“An Academy of Disobedients”: Free People of Colour’s Cartographies of Water and Land on Colombia’s Magdalena River

• In Event: Gendered Waterways of the Afro-Iberian Atlantic World

Description for Program

Close to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, along the banks of the Magdalena River, a community of free people of colour thrived during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Named Chiriguaná, this community raised cattle, mules, goats, and cultivated farmland with all kinds of produce to be transported and sold throughout different riverine ports. In 1796, their white landowning neighbor launched a litigation that aimed to impede the commercial life and growth of the community. This litigation produced a little over 300 pages of census material, testimonies, and correspondence reflecting a conflict that would span a decade. Sprinkled throughout these pages are numerous instances where colonial authorities used disparaging language against the free people of colour of Chiriguaná. This language meant to question the community’s freedom, to devalue their claims to the land they inhabited, and to dismiss their capacity for collective organization. In this talk, I question this disparaging language, inverting its meaning to underline the opposite: that Chiriguaná’s free people of colour created a territory of self-definition that constantly challenged colonial authorities through their own organized spatial imaginaries of land and water.

Author

• Valeria Mantilla Morales, Stonybrook University