Abstract Scholarship on Black Atlantic geographies and non-European knowledge-making has underscored the crucial role of Africans and Afro-descendants in shaping New World landscapes, where their interaction with American environments was vital for survival. Building on these insights, this article explores the environmental knowledge of the bogas, Afro-Indigenous boatmen who navigated the Magdalena River. As the only route connecting New Granada’s capital, Santa Fe, with the Atlantic world, the Magdalena was central to the viceroyalty’s political and economic integration. The bogas were key to this process–not only because of their physical labor, but because of their deep expertise in fluvial geography. By centering the journeys, labor, and interactions of bogas with passengers and riverine communities, the article reframes the history of the Magdalena River. It shows how these encounters became sites of knowledge production, positioning boatmen as political actors who forged social and spatial networks linking Caribbean and Andean worlds. It also rethinks environmental knowledge in the Caribbean, tracing its roots to enduring Afro-Indigenous relationships. In doing so, it calls for a more inclusive framework for understanding African diasporic experience in the Americas and for reimagining the geography of the Caribbean itself.
Katherine Bonil-Gómez (Wed,) studied this question.