Adela Amaral

Background

I am an anthropologist of Spanish colonialism and an archaeologist of contemporary Mexico. My work is concerned with colonial histories and legacies of Black fugitivity or, marronage, through which I consider political (im)possibilities on the margins of rural Mexico. My research mingles multiple archives and methodologies— documentary, archaeological, ethnographic, and fiction— to weave stories of material, political, and ghostly landscapes that expose the intersections of modernity, race, state, and capital in the past and the present. 

Broadly, my work examines the relationships between race, state power, and material practices in Mexico on two levels. First, I study the relationship between racialization and materiality and how people’s experiences of material reality are mediated by race. I seek to understand how modern worlds are a) materially created by mobilizing racialized ontologies (such as blackness), and b) how these worlds are experienced and re-created by non-white racialized subjects. Second, I am interested in the various discursive and material expressions of colonial processes of racialization in history, including the present. My multi-archive approach examines how the material world (re)constitutes, remembers, and disrupts histories of racialized subjection and subjectivities.

I focus these broader questions in the pueblo of Amapa, which was founded during Mexico’s colonial occupation by Black fugitives who fled sugar haciendas in the colony’s eastern region (present-day central Veracruz). Spanish officials approved the town’s construction in 1769 as a solution to the centuries old ‘maroon problem’ and its threat to colonial order. My research on the Amapa experiment includes extensive colonial documentary research in multiple Mexican archives and archaeological investigations in contemporary Amapa. Ideally, the historical Amapa settlement aimed to make its inhabitants legible and fix them within a spatial-racial hierarchy. Archaeological investigations, however, present a patchier record of resettled maroon life that departs from colonial expectations of normative urban civility and racial subjection. Most recently, this work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of University Women.

Education

PhD University of Chicago  2015

Courses Taught

ANTH 304 The Anthropocene
ANTH 318 Racialized Bodies & Places
ANTH 350 Archaeology of (Super)Modernity
ANTH 350 From Colonial Violence to Revolution
ANTH 421 The Archive
ANTH 545 Materiality  

Publications

2019   “Contesting Temporalities in a Historical Runaway Slave Town. Mexico 1769 to the Present”. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6(1): 47-63.

2017   “Social geographies, the practice of marronage, and the archaeology of absence in colonial Mexico”. Archaeological Dialogues 24(2): 207-223.