Yilver Mosquera-Vallejo and Javier Tobar

This paper offers an overview of the concepts of identity, cultural difference, and place, showing how they have been understood by anthropology and human geography. In this context, it aims to examine the geographies, networks and re-existences that have unfolded among the black populations of the Patía Valley and the Colombian South Pacific in the light of socio-historical and geographical evidence from 1993 to 2020. Using works published in the last three decades, our strategy consisted in identifying the historical processes, re-existences, and the ways in which these territories have been discursively produced. While the South Pacific has been traversed by different extractivist cycles from colonial times to the present, and in the last three decades by a process that co-produces ethnicity and biodiversity, we found, due to its colonial experience, that the Patía Valley is tied to maroon practices that have crystallized in everyday life, thus giving rise to re-existence. Finally, we establish that both spaces have been the object of constitutive violence that has produced terrorized lands.