Trafficked Histories: Kinship and Boundary-Making in the Guyanese–Venezuelan Borderlands

This paper reframes the history of kinship formation and ethno-racial conflict in the Guyanese-Venezuelan borderlands. Enslavement and fugitivity defined the imperial contact zone between the Essequibo and Orinoco rivers during the eighteenth and first-half of the nineteenth century. Amerindians loyal to the Dutch hunted ‘civilized Indians’ living on the Spanish Capuchin missions of the Orinoco, and as militias, indigenous raiders were contracted to hunt plantation escapees and rebels during the Berbice slave uprising in 1763-4 (Hoonhout 2020, Kars 2020). Even so, fugitive Africans and African-descended peoples escaped the plantations with some regularity, sometimes being able to forge ties with refugee Amerindian communities, while Afro-Indigenous frontier people—enslaved and free guides, trackers, and traffickers—managed the Dutch and Portuguese commercial and political interests. The essay emphasizes the critical role of frontier people as tacticians who used plants, animals, minerals, and otherworldly powers to negotiate rapacious economic alliances and quickly shifting political terrains on the edge of empire during an age of revolutionary upheaval. Building on the scholarship on rumor and racial formation, the paper argues that illicit trade provides a critical lens to understand longue dureé creole socio-cultural formation and ethno-racial struggle in the Guyanese-Venezuelan borderlands.