LAUSR

Abstract Mangroves emerged a crucial habitat for Africans and their descendants during the transatlantic slave trade. Europeans avoided mangroves because of the deadly fevers that frequently claimed the lives of those who ventured there. Many were felled by lethal falciparum malaria, against which Africans alone carried genetic resistance. The transatlantic slave trade spread the disease‐causing plasmodium to New World Anopheles mosquitoes through infected bloodstreams, extending African mangroves’ pestilential reputation to the Neotropics. On both sides of the Atlantic, an environment Europeans feared provided Africans food, basic necessities, and sometimes, refuge from slavery. In Neotropical mangroves Africans largely replaced declining Amerindian populations, who were also immunologically vulnerable to the introduced plasmodium. Today, African descendants in Old and New World mangroves demonstrate longstanding human use of this ecosystem. Comparison of shellfish gathering and gendered collection patterns in mangroves recognizes Amerindian and African influences in Neotropical mangroves and illuminates the connections to transatlantic diasporic history. The discussion considers how a more‐than‐human geography shaped “place‐based knowledge” of mangrove swamplands that remained marginal to European territorializing during the colonial period. African and Afro‐descendant place‐making underscores the ways people, plants, insects, microbes, shellfish, and tides framed geography and diasporic identity at the periphery of the Atlantic world.