Roots and ruptures: the urbanisation of an Indigenous village

Source abstract

This visual essay traces the transformations experienced in Azoyú as roads, electricity, and new consumer goods reorganised everyday life, mobility, and community gathering. Through photographs and lived memory, I reflect on what has changed, what has been lost, and what has been reworked, from adobe and brick making to the San Marcos petition for rain. Rather than treating ‘modernity’ as a single force, the essay shows how infrastructure, migration, and media reshape belonging within Afro-Indigenous convivencia, by which I mean a long history of living together, often unequally, through everyday exchange, shared celebrations, conflict, and adaptation in the Costa Chica. At the same time, rituals, dances, and local forms of care continue, unevenly, as practices of continuity and adaptation.