From Afro-descendant, more-than-human urban margins in Acapulco, Mexico

Source abstract

This visual essay examines the colonia of San Isidro Labrador, located on the urban margins of Acapulco, Mexico—a territory shaped by Afro-descendant heritages and enduring conditions of socio-environmental marginalization. Drawing on an ethnographic and more-than-human approach, the article explores how urban space is co-produced through a hybrid geography in which nonhuman actors—such as the creek—operate simultaneously as sources of livelihood and as agents of risk and destruction, particularly after extreme events such as Hurricane Otis (October 2023). The essay shows how state abandonment and institutional precarity intensify persistent forms of territorial injustice, compelling residents to develop local strategies of care, repair, and resistance amid a prolonged crisis. Through situated observations of everyday practices, collective memories, and fragile materialities—homes built on unstable ground and improvised infrastructures—the piece offers a critical reading of unequal urbanization, recognizing the agency of the nonhuman and the political force of local ways of inhabiting, rebuilding, and repairing the territory.