In colonial times in the Americas, cimarrón (maroon) was the name given to any rebellious or fugitive black slave who lived a life of freedom in remote territories. The term alludes to a domestic animal that escapes from its masters and becomes feral—connecting the concept with the idea of ‘wildness’. 

Marronage was thus an anti-hegemonic process. In fugitivism, maroons founded politically organized communities (known in some parts of the Americas as quilombos or palenques) that were usually located in places of difficult access and in which they lived autonomously during times when slavery was the norm in the Spanish colonies. 

In The Cimarrón and his Fandango, Mara approaches the history of the Afro-Mexican community, which is not her own but is that of the territory to which she belongs. This essay deals allegorically with the history of an identity that emerged from the contact between an enslaved community and a colonized territory. However, Mara's discourse is constructed, not from slavery and colonization, but from emancipation, from what the black community appropriated to make it their fandango. From their relationship with the territory and the shared desire for freedom. 

Thus, this series of photographs speaks of identity as something that emerges from the encounter between a collective imaginary and the territory that makes it possible. From the perspective of marronage, this emerging communal identity had its origin, not in the previous and planned organization of what was already known, but in the escape, in the resistance to the imposed order, in the unknown, in the refusal of what was without guarantees of what would be. In the wild, in the imagination.

At a time when a system imposes itself as the only truth, perhaps marronage, and the emancipated communities that emerged from it, point to the wisdom of the uncertain and the freedom of resisting the imposed Truth in order to create in community the Possible.

"Marronage, the act of removing oneself from the control of the slave plantation, wasn't preceded by honesty or truth-telling, but creative deception and a refusal of the epistemological imperatives of the master."

— Bayo Akomolafe

The Cimarrón and his Fandango was also published as a photo-book, which you can find here.