On a recent trip to the state of Bahia, Brazil, my family and I tried to visit the Iguape Valley quilombos studied by Merle Bowen in this remarkable book. We managed to contact a Freedom Route (Rota da Liberdade) representative, but even though we had a few days of flexibility to take a tour, we were warned that destructive summer rains made such a visit logistically impossible. Earlier, we had tried to visit another area studied by Bowen, the Quilombo Circuit in São Paulo's Ribeira Valley. Though this area was much closer to home, we nevertheless had no luck. This might have been due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only recently relieved by vaccine availability, but the real reason is still a mystery. Our contact simply stopped replying to emails.These experiences exemplify Bowen's arguments about the resilience and neglect of Black struggles in rural Brazil. Quilombos are typically understood as runaway slave villages established during the long history of Brazil's enslavement of African captives. But, as Bowen's investigation makes clear, defining the term has generated controversy, which has created abundant opportunities for denying land rights to the descendants of enslaved people and thus undermining their freedom in ways that perpetuate racial segregation and racialized exploitation. This is occurring in a country that claims to be a racial democracy, a self-image based on colonial miscegenation policies that some twentieth-century thinkers have used to argue that Brazil overcame postemancipation racial divisions by successfully blending Indigenous, European, and African cultural influences into a singular culture. While many studies have demonstrated the fallacies of this idea, convincing some institutions and legislators to develop a few antiracist policies, the idea that racism does not exist in Brazil remains a powerful illusion, one that Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro endorsed and used to weaken or reverse such policies, including processes designed to demarcate and protect quilombos.The book examines these issues with clarity. Bowen, a senior University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political scientist who specializes in African American studies, analyzes policymaking and implementation processes regarding the land rights that Black people have fought for in Brazil since the abolition of slavery in 1888. Her work considers history from the perspective of present-day problems, in this case the significance of land as an enduring compensation for generations of stolen labor power. The main primary sources used by Bowen are oral histories. She credits the persistence of Black social movements for achieving some reparations for African descendants, and she emphasizes the right to land as one of the most significant battlegrounds for achieving meaningful structural change.Defining quilombos has been a key issue since the 1988 federal constitution established directives for Brazilian democracy following more than two decades of military rule. Among them was Article 68 of a transitional document that regulated the constitution's implementation by directing the government to emit definitive property titles to surviving quilombo communities. The first postdictatorship government established a foundation to put the laws in practice, but everything about the implementation process fell quickly into doubt. For more than a decade, anthropologists had to confirm a community's claims to being composed of slave descendants who had continuously occupied the proposed area from 1888 to 1988. But over the course of a century, disruptive events often undermined such continuity. Notably, land grabs by influential if unscrupulous individuals and groups pushed quilombo residents (called quilombolas) from the best land and forced them to accept drastically reduced, often unsustainable spaces. By recounting these stories, Bowen demonstrates that undermining the viability of Black farming communities was, and continues to be, an objective of dominant groups.In 2003, the new Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) administration issued an executive order that altered the parameters for designating Black rural communities. The order aligned Brazilian law with internationally accepted norms for treating endangered cultures: all “ethnoracial groups” with “specific territorial relations,” a “supposition of black ancestry,” and a trajectory of “resistance to historical oppression suffered” were entitled to have their communal lands recognized and protected (quoted in p. 92). This language eliminated the need for an anthropological assessment and widened the list of groups and areas that could benefit from Article 68.Since 1988, conflict over land has only intensified in Brazil. The reprimarization process, fetishizing natural resource exploitation, has raised the value of land for grazing, farming, forestry, mining, and investment. Associated interest groups have become staunch opponents of all forms of socially determined land claims, such as quilombos, Indigenous peoples' territories, and agrarian reform settlements. Internationally, entities like the World Bank have proposed ethnic and ecological tourism as alternative land uses that could help gain respect for quilombo designations in a capitalist value system. But investments have generally ignored community-determined values. The tourism industry rejects tour ideas that show the costs of enslavement and celebrate the resistance and resilience of quilombolas. Even without the support and cooperation of Black rural communities, the industry has gained the bulk of investments selling tours that reproduce plantation themes, including racialized inequities. In all probability, these tensions contributed to the difficulties we encountered when trying to tour quilombos in Bahia and São Paulo.