A quilombo was originally a slave camp or town installed in the Amazon jungle. In this place, groups of slaves of African origin who fled from the farms where they worked hid to avoid possible reprisals from the masters and the authorities.
This may seem like an insult or a bad word, but the reality is that this term has a very interesting origin, rarely known. If we think about it for a moment, the word like so many others represents the typical terminology of the African languages that populated our land and contributed to its culture.
The term quilombo in Portuguese comes from the kinbundu, a word that comes from an African language that is spoken in the territory of Angola, since many of the slaves who came to America came from the African continent.
As with many words, the term we seek to define here has also gained and acquired new meanings over time. Therefore, to say today that something is a quilombo is to apply a pejorative tone to that something, referring more than anything to the disorder, the chaos that can exist in that place and that clearly refers to the type of life that is led in the ancients quilombos of slavery.
In some countries, the term is also used to refer to a space in which there are women who offer sexual services. Quilombo, in this sense, is synonymous with a brothel: "The television cameras detected a married politician who entered a quilombo at dawn."
In Argentina and Uruguay, quilombo serves to describe a messy and confusing situation. Therefore, a bar fight, a very hectic and tumultuous demonstration or a heated argument between neighbors are contexts that are normally described as quilombos.
