This article explores efforts by Afro‐Nicaraguan women activists to enact their communal land rights in Bluefields during a 2009 land occupation. Creole women's interpretation of state power, underdevelopment, and the failure of the autonomy process suggest that a critical race understanding of regional politics not only reveals the persistence of structural anti‐black racism but also demonstrates how the state's disregard for the region as the nation's imagined site of racial Otherness harms all Costeños, including poor Mestizos. Creole women's articulation of a geography of solidarity rooted in racial justice rather than blame offers new strategies for confronting regional inequality and state neglect in the construction of regional autonomy.