Cimarrón and the Reordering of the Living World

Abstract

This essay examines three historical moments in the signification of the term cimarrón across the hispanophone Caribbean. It explores its origin during the conquest, simultaneously naming runaway livestock and Native and Black enslaved peoples who challenged colonization. In the twentieth century, the cimarrón became attached to masculinist nationalist tropes key to postwar anticolonial movements. In the new millennium, Black and Brown women and LBTQ+ folks use the term to convey an ethos of antipatriarchal, community-centered activism. The essay argues that the origins of the term demand a close consideration of the relationship between conquest, othering, racialization, commodification, and the reordering of the animal world with human animals as supreme beings. The contemporary reappropriation of the term alludes to a decolonial reframing, a unique opportunity to reject Western ontologies grounded on the violent practices of othering while also pointing us toward new conditions of possibility based on relationality.