In the Plantations’ Shadows: Black Peasants and Land Claims in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spanish Equatorial Guinea, 1850-1950

FAIN: FT-286026-22

Adriana Chira
Emory University (Atlanta, GA 30322-1018)

Research leading to a history of post-abolition land occupation in rural island territories of Spain in the Caribbean and coastal Africa between 1850 and 1950.

This comparative project explores a mode of land tenure that rural communities transitioning from slavery to freedom relied on to tackle food insecurity and racialized dispossession between the 1850s and the 1950s: direct land occupation without title. To this day, occupation continues to be common practice across the Global South, especially in former regions of the Spanish Empire where the legal framework offered protections. My project focuses on Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spanish Equatorial Guinea, leading cash crop producers for the world markets during the period under research. There, smallholders anchored in occupation engaged in subsistence and small-scale cash crop production along the margins of agricultural corporations, on commercially unviable and environmentally challenging lands. Understanding these economies and the peasantries’ legal strategies to protect them can shed light on practices through which smallholders have withstood land grabs and environmental pressures.