In slaveholding America, quilombo referred to a concrete geographical expression of conflicts within the dominant system and was a reconstruction and elaboration of a type of territorial organization that already existed in southern Africa. The vast extent of 'free' settlements developing on Brazilian Atlantic shores, with a form of territorial organization of African origin, had the common features of a safe, secure but not necessarily isolated space, with equal conditions for the majority of community relations and freedom of access to land, as well as a possible basis for confrontations and wars. Figures 2, 3 and 4 show examples of the organization of African spaces built in the New World and, in particular, of the distribution of houses and the structure of surveillance and protection of the quilombo. In this sense, the African and the American quilombos have fundamental similarities. These African sites in the Americas were a spatial manifestation of continental extension, with a collective desire to resist the society of oppression and perverse exclusion.
![img-18.jpeg](img_ref_19)  
Figure 2. Aspects of space typology and distribution of homes of Maroons in colonial Brazil.
Source: Anjos, 2007a.  
![img-19.jpeg](img_ref_20)  
Figure 3. Examples of the stoves and wood ovens used by Maroons in colonial Brazil.
Source: Anjos, 2007a.
![img-20.jpeg](img_ref_21)
figure 4. The guard and surveillance system of the Maroons in colonial Brazil.
Source: Anjos, 2007a.  
In Brazil and Uruguay, they were, and still are, referred to as mocambos, calbambo and quilombos; in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Cuba they were called palanques; cumbes in Venezuela; marrons in Haiti, the Caribbean Islands, Suriname, the Guianas, Jamaica and the United States of America; cimarrons in several other parts of Spanish-speaking America and Bush Negroes in French Guiana (Anjos, 2009). The following section will explore some of the references for spatial expression in colonial-imperial African Brazil.