Mazagão had been a Portuguese outpost on the Atlantic coast of Morocco since the sixteenth century, a walled Christian garrison under steady military pressure from the surrounding Muslim states. When Lisbon finally abandoned it, 2,092 inhabitants were resettled, and 1,855 of them were shipped to Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, arriving in 1770. They waited there while the crown decided what to do with them. In 1773 a new Mazagão was founded far inland, in what is now the state of Amapá, and the refugees were moved into it. By 1777 only 343 of them were still living in Belém. The town they left behind in Morocco is still there, renamed El Jadida, its Portuguese cistern and ramparts now a UNESCO-listed reminder of the empire that walked away.

Whatever the planners in Lisbon imagined, the Amazon did not cooperate. The new settlement's economy was built on rice and cotton worked by enslaved Indigenous people — men and women taken from the surrounding rainforest and put to labor for a community that had itself been displaced by force. Rice harvests failed. Epidemics moved through the houses. The isolation was total, days of river travel from anywhere. Families drifted away, and by 1831 Mazagão Velho had been struck from the official list of villages altogether. It recovered enough to become the seat of its municipality in 1841, then lost that too: in 1915 the administration moved to Nova do Anauerapucú, which took the name Mazagão Novo, and later simply Mazagão. The original town became a district of its own namesake in 1960. Velho means old. It is also, in this case, a demotion.

What survived was the festival. From 16 to 28 July the village fills with masses, novenas, dawn alvoradas, processions, cavalhadas of mounted riders, and the dance called the vominê. Children are given roles and grow into bigger ones. The whole thing builds toward 25 July, the feast of Saint James, a state holiday in Amapá since 2012, when the Festa de São Tiago culminates in an open-air reenactment of a battle between Moors and Christians that spills out of the churchyard and through the streets. In 2017 the village — a place most Brazilians could not find on a map — drew a crowd of 50,000.

The saint at the center of it is São Tiago, Saint James the Greater, who in Iberian tradition appears as Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer, riding into medieval battles on the Christian side. The festival's story has him arriving among the soldiers as an unknown fighter and turning the day. That is a Reconquista legend, imported whole. What Mazagão Velho did with it over two and a half centuries is something else. The community that carries the festival is Luso-African and Amazonian, its ancestry mixing the evacuated Portuguese with Africans and Indigenous people of the lower Amazon, and the war it performs each July is not really about Morocco anymore. It is a village telling itself, in costume and gunpowder and wooden swords, where it came from and how it got here.