Planting Seeds of Freedom in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico: How Blackdom Grew Its Roots through Dry-Farming

Blackdom in the Borderlands: Significance of the Afro-Frontier (1903-1929)

El Palacio Magazine | March 2021 | Introduction:

In the early 1900s, the North American continental interior hosted two different centuries-long global colonization schemes. The Pecos Valley region’s economic surge underwent the largest infrastructure projects in the world at the time and brought exploitation of people and land. African descendants under the conditions of American Blackness (Black people) sought opportunity in the colonization collision at Mexico’s northern frontier and the United States’ western frontier. Through the homestead process in the southeastern section of the New Mexico Territory, Black people became colonizers. After the discovery of oil in New Mexico, they fully participated in the bonanza and received royalties that extended through the post-World War II era. In this essay, we explore an intersection of African descendants in diaspora, who quarantined themselves to achieve the goals of their ancestral strivings.

Maya L. Allen: With a background in systematics of algae as an undergraduate researcher, Ms. Allen has since gone on to work in marine, fresh-water and terrestrial systems. Ms. Allen also was a participant in the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Project as an undergraduate, where she contributed to this important effort to make academic collections more accessible to the global research community and the public. She conducted her MS thesis work on resolving the phylogeny of Glossopetalon, a small genus of flowering shrubs native to SW North America using restriction site associated DNA sequencing (RAD-seq). Ms. Allen has transitioned to exploring research questions focused on the phenotypic plasticity’s role in evolution and patterns of plasticity throughout species ranges. As a graduate student at UNM she is a mentor to students from underrepresented groups through the Project for New Mexico Graduate Students of Color program and as a Research Coaching Fellow.