Conjuring a moment in 1769 colonial Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Exercising Freedoms: Historical Archaeology of the African Diaspora in Latin America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1769, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Negros de Amapa was a newly built ‘free’ Black town, fenced in by multiple forms of unfreedom. However the traces of that attempt to build the conditions for Black colonial life that remain in Amapa today, more often than not, emerge as empty signs, memories without recollection and tenuous realities crafted through academic writing. What if we were to contravene the limits placed by traces, sources and archives or dig through archives for things other than historical veracity? Which opens up another question: what types of stories of (un)freedoms can we create with the people among whom we work? And another question still: what if that audience is children?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Exercising Freedoms: Historical Archaeology of the African Diaspora in Latin America

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53515