There are many ways to describe the Pacific coast of Colombia. It is a place of stunning biodiversity. It has a long history as a source of precious metals and, more recently, tropical agricultural products. It has one of the highest annual rates of precipitation in the world. It is also understood as the region of Colombia with the greatest population of black inhabitants and is notable in the national imagination largely for its absence.

Recent decades have seen some degree of change. The Constitution of 1991 recognized Colombia as a pluri-ethnic nation and created a legal framework for the emergence of the Afro-descendant communities into national life, and scholarship has kept pace with the corresponding legal and cultural transformation.

With this deeply considered ethnography, Ulrich Oslender has expanded this literature and demonstrated how much of the Pacific coast story remains to be told. He has also initiated a more complex mapping of the region than that currently available in the general literature. Though imagined as a single space, there are three Colombian departments on the Pacific coast, Nariño, Cauca, and Chocó. The northern third of the coast, all within Chocó, is dominated by a mountain range, and much of its watershed drains into the Atrato River, which flows into the Gulf of Urabá in the Caribbean. The lower two-thirds is defined by numerous small rivers that flow into the Pacific and extensive mangroves. In these areas, tidal rhythms shape daily life. Although Oslender's work engages the entire Pacific, and refers occasionally to the Caribbean, the focus is on the town of Guapi in Cauca and a number of nearby communities where Oslender conducted his doctoral fieldwork.

The book follows two decades of observing, participating, listening, and thinking carefully. To share what he has learned, Oslender offers a fragmented ethnography with a deceptively subtle presentation. The first half of the book is comprised of a short prologue, an introduction, two chapters, and a novel section called Interlude. Here he presents his theoretical concerns, his fascination with the poetry of the region—décimas—and two of his most important sources of information, don Agapito Montaño and doña Lucumí Caicedo. He also sets the tone for a book in which theoretical considerations and extended quotes from informants are threaded through every chapter. In this fashion, Oslender argues for a “critical place perspective” of social movements, engaging with Henri Lefebvre's work on the politics of space. While this discussion adds to social movement scholarship, it is a secondary concern. His priority is presenting this spatially grounded approach and explaining how an “aquatic sense of place” is crucial to both the identity and politics of the region.

Though the physical reality of mangroves, rain, rivers, and tides makes “aquatic sense of place” seem self-evident, the three chapters and epilogue that comprise the second half of the book demonstrate the complexity of Oslender's approach. These chapters contain excellent maps (one drawn collectively by a community on the Atrato River), numerous photographs, and more testimony. Readers appreciate the geography and history of the Pacific coast, from the deeper history of Afro-Colombia, highlighting the role of palenques along both coasts, to the impact of the Constitution of 1991. Even though the legal recognition of Colombia as a pluri-ethnic nation was conceived with reference to indigenous communities, Afro-descended groups organized around the new law and a number of subsequent measures, gaining legal recognition and collective land titles. Much of the force of Oslender's social movement analysis comes from his careful description of how this process played out, with all of its contradictions and tensions.

Oslender examines the politics articulated in the formation of community councils; the impact of extractive agricultural industries based on the naidi palm tree—source of the açaí berry and palm hearts—and questions of sustainability, and initiatives from the national government that translated poorly in this riparian world. The anecdotes are rich and varied, though episodic. These chapters touch on anti-coca fumigation campaigns, while the epilogue reflects on the arrival of paramilitaries in Chocó. Oslender's arguments are convincing and memorable, though questions about violence along the Pacific during this century, and the outcome of tensions between organizers along the coast and representatives among displaced populations in distant urban areas, hang heavy over the text.