s recorded history since its independence in 1822, a lack that Mestre Gil said he regularly confronted as a high school teacher. Most of the group’s participants did, however, know the basic story of Palmares’s best known inhabitant, Zumbi (1655–1695). We had visited two statues of Zumbi, Palmares’s famed leader who died in battle against Portuguese colonial forces, on the bus ride to the park.
As a researcher investigating literature, film, and art about Zumbi in the 20th–21st centuries, I expected Mestre Gil to start where most versions of Palmares offered in museums and textbooks begin and end: with Zumbi as an exceptional hero who resisted enslavement, often the only such resistance fighter in Brazil’s 400-year history of slavery identified by name. Mestre Gil, however, told a different story. His was one of a complex confederation founded and led by a matriarch named Acotirene (Oliveira 1998, 23), a key architect of the defense strategies that Black and indigenous inhabitants of Palmares relied on for their survival. Mestre Gil’s tour emphasized gender equity in Palmares’s collaborative political and social structures. In his version, the collective guaranteed Palmares’s century-long survival, rather than the individual male heroes frequently commemorated in public art and popular culture.
During the late 20th century, Zumbi became a cultural touchstone for activists and artists, especially those engaged in activism against racism. During the 1970s–1980s, for example, popular music associated with resistance against Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985) celebrated Zumbi as an exceptional warrior, and literature and film portrayed Palmares as a place from which his spirit of resistance could be recuperated (Ben 1974; Nascimento 1979; Diegues et. al. 1984; Gil 1984). In 1988, as the country ratified a new, democratic constitution after the dictatorship, state events also celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Abolition and re-democratization were characterized by the state as two moments of collective liberation.
However, Black intellectuals and activists objected to casting abolition and democratization as acts of state benevolence. Rather, they argued that abolition and re-democratization were hard-won changes led by Black historical actors who organized and struggled to bring them about (Nascimento 1998). Activists called instead for a day of Black Consciousness, which was finally federally recognized in 2011 as the Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness, and celebrated on November 20, the day of Zumbi’s death. What remained consistent throughout this period was the image of an exceptional male warrior struggling in battle against oppression. The heroic figure of Zumbi came to stand for the Black Brazilian community in general.
During the 21st century, as artists and writers have engaged more deeply with art as a mode of excavating the Black past, narratives of Zumbi and Palmares have undergone a transformation. More complex portrayals of Palmares de-emphasize Zumbi as a single Black patriarch, and focus instead on a wider vision of Palmares as a community, including women leaders such as Acotirene. Like Mestre Gil, these works represent the quilombo as a complex social and political space where cooperation and strategic collaboration were necessary for Palmares to operate as a physical and symbolic refuge.
The story Mestre Gil told of Palmares is a reminder of how powerfully literature, art, and public memory interact. They have the capacity to shift the way we see history, and to help us imagine a more inclusive and just present.
—Lanie Millar is an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Romance Languages. She received a 2025 CSWS Faculty Research Grant for this project.
References
Ben, Jorge (Jorge Duílio Lima Menezes). 1974. “Zumbi.” Philips Records.
Diegues, Carlos, et al. 1984. Quilombo. New Yorker Video.
D’Salete, Marcelo. 2018. Angola Janga. Polvo.
D’Salete, Marcelo. 2020. “Acotirene Aqualtune Lucrecia Dandara.” 2020. Ink on Paper, 47.9 x 37.9 cm. Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
Gil, Gilberto. 1984. “Zumbi: A felicidade guerreira.” WEA.
Nascimento, Abdias. 1979. Sortilégio II: Mistério Negro de Zumbi Redivivo. Paz e Terra.
Nascimento, Abdias. 1998. Speech in the Federal Senate of Brazil, May 13, 1998, https://www25.senado.leg.br/web/atividade/pronunciamentos/-/p/pronunciamento/226669.
Oliveira, Eduardo de. 1998. Quem é quem na negritude brasileira. Congresso Nacional Afro-Brasileiro/ Secretaria Nacional de Direitos Humanos do Ministério da Justiça.