In 1974, the anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann published three landmark articles in the Revista Colombiana de Antropología in which she sought to understand the cultural dynamics of the black people of the Colombian Pacific coast. These texts represented a geographical shift from the previous activity of her research, that had been focused on the San Andrés y Providencia archipelago but they also involved a significant transformation in the questions and conceptual frameworks used to decipher the complex interweaving between the environment and the black culture and history of the colombian South Pacific. This paper seeks to explore these changes.