Living Among the Logwood: Maya Forests, Liminal Amphibians, and Quotidian Connectivities in the Laguna de Términos, 1667–1717

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the forests, wetlands, savannas, and mangroves of Laguna de Términos, the world’s largest tidal lagoon by volume, became a key site of interconnection in the Greater Western Caribbean Basin. Contrary to the region’s reputation as an isolated, empty swamp from which English loggers poached dyewood from Spanish territory, the coastal lowlands were connected by networks of nonhumans, Mayas, English, Africans, and Spaniards living among the dyewood stands. By decentering the primacy of dyewood and examining these other relationships, this article underscores the ways in which quotidian interactions substantially blurred imperial, cultural, and species divisions. Mundane activities, like eating and everyday exchanges, made the lagoon a destination, not a backwater, and became the mechanism by which multiple layers of Caribbean interactions coexisted and mixed.