In 2023, I had a couple of amazing experiences visiting Curaçao and Cartagena and learning from locals about African diaspora history, continually thinking, I wish my students were here too. I wanted to bring these spaces and these conversations back to Charlottesville. I was teaching a course called Afro-Caribbean-Latinx Histories that examined African descended people in the Caribbean and Latin America as protagonists in the development of the Americas. The people I met in Cartagena, a city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, were preserving and publicly sharing histories that we had been studying and discussing at the University of Virginia, in the very sites where it had transpired.

This urgent feeling to share these conversations began when I met Dimitri Cloose at the office of Curaçao’s National Archeological Anthropological Memory Management, a government funded organization charged with “safeguarding our shared memory.” Dimitri described NAAM’s efforts to recognize the. histories and contributions of Afro-Curaçaoans, and he described recent controversies over how to tell a national story that acknowledged the centrality of slavery or downplayed it, what kinds of monuments should go up, and what kinds should come down. In effect, Curaçaoans were struggling with how to tell the story of a nation grounded in slavery and freedom. I told Dimitri that we were having the same conversations in Charlottesville about monuments and public memory, slavery and freedom, at that very moment. However, just as many of us are unfamiliar with the history of Curaçao, Dimitri was unaware of what was happening in Charlottesville, and we started an information exchange over email and eventually a working group, thanks to the Center for Cultural Landscapes at UVA’s School of Architecture, with collaborators from Curaçao, Charlottesville, and Cartagena to make a video about how these communities memorialize their complex histories in public spaces.

When it was time for our collaboration to conclude, Dimitri emailed me to say that the videographer had produced a video that did not match to the format we had discussed. For one thing, it was in Papiamento and not English, which Jeanne and Dimitri and I had intended. However, in a nation where Dutch and English are taught in the public schools (these languages along with Spanish are often used in public), creating resources about Curaçao’s national history and culture in the national Creole language most widely used by its polylingual residents is essential. The language itself is an example of the resilience of Afro-Curaçaoans, and, as Tico Vos put it, the beating heartbeat of the culture. In fact, much of the work at NAAM includes producing work in Papiamento. One of the NAAM initiatives I wish we had been able to include in our video is the very recently launched, Kaminda Nos a Prosperá (Where We Thrived), a Curaçao Cultural Landscapes project led by local archaeologist, Amy Victorina. This project uses GIS to recognize Afro-Curaçaoan cultural heritage sites on a digital map intended to guide visitors to these historic places, including sites of resistance, punishment, gathering, celebration and burial.

The video made by Tico Vos, titled Alma di Kòrsou (the Soul of Curaçao) “is more than a mini-documentary—it is a heartfelt invitation to explore the powerful spirit that has shaped our island.” This video consists of historical reenactments, dance, cuisine, and interviews with Curaçaoan artists, musicians, and historians, including Dimitri Cloose. I hope that we will have the opportunity to add English subtitles for our Anglophone audience in the future. Both videos, Alma di Kòrsou and Slavery, Freedom, Public History & National Identity: Charlottesville, Curaçao, Cartagena, explore these locations as fundamentally Black spaces whose complicated histories help us to better appreciate and understand the communities we are today.