In this guest post Dr Ulises Moreno-Tabarez reflects on Coastal commons: Afro-Indigenous urban solidarities, a seminar series exploring collaborative research, environmental justice, and Afro-Indigenous coastal urbanisms across small coastal cities and towns in Guerrero and Oaxaca, Mexico. The project was supported by an Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award.
We have been slow with Coastal Commons, slower than we first imagined, and I want to say that plainly at the start. Part of what the Urban Studies Foundation (USF) made possible was the time and space to work at the pace this collaboration required. We were working across small coastal towns in Guerrero and Oaxaca, places that may sit close to one another on a map, but that carry their own histories, rhythms, authorities, hurricanes, earthquakes, memories, and ways of understanding what urban life means. Weather interruptions, illness, migration, weak connectivity, local calendars, and the ordinary demands of work and care kept changing our timings. We are grateful that the project had enough room to stretch with those realities rather than forcing everything into a faster schedule.
The roots of this project go back to 2019, when I began organising workshops while volunteering with the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas. Those early conversations were meant to think about development from local and global perspectives, but they quickly became something more grounded. People wanted to talk about water scarcity and contamination, sand extraction, the health of rivers, mining threats, corruption, the misuse of public resources, and unregulated urbanisation (Moreno-Tabarez 2020). Health and water kept returning as shared concerns. So did the question of how historical violence remains active in the present. Those encounters also brought together artists, artisans, organisers, researchers, and local intellectuals. Out of them grew further collaborations, including the virtual symposium Environmental Racism is Garbage, which tried to confront mining threats and territorial extraction through art, performance, and public discussion.
Later, with support from the USF and through work with the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, Coastal Commons took shape as a multi-sited seminar series. It was never one event. It was a chain of visits, workshops, screenings, seminars, conversations, translations, edits, and follow ups that unfolded over time across Xochistlahuaca, Ometepec, Cuajinicuilapa, Azoyú, Guadalupe Victoria, Huehuetónoc, San Marcos, Acapulco, Santa Rosa de Lima, and other small cities along the coast.
One strand of that work was site visits and local dialogue. We spent time with cooperatives, women’s organisations, activists, advocates, traditional authorities, and other local actors in both rural and urban communities. These visits were not a preliminary box to tick before the “real” work began. They were the work. They let us build trust, listen carefully, and understand what mattered in each place before trying to define outputs. They also reminded us that collaboration has to be made locally, through repeated presence, through shared meals, through conversation, and through the practical labour of staying in touch.
A second strand was Afro Indigenous consciousness building. These seminars were co-developed with participants and shaped by the people who joined them. We used them to trace urban histories, explore Black and Indigenous lifeworlds, and think together about the afterlives of colonial violence. In Cuajinicuilapa, for example, youth workshops and adult reading circles opened discussions on Black consciousness that moved across Mediterranean trade, Atlantic slave routes, Asian migration through Acapulco, and present-day forms of racialised labour. That part of the work helped widen the historical field. It asked people to think beyond the narrow stories that usually frame the region (such as migration to the United States), and to reckon instead with longer entanglements of Black, Indigenous, and Asian histories, with labour, memory, territorial belonging, and the politics of recognition. These were not easy conversations, and they did not produce quick closure if any. Still, they planted concepts, questions, and forms of historical consciousness that remain with us and that we hope to share in future works.
A third strand was the workshop process itself. Many of these meetings took place through convivencias, shared food, informal hangouts, and longer accompaniment, rather than through rigid academic formats. That was important because some of the strongest discussions emerged when people had room to speak in a way that felt familiar and collective. Across different places we worked with Theatre of the Oppressed, participatory action research, textile practice, ethnobotany, painting, and environmental storytelling. Young people used Theatre of the Oppressed to work through power, conflict, and participation. Women weavers in Guadalupe Victoria and Huehuetónoc used textile practice to think about gender, identity, and urban change from the south. In Xochistlahuaca, water, art, and territorial defence became a shared language through painting workshops and public discussion. Ethnobotany workshops brought women together to work with soaps, ointments, herbs, and local ingredients while talking about water shortage, care, and daily life. These were methods, but they were also ways of creating a different social atmosphere for thought.
The fourth strand was community produced videos. This became one of the clearest achievements of the project. We had originally imagined bringing in more external facilitation, but in practice we trained ourselves first and then worked directly with community participants. That shift changed the texture of the work. It became more local, more flexible, and more responsive. In Xochistlahuaca, women and girls produced Memorias en el Agua and Justicia Energética with strong editorial ownership over both the process and the final form. In Azoyú, work on La Llorada moved through local review, requested edits, and continued discussion. In Ometepec, the street vendors’ documentary slowed down because deaths during and after the pandemic changed what could be published and when. Work on this remains halted, but we will produce something meaningful when we get the chance. Overall, that slower pace taught us something important. Community authorship does not move on institutional timelines. It moves with consent, assembly, grief, revision, and trust. We came to accept that as part of the ethics of the work, not as an obstacle to it.
The project also changed how we thought about publication. We encouraged different collective members to write blog posts and short reflections, and we worked across translation so that these pieces could circulate in both Spanish and English. For many contributors, this was their first time publishing in an international blog or journal space. We feel this is important for everyone involved, writers and readers alike. Too often, people in regions like ours are spoken about, translated by others, or turned into examples for someone else’s argument. We wanted to make space for first-time authors, for local artists, for activists, for students, and for community intellectuals to write and publish from where they stand. That commitment also carried into the City Special Feature (Coastal commons: Littoral urbanisms, Afro-Indigenous relations, and small coastal cities), where visual essays by mostly first-time local writers were published in English and Spanish, a first for City as well. We also held seminars in both languages, and that bilingual labour became part of the political work of the project. It was one way of refusing the idea that international circulation has to come at the cost of local voice.
Some of what we made is already public. Blog posts and short reflections are out. Memorias en el Agua is out. Community videos were filmed, edited, presented locally, and discussed with participants. Some pieces remain unfinished, and that too is part of the story. Alongside the published work, we now have a living archive of videos, essays, recordings, workshop materials, photographs, and notes that can continue to be used by collectives, classrooms, and future projects. City hosts part of this archive: https://cityjournal.online/coastalcommons/. The digital equipment acquired through the project continues to circulate among community groups who use it to document land, labour, water, and ritual. In that sense, the resources stretched a very long way, partly because the work was collaborative from the beginning.
This is why our gratitude to the USF is about more than funding. Of course the money mattered. It paid for translation, audiovisual work, workshops, food, materials, transport, coordination, and equipment. But the deeper value of the award was that it gave this work room to grow. It gave legitimacy to a little known geography and to the people trying to think, document, and narrate it on their own terms. It allowed us to take our places seriously as sites of knowledge, not only as sites of damage, need, or case material. It let us keep building networks across disciplines, generations, and ethnoracial histories. It let us work slowly enough for relationships to matter.
Coastal Commons is still unfolding. It has been shaped by delays, by adaptation, and by the realities of working collaboratively across the coast. But that is also what has given the project its form. What emerged were not only events or outputs, but a wider field of relationships, methods, and shared authorship that continues to produce work.
In the next post, I want to turn to one of the major outcomes of this process, the City Special Feature itself. That will be a chance to look more closely at the visual essays we produced, the first time authors who made them possible, and what it meant to publish these coastal narratives in both Spanish and English.