Global Encounters Lunch: Historicizing Blackness in Colombia’s Pacific Littoral

The south western Pacific coast of modern day Colombia is perhaps one of the most bio-diverse regions and one of the most Africanized regions of the Americas. This talk explores the ways that Spain relied upon enslaved Africans to claim, settle, and mine the region’s riverbeds for gold. Along the way, the enslaved fled captivity, established runaways slave settlements, and negotiated free town status for themselves as Spanish imperial subjects. This paper will explore the social lives that the enslaved and free established in these territories during the early eighteenth century.

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