The autonomous settlements established by Black and indigenous Brazilians to escape slavery and ongoing oppression number between 3,000 and 5,000, “but the Brazilian government only recognizes about half of them in terms of cultural rights” and even less in terms of land rights, said Carla Guerron Montero, an anthropologist at the University of Delaware. Professor Montero has done an extensive study of quilombos, whose residents’ are best described as an ethnic, rather than a racial, group.