In December of 2024, the American Historical Review released a special edition entitled, Histories of Resilience that challenged historians to employ the concept of resilience in its varied forms as an analytical lens through which to consider the ways communities confronted crises – environmental, political, economic, or cultural – and how these confrontations proved transformative. At the heart of the issue were questions posed by the contributors about the concept of resilience and its relationship to change: how much change, for example, can an individual, group, or landscape display before they are no longer considered resilient? How can a concept like resilience be usefully employed without implicit or explicit reference to stasis or essentialism? Is resilience necessarily a positive attribute?[1]

Drawing on inspiration from these questions, this panel seeks to explore the applicability and utility of the concept of resilience, broadly defined, in the study of colonial resource extraction in Latin America. In many respects, the study of colonial resource extraction, its influence on colonial societies, and its environmental impact present an ideal topic through which to explore histories of resilience. Over the centuries since the arrival of Europeans in the New World, the pursuit of natural resources has left an indelible mark on countless Latin American landscapes, from the highlands of the Andes to the tropical lowlands of the Caribbean. Moreover, efforts to extract resources in the colonial context produced a spectrum of coercive labor regimes, from rotational labor drafts to debt peonage to enslaved labor. In all these instances, the introduction and imposition of distinctly colonial extractive regimes impacted local environments and cultures, rendering change and resilience natural foci for scholarship on the peoples and places shaped by these processes.

This panel brings together scholars whose work focusses on Cuba, Peru, Brazil, and Nueva Granada to consider the forms and meanings of resilience in various geographic, environmental, and cultural contexts. The panel focuses on two central questions. First, how did resource extraction reconfigure landscapes, cultures, and social relations? Second, in what ways did communities, particularly Indigenous and Afro-descendent groups, transform adversity into practices of resistance, adaptation, or innovation? In other words, how did affected communities define resilience through their actions?

[1] Shelly Chan et al., Introduction: A Note from the Editorial Collective, n.d., accessed February 11, 2026, https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae472.