A View of Afro-Diasporic History from Colombia
The Muntu Bantu, a memorial museum and cultural center in Quibdo, Chocó, on Colombia’s Pacific coast region, seeks to work “for the study, promotion and diffusion of the Afro…
Category: Memory and Resistance
Transforming Havana’s Gay Ambiente
The epicenter of Havana’s gay ambiente might be La Rampa—a stretch of Calle 23 in the touristy El Vedado neighborhood— but the peripheral neighborhoods of Havana are also…
Slavery and Precarious Freedom
Slavery was a form of labor exploitation in which workers became the property of others; slaves were considered things, thus routinely exposed to transactions such as sale, auction…
Sandoval Redux
“While I lie on a cushion of worm slime, Father Alonso de Sandoval appears”: So remarks one of the several enslaved narrators in Afro-Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella’s 1983…
The Routine of an Unconventional Path
As a scientist by training and by conviction, I wish sometimes that I could just be like so many of my esteemed colleagues: just keep doing research in High-Energy Astrophysics, build a career around it, and hopefully derive my life’s satisfaction from it…
Mining and the Defense of Afro-Colombian Territory
We—an anthropologist and photographer, sister and brother—visited Yolombó in the department of Cauca, Colombia, in June 2017. Yolombó is part of a federation of ve towns…
Afro-Boricua Agency: Against the Myth of the Whitest of the Antilles
Puerto Rico is in crisis, made unimaginably worse by Hurricane Maria, this ongoing crisis highlights the racial character of our colonial condition. President Trump, who charged that…
African and Afro-Indian Rebel Leaders in Latin America
On Christmas Day in the year 1521, and half a world away from home, a group of enslaved West African Muslim warriors led a slave revolt on the island of Hispaniola, a distant island…
“I Found My Island”: Field Reflections of a Black Nuyorican in Puerto Rico
I landed in San Juan for the first time as a young adult with a bright orange 52-pound suitcase, my dog Zora, and an eager excitement to be reunited with the island…
