Events

Building on a spatial and environmental framing, “Disavowed Mobilities” asks how Afro-Amerindian movement, survival, and displacement were structured not only by imperial violence but also by the material and ecological conditions of an amphibian territory. By foregrounding landscapes and seascapes as key historical agents, exile emerges as a process of spatial reconfiguration, unfolding across islands, coastlines, and contested frontiers. The trajectories of Afro-Amerindian people reveal not only how Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America became linked through ongoing processes of displacement, but also how their human-environmental interactions structured and enabled resistance.

Drawing on archival, ethnographic and oral history research, the lecture reflects on what it means to follow these mobile worlds through different forms of historical evidence, how these mobilities are remembered, and what kind of archives of the future we are creating.

Beatriz Véliz Argueta is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS), University of Guadalajara/ Central American Historical Research Center (CIHAC), University of Costa Rica. Her research combines environmental history, cartography, history of science, and art history to examine how places are constructed – visually, materially, and narratively – across colonial and postcolonial contexts.