Breaching Walls and Crossing Bodies: Cartagena de Indias and Spatial Passages

Breaching walls and Crossing Bodies. Cartagena de Indias and spatial passages.

Cartagena de Indias, the Key to the Indies, was a viable target for privateers and pirates alike, its vulnerability and its strength oddly juxtaposed. Despite its fragility, it was a major military bulwark, with crucially important shipyards, home to guardacostas like the Goleta San Antonio, and a fixed regiment. It was a fortified city, designed to represent and protect the Hispanic imperial and cultural system. Constructed by the hands and with the sweat of those colonized bodies that would be assimilated into its dominant culture, the walls of Cartagena were built to keep strangers out, but they simultaneously had to encompass those charged with their construction. These were the disenfranchised, the enslaved Africans, the convicted criminals who laboured on the King’s fortifications. Eventually, even such unsavoury groups would have to be incorporated into the cityscape’s cultural matrix.  This work will explore the relations between the interior and exterior spaces of the city in its physical and cultural manifestations during the colonial period. Transcending the material structures of the city walls, we will also analyze the watery boundaries between ship and shore and the extension of Cartagena into the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds.