“It’s tremendously lonely”: Collective emotions and memory during a time of gentrification-led displacement

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Geographies

Abstract

This paper examines the collective embodied feelings, emotions, and memories of residents in Getsemaní, a predominantly Afrodescendant community located within the old city walls of Cartagena de Indias, just outside the historic downtown center, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. It explores what community narratives and affective expressions can reveal about legacy residents’ place attachments and their senses of loss amid rapid changes brought about by gentrification. The paper argues that the emblematic use of symbols and memories of joy, longing, and belonging, and communal identity, expressed through the narratives of legacy residents, reflects the collective “ecosystem of emotions” (Fullilove, 2016, p. 17) surrounding their impending displacement.
This ethnography and discourse analysis of structured interviews builds on and contributes to the scholarship on Black placemaking, collective memory, and gentrification-induced emotions coming out of various disciplines and subfields, including Black and Indigenous critical feminist geography, critical urban sociology, Black feminist sociology, as well as the sociology of emotions and affect theory. This paper shows how Getsemanisenses (legacy residents of Getsemaní) narrate their past stigma, present struggles against displacement, and hopes and fears of the future to shed light on the affective experiences that shape Black placemaking. By examining how people perceive their past, present, and future during a time of gentrification-induced crisis, this paper explores how collective memories become embedded in everyday forms of resistance against displacement. It also provides a lens for understanding the affective effects of urban dislocations and what I refer to as “Black placeunmaking” on an Afro-Indigenous Latin American urban community. An exploration of the experiences of Black people in this particular Colombian Caribbean coastal site, engaged in contests over space, and their determination to make place despite these struggles, reveals what Black placemaking looks like in environments where Blackness is frequently embraced, denied, ambiguous, partial, ephemeral, enacted when convenient, and effaced when not.

Author

• Melissa M. Valle, Rutgers University-Newark