# Trunks and branches: societies and territorialities in freedom  
Meanwhile, gold, mining, slavery, rivers, forests, punishment, complex mine estate set-ups, order, inter-ethnic relationships, subversions, extended families and branches are all factors and elements that came together in the construction of these regional societies and communities which, following Almario's lead, we can name and characterize as 'local societies in freedom', constructed against the grain of the demands of 'an enslaved society' (Almario García, 2012, p. 74). The array of regions of the Pacific area and the human groups contained therein, along with the biogeographical landscape, economic structures of gold production and slave relations and connections led to the establishment of places from the perspective of tensions in a region which is simultaneously a mining border and central and self-sufficient in its resistance and cultural creativity. The paradox and dialectics of a marginal frontier region come through particularly strongly in  
Popayán and Cali, for example - they are not only centres of gravitational power, but are also, first and foremost, a set of Afro-descendant communities. Both are either autonomous or semi-autonomous, and benefited from or experienced precarious control in centre-periphery relations. They were also subjected to the realities of mining levies and the dynamics of disposal and supply, along with precarious communication channels, local autarchies and weak control, charters and diffuse orders, or lack thereof. This was a context of subversive disarray based on territorial political appropriation in order to resist, to accommodate and to spread their own community environments.