African Memories, Foodways, and Freedom in Colonial Colombia's Gold Mines

African Memories, Foodways, and Freedom is the first in-depth study of the African population brought to the gold mines of colonial Antioquia, and of the revolts and maroon settlements they formed from the sixteenth century. The book pairs Antioquia’s archives with West African sources, an integration rarely attempted for this period. It traces the forced arrival of Upper Guinean, West, and West Central African captives through judicial and Inquisition records, slave trade documentation, and treasury series on registered gold. It situates these processes against the Zenú hydraulic and goldwork civilisation, analysing how Spanish occupation, through coercive rule, reorganised territory, labour, and extraction. Gender is central to the analysis. The book argues that Upper Guinean women’s food knowledge, long overlooked by historiography, was structural to the economy of colonial Antioquia’s mines. Through sustained exchange with Indigenous peoples, African agrifood practices sustained self-sufficient maroon communities in the mountainous goldfields. By securing food production and seizing strategic terrain, maroons curtailed colonial access to the Guamocó gold frontier, intensifying existing constraints on labourers, water supply, provisioning, and transport. Integrating these threads, the book reinterprets Guamocó’s abandonment as a site where Indigenous and African diaspora knowledges operated as means for contesting and renegotiating colonial rule.