American-African Women: Body-Territory, Ancestrality and Memories of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This article proposes a discussion of Ame-African (American-African) women’s memory from a countercolonial perspective and in dialogue with Lélia Gonzalez’s dialectic between consciousness and memory, focusing on her theoretical and practical contribution through the category of “Ame-African.” To this end, we draw on methodologies that prioritize the weaving of memories through oral tradition, where narratives and meanings weave an “invisible tapestry” of women’s struggles and resistance that extends throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. We address women’s resistance to violence and the violation of rights, linked to notions of the body-territory and ancestry, as well as dynamics of healing, healthcare, territorial mobilization, and the building of networks of protection and affection established by Ame-African women. We seek to articulate movements of creation and recreation of women’s resistance and insurgencies within a specific space-time in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean. Our sisterhood as Black/Afro-American/Quilombola women enables the weaving of threads and “knots” that, despite our territorial and cultural diversity, allow us to form connections and networks for the production of knowledge, wisdom, and affection.

Keywords:
Women; Body-territory; Feminism; Ancestrality; Memory

Resumo

Este artigo propõe um debate sobre a memória de mulheres amefricanas a partir de uma perspectiva contracolonial e em diálogo com a dialética entre consciência e memória de Lélia Gonzalez, com foco em sua contribuição teórica e prática por meio da categoria Amefricana. Para tanto, apoiamo-nos em metodologias que privilegiam a tecitura de memórias a partir da oralidade, onde narrativas e sentidos tecem uma “trama invisível” de lutas e resistência de mulheres que se estende a toda América Latina e Caribe. Falamos da resistência de mulheres à violência e à violação de direitos articulada às noções de corpo-território e de ancestralidade, como também abordamos dinâmicas de cura, cuidado em saúde, mobilização territorial e construção de redes de proteção e afeto concretizadas por mulheres amefricanas. Buscamos enunciar movimentos de criação e recriação de resistências e insurgências de mulheres em um determinado espaço-tempo no contexto da América Latina e Caribe. Nossa irmandade enquanto mulheres negras/amefricanas/quilombolas possibilita arranjos de fios e “nós” que, a despeito de nossa pluralidade territorial e cultural, nos permite conexões e redes de produção de conhecimento, saberes e afetos.

Palavras-chave:
Mulheres; Corpo-território; Feminismo; Ancestralidade; Memória

Introduction

Our ancestors left us a legacy of struggle and resistance that transcends the era in which they lived and extends to every place our feet may tread and our ideas may reach. They taught us to listen, to speak, to fight, and, above all, to dream. They also dared to dream for us what they themselves would no longer be able to achieve in their lifetimes. We carry the marks of this legacy in our bodies and words: the strength that springs from the earth, the wisdom born of stories told by the fire, the faith that is renewed in our collective journey. We are the continuation of their hopes and the fulfillment of their interrupted dreams. Every step we take is also a step they took; every achievement of ours reopens the path they began to trace.

Above all, it was the women who came before us who, throughout the region we now know as Latin America and the Caribbean, wove a network of invisible threads connecting ancestral Afro-diasporic wisdom, knowledge, and technologies, as well as the knowledge, wisdom, and technologies of Black, Quilombola, and Indigenous peoples of resistance that allow us to unite our struggles and believe that we can stand together in the same trenches, building other ways of living, relating to one another, existing, and ensuring our future existence. These networks are not limited to the past; they are renewed with every gesture of solidarity, every word that recovers collective memory, and every action that reaffirms the right to exist with dignity. They are threads that cross borders and remind us that ancestry is not merely a legacy but also a concrete project for building tomorrow without relinquishing the roots that sustain us.

This article presents reflections based on the Research Project¹ “Collective Insurgent Practices: Struggles, Resistance, and Organization of Quilombola, Cimarron, Raizal, Garifuna, and Palenquera Women in Latin America and the Caribbean.” The criteria for including participants in this study were the following: Women who identify as quilombola and black, affirming their black and quilombola ancestry as part of the history of their territories; women who serve as leaders in their quilombola communities—whether certified or officially recognized; women with a history of leadership in their communities, based on their involvement with the quilombola association, in the struggle for land, or in acts of resistance in the areas of culture, religion, education, and health care practices. This is a proposal for circular writing, which allows us to listen, speak, and engage in dialogue with one another’s existence and to learn as we do so. This dynamic article highlights collective and emotional memories, as well as spaces of resistance that permeated the lived experiences of our mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers in Latin America and the Caribbean. We aim to see through one another’s eyes and, in this viewing (“enxergamento”) of things we cannot see with our own eyes, weave together analyses of how we can move forward from the steps that came before and brought us this far, opening new paths for those who will come after us. In this weaving of memories, we turn to the teacher Lélia Gonzalez, who offers us a methodological path that allows us to revisit what history still insists on hiding or showing us in an allegorical, caricatured way, captured by the fetish of commodities. We begin with oral tradition, in which narratives and meanings weave an “invisible tapestry” of women’s struggles and resistance that spans all of Latin America and the Caribbean to build this proposal.

Geographically speaking, we are located in various places: in the state of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil’s Southeast Region; in Oriximiná, Pará, in the country’s North/Amazon region; and in the Guiana Lands². We travel through the quilombos, the lands of Maranhão, the banks of the Trombetas River, the Amazonian lands, the cities that hold our stories and challenge us to reinvent ourselves, and many other places where our academic and political ties and commitments take us.

We bring to this article the accumulated insights from our listening, experiences, research, community outreach, and activism as black women and researchers. These analyses address women’s resistance to violence and the violation of their rights, linked to the concepts of the body-territory and ancestry. We address dynamics of healing, healthcare, territorial mobilization, and the building of networks of protection and affection carried out by Afro-American women. We seek to articulate movements of creation and recreation of women’s resistance and insurgencies within a specific space-time in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean.

For us, Ame-African women represent the synthesis of a powerful encounter between women of the African diaspora and indigenous women, not only in their struggles but also in their ancestral knowledge, wisdom, and technologies, as well as in their resistance to all forms of colonial-racist-patriarchal oppression and to the exploitation of their bodies and labor by capital. Lélia Gonzalez (2020, 2020a, 2020b) understood Ame-Africanity as a praxis of resistance that emerges in the face of processes of colonial exploitation and oppression. For Lélia, Ame-Africanity is as follows:

Even during the era of slavery, it manifested itself in revolts, in the formulation of strategies for cultural resistance, and in the development of alternative forms of free social organization. Its concrete expression can be found in the quilombos, cimarrones, cumbes, palenques, marronages, and maroon societies, scattered across the most diverse regions of the entire continent (Gonzalez, 2020a, p. 138, emphasis added by the author).

“Ame-Africanity,” as proposed by Lélia, is not a category that erases the historical, social, and cultural particularities of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous women; rather, it is about reaffirming those particularities and the possibility of unifying their struggles. It is a category that repositions the leading role of black, quilombola, and indigenous women in history, demonstrating that their experiences, forms of organization, and knowledge are not marginal but central to the construction of alternatives to the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and capitalist model of society. Therefore, Ame-Americanity is not limited to a concept of identity but constitutes a political, epistemic, and civilizational project that proposes the decolonization of thought and social practices. In this sense, Lélia states the following:

This transnational and Afro-diasporic connection was precisely what led Lélia Gonzalez to focus on the similarities among these women, incorporating a new feminist approach into her analyses and political activism. Needless to say, beyond offering an alternative methodological and conceptual framework, Afro-Latin American feminism represents a truly pluralistic, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial praxis (Soares; Santos, 2021, pp. 878–879).

These women, such as Nanny, who organized the struggle and resistance from within the territory, becoming the greatest heroine of her people, who could foresee enemy attacks and resorted to magical means to drive them out, are not exceptions. There are many other African women—black, indigenous, and quilombola—who can serve as inspirations for contemporary women’s movements. They did not allow their practices of healing, health, and resistance to be imprisoned by the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2005). These women, “guardians of Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions, of the sacred, of care, of their daughters and sons, of the griots, of the farm, of the seeds, and of the preservation of natural resources essential to guaranteeing rights” (Dealdina, 2020, p. 37), weave together the collective and the communal within the territory and beyond it. Their life stories reveal that political struggle and the production of knowledge are inseparable from daily life, emotional bonds, and spiritual practices. Conversely, it is in the intertwining of the body, the territory, and ancestry that an epistemology of care and freedom is founded, marked by unique ways of interpreting the world and sustaining collective existence. Let us learn from them!

Afro-diasporic Women in Latin America and the Caribbean

At the International Meeting of Afro-Rural Communities of Latin America and the Caribbean (organized by the Center for Black Culture (CCN), the National Coordination for the Coordination of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (CONAQ), and the New Social Cartography of the Amazon Project (PNCSA))³ in Bom Jesus da Lapa, Bahia, in 2019, which was attended by Quilombolas and Afro-rural communities from Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Suriname, French Guiana, Honduras, Bolivia, and Argentina, important issues central to these peoples’ struggle for their territories were discussed. On that occasion, we observed both the specific characteristics of the experiences of quilombolas and Afro-rural communities in these different countries and the historical similarities regarding resistance and the struggle for territory (Soares, 2020). In general, it was observed that:

The second half of the 20^th century marked a turning point in the intensification of rural conflicts throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, leading to an increase in violence against Indigenous peoples, Quilombolas, Cimarrones, Palenques, Garrífunas, “Ndjuka,” Saamaka, Afro-Mexicans, and other peoples considered “traditional,” whether native to the Americas or descended from the African diaspora. Megaprojects, such as hydroelectric dams and mining operations, for example, have violently displaced communities in Colombia, Suriname, Nicaragua, and Brazil. According to testimonies from the International Meeting of Afro-Rural Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (2019), the state has supported, facilitated, and promoted capital at the expense of traditional communities in these countries. National and regional (state and municipal) governments have acted as agents of capital in these cases, which places them among the primary violators of the rights of quilombolas and people of African descent (Soares, 2020, p. 276).

That meeting, which was attended by some of the authors of this article and has brought us closer together ever since, highlighted the leading role of women in the struggle for territory, emphasizing that they are also the ones who suffer the most violence and abuse in conflict-affected territories, as we can see in the statement below. Speaking about Colombia, Maria Del Rosario noted the following:

We suffer disproportionate impacts from the war. Most of the people forced from their territories are of African descent and women. The worst violence is directed against young women between the ages of 18 and 40 or 50. They destroy the lives of women who are giving birth. It is a form of annihilation of us as a people. There is violence against women who are struggling: they mutilate themselves, disappear, or take their lives. The collective impact of violence against women is such that a quarter of all this violence results in femicide (statement by Maria Del Rosario, Colombia). Panel on Confronting Violence Against Afro-Rural Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2019).

Maria Del Rosário’s words echo a crucial dimension of the contemporary struggles of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean: the intersection between territory, body, and resistance. When rural Afro-women assert that “they are destroying the lives of women who are giving birth,” they are denouncing not only the physical and symbolic violence inflicted upon them but also the systematic attempt to destroy their means of continuity as peoples. This is a form of necropolitical violence, in the terms of Achille Mbembe (2018), which manages the death and suffering of certain bodies to ensure the expansion of capital and the reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies inherited from coloniality. Thus,

In this contemporary context of predatory capital expansion, various feminist movements “[…] began to use the concept of the body-territory to frame resistance against neo-extractivist encroachments, led primarily by women” (Gago, 2020, p. 87).

Therefore, these women are subjected to a form of violence that, while directed at the territory, also strikes directly at their bodies. Nevertheless, the voices of these women reveal a subversion of this logic of death through practices of (re)existence that transform suffering into struggle and the territory into a political and spiritual space. Latin American and Caribbean Afro-diasporic women have been asserting their right to territory as land ownership and as an ontological condition of collective existence—a space that articulates the sacred, the political, the economic, and the affective. This perspective breaks with categories that dissociate nature and culture, body and spirit, and work and care and reveals that the defense of territory is also the defense of a way of being and knowing that is ancestrally inscribed.

At the International Meeting of Afro-Rural Communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, other common consequences of capital’s encroachment on quilombola and Afro-rural territories were highlighted, such as the loss of territory; weakening of the production system; the creation of militias to expel families from their territories; limited participation in institutional spaces; militarization and pressure from churches within these territories; the use of information by universities as a resource for consumption (solely for the production of academic articles); and actions by neoliberal governments that result in the suspension of rights (Soares, 2020).

Despite these historical processes of violence and rights violations that have befallen these women since their ancestors were forcibly removed from Africa and brought to these lands, they have resisted. Nonetheless, not all resistance and struggle by Afro-diasporic women are recognized as such. This is because the prevailing conception of what constitutes struggle and resistance is permeated by colonialist, racist, and patriarchal models that hold up the white male figure as the ideal protagonist of rebellious, revolutionary, transgressive, and insurgent movements—a model that defines what is recognized as a legitimate political act. Black men and women are left with the racist stereotype of a “submissive” person, “incapable” of developing collective consciousness, class consciousness, or actions considered revolutionary. These stereotypes have no basis apart from racism. From a sociological perspective, such stereotyping is an attempt to depoliticize Black people, confining them to the status of objects of study or victims but never as makers of history (Ramos, 1995). This ideological operation reinforces the normalization of racial and gender inequality and legitimizes the exclusion of black bodies from the public sphere and the narrative of emancipation.

On the other hand, the historical record of women’s struggles against oppressive systems predominantly reflects white feminism, which serves as inspiration for feminist organizations in the West, including the Americas. Black, Indigenous, community-based, Afro-diasporic, and Quilombola feminisms have displaced this limiting perspective from the center of the Western narrative, which is grounded in the experience of white, European, middle-class women. By revisiting different subjects, stories, and struggles and by broadening the possibilities for analysis and historical references, we can recognize the plurality of forms of struggle and resistance and strengthen the collective fight against patriarchy—not as divisive but as a means of solidarity. Through these epistemic and political shifts and uprisings, these women have woven new forms of organization. Therefore,

The weaving of resistance and collective struggles led by women does not occur only in quilombola territories. It is also present in Indigenous territories, Afro-Brazilian spiritual centers, popular movements, landless settlements and camps, Afro-rural communities, favelas, urban occupations, and, increasingly, in quilombo-like gatherings within universities, on the streets, in feminist collectives, in samba circles, in funk, and in hip-hop. It traverses the ground that provides the foundation and substance for what we might call spaces of resistance or territories of black and anti-colonial insurgencies (Soares, 2021, p. 524).

In doing so, they offer a radical critique of the universalization of the category “woman,” which has historically rendered invisible the intersections between gender, race, class, and territory. Regarding these uprisings, it should be noted that the Afro-Amazonian feminists of the Intermunã Center for Amazonian Expressions have denounced the stigmatization of Afro-descendant identities and their political and cultural reduction to the borders of nation-states. By identifying themselves as Afro-Amazonian, they reject the colonial model of territorial and institutional expansion imposed by the colonizer, which treats the European experience of domination and conflict in the Americas as the sole and legitimate one. Furthermore, these women do not merely claim a geographic marker but assert a political identity that destabilizes the boundaries between the African and the Indigenous, the local and the global, and the human and the non-human. On another level, they reaffirm the mutual recognition of Afro-Indigenous ancestry that shapes the practices and cultures of Afro-Amazonian peoples as a possibility for reimagining life, as well as for developing Afro-Amerindian epistemologies.

The selection of this self-designation reveals an active rejection of the Eurocentric paradigm of identity, as it reduces African descent’s experience to political and cultural categories constructed from a colonial perspective. Instead, Afro-American feminists propose rearticulating an Afro-Amerindian consciousness, in which the Amazonian territory is understood as a site of enunciation and knowledge production, not merely as a space of extraction, exoticization, or intervention. These forms of insurgency and resistance are led by women against racism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression and capitalist exploitation, which are expressed in institutional practices and public policies, such as care and health promotion policies.

Body-Territory and Ancestry

Ms. Nice Maria Aires, a Quilombo leader from Maranhão, reaffirms in a powerful statement, recorded in the book Nice Guerreira (2016), that the orixás do not like dirty water or trash, thereby highlighting the connection between the struggle for territory and the struggle for nature, along with the spiritual dimension of African-based religions and the symbolic potential of her culture.

[...] When the forest disappears, so do the banks of the streams, which we call olho d’água. It remains alive there all the time, but it is disappearing too. They say that people who have this spiritual experience—the enchanted beings and the orixás—love the forest. They do not live in grasslands; they do not live in places that have been destroyed; they do not live... They are also part of the forest—the waters, both the clean and the polluted ones. They do not stay there either. So, they talk to us a lot about this issue. Moreover, regarding this traditional knowledge, they are against pollution; where there is pollution, they cannot coexist (Aires, 2016, p. 67).

By linking care for the land to the purity of the waters and respect for nature, Ms. Nice reveals the inseparable connection between body, land, and spirituality—a fundamental principle of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Amazonian cosmologies. Furthermore, Ms. Nice’s words and experiences express that, in the daily struggle of quilombola women for clean water, for the healthy food they put on their plates, and for the standing forests from which they derive sustenance for their families, there is a countercolonial praxis mobilized against predatory systems that exploit nature and human beings. Selma Dealdina (2020, p. 37) states the following:

We, as Quilombo women, play an indispensable role in the struggles for resistance and for the preservation and legal recognition of our territories. Both in the Quilombo and in the city, we have been the guardians of Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions, the sacred, care, our children, the griots, the farm, the seeds, and the preservation of natural resources that are essential to guaranteeing our rights.

Thus, the “body-territory” category, reinterpreted in light of Quilombola and Afro-Amazonian experiences, takes on new layers of meaning. It not only denounces patriarchy and colonialism as systems of expropriation of bodies and land but also proposes an alternative paradigm of life and knowledge—the paradigm of interdependence among human beings, nature, and ancestry. This vision, rooted in Afro-diasporic epistemologies, challenges capitalist and anthropocentric rationality, reestablishing spirituality as a legitimate field for knowledge production and political action.

Ms. Maria Amélia, a leader from the Andirá River in the municipality of Barreirinha, Amazonas, portrayed in her book Trilhas percorridas por uma militante quilombola (Paths Traveled by a Quilombo Activist, 2016), conveys in her narrative how the female body becomes a political and ethical territory in the face of attempts at control and silencing.

I gave him this document to present at the police station. This document says the following: if we do not provide land documents, our CPF numbers, and ID cards, we will not be allowed to clear the land or burn it. But how are we supposed to use the land? [...] So, I took a stand. I was threatened. They said they were going to arrest me because I was telling everyone to farm here in Matupiri and that I hadn’t received orders from anyone, that I was doing something wrong within our community. Anyway, I know that the locals themselves are against me. But I want to say, I’m not doing anything against them; I’m doing it for the sake of my people (Amélia, 2016, pp. 60–61).

If, for Ms. Nice, the territory is an extension of the sacred, for Ms. Maria Amélia it is the embodied expression of the collective—a body that moves and resists attempts to criminalize traditional practices and impose a state-sanctioned rationality on Quilombola ways of life. By criminalizing traditional agricultural practices and demanding the formal regularization of peasant life, the state imposes a bureaucratic rationality that delegitimizes traditional knowledge and transforms the territory into an object of regulation rather than of belonging.

Like so many Quilombo women who have transformed their territory into a space of healing and resistance, Luiza Liberata embodies the concrete expression of the connection between ancestry, the body, and nature. A Quilombo survivor from Quilombo da Caveira in São Pedro da Aldeia, Rio de Janeiro, and a guardian of traditional knowledge, she was recognized in her Quilombo as a prayer leader, midwife, and healer. A mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Luiza turned every birth into a ritual of consecration to the forces of nature. According to the tradition she preserved, the first full moon after childbirth marked the moment when the child was to be presented to the moon, with the purpose of ensuring the child’s health, prosperity, and abundance. At that moment, she would gather all the child’s belongings—clothes, shoes, cloth diapers, and so on—place them in a woven straw (sapê) basket, hold the child up toward the sky, and recite: “Moon, moonlight, take this child to help me raise him; his head is yours and his bottom is mine.” This was a ritual practiced by Luiza in the community that not only acknowledged the connection between humans and nature but also represented the hope that the quilombola children would be protected throughout their lives.

Luiza’s respect for the forces of nature was at the heart of her way of life and her approach to healing. For her, water, herbs, and the moon possessed a spiritual power capable of restoring balance among body, mind, and spirit, thus becoming indispensable allies in treating illnesses. She was also known for curing ailments of the time, such as “fallen spine”—characterized by intense pain in the sternum—through prayers and ancestral knowledge and “inguinal swelling,” a cluster of lymph nodes in the groin area, using prayers and ritualistic gestures learned from the elders and passed down from generation to generation. In one of her prayers, she would say, “At this door there are three planks: one, two, three, ‘íngua’ (swollen lymph node) gone,” reaffirming the word as an instrument of power and healing. Moreover, at that moment, the “íngua” was no more. Her backyard, filled with medicinal plants, served as a true therapeutic space, where she prepared healing syrups and baths. Luiza Liberata’s journey is thus part of the ancestral lineage of African-American women, who, through dialogue with the natural elements, transformed the act of caring into a political and spiritual practice, reaffirming the bond between territory, nature, and ancestry.

At the start of the Month of Afro-Diasporic Women from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Diaspora, on July 6, 2025, in the ancestral land of Mana in the Amazon, Ame-African women known as “FanmNèg...Fô⁴!” traditions and the care of the farm that feeds us. The late Aunt Manotte was our oldest FanmNèg…Fô!—an Afro-Guyanese woman who had been re-empowered by the INTERRMUN’Ã Institute and who participated in workshops to revive the traditions of the Tterras (lands) of women and men proud to be descendants of free Africans. To the sound of the drum, she played gently with her hands—hands that had harvested cassava, lemons, oranges, and black sesame on the farm she inherited from her parents. Aunt Manotte, in silence, brought forth the words of the sacred Amazonian forest, beating the grajé rhythm while dancing with her heel stamped firmly on the Tterra (land), honoring the Mananense tradition of movement. The FanmNèg…Fô!, from the workshops of the same name, honored the memories of their time with Aunt Manotte with their emotionally charged words. She was the only daughter of her great-uncle, the healer Uncle Matu, whose silent gaze reflected the ancestral knowledge of plants and healing hands (Servius-Harmois, 2024).

That day, Cousin Rosemarie rose with great calm and dignity to speak about and honor Aunt Eliane, her mother and Aunt Manotte’s older cousin. She had also passed away, joining her ancestors one month after her cousin’s death. The family members, gathered together with the children and the younger ones and the FanmNèg… Fô!, learned a little about the life of the family’s oldest healer, who had received ancestral knowledge from their aunts, Aunt Jotte and Aunt Mélide, both descendants of the African wisdom of Mana. One of them lived in a thatched house and smoked a pipe, walking barefoot on the hot sandy streets […]. Aunt Eliane had learned these healing practices by observing the older women, sitting in a corner, paying close attention to every detail, watching and listening to how the plants were used. Rosemarie remembered how the herbal syrup and mocotó (calf’s foot) that her mother prepared were very famous and in high demand, as they cured infertile women. Rosemarie had traveled back to Mana to take part in this moment, passing on and ensuring the continuity of the griot’s word in the Tterra, where this ancestral knowledge was preserved. Re-learning to listen to our own stories is a countercolonial challenge, as it raises awareness of the relationship between collective identity and traditional territories (Servius-Harmois, 2024, p. 97).

Thus, “Chonjé Tante Manotte, Chonjé Tante Eliane” was born, in memory of Aunt Manotte and Aunt Eliane—the name given to these reunions held in their honor, reflecting a desire for the rebirth of these territories through reactivated memory, returning to spaces imbued with energies to be reidentified through the living oral tradition of spoken languages—expressed through their gestural and visual codes—while attuning to powerful perceptions and connections with the Gangans/Elders and Ancestors in the Afro-Guyanese language. In a territory where, to this day, Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) has not been ratified (Servius-Harmois, 2024, p. 96), denying rights to peoples with traditional knowledge, “Chonjé Tante Manotte, Chonjé Tante Eliane” emerges as an initiative of resistance and re-existence from the INTERRMUN’Ã Institute. It is proposed as a celebration to be repeated in the territories, on the plantations, in the quilombos, and in all places of Afro-African memory as a first act of homage to the aunts, grandmothers, and mothers of knowledge in each place, which would kick off the July activities honoring Afro-Latin, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Amazonian women and women of the diasporas, with respect for the sacred precedence of Ame-African women.

The stories above—some of which were shared with us through research and outreach or through our activist engagement in territories of resistance, and others that are part of our own history, rooted in our ancestry—demonstrate that Networks of Resistance against oblivion and historical amnesia—a tool of the colonial and slave-owning system—continue to be created and recreated in the Amazon, on the coast, and in the hinterlands of Brazil; in the Guiana Lands; and in the quilombos of Rio de Janeiro and Maranhão. These networks reaffirm both the struggles and resistance of our ancestors and assert us as the heirs to those struggles.

Horizons, Words, and Gestures of Care Affirmed in the Struggle of African American Women

In addition to the violence perpetrated against women’s bodies and territories since time immemorial, there is also an epistemic annihilation of words and gestures of care, sustained by a slave-owning ethos (Moura, 1993). An “epistemicide,” in the terms of Sueli Carneiro (2023), marked by discourses and practices that conceal racial privileges while neglecting the role of women in the defense of life—a role that should instead be recognized as a pillar of institutional practices and public policies. Instead, discourses emerge in the public discourse on community health that disregard the historical role of Afro-Brazilian women in care, health, and well-being.

Narratives about care are common in healthcare and training settings because, in addition to failing to recognize the health needs of Black women and their communities (Barbosa; Oliveira; Correia, 2023), they also neglect their knowledge and the grassroots solutions led by these women, even when these involve age-old, community-based practices (Alves et al., 2023). Therefore, ethical, aesthetic, and political notions and attitudes are embodied in practices of care and healing grounded in an anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, and conservationist perspective on nature and its territories—a perspective that transmits a generational legacy in defense of life.

Thus, “identifying racial difference as a right asserted in women’s struggle for access to and dignified health care, bodily integrity, and respect for values and beliefs” (Carneiro, 2006, p. 22) means recognizing the narratives of care among African American women, as well as their knowledge and practices, as threads that sustain networks of (re)existence, knowledge, and affection in the diaspora across this continent.

Through our journeys in quilombo territories and our dialogues with women, community leaders, midwives, “jongueiras” (female practitioners, Jongo singers, or dancers), and “rezadeiras” (prayer leaders), we have gained valuable insights. These lessons allow us to envision possible paths toward social justice grounded in the territory as the material and symbolic foundation of communities, particularly as they relate to the exercise of rights and health care practices:

• Access to social rights such as land, health care, and education is essential to redressing the historical social debt owed to Afro-rural and Quilombola communities. The struggle for land is inseparable from the struggle for social rights demanded and asserted in the struggle of Afro-Brazilian women;

• Traditional Afro-rural territories, such as the quilombos, embody a relationship of continuity with memory and nature—sources of knowledge and health care;

• The home, the backyards, the courtyards, the community—in short, all living spaces in Afro-rural and quilombo territories—are permeated by memories of care that shape practices of caring and healing as ways of (co)existing;

• Black African women are key figures in shaping practices and meanings of care as a form of creative (re)existence and resistance against colonial oppression;

• Care practices embody ancestral rites and beliefs that take tangible form in words and physical acts such as the blessing—an expression of faith and religiosity that ascribes particular meanings to the body, life, and death;

• Elders are guardians of the knowledge and practices that preserve a unique way of caring for and healing others as a resource at the service of the community—never as individual property to be exploited or used to exclude others;

• Community hospitality, as taught by Black peoples on their journeys, provides us with pedagogies of care and coexistence. This hospitality teaches survival and patience, attitudes that are always “full of hope”—a driving force for building futures that emerge from diasporic pasts and presents;

• Community life teaches strategies for care in a collective sense. The network of coexistence and affection—a source of support in the face of oppression since the days of slavery—has left a legacy of care rooted in a profound knowledge of herbs, prayers, words, and acts designed to comfort and alleviate pain;

• The knowledge, practices, and pathways of community care—taught and practiced by women—create opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and the transmission of a cultural legacy from elders to the younger generations: children, adolescents, and young adults;

• The process of care, as well as dances and chants, ensures the continuity of a people, transforming racial differences and ethnic identity into a bond of communal affirmation rather than a pejorative and punitive factor affecting the health of African American women.

The experience of territory as an inhabited space (Santos, 1994), the production of the commons (Federici, 2022), and the care provided by African-American women become alternative paths for rebuilding humanity shattered by slave-based colonialism, as well as threads in an “invisible tapestry” of women’s struggles and resistance that extend throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. This approach is a political alternative grounded in the collective and communal experience led by Afro-American women to confront social, economic, political, and health crises. Community care, a material and symbolic space embodied within the territory (Almeida, 2022), evokes an ethic of coexistence personified in pedagogies of belonging (hooks, 2022): mechanisms for survival in times of crisis.

Women carry within their very bodies—and in the way they care for others, heal, and live in community—an encyclopedia of ways of being; powerful “instrumental knowledge” emerging from the “commons” (Soares, 2023); and spaces for weaving hope, care, healing, and liberation. On the other hand, the possibility and the act of narrating collective memories—evidenced by the circularity of this text’s composition—also serve as a path toward disengagement from colonial consciousness, contributing to the development of critical reflection on care, grounded in respect for the knowledge and practices that emerge from local territories and in the ethics of listening to others.

Final Considerations

What narratives and meanings weave the “invisible fabric” of women’s struggles and resistance that spans all of Latin America and the Caribbean?

In the practices of healing, healthcare, territorial mobilization, food provision, and the building of networks of protection and affection carried out by Afro-American women in Latin America and the Caribbean, there is certainly a “mythical ancestry” (Gonzalez, 2020b) that permeates these women’s existence. This is a cosmological perspective that, despite countless attempts at annihilation, has not yet been subjugated by the coloniality of knowledge and the fetishization of commodities. This dimension is profoundly transgressive in its form and meaning, but it may disappear due to the incursion of other ways of thinking, producing, caring for health, and revering the “sacred.” These historically constructed struggles and forms of resistance are dynamic and ever-evolving; they are not frozen in time, do not represent the archaic in the colonialist sense, and are woven together while acknowledging the limits of their reach. There is an ethic of coexistence among different forms of knowledge and a convergence with nature and the Other (Santos, 2023). But many of these practices have been appropriated by “esotericism” and scientism and renamed with terms accepted in the market and the scientific world, patented and sold with labels and packaging that contains subjectless content. It is an “epistemicide” (Carneiro, 2023) that has been reproduced over time and is a hallmark of the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2005).

In territories marked by collective insurgencies, there are still spaces for practices related to food production, health care, the preservation of memory, sharing, and countercolonial convergences (Santos, 2023), as indicated in the text below:

There was no illness, evil eye, or ailment of the body or soul that Firmina could not cure. If it was beyond her knowledge, she would tell the sick person where to find a remedy. Firmina blessed children and adults afflicted by the evil eye, ringworm, scoliosis, erysipelas, and women’s ailments. […] Old Firmina earned the nickname “Firmina D’água” because she had a very unique way, which she had learned from her mother, of figuring out how to treat the people who sought her out. Using a cotton thread soaked in sweet babaçu coconut oil, she would bless those who sought her out, say her prayers, and then drip the oil into a basin of water. There, everything she needed to know would be revealed. For each patient, there was a different recipe—a preparation that only she knew how to make. […] Firmina didn’t charge or accept cash payment for the work she did, but she gladly accepted the gifts she received, so it was certain that her backyard would have a plump suckling pig, a chicken, or a coat, or that her kitchen would have a basket of flour or a bag of rice, ensuring that no one went hungry. In addition to being a healer and a folk healer, Firmina was also a skilled midwife and helped bring nearly half of the children born in her village into the world. She was devoted to Saint John and danced the “tambor de mina” [a traditional dance], just like her grandmother (Soares, 2021, pp. 75–76).

Firmina may be an Indigenous woman, a Quilombola, a Cimarron, a Palenquera, a Garifuna, an “Ndjuka,” a Saamaka, an Afro-Mexican, or a member of another people considered “traditional,” whether native to the Americas or descended from the African diaspora. Firmina is an Ame-African, in the terms of Lélia Gonzalez, because her body-territory, ancestry, and memory are part of a web that has been woven long before her, by the hands of women who dared to dream of a different future for their daughters and granddaughters.

Financing:

This article is the result of the research project “Collective Insurgent Practices: Struggles, Resistance, and Organization of Quilombola, Cimarron, Raizal, Garifuna, and Palenquera Women in Latin America and the Caribbean,” funded by the FAPERJ Call for Proposals No. 10/2024—“Support for Female Scientists Who Are Mothers Affiliated with ICTs in the State of Rio de Janeiro” Program and received support from the CNPq/UFF PIBIC Call for Proposals 2024/2025.

Data Availability Statement:

The data supporting the findings of this study cannot be made publicly available due to ethical restrictions. The research involves interviews with members of traditional communities and was conducted in strict compliance with ethical standards established by Resolution 510/2016. The study protocol was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (CEP Humanas, Approval No. 5.016.792/2021). Under the terms of this approval, the authors are ethically bound to destroy all interview materials (audio recordings and transcripts) upon study completion to protect the privacy and anonymity of the participants.

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Correspondence

Maria Raimunda P. Soares, Email: [e-mail], Rua Recife, s/n, Campus de Rio das Ostras, Jardim Bela Vista, Rio das Ostras, RJ, Brazil, Zip code: 28895-532.

Editors:

José Miguel Olivar e Jorginete Damião

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 Oct 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  02 Nov 2025
• Reviewed
  11 Mar 2026
• Accepted
  18 Mar 2026