Paola Vargas Arana – författare

African Memories, Foodways, and Freedom is the first in-depth study of the African population introduced to the gold mines of colonial Antioquia from the early sixteenth century and the revolts and maroon settlements that followed. Reading Antioquia’s documentation alongside West African sources, an archival pairing rarely attempted for this period, the book traces the forced arrival of Upper Guinean, West and West-Central African captives through judicial and Inquisition records, correspondence, slave-trade documentation, travellers’ accounts, and treasury series on registered gold. It situates these processes against the earlier 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 African women’s food labour, under-registered in history, was structural to the economy of colonial Antioquia’s mines. African agrifood practices, reworked through sustained exchange with Indigenous peoples, supported self-sufficient maroon settlements in the mountainous goldfields. By establishing control over strategic terrain and securing food production, these settlements impeded colonial access to key mining zones and intensified existing constraints on water supply, provisioning, transport, and labour. Integrating demographic reconstruction, mining records, and ecological analysis, the book reinterprets gold production decline and the abandonment of Guamocó mining district.