Plant Practices and Community Resilience in a Colonial Mining Landscape

The district of Buría in the New Kingdom of Granada developed around Spanish gold extraction and drew enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples into coercive labor regimes that disrupted landscapes and community life. Within this setting, Miguel, also known as El Negro Miguel, led a rebellion that established a fugitive settlement beyond Spanish control. Scholarship has emphasized the political dimensions of this uprising. This paper examines the everyday material practices that sustained survival and resistance among the community that formed around it.

I argue that plant knowledge formed a foundation for resilience. Genipapo and annatto supported healing, bodily protection, camouflage, and ritual life, and they helped reproduce social and spiritual ties under conditions of displacement and forced labor. Enslaved Africans carried botanical knowledge across the Atlantic and adapted familiar practices to new environments, transforming African uses of Takula into annatto-based applications in the Americas. These adaptations show how diasporic expertise enabled people to navigate unfamiliar ecologies, maintain cultural continuities, and respond to the demands of colonial labor.

Treating plants as culturally meaningful matter embedded in relations to land, body, and belief highlights how environmental knowledge operated as a set of practical technologies. These practices supported recovery, mobility, and collective organization and enabled the community at Buría to sustain a fugitive settlement and wage prolonged resistance. The paper therefore defines resilience in concrete terms: the material strategies that allowed Afro-descendant and Indigenous people to preserve health, maintain social bonds, and build autonomous life within a mining frontier shaped by extraction and coercion.