Maroon communities, or communities of descendants of fugitives from slavery, have been long-lasting examples of social movements pursuing political goals through the production and mobilization of space. They have been largely forgotten in academic analyses, however, which, in Latin America, are primarily focused on peasants and indigenous movements. Therefore, drawing on socioterritorial movements readings and maroon studies, this article analyzes how maroon-descendant communities have produced territory in both urban and rural spaces-including areas of forced displacement-locally and transnationally, to survive hegemonies deeply rooted in the legacy of slavery and to achieve political aims. These communities unsettle binary categories of rural and urban socioterritorial movements and monolithic visions of antistate struggle. This transterritorial, rural-urban appropriation of spaces resisting different powers follows the past logic of marronage to achieve freedom and security, re-creating in present times the political vision of historical maroon leaders regarding the construction of a grand Palenque in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

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As a strategy for freedom, marronage has usually been narrated as an initiative of enslaved men who defied colonial power to escape oppression and produce territorialised societies away from slavery. Drawing on historical Maroon studies in Afro-Latin America, feminist geography, and communitarian feminist praxis on territorio cuerpo-tierra (body-land as territory), this article explores the role of Maroon-descendant women in the making and remaking of territories in the Colombian Caribbean. Records in the General Archive of the Indies, the General National Archive in Bogotá, the Historical Archive of Cartagena de Indias and the oral tradition of Maroon-descendant communities themselves are used to explain the place of women in struggles for territory in the context of violent land dispossession due to Colombia’s armed conflict. This article also demonstrates how the reparation process to claim back lost lands is also a women’s matter. We can understand this as an intimate and affective, almost invisible process, as in colonial times, by analysing the spatial practices of María de Los Santos, an internally displaced woman from the community of La Bonga in San Basilio de Palenque, a town of descendants of fugitives from slavery. These practices, understood through the work of an anthropologist from this community, Jesús Natividad Pérez Palomino, are intimate yet collective and mobilise both the tangible and intangible legacy of marronage to enable her and her people to endure.