From the littoral: Afro-Indigenous urbanisms in small coastal cities

Abstract

This framing article introduces the City Special Feature Coastal commons: Afro-Indigenous urbanisms in small coastal cities. Centring the coastal towns of Guerrero and Oaxaca, it argues that small coastal cities are not margins but vantage points from which to rethink urban theory and justice. We conceptualise the littoral not as a thin edge where land meets sea but as a field of relations where Afrodescendant, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous lifeways shape urbanisation through water, work, ritual, and refusal. Building on the colonial grammar of calidad and its afterlives, we theorise ‘ethnoracial capitalisms’ to capture how contemporary forms of recognition and extraction remain braided together. Three thematic braids organise the essays: water as commons and labour as care, ritual and refusal as spectral commons, and governance, recognition, and the price of being seen. Across case studies of Ometepec, Azoyú, Xochistlahuaca, San Isidro Labrador, Acapulco, and the Oaxaca coast, visual and narrative methods make visible everyday practices of survival, repair, and commoning that exceed metropolitan frameworks of scale. The Special Feature situates Afro-Indigenous urbanisms as primary and generative, unsettling the urban canon and proposing littoral cities as critical sites for reimagining urban life, memory, and justice.

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