Book contents
- Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Afro-Latin America
- Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Key Events in Afro-Mexican History
- Introduction
- Part I Freedom and Colonial Legacies
- Part II (Un)Disappearing Black Mexico
- 5 Historical Memory about Slavery, Abolition, and Afro-descendants in the Mexican Press, 1821–60
- 6 The Geography of Race in Oaxaca’s Costa Chica
- 7 Oilseed Archives
- 8 The Pictorial Limits of the Nation
- 9 Reflections from the Twentieth Century
- Index
- References
7 - Oilseed Archives
Reading Afro-Mexico Landscapes in Plants and Plantations
from Part II - (Un)Disappearing Black Mexico
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2025
Book contents
- Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Afro-Latin America
- Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Key Events in Afro-Mexican History
- Introduction
- Part I Freedom and Colonial Legacies
- Part II (Un)Disappearing Black Mexico
- 5 Historical Memory about Slavery, Abolition, and Afro-descendants in the Mexican Press, 1821–60
- 6 The Geography of Race in Oaxaca’s Costa Chica
- 7 Oilseed Archives
- 8 The Pictorial Limits of the Nation
- 9 Reflections from the Twentieth Century
- Index
- References
Summary
Black and Afro-Indigenous life overlaps with the social and ecological lives of oilseeds in coastal Guerrero. This chapter uses oilseed plants, such as sesame, coconuts, and cotton, to analyze structural aspects of the Afro-Mexican experience. By following oilseeds in agrarian, economic, and local archives, this chapter demonstrates that plants provide archival and botanical evidence of racialized landscapes and landscapes of freedom. Oilseed landscapes are living legacies of slavery, plantations, and resistance. Taking inspiration from the way paleoclimatologists tell stories from natural archives such as ice cores, tree rings, and lake bed cores, this chapter presents oilseeds as an archival proxy to study socioenvironmental change but in tropical regions. A political ecology approach to the political economy of oilseeds demonstrates that Afro-descendant communities did more than exist; their labor and knowledge of oilseeds shaped socioeconomic development and politics on the coast.
Keywords
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth CenturySlavery, Freedom, and the Writing of History, pp. 193 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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