Geographies of Power and Belonging: Campesino Responses to Modernity/Coloniality in Inzá, Cauca, Colombia

• In Event: Translating Modernities in the Global South I

Abstract

This paper investigates how collective rights to land are rooted in blood and soil, and with what repercussions. In 1991, Colombia adopted policies of multiculturalism to codify rights for ethnicized collective political subjects. Struggling against acute experiences of dispossession, social movements are using multiculturalism's openings in a bid to claim land. Yet, what are the implications of such efforts? I argue that state-driven possibilities for recognition construct naturalized hierarchies between marginalized groups, and consequently exasperate exclusion. Policies of multiculturalism in Colombia privilege land claims by ethnicized political identity groups able to demonstrate an autochthonous presence in specific, delimited territories. Limiting and disciplining "acceptable" articulations of diversity, these rights openings drive apart similarly marginalized subaltern groups by (re)constructing the naturalized hierarchies and divisions inherent to modernity/coloniality. Drawing primarily on semi-structured interviews with leaders of the Campesino Association of Inzá, Tierradentro (ACIT), I explore the implications of campesinos' limited possibilities for recognition. In the process, I unpack how rooting rights in autochthony risks consolidating the hierarchies of modernity/coloniality. However, I also propose that the ACIT's organizing suggests how boundaries around marginalized identity groups might be reclaimed to challenge on-going colonial oppression. To shed light on these potential openings, I analyze productive projects aimed at generating alternative economic spaces. I consider how these activities might allow groups to draw on shared experiences of marginalization and exclusion in order to disassemble hierarchies of difference, and collaboratively construct alternatives to modernity out of a dynamic idea of place.

Author

• Sarah Jane Hamilton