In this guest post Dr Ulises Moreno-Tabarez and Dr Dulce María Quintero Romero introduce Coastal Commons: Littoral urbanisms, Afro-Indigenous relations, and small coastal cities, a Special Feature published in ‘City’. The feature emerged from the Coastal commons: Afro-Indigenous urban solidarities project, supported by an Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award.
The cover of City 30.1-2 shows people walking through rain in Azoyú on the day of La Llorada. They carry flower strings on their shoulders and move towards the meeting point, the town’s centre, between the eastern and western sides. In local memory those sides were long marked by racial and colonial hierarchy, the east associated with Me’phaa and described as the side of “los Indios”, the west as the side of “la gente de Razón”. La Llorada is the annual ceremony in which those divisions are handled in public through procession, exchange, tears, atonement, and embrace. That photograph came from an essay that did not enter the final Special Feature. For us, it is one of the clearest ways to introduce the issue, because it shows the question the collection kept returning to, how a small coastal town organises memory, difference, and repair in urban public space.
The Special Feature, Coastal Commons: Littoral urbanisms, Afro-Indigenous relations, and small coastal cities, appeared in City in April 2026. Our argument is straightforward: small coastal cities are places from which urbanisation can be read with unusual clarity. In these essays, the littoral names the zone where water, work, ritual, governance, and everyday survival meet at close range. The issue also uses ‘Afro-Indigenous’ as a geohistorical analytic for relations on the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca, not as a label to impose on people given that relations to these identity categories vary starkly between localities that are all but 30 minutes away from another.
The work was organised around reciprocity, return, and bilingual local authorship, with images, captions, and first-person voice treated as forms of argument rather than illustration. The editorial process followed the same logic: the essays were made through workshops, site visits, shared reading, collaborative media making, repeated drafting, translation, and long editorial conversations about what could be shown, what needed more time, and what should remain opaque. Most of the contributors were first time local authors. The issue was built through those conditions of writing rather than by assembling a set of already finished essays. That process also shaped the decision to publish bilingually. English and Spanish publication was part of the method, because an English-only issue would have broken the connection to the publics that made the work possible. The aim was to keep the writing answerable both to international readers and to the networks with whom the project continues to work, including organisers, street vendors, weavers, artists, artisans, and activists across the coast.
The published essays show what that collective process produced. Dulce María Quintero Romero’s essay on the women of UIRA in post-Otis Acapulco follows Indigenous migrant women who hold together wage work, care, mutual aid, and organisation in a city that depends on their labour while often treating them as disposable. Miguel Angel Liborio Maceda writes from Azoyú and shows urbanisation through changes in light, transport, water, building, and sociability. Oil lamps give way to electricity, walking routes to roads, streams to pipes, family conversation to television and phones. Yet the essay does not flatten that history into a single story of replacement. Rain petitions, dances, healing practices, and collective forms of care remain, though unevenly and under pressure.
Keila Amayrani Martínez Martínez writes from Suljaa’, Xochistlahuaca, and gives one of the clearest accounts in the issue of urbanisation as a set of negotiations that enter the body and the home. Her essay follows paths, looms, food, transport, language, hairstyles, and dress. It shows how migration, digital platforms, uneven infrastructure, and movement between localities and the cabecera municipal make markers of belonging conditional. The huipil, the hairstyle, even the language one chooses to speak, are not simply inherited facts. They are worked at, deferred, restaged, or protected according to where one is, who is looking, and what sort of ridicule or recognition is likely to follow. When power cuts interrupt phone signals and screens, another rhythm briefly returns, conversation, football, shared evenings, the sounds of the house.
Christopher del Valle’s narrative from San Isidro Labrador keeps that question of memory alive at the scale of one family. A grandson stays with his recently widowed grandmother and, over a week, learns the history of migration, work, Pauline, and Otis through her speech. Manuel Orlando Lozano Ortiz, José Vladimir Morales Ruano, Ramón Bedolla Solano, and Irene Lungo Rodríguez stay with the same colonia but shift the frame. They describe San Isidro Labrador through the arroyo, the stony ground, informal housing, and the daily repair required when water is both supply and threat. Leticia Carpio Cortés works from San Marcos, where Afro-Mexican youth used participatory research to document local concerns about the Riviera San Marcos tourism development and then built Afroaventura Tours as a community-based response, combining environmental monitoring, local knowledge, and risk management. Heladio Reyes Cruz and Juan Cristóbal Jasso Aguilar turn to the coast of Oaxaca, where Ecosta Yutu Cuii and the Afrouniversidad show how education, territorial defence, and institution building are being organised from within the region itself.
Two strands remained outside the final table of contents, and they are part of the story of this Special Feature. The first is La Llorada, the essay from which the cover image came. That work follows the preparations for 6 October in Azoyú, neighbourhood committees, mayordomías, the making of flower strings, the Tiger, the Turtle, the Dance of the Conquest, the processions, and the final meeting in the square where the two sides embrace and exchange garlands. It needed more room than the Special Feature could give it. It also needed a slower treatment of what it means for a town to stage atonement and reconciliation as a recurring civic act. The questions there are too specific to be reduced to one image, and too large to be closed quickly.
The second is the Ometepec material that appears briefly in the framing essay through Arturo, el señor del tiempo, and Rocío, who returns before dawn from Marquelia to prepare smoked fish for the pavement. Arturo repairs watches he brings from Guatemala. Rocío salts, cuts, and smokes fish through the night, then sells it on the sidewalk in the morning. That opening scene stayed in the framing essay because it condensed the project’s method. The fuller article, on street vendors in Ometepec, disputes over pavement, local power, and Arturo’s relation to time, is still being worked into a different form. It, too, required more time, more presence, and a wider space than this issue could offer. This has been our process: slow to take, weathered by weather, and still critically resilient, insisting that this work should exist.
Coastal Commons involved both peer review and the question of who gets to speak as an author of urban knowledge, in which language, and in what form. The use of visual essays and first-person voice was part of that decision. These pieces were written by people who are not usually invited to theorise the urban, yet whose lives are already structured by roads, tourism, disaster, labour markets, municipal authority, and racial histories. The editorial work asked them to speak from those conditions, not to imitate a metropolitan register of expertise.
This is where the littoral becomes more than a setting. In the framing essay, it names a field of relations rather than a thin edge between land and sea. That description keeps attention on the places where urban life is negotiated, the market stall, the arroyo, the ritual route, the workshop, the repair bench, the path to the cabecera, the lagoon under tourist pressure, the classroom built through assembly. Once urbanisation is read from those places, small coastal cities become legible as working sites of theory.
That is also the invitation this Special Feature extends. We did not want theory to leave the coast, have its language cleaned up elsewhere, and return only as explanation. We wanted theory to remain answerable to the people who made it possible. The issue speaks from the Costa Chica as a site of argument, and it invites readers to think with these essays about what this geography might clarify, unsettle, or sharpen in their own work. The invitation is not only to recognise parallel coastlines, borderlines, borderlands, or comparable situations, but to engage this material directly, including through disagreement, pressure, and critical reading, since that is what serious exchange requires.
The issue is now published. The work that made it has not ended. Some collaborations continue in the same places. Some essays are still being revised into other forms. Some arguments, especially the one held in the cover image, are only now reaching the space they need. That is how this Special Feature should be read, as one moment in an ongoing collective process on the coast.