Unmapping is, broadly speaking, a wayfinding technology rooted in cultural traditions, kinships, and ecological knowledges that are often disregarded, erased, or undetectable by mainstream geospatial practicies. Unmapping differs from mainstream geospatial practices in both the process of reading and making place. For example, knowledge of how to escape flash floods in the mountains passed only through stories is a type of emergency planning that does not easily fit into a map layer.

As a social environmental scientist deeply committed to climate justice, unmapping provides a path for me to listen, as Dr. Michelle Montgomery once explained, to the vibration of a place and the people who have long cared for and known it as kin. The map below, is centered around the archipelago of Borinkén. It is my attempt to listen to desde afeura. This map lives alongside existing unmapping projects that highlight the rich legacies of survivance of Afro and Indigenous peoples in the wake of entangled forces of climate change and racist settler-colonialism within the so-called US territories, in the Caribbean, and in geographic imaginaries* beyond our wildest dreams.

Click here to view the begginings of my story map project.

The map below is centered on the Maricao State Forest. This project is partially inspired by an archival document submitted to the US Department of the Interior's National Register of Historic places. This submission was filed by a group of Puerto Ricans working in anthropology, journalism, history, and conservation architecture and describes the relationship between the state forests and historic Spanish settler-colonial conservation practice. A question that came up for me while reading this document was: what are the benefits of "state" level conservation for Afro and Indigenous residents within a US-territory (colony?). Do these efforts improve local health outcomes and/or; deepen traditional kinships with land?; support Afro and Indigenous ecological practices? As I sit with these questions and continue resarchign aroudn them, so too will this map change in response to what I know. Stay tuned for those changes primxs (wherever you may be).