Guest Lecture: Disavowed Mobilities: On Movement, Landscapes, and Afro-Amerindian encounters in Caribbean and Central American History; Speaker: Beatriz Véliz Argueta (CALAS/ University of Guadalajara/ University of Costa Rica)

Abstract:

What does it mean to follow a moving subject through space and time? How did mountains, ravines, winds and currents shape human mobility in the Caribbean and Central America in the early modern period? 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 -dense forest, mountains and ravines- and seascapes -currents, winds and shores- 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.

Following these histories also means following different ways in which movement has been made visible, recorded, remembered, and understood. 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. Through these encounters, the lecture develops moving worlds as a way of approaching mobility as an interconnected, relational, and spatial process. Bringing different forms of evidence into dialogue, the lecture considers what becomes visible when we follow mobility through space and time, and how environments, places, and human encounters shape the historical worlds through which people move.

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. Working across multiple archives and languages, she develops research-based storytelling projects that reactivate archival materials through visual, sonic, and narrative forms.

Her current public history project, Disavowed Mobilities: Garifuna, Exile, and Human–Environmental Interactions in Caribbean–Central American History, traces the formation and displacement of Garifuna communities across the Caribbean and Central American coast combining archival research, fieldwork and oral history.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/67146376660?pwd=zeDlFVFmWqxu5uJxUM0wKkhdClDKrK.1

Meeting-ID: 671 4637 6660
Code: k0zbVea0r