The hills of the Maciço de Baturité rise from the coastal plain about 55 kilometers southwest of Fortaleza, catching rain that the drier sertão does not see. The region around the Acarape River was home to the Potyguara, Jenipapo, and Kanindé peoples, each with their own territories and traditions. The soil held moisture; the river ran year-round. When Portuguese colonizers pushed into Ceará during the agricultural expansion of the 19th century, they saw what the indigenous peoples had known - land that could grow sugar. The indigenous presence in this region was displaced and, over generations, destroyed.

Sugarcane production brought enslaved Africans to Acarape, as it had to every Brazilian region where cane would grow. The lives these people led were shaped by forced labor in fields whose profits flowed to slaveholders and distant merchants. They built the economy. They built the infrastructure. They did not share in the wealth or the freedom of the country they were held in. Much of what is known about their individual lives has been lost to the documentary gaps that slavery produces; much remains to be recovered by historians who continue the work.

The abolition movement in Ceará gained momentum through the early 1880s, pushed by abolitionists including the Jangadeiros - the raft-fishermen of Fortaleza who refused to ferry enslaved people from the port. On 1 January 1883, Acarape became the first municipality in Brazil to declare all enslaved people within its limits free. The state of Ceará as a whole abolished slavery on 25 March 1884, also a first. National abolition followed with the Lei Áurea on 13 May 1888. Acarape's early act was radical, symbolic, and irreversible; the name Redenção - Redemption - was adopted to mark what had happened and what the town now was.

In 2010 the federal government established the University of International Integration of the Afro-Brazilian Lusophony - UNILAB - and chose Redenção as its headquarters. The choice was deliberate. UNILAB exists to integrate Brazil with Portuguese-speaking African nations, and students from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and East Timor study here alongside Brazilians. The university sits in a town that declared freedom 135 years before its founding. The connection is symbolic but also functional: students walking between the Auroras and Liberdade campuses are doing what the town's name has meant since 1883 - a community defined by the act of making people free.

Redenção sits in four districts across a wet pocket of the otherwise arid state, where temperatures stay between 22 and 32 degrees Celsius and the vegetation is greener Caatinga than the sertão to the south. The mountain of Saint Rita rises above the town; Acarape do Meio reservoir catches the river that gave the old settlement its name. Two museums and three squares anchor the historic center, receiving visitors who come for what the name commemorates. In a country that reckons imperfectly with the legacy of slavery, Redenção is a place where the reckoning happened early, decisively, and in public - and where the community chose to mark it by changing what it called itself.