This project is part of a pilot research initiative aimed at foregrounding Afro-descendant heritage within the Latin America and Caribbean collections at the British Museum. Building on a significant but under-documented collection of nearly 200 objects collected by anthropologists Brian Moser and Donald Tayler along the San Juan River Valley (Colombian Chocó region) during the 1960 Anglo-Colombian Recording Expedition, the project focuses on a selection of instruments used for the preparation and provision of food. By focusing on cultural practices related to their use and reusage, the project traced Afro-descendant culinary traditions, highlighting their intersection with Indigenous knowledge and material culture in the Chocó territory.
Between December 2024 and September 2025, SDCELAR worked together with museology consultant Sandra Mendoza Lafaurie, principal investigator of the project, together with local collaborators from the Gastronomic Museum of Chocó —with its director Diana Mosquera Mosquera— and the Museum of Art and Memory of Mampuján —with its director Juana Alicia Ruíz and the Mampuján Weavers collective. The participatory documentation of this collection was carried out through workshops and networking with local representatives of community museums (including the Museo de Oficios – Fuerte de San Fernando), bridging the Pacific and Caribbean regions through shared culinary traditions. Also part of this project was the collaboration with Afro-Colombian artists from the Pacific and the Caribbean, enriching perspectives on contemporary Black identity, territory, and knowledges.
Black Identity in the Colombian Pacific
‘Being Black in the Pacific is an ode to life, it is having an immense love for being alive, it is being happy with what you eat, drink and the relationships that are built. To be a Black woman from the Pacific is to live life with joy and resistance, having the clarity that you are because others were, because others are and because others will be. Being a Black woman from the Pacific is a privilege, but at the same time a responsibility: a privilege because you are born with traces of wise, warrior, creative, skilled, happy people; responsibility because you are born with the call to vindicate the greatness from which you come. To be Black in the Pacific is to live in contrast but happy that here is where you live.’
—Diana Mosquera, Director of the Gastronomic Museum of Chocó.
Black Identity in the Colombian Caribbean
‘We are not descendants of slaves. We are descendants of free people who were engineers, Kings, Princes and who came not from one country, but a beautiful, rich continent. A continent that has wealth in the soil, in the subsoil, in nature, which is not just a desert. I am proud to be of African descent. We have contributed a lot to Colombia in different areas, not only in the sports sector, but also in the political sector, in the cultural sector, and in science. I want Afro-Caribbeans to keep that in mind. I feel very proud to be an Afro-Caribbean woman.’
—Juana Alicia Ruiz, Director of the Museum of Art and Memory of Mampuján.
The arrival of Europeans in the lands that are today known as America was accompanied by a complex process of colonisation, which not only affected the local populations. The strong presence of Afro-descendants in the Colombian Caribbean and Pacific territory that is evident today, as well as the interethnic relations with Indigenous peoples, particularly in the Chocó region, are connected to the processes of enslavement and trafficking of men, women and children from Africa as labour force (Álvarez, 2020; Losonczy, 1997). At the same time, this demographic scenario is also testimony to the processes of resistance and struggle led by them. Today, it seems an impossible and pointless task to talk about colonialism in Colombia without considering the structuring effects of racialization, slavery, and resistance on both sides of the Atlantic.
Founded in the sixteenth century, Cartagena de Indias would soon become the main port of entry and trade for enslaved African populations in Hispanic America. While Cartagena emerged as an important economic, political and military enclave, the nearby regions would see the first free territories for people of African origin and descent, as a result of their emancipatory struggles. Indeed, it was in this region where the first free maroon communities (palenques) were formed, in response to European rule, giving rise to local experiences of self-governance and cultural practices whose legacies remain palpable to this day.
Although still relatively understudied, the internal trade of enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants following their arrival in Cartagena also led Black populations inland via secondary Pacific ports such as Buenaventura, as well as river ports like Mompox (Caribbean) and Quibdó (Pacific). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Colombian Pacific region, movements and migrations of Afro-descendant communities were closely tied to their deployment as labour for gold extraction in rivers such as the San Juan and the Atrato, as well as to the formation of palenques. Gradually, Black populations moved along these rivers, driven by abolitionist movements, acts of resistance to enslavement, and, in some cases, the purchase of their own freedom. They established themselves along the Pacific coastline and in the middle and lower river basins.
The abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century further enabled new waves of migration among Black communities. This not only consolidated a significant Afro-descendant presence in the Chocó region but also fostered new relationships with Indigenous communities such as the Embera and the Wounaan, who were also engaged in processes of resistance and confrontation with colonial powers. Referred to in historical records as Noanamás, the Wounaan have lived along the banks of the San Juan River since immemorial times. Among their ancestral cultural practices are basketry and the crafting of wooden canoes —materials well represented in the Chocó collection at the British Museum.
The Colombian Pacific and Caribbean are also connected by the violence of the armed conflict, which has marked the last decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly affecting Afro-descendant (and Indigenous) populations in both regions. The dispute for control over territory between paramilitary groups, the ELN (National Liberation Army) and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), associated with illegal activities such as mining and drug trafficking, has produced atrocious cases of massacres, coercion, and forced displacement of communities in Chocó and Montes de María (Bolívar). Aurora Vergara-Figueroa analyses the experiences of forced displacement, or rather, deracination, as a fundamental element to understand the Afro-Colombian diaspora in contemporary times (2017). In this context, the author highlights the importance of Black women’s leadership, emphasizing that ‘Afrodiasporic feminism is a strategy of social mobilisation, a practice of solidarity, and a claim for reparative justice.’ (Vergara-Figueroa 2017, p. 83).
Territory: The Colombian Chocó
‘The Chocó is a mixed land, where the Andes mountain range in its western side descends to embrace the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea in full. It leaves in its wake beautiful, rich, and varied ecosystems of tropical rainforest. It is there, over that green carpet, where the diverse life of flora and fauna finds a sanctuary of freedom where they can be and thrive. The historical conditions of human life made it possible for Black communities who arrived in Colombia in conditions of slavery to find in these landscapes the memory of mother Africa; and this same land is a faithful witness to the culture of brotherhood with which the people who found a home here live. Black, Indigenous, and mestizos set an example for the world on how to live together in harmony, respect, and happiness.’
—Diana Mosquera, Director of the Gastronomic Museum of Chocó.
Revisiting the Chocó collection at the British Museum
The collections of the department of Chocó (Colombia) stewarded at the British Museum may be understood in a context marked by complex interethnic interactions between Indigenous and Black communities. The objects and instruments that make up these collections are testaments to the intersections between various material traditions, appropriations and resignifications. Throughout an intricate trajectory of resilience and resistance, knowledge and experiences from different communities have particularly materialized in culinary, medicinal and religious practices, among other aspects of daily life.
The study of the Chocó collection at the British Museum reflects the role played by several national and international institutions during the twentieth century that would join efforts to document and collect materials and cultural practices from various parts of Colombia. The objects and instruments that make up this collection of 191 pieces were acquired by the British Museum from geologist Brian Moser (University of Cambridge) and anthropologist Donald Tayler (University of Oxford) following one of the expeditions conducted by them between 1960 and 1961 through the department of Chocó and its borders with Panama.
However, Moser had arrived in the country earlier, in June 1959, sponsored by the University of Cambridge to tour the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy. By October 1960, Moser would combine forces with Tayler under the Anglo-Colombian Recording Expedition, taking both on a journey through various regions until December 1961. The expedition was supported by the British Museum (UK) and the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History–ICANH, formerly called the Colombian Institute of Anthropology–ICAN. In addition, the British Institute of Sound, among other institutions, also played an important part in championing these travels, in which ethnomusicologist recordings featured as a core interest.
The trustees of the British Museum provided Moser and Tayler with £200 (equivalent to aprox. 20,000,000 Colombian pesos today) to cover the expenses of their excursion, which they would use to “collect ethnographic material relating to the music and life of the tribes visited, and to carry out a special study of the distribution and use of narcotic plants and stimulants” (Banco de la República, 2025). As for the scope and impact that this project would have within the Colombian territory, the Anglo-Colombian Recording expedition would produce and give rise to documentaries, sound albums, articles and photographs that can be found today both in the United Kingdom and Colombia.
Access here the photographic archive of Brian Moser at the Bank of the Republic of Colombia.
Between 1960 and 1961, Moser and Tayler, along with other collaborators such as the Colombian ethnobotanist Néstor Uscátegui Mendoza, recorded the musical sounds of Indigenous communities and collected more than 300 objects in five different locations in Colombia. As part of its itinerary, the expedition passed through the town of Noanamá in Chocó, on the San Juan River. Although Tayler and Moser’s collecting practices demonstrate their interest in the Indigenous communities of the region, glimpses of their photographic archive (stored at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and at the Bank of the Republic, Colombia) and audio (at the British Library, London) can already reveal the presence of Afro-descendant communities along the San Juan River. Tayler actually acknowledges the coexistence and adaptations that took place between Wounaan Indigenous groups and Afro-descendants at the time of the audio recordings in the lower San Juan River (NTS Radio, 2023). All of this opens a window to delve deep into the interethnic relations in the Colombian Pacific, particularly the interactions in place between Indigenous and Afro-descendants in the Chocó territory.
Connecting collections and museums through culinary practices
In February 2025, SDCELAR co-organized a workshop with women leaders at the head of museums and culinary cultural projects in the Colombian Caribbean and Pacific. Thanks to a collaboration with the Escuela Taller Cartagena de Indias, Sandra Mendoza led a workshop where the women gathered ‘around the hearth’ to discuss about a selection of instruments from the Chocó collection. In addition to connecting their experiences around heritage management, the goal was to “awaken the soul” and find in these instruments their current uses, illuminating the Afro-descendant presence in their production and ways of usage.
In his well-known work ‘Fogón Caribe: la historia de la cocina del Caribe Colombiano”, Enrique Morales Bedoya (2010) refers to the strong influence of African heritage on Caribbean cuisines and the central role of enslaved Black women in the domestic sphere: ‘The most important character was the cook, called guisandera by the chroniclers, because the preparation of food is in their hands, an art with which they have always been recognized. The workshop A ‘hearth to hearth’: Afro-Colombian dialogues around culinary practices demonstrated how these ancestral knowledges and practices are living heritage and still very much present among the populations of the Colombian Caribbean and Pacific.
Women from the Chocó Gastronomic Museum, the Museum of Art and Memory of Mampuján, the Museum of Crafts – Fort of San Fernando, and the Chocó company Viche Canao, focused the discussions around their heritage, experiences, and shared demands of self-representation. Taking as an entry point the knowledge associated to the instruments of the Chocó collection at the British Museum, the matriarchs found resonances of the shared traits and importance of culinary practices across their territories.
The collection of instruments from Chocó therefore acquired a new dimension through the contributions of the women who would recognize shared elements in material traditions, while highlighting the particularities of their territories and cuisines. This encounter revitalized the narratives and experiences of the Colombian Caribbean and Pacific, allowing each participant in the workshop to find a space for continued strengthening.
Learn more about participating community museums and leaders here.
‘It was thrilling to listen to the women who carry the traditional cuisines of Bolívar and Chocó talk about their foods, preparation techniques, and dishes, as well as the ways in which they had received that knowledge from other women. As they spoke, they found striking coincidences in the ingredients and preparations of these territories.
Diana’s pasteles chocoanos, Liseth’s viche, Adelaida’s sweets, and that delicious fish sancocho accompanied by coconut rice, fish, plantain, and salad prepared by Juana, Alexa, Gledys, and Janiris—along with the cocadas made by Antonia Cassiani—revealed the history and memory that have been shared and transmitted for centuries around the hearth. They evoke the women of yesterday and today: the “gateras,” enslaved or free Black women who earned money selling fruits and various foods during the colonial period; or the women who, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, advertised cooking classes or the sale of desserts and other elaborate preparations in local newspapers, sometimes building prosperous businesses that granted them economic autonomy and some freedom. More recent examples, though they may seem distant in time, are the women who still walk the streets selling buns from 5:00 a.m., those who set up their tables of fried foods (fritos), or the famous palenqueras who continue to sweeten mid-afternoon coffee.
All these women —regardless of the era and the foods they have prepared and sold— share something in common: in the kitchen, in the recipes learned from mothers and grandmothers, they have found not only traces of the past and its traditions, but also independence, freedom, and ways to keep creating community.’
—Sandra Mendoza Lafaurie, Escuela Taller Cartagena.
Making visible the Afro-descendant presence in the British Museum collections
The documentation of fifteen instruments from the British Museum’s collection from the Chocó region made it possible to establish at least three curatorial and interpretive themes that inform us on how these objects are rooted in ancestral knowledge and how they recover new meanings in their contemporary uses. Looking again at these ‘instruments,’ as Diana Mosquera calls them, allows us to explore the ways in which Indigenous and Black communities in the Chocó region have used and reused different materialities in shared ways, revealing a rich exchange of knowledge and a tangible intersection between understandings of the environment and resource management.
The construction of these curatorial narratives was carried out through a participatory process, in collaboration with men and women who live in Chocó and are knowledgeable about the material production of these instruments and the cuisines of the Colombian Pacific. The thematic axes presented below emerge from the work of Sandra Mendoza Lafaurie, Diana Mosquera, knowledge holders from the department of Chocó, and the dialogues initiated in the workshop ‘A hearth to heath’.
Discover each curatorial theme by clicking on the image below:
This project made it possible not only to advance in the documentation of the British Museum’s collections, but also to foster new works and artistic research that give greater visibility to contemporary Afro-diasporic experiences. We invite you to learn more about the acquisition of an artwork by the Mampuján Weavers, directly inspired by the Afro-descendant experience in the Caribbean, as well as the art-documentary produced by Astrid González, as a result of her artistic residency at the British Museum.
Further Reading
Álvarez, Ó. F. (2020). Relaciones interétnicas en el Chocó colombiano. Indígenas y afrocolombianos en el panorama de la investigación. Gazeta de Antropología, 36 (2), Artículo 08.
Banco de la República. (2025). Brian Moser. https://www.banrepcultural.org/coleccion-bibliografica/especiales/brian-moser
Banco de la República. (n.d.). La Amazonia perdida. https://www.banrepcultural.org/la-amazonia-perdida/amazonia006.html
Banco de la República. (2023). Cocinas del Pacífico: Saberes y recorridos.
Morales Bedoya, E. (2010). Fogón Caribe: La historia de la gastronomía del Caribe colombiano. Editorial La Iguana Ciega.
Mosquera, S. A., & Caicedo, L. M. G. (2025). El Chocó en la olla: Olores, colores y sabores de Africanía.
NTS Radio. (2023). British Library Sound Archive – Anglo-Colombian Recording Expedition, 1960–1961. https://www.nts.live/editorial/british-library-sound-archive-anglo-colombian
Losonczy, A.-M. (1997). Hacia una antropología de lo interétnico: Una perspectiva negro-americana e indígena. En V. Uribe & E. Restrepo (Eds.), Antropología de la modernidad. Instituto Colombiano de Antropología.
Vergara-Figueroa, A., Sánchez Barona, A., & de la Fuente, A. (Eds.). (2025). Desigualdades sociales en perspectiva interseccional. Estudios Afrocolombianos: Lecturas esenciales (Tomo II). Centro de Estudios Afrodiaspóricos (CEAF) – Universidad Icesi. https://doi.org/10.18046/EUI/eale.2
Vergara-Figueroa, A. (2017). Afrodescendant resistance to deracination in Colombia: Massacre at Bellavista-Bojayá-Chocó. Palgrave Macmillan.
Collaborators
Sandra Mendoza Lafaurie
Historian with a master's degree in Museology and Heritage Management, Sandra has specialized in the formulation of museological plans, curatorship of exhibitions, museum renovation projects, as well as management, conceptualization and implementation of strategies for the interpretation and enhancement of cultural heritage. Sandra has extensive experience in the development of didactic strategies for the dissemination of archaeological heritage and the creation of cultural tourism products. She also has skills and special interest in the development of heritage projects with communities and experiences around traditional cuisines.
Diana Mosquera
Founder and Director of the Gastronomic Museums of Chocó, Diana is a Business Administrator with an MBA in the area. This experience has helped her understand the business ecosystems of their region, catapulting economic units that perfectly combine her passion for the traditional cuisine of the territory, with the arts, knowledge and crafts associated with the gastronomy of the Black and indigenous communities that inhabit this Colombian region. As a Black woman born in Atrato (Chocó), Diana is passionate about Afro-descendant culture in the Americas and an enthusiast of the region's food and flavors.
Juana Alicia Ruíz
Afro social leader from the Montes de María region, Juana has an extensive trajectory as a human rights defender not limited to Mampuján, which earned her the 2024 Human Rights Defender Award by the United States Department of State. She holds a Master’s degree in Peacebuilding and Social Conflict from the University of Cartagena. As a leader of the internationally renowned collective of Mampuján Weavers, Juana has supported important educational processes that have enabled the recovery of memory related to Colombia’s armed conflict, helping to identify pathways towards healing and forgiveness. Through the art of quilting (tela sobre tela), the recovery of traditional foods and culinary practices from her territory, and her work as Director of the Mampuján Museum of Art and Memory, she advocates for justice and collective reparation, while highlighting the significant social and cultural legacy of Afro-descendant women and communities.
Publications related to women’s and maternal health with Wixárika communities by the author of this exhibition
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2013)
Shame as a barrier to health seeking among indigenous Huichol migrant labourers: An interpretive approach of the “violence continuum” and “authoritative knowledge”
Social Science and Medicine 97 75-81
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2023)
Wixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene
Medical Anthropology Theory 10 (2) 1-26
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2020)
“You see, we women, we can’t talk, we can’t have an opinion…”. The coloniality of gender and childbirth practices in Indigenous Wixárika families
Social Science and Medicine 252, 112912
Jennie Gamlin and David Osrin (2020)
Preventable infant deaths, lone births and lack of registration in Mexican indigenous communities: health care services and the afterlife of colonialism
Ethnicity and Health 25 (7)
Jennie Gamlin and Seth Holmes (2018)
Preventable perinatal deaths in indigenous Wixárika communities: an ethnographic study of pregnancy, childbirth and structural violence BMC
Pregnancy and Childbirth 18 (Article number 243) 2018
Gamlin, Jennie B. and Sarah J Hawkes (2015)
Pregnancy and birth in an Indigenous Huichol community: from structural violence to structural policy responses
Culture, health and sexuality 17 (1)
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