Guadalupe García Presents: Colonial Logic in Latin American and Caribbean Cities

Guadalupe García Presents: “Colonial Logic in Latin American and Caribbean Cities”

Cartographic and literary depictions of colonial Latin American and Caribbean cities tell many stories; of bustling port towns, economic hubs, and administrative colonial centers. Embedded within these narratives are also stories of competing geographies and the enslaved and free black peoples who moved within them. This seminar presentation serves as an entrance into one of the many faces of the black urban Atlantic. It uses Havana as a case study to explore the contested geographies of port and mainland spaces and their relationship to the documentary and archival collections that have framed the ways in which we narrate colonial urban history.

Guadalupe García specializes in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research interests include colonial cities, urban space, and legal topographies. Her first book was published in 2016 with the University of California Press and is entitled Beyond the Walled City: Colonia Exclusion in Havana. Her current project explores how the multiple, competing geographies of nineteenth-century Havana might be made visible with the use of digital technologies. The project moves beyond mapping to also consider the ways in which space, scale, and projection can be used to counter the logic of the archive and expand our contemporary understanding of cities.