The river is territory: Quilombolas in defense of the waters of eastern Amazonia

Abstract

In 2023, images of diminished Amazonian river channels, small ribbons of bluish-brown surrounded by massive sand banks, captivated Brazilian and international audiences. Eco-social activists, concerned government officials, and the international environmental movement brought attention to these apocalyptic landscapes: The seemingly infinite water resources of the expansive Amazon Basin reduced to a trickle. This paper calls for a local territorialization of rivers, specifically in Brazil's eastern Pará state where the pressures of development arrived with the opening of the Belém-Brasília Highway (1960), Trans-Amazonian Highway (1972), and Tucuruí Dam (1984). We write from a region accustomed to devastation under the mantra of economic growth and development. We offer three principal interventions within the framework of the river as territory. First, we emphasize the importance of the small tributaries, referred to locally as igarapés, which nourish these rivers. Next, in order to arrive at the affective power of rivers in Quilombola societies, we must consider the historical role of rivers as landscapes of flight, fear, and expert knowledge–factors in the formation of hydro-survivance which connects the layers of the past to the present moment in the Quilombola politics. Finally, rivers create the possibility of movement, and in this case, eco-social movements which network dispersed Quilombola communities with each other, but often go further, resulting in coalitions between Quilombolas, Indigenous groups, traditional populations (such as ribeirinhos), and environmentalists.

Introduction

In 2023, images of diminished Amazonian river channels, small ribbons of bluish-brown water surrounded by massive sand banks, captivated Brazilian and international audiences. Eco-social activists, concerned government officials, and the international environmental movement brought attention to these apocalyptic landscapes: The seemingly infinite water resources of the expansive Amazon Basin were reduced to a trickle. In December of 2023, the rains returned. Life began to reclaim familiar patterns as riverine communities found swelling channels, and they renewed their deep ties with the Basin's rivers and tributary streams (igarapés). 2024 brought the return of the brutal drought, and once again local communities were forced to trek grueling distances across formerly submerged sandbars to reach the basics required for life: Clean water, foodstuffs, fuels, and other needs which mostly arrive by boat across this amphibious geography (Nolte, 2025). Often, these walks took place under a hazy, smoke-choked sky as the drought coincided with the frequent burning of Amazonian lands for agricultural production and land-grabbing. Disappearing water resources and ash falling from the sky resulted in protests by traditional Amazon communities, Indigenous, Quilombola, and ribeirinho, to demand action from local, state, and federal government.

This paper calls for a local territorialization of rivers, specifically in eastern Pará state, where the pressures of development arrived with the opening of the Belém-Brasília Highway (1960), the Trans-Amazonian Highway (1972), and the Tucuruí Dam (1984). We write from a region accustomed to devastation under the mantra of economic growth and development (Ioris, 2024). As a result, rivers become regarded as industrialized corridors, advantageous natural infrastructures which require techno-optimization in order to enable Brazilian commodities to compete and win through their comparative advantage against other agribusiness powerhouses like Argentina or the United States. A sense of pride in rivers does exist. A good example is the logo of a small, local soccer club, which proudly depicts the Tucuruí Dam with the name “Independiente.” However, boosters of both highway expansion and river infrastructure industrialization must be reminded that a river is also a local space, even a territory.

As both place and territory, rivers inspire defense, affection, embodiment, movement, and connection between the humans and non-humans composing an amphibious network (Brierley et al., 2013; Kaaristo and Visentin, 2023; Liao and Schmidt, 2023). Specifically, we bring attention to the historical and continuing relationship of Quilombolas (descendents of Africans who escaped plantation slavery and founded autonomous communities) to rivers. We focus on two rivers, the Moju River and Joana Peres River (a tributary of the lower Tocantins River), in order to ground our claims in the day-to-day interactions between two of the authors and their respective territories across these regions of considerable importance to Quilombola politics in Pará (Figure 1). Both rivers remain relevant in infrastructure and development debates due to the distant resource geographies which they connect: The Moju River allows timber and palm oil shipments to arrive smoothly at the entrepot of Belém, the capital of Pará state while the Joana Peres River, through its connection to the Tocantins River, finds itself incorporated into ongoing plans for a seamless, industrial waterway beginning in the Matopiba agricultural frontier of central Brazil and ending at the export facilities found at the deepwater port of Vila do Conde (Barcarena, Pará).

Figure 1.

The location of the Quilombos of the two co-authors, Sítio Bosque & Joana Peres, relative to the state of Pará.

First, we introduce international audiences to the emerging motto “the river is territory” (o rio é território). Next, we offer three principal interventions within the framework of the river as territory. Our interventions begin by emphasizing the importance of small tributaries, locally referred to as igarapés, which nourish the rivers. While international advocacy efforts often focus on the main stem Amazonas River and its massive tributaries—such as the Xingu, Tapajós, and Madeira, Quilombola communities often notice river degradation first by sensing changes, often at the scale of the body, through interactions with the igarapés flowing through their territories. Igarapés connect territories to their historical ecologies and upland areas to river basins. These tributary streams provide the ecological life force of Quilombola territories and act as socio-ecological networks through providing clean water, relief from heat, transport for agroecological products, and a warning system of impacts occurring outside territorial borders. Second, the concepts of hydrocitizenship and hydro-social territories, while influential in our theorization, fall short of capturing the significance of rivers to Quilombola territories. In order to arrive at the affective power of rivers in Quilombola societies, we must consider the historical role of rivers as landscapes of flight, fear, and expert knowledge—factors in the formation of hydro-survivance which connects the layers of the past to the present moment in Quilombola politics. Finally, rivers themselves are communities. They are the shared space, and indeed territory, of traditional peoples and nonhumans as well. The connectivity of rivers creates the possibility of movement, and in this case eco-social movements which network dispersed Quilombola communities with each other, but often go even further, resulting in coalitions between Quilombolas, Indigenous groups, traditional populations (such as ribeirinhos), and environmentalists.

Literature: Socio-territorial movements, rivers, and embodiment

The motto “the river is territory” (o rio é território) comes from the direct experience of the Quilombola communities which maintain historical and ongoing relations with their adjacent rivers. In terms of power relations, these rivers are not neutral spaces, but rather remain caught between efforts to shape their destiny through expressions of territoriality by the state, private enterprises, and local communities. Thinking with the geographic concept of scale through the global, hemispheric, regional, local, and body links Quilombola mottos and politics in eastern Amazonia to other research sites through emerging interdisciplinary frameworks around cultures of water and territory.

Whether aquatic or land-based, today's academic literature on the socio-ecologies of traditional communities remains much-indebted to approaches utilized in previous peasant movement studies, critical development studies, and the more recent trend linking territory with social movements broadly under the political ecology framework. In Anglophone geography, “territory” referenced discussions of statehood or economic influence until the term gained expanded usage recently through efforts by local groups, such as social movements, to politicize place and reclaim space (Lévy, 2011). One of the hallmarks of the recent “territorial turn” has been to affix social identity groups to their “property.” In the case of Pará, this includes demarcated territories (such as Indigenous territories, Quilombola territories, and extractivist reserves). Scholars point out that demarcation clarifies tenure conflicts for neoliberal development projects and real estate speculation (Bryan, 2012). Rivers complicate the matter.

Understanding aquatic spaces as territory remains an incipient consideration within studies of traditional territories, yet the discipline of geography in particular includes notable contributions on the use of rivers by socio-territorial movements (Boelens et al., 2023; Oslender, 2002), contesting hydro infrastructures (Akhter, 2019), environmental governance (Mosquera-Guerrero and Krueger, 2024), rights of nature as applied to rivers (Boelens et al., 2024), hydrocitizenship (McEwen et al., 2020), and hydro-social territories (Boelens et al., 2016). Throughout this impressive body of literature at the intersection of social movement studies and political ecology, we notice areas for growth: The Amazon Basin is one of the most important regions of the world for climate stability and seldom do these literatures connect the dynamics of Amazonia as a large scale extractive-capitalist frontier to a growing, internationalizing Maroon social movement (Bledsoe, 2017; Winston, 2021; Zavala Guillen, 2022), that of Quilombolas. This may be due to the fact that while Quilombolas historically existed throughout all of Brazil except two states, only a subset of the national social movement centers an Afro-Amazonian identity as do the Quilombolas of Pará. This omission risks repeating the past errors of the Brazilian academy which dismissed the existence of Quilombos in the Amazon. Private industry repeats the same argument to this day. We also contend that Quilombolas bring important interventions to both hydrocitizenship and hydro-social territories. It is suggested that hydrocitizenship involves “an expanded sense of ecological citizenship” and “flattening implicit hierarchies” between human and nonhuman (McEwen et al., 2020, 781). Missing here is a consideration of geo-racial regimes (Zeiderman, 2025), including both oppression and invisibility, which lead Quilombolas to pursue survival alongside the river as a strategy that both precedes and surpasses recognition by the state. Similarly, we echo Panez Pinto's critique of hydro-social territories (2018, 218) which notes that territory is not simply a recognition of cultural or even ontological difference.

Territory is also a praxis which when understood through a long history of struggle, like that of Quilombolas, becomes a political horizon to define which lifeways will remain possible in a future of extractive infrastructures “in which technology has reinscribed humanity in a movement of cosmic speed” (Mbembe, 2024, 12). Euro-American approaches to territory often deploy similar methods, privileging politics from above through a heavy reliance on regional and subregional maps produced by aerial photography (Cifuentes, 2023; Rajão, 2013). These scales are undoubtedly important for articulating extra-territorial politics, to which we will return later in this paper. However, territoriality also occurs through embodied relations, both at the individual and community scales. These relations include collective memories, historical ecologies, and nonhuman actors which generate politics from below.

As a feminist intervention, cuerpo-territorio upends the top-down, satellite view of terrestrial space essential to remote sensing techniques: The oft-cited “view from nowhere” (Haraway, 2014). We intentionally leave cuerpo-territorio untranslated to emphasize the primacy of Spanish-speaking Latin American literature on the subject and acknowledge the threat of cooptation of both the theory and related method of body-mapping (Guzmán, 2025). The epistemological roots of cuerpo-territorio extend from Latin American decolonial and Indigenous communitarian feminisms (Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021). Cuerpo-territorio emphasizes the viscerality of human interactions with the nonhuman world, including relational emotions such as grief over suffering water bodies (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Rodríguez Aguilera, 2022). The recognition of water as not separate from the earth (or political struggles over territory) has led to the development of the connected concept of agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory (Zaragocin, 2024).

We echo Zaragocin's recognition of tensions related to subjectivity when moving from individual to collective bodies (2024, p. 6) and provide a reminder that while literature may easily affix water to territory, the physical properties of water and terra make for surprises which challenge the flattening of waters into pre-existing territories (both in literature and practice). For example, the phenomenon of river capture in Amazonia cautions us that centering the human body in relation to territory both contextualizes impacts to territory at the intimate scale (and viceversa) and also raises the question of the agency of other bodies including the river itself ¹ . So while the entanglements of human bodies, territories, water bodies, and other eco-social relations may be new to academia, the idea is not new for Quilombolas who through the entity of Cobra Grande ² both relate to the river and negotiate territory with its wriggling, unpredictable, and at times capricious body.

Literature: Sharing Quilombola knowledge across expanding scales

Our inclusion of the concept of survivance (Vizenor, 2000) from North American decolonial literature deserves special note. Native American philosopher Gerald Vizenor describes the continuing existence of Indigenous territories in the face of extractive colonialism as, “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence … an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (p. 15). Our articulation of hydro-survivance not only reflects a decolonial epistemological politics, but also speaks to the historical experience of Quilombolas in relation to the aquatic space, extractive industries, and self-representation in Amazonia. The extension of survivance to what we call “hydro-survivance” accompanies a situated understanding of the river as a necessary political horizon which moves beyond simply labeling subaltern groups as “affected” by development (Panez Pinto, 2018, 219). Wald and Ybarra observe that, “Indigenous survivance and resurgence emerge from storytelling and praxis in which environmental cannot be disentangled from the cultural” (2025, 149). Similarly, Quilombolas and Quilombola territories maintain collective historical ecologies through the intergenerational transmission of oral histories including “concealing protocols” (Rubis and Theriault, 2020). Larsen and Johnson (2017: 188) link survivance to coalitional spaces which resist colonialism's ongoing attempts to “subvert and devalue the mutual recognition involved in … life-supportive relationships”. Throughout eastern Amazonia, Quilombolas acknowledge that contemporary agroecological techniques not only incorporate African knowledge, but build upon Indigenous practices which existed prior to the formation of the original Quilombos. Increasingly, Quilombolas find themselves in the same international coalitions as Indigenous peoples, suggesting that both past community formations and future horizons occur through a confluence of knowledge exchange and politics.

When Quilombolas in Pará declare, “the river is territory,” we emphasize that self-determination achieved through our historical relationship with aquatic spaces also involves knowledge production. Today's demarcated and yet-to-be-demarcated Quilombola territories were built upon historical political ecologies mediated by movement along waterways (De la Torre, 2018) and layers of collective memory which resist colonization like “shoals” (King, 2019). Unlike the colonizers, Quilombolas’ African ancestors found belonging in neotropical forests, perhaps on account of the similarities in plant groups at the rank of the genus level between two great forests, the Amazon and the Congo, which in the distant past emerged from one landscape (Voeks, 1997). Quilombolas developed knowledge of Amazonian rivers and forests through the cultivation and protection of what today some call an abolition ecology (Heynen & Ybarra, 2021).

Our right to territory was always contested due to the fugitive status of Quilombolas and other Afro-descedent peoples in the eyes of large landowners and environmentalists alike (Ferdinand, 2021). Yet we are increasingly recognized as protagonists in the production of our own knowledge, particularly on the subject of territory, which is why academic literature written by Quilombolas is growing. Here, we draw special attention to the work of Antônio Bispo dos Santos, often referred to as Nêgo Bispo. His recent book A Terra Dá, A Terra Quer (2023) was published shortly before his passing in January of 2024. By expressing the tensions between staying connected to the terra of his birth while traveling widely as a part of his research and advocacy, Nêgo Bispo presents an uniquely Quilombola cosmovision. Today's Quilombola youth must live through similar challenges, often enduring long journeys between territory and city, in order to serve both as community members and social movement leaders. As a result, the writing of Quilombolas tends to focus primarily on the condition of the territories in order to bring more attention to the rural reality and needs of Quilombola communities. Frequent topics include the history of the movement (Nascimento, 2023), Quilombola subjectivity between the university and territory (Ribeiro Filho, 2024), territoriality (Lima, 2024), health (Cardoso et al., 2020; Sarmento and Sousa, 2022), education (Cardoso e Cardoso et al., 2024), identity (Bandeira Netto et al., 2024), and politics (Galiza et al., 2025). Across this literature, we contribute an Afro-Amazonian perspective which reflects the importance of both situated methods and dialogical knowledge production.

Methods

This paper contributes to literature on Quilombolas written by Quilombolas, but in this case it was written for an international audience through the inclusion of an English-speaking co-author. Additionally, our group of authors includes a Brazilian professor at the Federal University of Pará in Belém (Universidade Federal do Pará or “UFPA”), who has served as a mentor to the other three authors. The four authors draw on a year of fieldwork conducted together while at UFPA. This fieldwork extended Alfredo Wagner's social cartography methodology (Almeida, 2013) to Quilombola communities surrounding the Belém metropolitan area. It was during this study, conducted as a part of a UFPA research project “AWÁ SURARA” ³ : Quilombolas e indígenas nos territórios e na universidade (Peixoto et al., 2023) that the idea of “o rio é território” (translation: The river is territory) first arose. The two Quilombola authors immediately recognized that the motto reflects a “hidden transcript” (Oslender, 2007) which has existed within the territories since their respective founding.

Our year of fieldwork also included visits to Manoel's Quilombo at Joana Peres and Alzinei's Quilombo at Sítio Bosque. In both locations, we engaged with politicized mental maps, hybrid maps ⁴ , and GPS-informed territorial maps of resources. These maps emerged through oral histories with community elders, semi-structured interviews with community associations (the local governance body), and visits to significant socio-ecological sites to accompany the narratives of community members. Our methodology includes conversations between the four authors which consider the day-to-day experiences and conflicts around territory faced by the two Quilombola authors. Through recording and transcribing these conversations, we developed political statements, sometimes referred to as causas comuns (translation: common causes), which thematically link the geographically distant aquatic spaces of the two Quilombola authors’ territories and also suggest an expanded politics that, like water itself, transgresses territorial borders. We believe our methods address gaps in the existing literature on territory and aquatic spaces through our reliance on social cartography in the field resulting in a watery yet “grounded” approach (Charmaz, 2005).

We began our fieldwork with community members of various generations gathered around tables creating mental maps of the history, culture, and conflicts found within their territory. As a final result, this article weaves together conversations between the Quilombola authors, the US-based author, and the professor at UFPA to develop a disciplinarily transversal, river-based praxis which through engagement with relevant, hemispheric theory, leads to our article's theoretical contributions. Drawing on Afro-Nicaraguan political theorist Juliet Hooker's (2017) conceptualization, cuerpo-territorio scholar Zaragocin (2024) likewise calls for otherwise contextually specific theories, such as those of socio-territories, to resist provincialization and to instead begin traveling to link up with related debates across Abya Yala (the Americas).

This is not meant to universalize the specifics of territory: Water and terra exist in place. Rather, through the translation of our conversations, political protagonisms, and histories from Portuguese to English, we embark on a decolonial methodology (Smith, 2012) which begins with concerns and desires at the community scale in eastern Amazonia. Furthermore, it is precisely the perspective of social movements which is typically left out of academic knowledge production regarding water conflicts (Panez Pinto, 2018). We arrive at academic debates across every-increasing scales with the political intent to increase the often limited space afforded Quilombolas of Amazonia.

Regional context: Introducing fluvial Pará

Belém, a city of about 1.3 million inhabitants, with more than 2.6 million in its metropolitan area (IBGE, 2023), occupies a relatively flat peninsula at the confluence of several robust river networks: The Guamá, Capim, Acará, Moju, and Tocantins (which includes the massive Araguaia Basin much further upstream). The sheer amount of water entering the ocean, along with tides that travel deep into the interior of these watersheds on account of the flat topography, result in both a riverine urban metropolis and also an “amphibious universe” (Raffles, 2003) composed of surrounding islands, channels, and igarapés. In his 2003 multi-site ethnography across the waterways of eastern Amazonia, Hugh Raffles describes the region's fluvial morphology as an “amphibious world of mobile porosities where land and water become each other” (ibid, p. 182). Belém's geographical position may best be understood as an estuary centered at the Bay of Guajará, separated by the Marajó archipelago from the mouth of the Amazon River. At the southernmost end of the Bay of Guarajá the Acará River and Moju River combine to empty into the estuary. As a boat ascends upriver, towering Bertholletia excelsa Brazil nut trees (locally known as castanheiras) remain in dense clusters. We find there the sounds of neotropical fauna emitting from cool forest depths, along with fresh water in crystal clear streams (igarapés), and valuable earthy delights, such as the salutary essences of the Amazon including andiroba, copaíba, and breu-branco. In this particular geography, remnant old growth forests often occur within Quilombola territories, in contrast to clearings for cattle raising and other rural enterprises. Quilombola territories are collective lands. They were constitutionally guaranteed to the descendents of enslaved Africans, who formed autonomous communities, sometimes called Quilombos, throughout Brazil. In Pará, the spatial organization of a plantation-based economy has not changed considerably in the region surrounding Belém. Regional development initiatives continue to favor the use of the nearby Atlantic Ocean and connected river networks to export large quantities of commodities. These traditionally included sugar, cotton, and cacao, but they now emphasize soy and dendê (an African palm-derived vegetable oil). Timber was, and continues to be, a major river-based export. Quilombolas faced a history of exploitation and capture along these same riverways.

An emergent framework: The river is territory

“The river is territory” is a motto for Quilombolas as guardians of nature, above all the waters and forests of Amazonia. It names and strengthens what we already experience. “The river is territory” is a practical and operative concept to assert our right to a way of life and at the same time to assert the right of the waters to remain clean and pure. “The river is territory” is an expression to name our interactive, reciprocal relationship with nature. As a praxis, “the river is territory” strengthens what we experience historically, culturally and politically as well. The motto is informed by life in our communities, our Quilombos. However, before engaging with the interventions integral to this framework, we need to both historicize and contextualize why we decided to apply the concept of territory to aquatic space.

The expression “the river is territory” has a very strong meaning in the Quilombo Joana Peres which exists along the narrow Joana Peres River, a tributary of the much larger Tocantins. The Quilombo self-organized originally to defend the Joana Peres River. In order to defend itself and the river, the Quilombo put together teams of people and leadership to coordinate monitoring the territory, which included the river. The river is rich and for that reason the Quilombo grew as a community. At the same time, the territory became frequently targeted for its rich productivity, as many people came from outside to fish within the territory because it was widely regarded as having an abundance of fish. Many people entered without permission. The community organized itself in this sense to defend itself, to go after these people who were invading the fishing area and territory.

According to the oral historical narrative, around 1778 a Portuguese woman with the same name originally founded Joana Peres. And with her she brought Africans who were slaves. She died some time later. So these people in the slave condition, our ancestors, fled to hideouts near the community. They became a Mocambo (a regional term for a Quilombo). However, the Mocambeiros returned to the original site of the Joana Peres settlement when they saw that there was no longer any danger of being captured by the people who were called masters. With Mocambeiros in control of the Joana Peres settlement site, the community from there became a village (vila). This village was a trading point for many products including the castanha do Pará (Bertholletia excelsa), but also other nuts, fish, animal skins, shells, and the milk from the rubber tree which became the balls of rubber coveted by the rest of the world. The Mocambeiros produced all these goods themselves, both derived from the environment within the territory and via boats arriving from the surrounding region. Trade concentrated there in Joana Peres, the community center. Our grandparents went from the community of Joana Peres to Baião (the municipal capital) by rowing a carved-out trunk (casco), the same distance that today requires four hours by motorized boat. They traveled by casco, by dugout canoe, to go to the city and buy supplies or transport sick people for medical care. There were no wooden-slat boats available at that time. Travel by river was a process, including the movement of people and goods. For Joana Peres, the river was a space of sustenance and survival. The community was built as a river space, as a space of the river.

The river is as important as the solid ground. The river is a space of encounter and searching, of departure, and also of sustainable sustenance for the family in terms of food and income. We live in the river to fish, we live in the river to bathe. We live in the river to go to other places, like the city, to go to other communities. Now we are thinking of the river and its tributaries—our beloved igarapés—as territories to which we belong. The waters do not belong to us, but we belong to them, as we belong to the territory, and not the other way around, as is the case with the utilitarian mentality of large capitalist enterprises. Like the plantations of the past, today's multi-national extractive industries view the river and those living along its margins as both exploitable and expendable. Quilombolas claim the river as territory despite threats, especially the hydroelectric plants such as the Tucuruí. Now the canalization of the Tocantins River aims at opening the river to more commerce and will remove the river as a territorial space of communities. This is why the discussion of the river as territory is so important, which means understanding that the river is also part of Quilombola territory—of the memories, of the experiences of our communities. The river reinforces Quilombola communities which were formed by the aquatic space of the river. That space is also a territory.

We don't recognize the river as a space separate from our experience because we talk about the river as a space of our very being. It's the feeling of a person talking about themself, the person themself. So the river is also inside the person, from the bond of experience. It's like the work a Quilombola does in agriculture. The river and the Quilombola are one. It is important to bring this feeling to our speech. When we speak of our experiences, it transforms the river, that space. And that passion—feeling/experience/labor—has become a space for defense and agency. It's inside those who organize themselves to carry out collective defense of the Quilombola, the territory, the fisherman, the ribeirinho.

Begin within: Resistance, scale and igarapés

When Quilombolas confront the exploitation of the rivers abutting our terrestrial territories, this contestation of claims to the aquatic space reflects the ongoing labor of territorialization. Large rivers such as the Moju and Tocantins attract much attention due to the sheer density of encounters including timber barges, Amazon river dolphins (I. g. geoffrensis or locally referred to as boto), community boats carrying açaí, and quick trips via motorized canoes (rabetas) not to mention the role of these rivers in regional hydrology. Historically, larger rivers also attracted more attention from slavecatcher parties. As a result, Quilombolas learned to depend on the smaller tributary streams, referred to as igarapés in Pará, for day-to-day livelihoods and as a means to connect the safety of interior forests to regional transportation via the river. In this section, we establish the history of danger and resistance associated with rivers to emphasize the topological relationship between river, igarapé, and forest. Today, when we say, “the river is territory”, we must also affirm that our igarapés are threatened as well. In juxtaposing the scale of the river with the igarapé, we mirror our relationship with the state and international organizations, which call for engagement at ever-increasing scales. While articulations offered by this ever-expanding network and accompanying information flows benefit the Quilombola social movement, Quilombola politics must acknowledge the tension of demands within territories and protect our communities at the scale of the igarapé as well.

Along the Moju River, in the Quilombo Sítio Bosque, in the past the houses had many trees in front of them, which made our Quilombola ancestors harder to spot when a boat was passing by. Even after the emancipatory Lei Áurea was signed (1888) and the liberation of slaves was declared, the process of enslavement continued for a long time, especially in more remote areas. Along the Moju River, there was still a process of enslavement until the 1940s and 1950s. Our current generation's parents and their siblings would run from the river's edge whenever they heard the commotion of a steamship, maria fumaça, going up the Moju River. They would run and wait for the boat to pass, staying hidden until it left. Our parents were told by their parents and their grandparents that they could be captured, forced to work, to perform tasks, to be slaves in fact. To work for free. To receive nothing. So the children at the time, our parents, were afraid of the passage of a maria fumaça which was a wood-fired boat that produced clouds of smoke.

So, after the boat left, our parents emerged from the forest and came home. We still find pieces of pottery in certain areas of the uplands, the terra firme, from when the community lived further from the river. However, the relationship between our ancestors and the river reemerged, our connection was strengthened even more, when the boats no longer were allowed to pass through capturing Black people. The situation improved in the 1960's, but we remember that in the past, the boat would capture Quilombolas from Sítio Bosque and other Quilombos on the Moju River. Since we are also Quilombolas, we can imagine, we feel an embodied connection, to what life along the river was like for our great-grandparents. They passed this to our grandparents—the same caution against capture and anxiety about steamships passing by. These stories, passed down between generations, reinforce what Black people would go through if they were captured. The river belongs to us who resisted. The river brought fear. It was also mastered by us in a way, by our people. The river was utilized to benefit our mobility, carrying goods, traveling to the city, to markets.

The river is not the only watercourse connected to our territories. There are also the streams (igarapés) and the sources or springs (cabeceiras) that feed these igarapés. Our ancestors, the founders of today's Quilombos, stayed away from the shores of major rivers like the Moju while memorizing the winding bends and branches of tributary igarapés such as the Caeté, Guajarauna, and Aratumunga (Figure 2). While the river connects Quilombola territories to other spaces, the igarapés connect communities within our territories. Within each territory exist community clusters. These formations rely upon the location of igarapés and cabeceiras–for clean water sources, sustenance through fish and crustacean species, medicinal plants growing along their edges, the best açaí da várzea (floodplain), a cool bath to break the midday heat, and an organic network, which distinguishes families’ places, in addition to facilitating movement by casco (dugout canoe) of people and supplies from the middle of the territory to its edge. Our igarapés offer a space for our communities at the scale of our communities. Quilombola communities began through resistance to the race-based exploitative plantation system of ordering space. Even on the “demonic grounds” of the plantations (McKittrick, 2006), enslaved Africans excavated, seeded, and tended gardens which combined knowledges and plants beyond the comprehension of the white planters. These gardens, which are sometimes called dooryard gardens gardens (Carney, 2021) created miniature, hidden territories which in some cases led to the establishment of Quilombos. Each household's garden might connect to another, perhaps through an overgrown path and the word of mouth required to know where to look. Within the geography of resistance that exists within a Quilombo, igarapés continue to function similarly, wandering through the forest to connect familial spaces. At the edges, the Quilombo defends territory as one, but within the community, space is organized by history at the scale of the family.

Figure 2.

A mental map drawn within the Quilombola Territory Sítio Bosque emphasizing the Moju River (“Rio Moju”) as the main access route/front porch of the territory and the tributary streams (igarapés) as interior passages between various community clusters.

Large river systems such as the Moju-Acará or the Tocantins take precedence in international conservation campaigns and global biodiversity activism (Laurance, 2005). Perhaps this is due to the concealed nature of igarapés and the international scale of methods used by policy makers and researchers who never set foot in a Quilombo. In this case, “seeing like a BINGO (Big International NGO)” means a top-down, satellite-inspired perspective on the Amazon. It also points to the absence of Quilombolas in international policies and conservation finance. From high above, in aerial or satellite images, our igarapés are invisible. These small streams flowing deep within our forests have oriented Quilombolas to move with ease and discretion, avoiding recapture by slavers. In contrast to the river which Quilombolas mastered through resistance and permanence, the igarapé became the internal artery once our African ancestors began to establish a territory. These original Quilombolas came to know their igarapés and passed on this relationship until the current generation. The phenomenon of “igarapé politics” points to the work undertaken daily in Quilombola communities to preserve the “good living” (bem viver) of the Quilombola way of life. The foundational, daily and relational work at the scale of community continues the collective struggle of our Quilombola ancestors who founded today's territories (Vaz and Barros, 2022). Territory is itself a process which began through collective resistance(s) hidden along the igarapés deep within Amazonian forests.

In our highlighting of the small igarapés cooly coursing through the thick understories of the forest muggy with the afternoon sun, we invite the reader to imagine the other purposes of a delightful dip into these crystal clear waters. As sheltered spaces of community and play, igarapés provide an inter-generational meeting place when the heat becomes unbearable for outdoor physical labor such as gathering açaí. Dos Santos and Pereira (2023) contrasts the relations occurring in rural areas, within his community and territory, with lifestyles found in the city. He places the variables of conviviality and time at the center of the comparison. As people with a strong, historical connection to nature, Quilombolas retain the perspective of natural cycles and free, unstructured access to our natural environment. This is partly because our bodies are directly linked to our territories which includes water-territory (Zaragocin, 2024). The territory is part of our body because we constitute ourselves through what we produce and take from our territory.

When we talk about the territory, it seems like we are talking about ourselves. When we talk about a space, it seems like we are talking about ourselves. That is our reality. If we talk about a space of solid ground (terra firme), of forest, of Brazil nut trees (castanheiras), of fields, of cultivation, or when we talk about fishing, we are the ones who have that belonging. We talk about something that is inside us. This transcends in our speech. This is why it still exists today. We defend what is ours, especially those people who are engaged in the Quilombola movement, who when they express themselves, it seems like the territories are talking. We are talking about territory, but we speak with a perception that we are talking about ourselves. When a community organizes itself to defend or organize its territory it is because what it is defending is inside it. The igarapé as territory is felt on the scale of our bodies. Or as cuerpo-territorio scholars Zaragocin and Caretta (2021: 1508) so eloquently state: “What is done to the body is done to the territory and vice versa”.

We depend on the relationship between body and territory. However, changes have been taking place due to the arrival of industrially processed foods, with the entry of cosmetics, and dependence upon pharmaceuticals. All of these products come from the extractive industry and change our existing relations, harming the territories at the most intimate scale. We first feel these changes in our living bodies because now 60% to 70% of our medicines come from pharmaceutical companies rather than the territory. In the past, we relied on our tea, our herbs. So we, in our bodies, feel these changes and our bodies are connected to the body of the territory. It was in this sense, philosophically and culturally, that we would say, “My navel is linked to the territory.” Today there is no umbilical connection with the territory. Our youngest, who were born into a technological world full of extractive industry's products, suffer the most from this weakening of the biocultural relations between body and territory. Still, Quilombolas of all ages seek out the igarapés, which continue to provide a place of refuge and remembrance of cooler, clearer waters. The igarapé as a space of the community and its various bodies retains this intimacy to Quilombola culture, one which connects natural sustenance to recreation and conviviality with and in nature. Thus we note the contrast of the rivers connecting our territories to other spaces with the igarapés which connect our spaces, including our bodies, within our territory.

The defense of rivers demonstrates the Quilombola commitment to wider scales of contentious politics while the ongoing effort to protect our igarapés identifies the work required within our territories if our communities are to survive. Applied to the vast geographic scale of Amazonia's river systems, rivers join relations of primary materials, supply chains, human labor, and distant urban metabolisms. Under the current, global capitalist mode of production, the impact of commodity extraction for export hides its harmful excesses within the territories and spaces of Quilombolas and other traditional communities. The resulting toxic spills, disappearing fish, and vanishing lifeways threaten the integrity of Quilombola terrestrial territories and survival of the Quilombo itself. For Quilombolas living among the hydrologies converging at Belém, survival begins with the seasonality, reliability, and availability of freshwater.

More than hydro-citizens: Quilombola hydro-survivance

During the high tides, water from the river generously mixes with the water of tributary igarapés, swishing and sloshing and flooding the point of connection between river and igarapé. Today when Quilombolas stand along the river, we do not fear capture, but note the endless chain of commodities passing by the shores of our territories. This flux of products represents intensifying environmental destruction (Pereira et al., 2025) as well as the disruption of Quilombolas’ own use of the river. Export interests within the Brazilian State would like to increase the economic productivity of these rivers, from the 1980-1984 construction of the Tucuruí Dam on the Tocantins River by the military dictatorship, to the second expansion phase 1998–2010, and the current project to dynamite 35 kilometers of the river on account of rock formations (the “Pedral do Lourenço”). These impede expanded shipping for agricultural commodities from the Matopiba frontier region, located some two thousand kilometers from points of export via the Atlantic Ocean (Nascimento, 2025). The industrialization of the Amazon's rivers through hydroelectric dams and hidroviaria projects, such as the Tocantins corridor, poses countless disruptions and predations upon fish life cycles, várzea productivity, and local communities (Ioris, 2021). The predations inflicted upon our communities through slaving parties, a project designed to control labor in order to produce a plantation logic of space, continues today through the development of global commodity export infrastructures. Rather than enjoying the promise of citizenship outlined by the Brazilian Constitution, Quilombola communities face the poison of brutalist necropolitics in the guise of development (Mbembe, 2024). Our territories face increasing reliance upon imported food and water as our own resources sour under the contorting pressures of channelization, pipelines, energy transmission lines, and plans for railways. Claiming the river as territory includes surviving this onslaught of so-called development which disrupts riverine relations of reciprocity between human and nonhuman. Through naming our stance hydro-survivance, we emphasize not only the stakes of this ontological conflict over the purpose of the river, but also reaffirm the self-determination of Quilombolas and the river itself to continue living and thriving together.

A multitude of companies have threatened the territory of Sítio Bosque over the decades. The names of these corporations change, sometimes the entities themselves combine, or the rights to individual projects are sold. The shifting ownership of invasive infrastructures such as pipelines, powerlines, slurry passages, storage containers, and commodity transportation systems reveals the transitory nature of commitments lauded as development in Pará (Ioris, 2020). While the state government identifies such ventures as investment, these infrastructures carry the resources of Pará to distant shores. Instead, traditional communities find leaky pipelines and absentee excuses. There is a veritable carousel of corporate ownership without feet on the very soils which become exploited.

Around the year 2004, Vale (the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce) excavated the Moju River. The community of Sítio Bosque was unable to drink the water for three months. Then we started to notice the turbidity of the water. The water appeared quite different, mainly in the areas that were closer to the town of Moju. Sítio Bosque is not far from the town of Moju and we started to find substantial mud in our water. People in the territory experienced increasing allergic reactions due to irritant particles in this mud—it was like a sand of really small grains. We began to experience bodily discomfort. Our water stayed that way for a long time, so much so that even our bathing became different from when we were children. So all these factors unfortunately have led people to have less of a relationship with the river.

Given a lack of information, we didn't confront Vale. We didn't organize ourselves as we should have because of a lack of education. We needed more information to be able to counter the corporations and move our side of the debate, protection of the river, forward. Finally, when our leaders at the time filed a complaint, we were told that the excavation of the river to install a slurry pipeline had already been authorized and that no impact had been identified. The project was portrayed as a very safe thing. And this justification came from an official article written by Hydro (the Norwegian multinational Norsk Hydro, which operates in 42 countries). Quilombola territories formed through resistance. These territories must be defended, especially given the arrival of large-scale, highly capitalized projects such as the bauxite mining infrastructures described above. Bauxite slurry, a mixture of ground bauxite ore and water, must travel from the south of Pará to the deep-water port Vila do Conde in the north, over three hundred kilometers by road. Carried through a steel pipeline, it closes this distance while piercing our rivers, toppling our forests, and dividing our communities.

Under modern capitalism, even natural elements of the landscape, such as rivers, must be captured and forced to work as infrastructure. The expanded Tocantins waterway will impact the lives of our communities in terms of food production and income. It will also affect our comings and goings between the cities and the Quilombo due to substantial changes in river traffic. The community transport boats will be replaced in favor of an expensive ferry. The Quilombo Joana Peres already faces problems arising from the changing condition of the river on account of the construction of the Tucuruí hydroelectric plant. Following the expansion of the hydroelectric plant (1998–2010), the community immediately encountered the issue of diarrhea among people because at that time people consumed water from the river, both for drinking and for food. As children, around eighty percent of our food came from the river and forest. Now that reliance has become inverted through increasing dependence on industrialized products. The river had always been our source. Many species began to disappear. For example, tambaqui, a fish species that was very common and important in the region, vanished. The dynamics of the river also shifted. With the construction of the dam the periodicity of the river's water level changed and led to problems with fish reproduction. The impacts of the Tucuruí hydroelectric plant prefigured what today we understand as climate change. We no longer have a rainy season. With the rains, the river used to swell through the months of December, January, February, and March. Now, in addition to impacts from the Tucuruí dam, there is little rain which further limits fish spawning when the igapós (aquatic forests) do not fill. The summer dry season lasts ever longer and our crops which used to grow naturally now spoil without irrigation. Along the Moju River, Quilombolas at Sítio Bosque also note the disappearance of fish species. These include the acará “branquinha,” filhote, piramutaba, and dourada de água doce. A decreasing availability of fish leads to the loss of cultural connection with one's own existence, with one's own survival based on what the river offers us.

In 2025, the Pankararu people of northeast Brazil demanded that the São Francisco River receive juridical rights (Cavalcante, 2025). Often referred to as “rights of nature”, socio-territorial movements around the world have sometimes succeeded in extending legal personhood to rivers or mountains. Examples of rivers which received this honor include the Whanganui River (New Zealand), River Ganga and Yamuna (India), and the Atrato River (Colombia). Rivers deserve special rights and so does the relationship of traditional communities to rivers, which for Quilombolas constitutes our way-of-being, our territory, and even ourselves. According to university intellectuals, a tight relationship between the aquatic space, democracy, and eco-social advocacy refers to hydro-citizenship (McEwen et al., 2020). Quilombolas in Pará certainly exercise hydro-citizenship and it is not our intention to dispute the rich analysis of hydro-social relations offered by esteemed researchers (Ross and Chang, 2020). Rather, we suggest that Quilombolas are hydrocitizens AND something more. Here we reflect on the theory of survivance by the Native American literary scholar Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor developed the theory of survivance to draw attention to the diverse practices of resistance, refusal, and self-determination enacted across centuries by Native American communities in the face of state-sponsored extermination. In Pará, Quilombolas faced and continue to confront oppressions which threaten to erase our unique Afro-descendant and Amazonian heritages. Capitalists and capital are an element of these threats. Capital interferes with the natural environment, which consequently impacts our culture. Now, the connection of Quilombolas with the river, for example our river bathing practices, are changing. The overarching dynamics have changed. The big companies and producers, for example the timber companies, do not respect our river. They pass by in the afternoon and evening with huge barges, full of timber. And if we question them, what will they say? They will say that they are passing through the canal and that the river is not ours. That is the answer that money gives us, that the river is public. But the companies do not survive from that space. And Quilombolas can. We live with and from the river.

The founders of today's Quilombos, our African ancestors, developed a strong relationship and affinity for the forests and rivers through their memories of Africa along with learning Pindorama's ⁵ own ecologies (Voeks, 1997). As a result, somehow the Africans survived and remained together within otherwise unknown spaces. The ecology and the newly arrived Africans together formed territories. When we say, for example, that we believe in nature, that nature is part of us, that we feel good when we're in that space, it's a connection that seems perfect. We manage this space, our territoriality, our feeling of belonging to the space. It is strong, it's a real feeling, it's a feeling for that space. A lot of these affections have been lost too. Because of the entry of capital. It's devaluing what we have. So, we say that what we have, that space where we are, should be utilized in another way and not as it is by big companies. Our parents say they could spend every day on the roça (family farming plot). That's exactly what we're talking about. It's the feeling we have about cultural learning. When someone says that laboring in our territory, such as farming manioc, is too demanding, we defend this culture, our culture, what sustains us. Laboring on our roça plots is not painful because we no longer spend the whole day working as slaves.

When Vizenor explains that Native Americans do not ascribe to the expectations of white society, it is similar for Quilombolas today. International environmental policy makers especially want to represent Quilombolas as guardians of nature. This is true, but the relationship between Quilombolas and the environment is even more intimate. Quilombolas have labored and existed with the environment to ensure the survival of both the Quilombo and the forest, the igarapés (Figures 3 & 4). Our destinies have been inseparable. Our relationship with the river space is different from that of the companies. It does not matter if it is cultural, social, political or economic. Our relationship with the river is different from that of big capital. For example, the barges of Biopalma, Biovale or Agropalma pass by along the Moju River loaded with palm oil. They descend the river to cross through our territories and to supply the export ships. When the harvest period is very high, there are two or three barges per day. At night it's risky–our community's movement isn't just during the day. It's at night, too, in the river. We attend churches, meetings and musical gatherings. The Quilombola way of living, the bem viver (“good life”) of communities, becomes disrupted and fragmented by the weight of capital. The narratives composing this section, along those of other Quilombos, together thread an intricate mesh of history, culture, representation, self-determination, and surviving, but also thriving, based on access to rivers and igarapes. We name this historical and lived reality: Hydro-survivance.

Figure 3.

Lower Moju River, Pará, Brazil. Forest canopy loss since 2000 vs canopy retention in blue. The presence of Quilombola Territory Sítio Bosque (along with the other Quilombos of the Lower Moju River) protects forests along the river in comparison to non-Quilombola upland areas. Forest condition data provided by Brendan Mackey and Sonia Hugh, Griffith University Australia. Data were sourced from Hansen Global Forest Change v1.12 (2000–2024); https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/UMD_hansen_global_forest_change_2024_v1_12. The development of the Google Earth Engine app used to produce these maps was supported by the Global Environment Fund Critical Forest Biomes Integrated Program.

Figure 4.

Joana Peres and Lower Tocantins rivers, Pará, Brazil. Forest canopy loss since 2000 vs canopy retention in blue. The presence of Quilombola Territory Joana Peres protects forests along the rivers in comparison to non-Quilombola areas on the east side of the Tocantins River. Forest condition data provided by Brendan Mackey and Sonia Hugh, Griffith University Australia. Data were sourced from Hansen Global Forest Change v1.12 (2000–2024); https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/UMD_hansen_global_forest_change_2024_v1_12. The development of the Google Earth Engine app used to produce these maps was supported by the Global Environment Fund Critical Forest Biomes Integrated Program.

So far we have mainly focused on rivers in the context of escape, flight, and survival. Throughout history, rivers also provided the possibilities of extra-territorial connection for Quilombos through regular trade with merchants downriver in town markets. Such commerce obviously carried its risks, but historical records demonstrate Quilombolas finding trading partners who flaunted the anti-Quilombo proclamations of the Portuguese Crown (De la Torre, 2018). Quilombola networks continued through the Brazilian Empire and past the official end of slavery. Our history as Quilombolas in the Lower Moju and Lower Tocantins regions of Pará is similar. These networks re-activate today during river-based trips to the city, sporting or religious events, and recently during the 2024 municipal elections.

Connective territories: Circulation, nonhumans, coalitions

The Quilombola concept of territory does not envision borders that prevent movement of humans or nonhumans. Not only is the river a Quilombola territory, but it is a shared territory and coalitional space (Larsen and Johnson, 2017). The river itself becomes a community by inspiring connection and inviting movement. We are reminded of our relations to other communities, who may not identify as Quilombola, but live along the river banks, much like us. Indeed, some of us identify as both Quilombola and ribeirinho as we emphasize both our African history and adaptation to the Amazonian environment. In this way, the river is a territory that connects territories. Or returning to Raffles's (2003: 193) words, the river is “all about maneuver and negotiation in a space that is simultaneously compressed by the geographic logic of the riverine community and exploded by the expansiveness of fluvial travel”. While rivers are reserved as the exclusive territory of the Brazilian federal government, Quilombola declarations represent a biocultural (Correa et al., 2025) territoriality over rivers. This both pushes back on the occupation of rivers by export interests and retains the possibility of eco-social riverine relations. Rivers are at the same time territory, borderlands, and the joining tissue between communities. While Quilombos are by nature historically emplaced and rooted, the river as territory allows for a communal, relational, and mobile notion of Quilombola territoriality. It is one which sways between the histories of the past and our current moment, rocking back and forth like a wooden pô pô pô boat, or weaving between obstacles like a speedy rabeta motorized canoe. Rivers connect Quilombola territories to each other, to other rural communities, and to cities. Therefore, we conclude our discussion of the emerging Quilombola motto “the river is territory” by emphasizing that our claims upon the river as territory are shared by other riverine communities with similar lifeways. As a result, the river emerges as a communal territory, a matrix of historical and present-day relations which together reflect a compelling counter-narrative and political praxis to the efforts of the state and extractive industries to instrumentalize our rivers. As a co-created territory of communities, rivers create the possibility for movement and collaboration between traditional territories.

Long before the Alça Viária highway (inaugurated in 2002), community elders paddled the products of their territories in small canoes in order to supply markets in cities such as Belém. Traveling from the Lower Moju River to Belém required multiple days of paddling labor, as tidal variations demanded a rhythm that worked with rather than against the force of water. Some community members today own larger, wooden Amazonian river boats running on petroleum. However, even gas-powered boats remain bound to the tide cycle and the timing of açaí deliveries, which compel passengers to delay their journeys until markets are ready to receive shipments. We may spend hours upon hours onboard a barco de linha (a slow-moving, motorized local delivery boat), catching up on university homework from a hammock while we wait for açaí markets to open along Belém's waterfront. Quilombola territory can also be mobile as when groups of Quilombolas, from multiple communities, heading to the city for a variety of interconnected needs, create a moving, relational space that is distinctly Quilombola.

Just as historical research identifies the importance of river-based trade for the continuing autonomy and sustainability of Quilombos, today products such as açaí form the backbone of the Quilombola agro-ecological economy. On the move, Quilombola boat trips to the city enable producers to negotiate directly with purchasers at markets like Porto da Palha and Feira do Açaí in Belém. Additionally, the arrival of a group of Quilombolas with varying itineraries demonstrates the diversity of the dispersed nature of Quilombola lifeways. In cities such as Belém, Quilombolas often reside in similar neighborhoods with family or extended family, sometimes linking multiple households across rural and urban settings. Quilombolas also produce relational space in the city, such as the student group Associação dos Discentes Quilombolas da Universidade Federal do Pará “ADQUFPA” (Association of Quilombola Students of the Federal University of Pará), which unites Quilombolas from across Pará at UFPA in order to advocate for their rights as students.

The Federal University of Pará (UFPA) hosts over 3500 Quilombola students out of a student body numbering more than 50,000 (ADIS, n.d.). This is not to mention the many traditional students of various backgrounds (including the Conselho Nacional das Populações Extrativista “CNS” house which accommodates ribeirinho students when they are in the capital); Indigenous teachers and students; and students of the urban periphery whose lives and stories connect urban, rural, and future Amazônias (Porto Gonçalves, 2001). The Guamá River forms one entry point to the university. The university has even constructed a dock for Quilombola and ribeirinho students to arrive by river and head directly to class. Fluvial transport in this case is not just practical, but maintains our relations with the rivers surrounding the capital even as we grieve with these water bodies (Rodríguez Aguilera, 2022) which increasingly suffer from urbanization and pollution. Rivers carry our unique, Afro-Amazonian sense-of-place to the cities of Pará. This circulation between urban and rural geographies reflects both our traditional territories and future aspirations.

During social cartography workshops at Sítio Bosque, we noted discrepancies between the demarcated territorial boundaries produced by ITERPA (the Pará state land titling agency) and those recognized by the community itself, particularly along the Moju River. We imagine that this has something to do with the liveliness of the Moju River, which may rise or fall as much as 8 meters during one day and 40 meters over the course of the year, recorded using a marker (caracol) that is placed in a riverside tree. Similarly, we call attention to the territory of the Quilombo Joana Peres which partly occupies a low-lying aquatic forest between the Joana Peres and Tocantins Rivers. Conflicts over fishing rights emerge there as a result of the shifting passable channels and dense assemblage of aguapé lilies. Local knowledge of this intricate network of waterways creates a relational space which relies on elders’ histories, lived experiences fishing and laboring in the environment, and sensitivity to the signs offered by non-human occupants such as the lontra (an Amazonian river otter Lontra longicaudis). The forest itself is listed as an Extractivist Reserve (RESEX), “Reserva Extrativista Ipaú-Anilzinho”, a conservation unit different from a Quilombola Territory (TQ). Thus, we observe multiple overlapping territorialities along with the shifting aquatic space itself.

In Sítio Bosque, the river is like that Pinduca song: It is our street (Figure 5). So a place, a space of transit. From which to resist, to fight. It was always already the defense of our territory, though not with the name território. It is the river, it is territory. Territory means that we have a feeling of belonging. It is a cultural feeling, it is a space where we used to play a lot in childhood, we feel that proximity and intimacy. So the river has always been our way of seeking health, our way of seeking safety. In addition to our interactive, everyday use of the river and the igarapés, these watercourses come to be thought of as something alive, an intimate, symbolic meaning for us. Our stories and traditions recognize rivers as entities that deserve our respect and careful regard. For example, the Boto is an entity that still brings fear to people along with certain concerns. And there is also a legend of the great snake, the Cobra Grande. So we grew up seeing, hearing the legend of the Cobra Grande. We end up seeing a relatively large snake that makes us apprehensive. It is mythical. But it is a matter of experience, of relationship with that space, it is part of it. The river has always been a contested, yet shared territory.

Figure 5.

The image below depicts the aquatic social life of various riverine communities coming together upon the Lower Moju River (photo by one of the authors).

Across the watersheds converging at Belém, Quilombolas practice a mobile and circulatory territoriality along with other riverine communities such as Castelo, Guadalupe, Itancoã, Santa Luzia, Novo Jerusalém, and Sítio Bosque (Sítio Bosque Quilombola Territory includes both Quilombola and ribeirinho communities). Our conceptualization of territory as both mobile and circulatory highlights the fluidity of river transport, lifeways, and those who depend upon it. In 2024, Quilombolas formed a collective candidacy for positions of municipal councilor (vereador) including representatives of thirteen different Quilombos. At the beginning of the 2024 campaign for municipal council by Sara Rodrigues and the Lower Moju mandato coletivo (collective mandate), the decision was made, based on both a shared socio-ecological identity and public policy goals, to pursue the support of not only Quilombolas, but also nearby riverine, rural communities. The collective candidacy recognized that the issues faced by us Quilombolas were very similar to the daily reality of ribeirinhos. The river is their territory as well. So the Lower Moju collective candidacy visited ribeirinho communities six times during the campaign in order to demonstrate that Quilombola politics and values travel with us and belong anywhere that retains a historical and continuing connection to the river (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Visit to a ribeirinho community during Sara Rodrigues’s 2024 campaign for the Moju municipal council (photo by one of the authors).

The elections of 2024 confirmed the communal nature of Quilombola values and the relation of these values to the aquatic realm. In the Lower Moju region, we focused on the issues of financing for permaculture (açaí, cacao, and cupuaçu), easier access to public programs which offer resources for improving life within our communities, and support for financial management of family (small-scale) agriculture. These proposals apply across the agro-ecological communities of the Moju, Abaetetuba, and Acará municipalities. By emphasizing the commonalities in the struggle of river-based communities against the overwhelming wealth of highly capitalized multinational corporations, Quilombolas created a coalitional space within politics which reflected the communal nature of riverine lifeways. This horizontal, connecting movement beyond the borders of Quilombola territories themselves, including victories by Quilombola candidates in both the Moju-Acará and Lower Tocantins river systems, demonstrates a generative social movement-led hydropolitics rather than “mere reaction and opposition” to destructive projects (Panez Pinto, 2018, 219). Along with ribeirinhos, Quilombolas recognize that our traditional spaces, communities, and territories must be defended collectively. In this way, the coalitional municipal campaigns of 2024 made public that which has been historically and privately understood: When it comes to communities defending their territories, social and environmental politics become one.

Our founders stood up for us, in front of the community. Of coordination, of defense. Of the feeling of belonging to the space of the river. It was ours then. The organization of the community came through a dynamic of defense, body-to-body. If the river is still ours, we're going to defend it. We believe in that feeling of belonging and of organization in defense of the river. It is from the space of the river that we speak when we discuss the river as a space. In Pará, Quilombolas are a riverine people. It is precisely for this reason that many of us will claim the identity of both Quilombola and ribeirinho. Recognizing rivers as part of Quilombola territory does not mean that we demand exclusive territorial control over these channels of life. Rivers are the shared territories of traditional communities and together we will fight and advocate for our health and rights to free movement alongside protections for rivers themselves. This is a collective struggle defining much of our past, current, and future inhabitation of Amazonia. With rivers begins the Quilombola right to the city and access to healthcare, education, and markets (Kantner and Peixoto, 2023). However, rivers do not only form a route between places. When Quilombolas travel together, with our communities and the products of our labors, we enact a mobile, Quilombola relational space. We transmit Quilombola culture, cuisine, and knowledge between territories along the stops made by slow-moving riverboats, all-the-time enriched by our lively conversations upon seeing relatives. When we arrive in the city, we aquilombar ⁶ there amid the university classrooms, hospital waiting rooms, and narrow alleys of neighborhoods like Guamá and Terra Firme. A Quilombo is a mobile concept, proven by its occurrence throughout Brazil (Gomes, 2023). In each location, the community's roots stretch deep into the earth alongside our treasured cultivars such as manioc and açaí. These roots also extend out, through the sea, to remember our origin in Africa. Finally, these roots follow the watercourses of the great rivers ensuring that wherever we travel, our shared community connects us back to our terrain and homes. We re-create Quilombola territory, we aquilombar, where we go together. Rivers continue to carry us along that shared path.

Conclusion

Internationally, discussions focus on the extent of Amazonia. Reports emphasize that already twenty percent of Amazonia's forests have been lost since 1970 (Beuchle et al., 2021), which hovers on the edge of a “tipping point” (Lovejoy and Nobre, 2018) that could lead to Basin-wide rainforest collapse by 2050 (Flores et al., 2024). Quilombolas do not experience the Amazon through these frightening statistics, but rather at the scale of community, that of the igarapé. This also means that the health of Quilombola territories comes first, whether in the case of discussions regarding carbon credits, infrastructure projects, or açaí production. Across generations, we live out our lives side-by-side the waters of our territories. The rivers and streams that run through our lands hold sacred value on which our way of life depends. For Quilombola territories, protection of the river is a matter of hydro-survivance and a political stance in response to predatory development. Thinking and acting with rivers as Quilombola territory not only bolsters the defense of the Quilombo but also allows the “speaking place” (lugar de fala) (Ribeiro, 2017) of Quilombolas as theorists, geopolitical actors, and political activists to travel. The river is a shared territory and meeting space for the negotiation of values and identities with other traditional peoples such as ribeirinhos. Through movement, rivers connect communities and assume the form of community in encounters between humans and nonhumans as well.

When we say “the river is territory,” we emphasize that not all Quilombola territory is demarcated. According to the organization Malungu, around 600 Quilombola communities exist in Pará, with 110 having already received titles (M. Nascimento, personal communication, July 14, 2025). However, thinking fluvially means Quilombolas follow an ecological, relational logic beyond the territorial rationale of modern states and capital. After all, how can a river that shifts its boundaries twice a day and fluctuates anywhere from 20 to 40 meters in a year be fixed to geographic boundaries? The river and igarapés are a relational territory for Quilombolas. For Quilombolas, the word território (“territory”) does not signify an empty container demarcated by the state as much as the flowing lineage of human-environment relations and acts of solidarity. The rivers are part of our stories and hopes for the future. As the world focuses upon Amazonia as an environmental territory to be protected, we welcome this collective solidarity and emphasize that Amazônia Negra (Black Amazonia) began with our ancestors’ acts of resistance which continue to this day.