Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved people crossed the Guiana border in Grão-Pará, modern-day Amapá, and formed quilombos. Miguel was an enslaved African man who escaped and lived in hiding in the border region. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution (1789) and the Caribbean Revolts (1791) circulated ideals feared by slave owners in Grão-Pará. Quilombolas like Miguel not only occupied the border, but also turned it into spaces for spreading ideas of freedom.