Geographies of Black Cimarronaje in the Northern Andes of Ecuador

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Construction of the colonial landscape and its legacies that guide the agendas of neoliberal governments have permitted a series of effects that define that north-central Andes under a historical geography created by the hacienda system and its confluence of human exploitation, forced diaspora, and racist geopolitics, which continues to affect Afro-descendant, rural, and Indigenous peoples. Based in collaborative historical archaeology and a Latin American feminist lens, I present a reflection about Black maroon geographies and fugitivity in Ecuador, specifically in the Chota-Mira Valley. Strategies of Afro-Ecuadorian resistance, and especially Black women and their descendants, propose rewriting landscapes of dispossession and histories of maroonage. These arguments are undertaken by moving through eighteenth-century maroon routes—a sort of fugitive infrastructure—and “counter-mapping” in the Territorio Ancestral Afroecuatoriano. The project proposes a historical revitalization of the territory through land recuperation and official recognition of access to the land.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37509.0