ABSTRACT
For more than four centuries, the communities formed by runaway slaves—Maroons—dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil to the southeastern United States, from Peru to the American southwest. These new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members and surviving for generations or even centuries. Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves in several parts of the hemisphere—Suriname, Jamaica, French Guiana, Colombia, and elsewhere—remaining fiercely proud of their Maroon origins and, in some cases at least, faithful to unique cultural traditions that were forged during the earliest days of Afro-American history. The English word “maroon,” like the French and Dutch marron, derives from the Spanish cimarrón—itself based on an Arawa-kan/Taino root. Cimarrón originally referred to domestic cattle that had taken to the hills in Hispaniola, and soon after to American Indian slaves who had escaped from the Spaniards as well. But by the end of the 1530s, it was used primarily to refer to Afro-American runaways, and the word had taken on strong connotations of “fierceness,” of being “wild” and “unbroken.”
