Landscapes of Freedom

Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia

Bibliographic Data

ID2835341
AuthorsOscar De La Torre (0000-0001-6332-1926, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume99
Issue3
Pages566-568
Publication date2019-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-7575631
OpenAlexW2965158894
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Landscapes of Freedom is a meticulous and innovative study of slavery and the postemancipation decades on the Pacific coast of Colombia. In “the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by black people,” enslaved Africans and their descendants appropriated the tropical rain forest to achieve the highest levels of autonomy of almost anywhere in the enslaved Americas, Leal argues (p. 5). In the decades after abolition, Afro-Colombians maintained their hard-won autonomy by retaining control over the extraction of vegetable ivory (tagua), gold, and other forest products, despite the arrival of mining companies and tagua exporters from Colombia and other countries. The locals' command over the extractive economy of the region explains why intellectuals from the highlands saw it as a hostile and unhealthy green hell inhabited by an untamable black population—a process that Leal conceptualizes as a racialization of the landscape.Leal's portrait of slavery in the region relies almost exclusively on secondary sources, but she has managed to produce a rich and much-needed synthesis of the subject. In the late eighteenth century, enslaved Africans represented about 40 percent of the coastal population, reaching a high of almost 10,000 individuals by 1800 (p. 38). They practiced placer gold mining in gangs that adopted Indian mining techniques and often enjoyed a high level of autonomy, given that mineowners frequently resided in the highlands. Instead of creating maroon communities, however, large numbers of slaves saved cash and eventually purchased their manumission. While this was a widespread practice throughout Spanish and Portuguese America, in Pacific Colombia a stunning 60 percent of manumissions were purchased by the enslaved themselves, not bequeathed by testament or obtained otherwise. While the data is sometimes fragmentary, Leal concludes that the self-purchase of freedom happened here more than anywhere else in the Americas—even Latin American cities (pp. 48, 52).The author then shifts focus to the political economy and the labor conflicts caused by disputes over access to natural resources in the decades after the 1851 abolition of slavery. Rubber, tagua, cacao, and timber were all exported from the region in the late 1800s, creating short-lived periods of commercial prosperity and small communities of merchants that for the most part adapted to the Afro-Colombians' preference for autonomy. As the twentieth century advanced, however, a technological revolution in river mining and new waves of national legislation intended to increase exports generated mining enclaves and increased conflicts over natural resources. Ultimately, however, Leal argues that despite the changes in these decades neither capital nor technology could “annihilate the autonomy that [Afro-Colombians] associated with freedom” (p. 149).During the early and mid-1900s, external observers and urban elites also bestowed specific racialized characteristics on the region's natural landscapes. Colombian intellectuals, missionaries, bureaucrats, and visitors from Popayán and even the national capital, Bogotá, came to describe the lowlands as dominated by a “rich but hellish” untamable nature and inhabited by savage blacks incapable of bringing civilization to this inhospitable area (p. 177). As the commercial ports of Tumaco and Quibdó grew and became multiracial cities during the first half of the 1900s, urban whites also sought distinction by criticizing the uncivilized and barbaric music and dances of urban blacks and by informally restricting the entrance of Afro-Colombians to specific spaces such as elite schools (p. 206).Overall, the book would probably have benefited from shortening its central chapters on the merchant communities and the regional economy, as this section shifts the focus away from the book's main characters, the Afro-Colombians themselves. Some readers would also appreciate a greater effort to capture the voices and faces in the multitude. When the author does so by discussing the case of Manuel Saturio Valencia, a black middle-class man from Quibdó executed for arson in 1907 with the apparent intent of reinforcing racial boundaries, the narrative becomes more dynamic and engaging. Finally, one wonders whether poverty, the main cost of the decades-long relentless pursuit of autonomy, should be discussed in more depth throughout the book, especially in its second half.Beyond these minor shortcomings, however, this is an urgently needed monograph, as the last English-language works on black populations in Pacific Colombia are decades old. Leal has tackled a complex subject for which there are not many sources by employing a series of original concepts from environmental history and the recent literature on Afro-Latin America. This is, in sum, a rich and informative piece of research, surely to become the work of reference on the history of black rural communities in Pacific Colombia

Archaeology · Art · Autonomy · Ethnology · Geography · Gold rush · Jungle · Maroon · Political science · Population · Portuguese · Sociology · Demography · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law

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