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.

This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.