1 - 26 - 2018 - Thanks To

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
ISSN: 1744-2222 (Print) 1744-2230 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlac20
‘Thanks to my forced displacement’: blackness and

the politics of Colombia’s war victims
Roosbelinda Cárdenas
To cite this article: Roosbelinda Cárdenas (2018) ‘Thanks to my forced displacement’: blackness
and the politics of Colombia’s war victims, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 13:1,
72-93, DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2018.1416893
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2018.1416893
Published online: 25 Jan 2018.
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http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rlac20
LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES, 2018
VOL. 13, NO. 1, 72–93
https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2018.1416893
ARTICLE
‘Thanks to my forced displacement’: blackness and the

politics of Colombia’s war victims
Roosbelinda Cárdenas
Hampshire College, School of Critical Social Inquiry, 893 West St., Amherst, MA 01002, USA
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In 1993 Afro-Colombians were granted multicultural rights as Afro-descendants; Colombia;
members of a distinct ethnic group and as collective subjects of war victims; internal
‘black communities’. In recent years, this discourse has intersected displacement; blackness;
with national and international apparatuses that seek to identify multicultural rights
victims of Colombia’s war in order to grant them rights and
reparations. This has resulted in the emergence of a new political
subject that is both racialized and defined as a victim: the afro-
desplazado, or black Internally Displaced Person (IDP). Using eth-
nographic description from an urban IDP arrival site in Bogotá, I
illustrate how these two discourses have become interwoven in
practice and explore their consequences for afro-desplazados. I
explore the political limits and possibilities of this new category
by showing how Afro-Colombians both adopt it and push at its
limits.
Introduction
‘If terror thrives on the production of epistemic murk and metamorphosis, it nevertheless
requires the hermeneutic violence that creates feeble fictions in the guise of realism,
objectivity, and the like, flattening contradiction and systematizing chaos.’
–––Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Taussig 1987, 132)
Isaías
As a cop in the mid-1980s, Isaías patrolled banana plantations in the Urabá region of
Northwestern Colombia. He evicted squatters who settled in private plantations and
‘neutralized’ union activists who stirred rebellion in the area. Located in a high-traffic
trade area, he made additional income by cooperating in contraband circles that
imported arms and exported the usual illicit merchandise from Colombia. After a few
years of enjoying success, however, one of his commanding officers demanded a portion
of his contraband profits and when Isaías refused to comply, the commander retaliated
by accusing him of murder. At that time, Isaías abandoned the police force and went
back to his hometown of Urrao to start a new life.
With a high school degree, Isaías quickly secured a job as a teacher in a village distant
from Urrao’s municipal center. For 4 years he taught first- to fifth-grade children in the
CONTACT Roosbelinda Cárdenas rcardenas@hampshire.edu

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 73
mornings and tended to his farm and cattle in the afternoons. He went into town
occasionally to buy household items and collect his pay. After some months, he
befriended some guerrilleros who began stopping by his place periodically to stock up
on food items. But this closeness soon proved troublesome.
Because of Isaías’ travel patterns – from his farm to the municipal center and back –
his background as a cop, and his constant communication with guerrilleros, it was not
long before he was accused of being an army informant and once again had to flee. To
escape, he walked through the wilderness for 2 days, eventually reaching Medellín. But
he couldn’t shake the feeling of being constantly hounded, so after a year there he
moved to Bogotá where he could better hide from his enemies. By the time I met him in
2006, Isaías had settled in Bogotá and was serving as president of the local chapter of
the Association for Displaced Afro-Colombians, AFRODES, the first organization of black
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Colombia.
Wilson
When he was in his late teens, Wilson ‘found a woman’ and began to work to sustain his
new household. His father-in-law gave him and his common-law wife a small plot of
land and her uncles taught him how to grow coca. At first, he earned a steady income
selling unprocessed leaves in bulk, but after a few years his plot was aerially fumigated
and he lost his harvest. Although he swore never to cultivate coca again, economic
hardship soon compelled him to replant. By this time, paramilitary groups were routinely
present in his hometown of Cajapí, in the Southwestern department of Nariño. In this
area, local campesinos were often intimidated into entering into risky economic relation-
ships with paramilitary groups. At first, paramilitary groups taught campesinos how to
process coca paste and sold them the necessary chemicals at low cost. Over time,
however, they established a monopoly over a given area by both controlling prices
and using violence to prevent other buyers from entering. Thus, although campesinos
might initially see an increase in their marginal profit, they would soon find themselves
entangled in dangerous and coercive arrangements that they couldn’t get out of. For
Wilson, as for many other campesinos who participated in the coca economy, the
bonanza was short-lived and very costly in the end. Soon after Wilson extended his
plots and began cultivating his father-in-law’s farm with coca, President Uribe imple-
mented his drug eradication program. The area was repeatedly fumigated and he was
again left empty-handed.
When she heard of his dire situation, Wilson’s oldest sister, who had worked as a
domestic worker in Bogotá for nearly 20 years, offered to pay for his bus fare to the city.
Aided by his sister, who was deeply knowledgeable of the humanitarian aid system,
Wilson managed to navigate the bureaucratic nightmare of acquiring official IDP status,
which entitled him to a 3-month stipend to pay for food and rent, and a small lump sum
transfer to set up a small business in Bogotá.1
Epistemic murk
The life stories of Wilson and Isaías have very little in common and yet they have
both become afro-desplazados, or black IDPs. In addition to physically converging in
74 R. CÁRDENAS
Cazucá, a conglomerate of shantytown neighborhoods in a marginal area of Bogotá,

they have adopted the same identity as black IDPs vis-à-vis the Colombian state and
aid organizations. This category, simultaneously suggesting racialization and victimi-
zation as a result of Colombia’s civil war, flattens the complexity of Wilson’s and
Isaías’ experiences. It is, in Taussig’s words, ‘a feeble fiction’ that attempts to system-
atize chaos by eliding the murky contradictions produced by the terror of war. And
yet, these fictions are highly productive. In the interactions between the state and
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that promote them, and the aid recipients
who adopt them, categories such as afro-desplazado actively reorganize the very
reality they appear to describe.
My intent in this paper is to analyze the political consequences of the emergence of
this category. Thus, I examine the process through which disparate experiences such as
those of Wilson and Isaías are flattened and circulated as analogous stories of racialized
war-victimization. In doing so, I identify two discursive apparatuses that have recently
become entangled in unexpected ways in Colombia: the politics of war victimization and
state multiculturalism. I suggest that this convergence has had two contradictory effects.
On the one hand, it has helped strengthen black consciousness and political organiza-
tion by creating links of racial solidarity among people who may not have otherwise
seen their lives as different expressions of the same mechanisms of exclusion and
discrimination. In other words, had it not been for the very category afro-desplazado,
Isaías and Wilson may have never collaborated as allies in the same cause. On the other
hand, this convergence carries with it a danger of creating a narrow association between
black suffering and the armed conflict, rather than with the pervasive structures of
systematic racism in Colombia.2 This danger is particularly present within state institu-
tions, which need to create and disseminate flat categories to implement quick
responses to crisis. In the end, the notion of afro-desplazado as utilized by state and
international humanitarian aid institutions might hide more than it elucidates. It hides
multiple forms of black suffering that precede and perhaps converge with the armed
conflict, but are not exclusively tied to it. Thus, it makes a continuous and structural
situation of discrimination and exclusion appear as a temporary anomaly, which will be
resolved with the end of the war. In addition, it establishes a perverse hierarchy that
makes visible and legitimates some forms of black suffering – that of war victims – as
worthy of redress, while continuing to minimize and/or entirely silence the seemingly
unremarkable suffering of those who are systematically denied their rights. My objective,
I hope is clear, is not to undermine the avenues that the category afro-desplazado has
opened in order to recognize and redress urgent and devastating forms of black
suffering. Rather, my objective is to point to its insufficiencies in recognizing and
redressing historical and ongoing forms of black suffering that cannot be simply
addressed with restitution and reparations for war victims.
I begin by briefly recapitulating the histories of these two discursive formations. Then,
I use ethnographic description to illustrate how they have become interwoven in
practice. To do so, I focus on two main modes of convergence: spatiality and subject
formation. In the first case, I show how particular places are simultaneously imagined
and produced as racialized places of blackness and war victimization. In the second case,
I analyze how processes of self-ascription and interpellation both as ‘afros’ and as
‘desplazados’ produce ‘afro-desplazados’.
Discursive formations
The politics of war victimization
Colombia’s politics of war victimization are made manifest in a whole set of representa-
tions, institutions, and practices that define who is a victim and therefore a legitimate
recipient of special rights such as state reparations, protection, and humanitarian aid.
This discursive formation saturates nearly every level of Colombian politics, and it has
intensified in the context of the recent peace accords, which require that the govern-
ment establish and carry out clear mechanisms for victims’ reparations. Although it is a
product of the national conjuncture, its emergence has been enabled by a complex set
of circumstances and actors that exceed the Colombian nation-state because it spans
the realm of international human rights and involves governmental and civil society
organizations from both within and outside of Colombia.
Because of its complexity and ubiquity, I will not attempt to outline every single
aspect of this discourse of war victimization.3 Instead, I will focus on the formation of
one particular category of victim: the IDP. Focusing on this figure is useful for two
reasons. First, IDPs are the largest and most visible group of victims of Colombia’s armed
conflict.4 Second, this category has acquired a central importance in black organizations’
efforts to rearticulate the struggle for Afro-Colombian rights (more on this below). Still, it
is worth clarifying that the IDP is only one among several victimized figures that hold
currency in Colombia today.
The categories of war victim, in general, and IDP, in particular, are fairly recent
constructs that are used to describe a very unruly set of circumstances. More to the
point, the designation of particular events as ‘violence’ and therefore officially recog-
nized as ‘legitimate’ causes of ‘forced displacement’ is complicated by at least two
factors. On the one hand, no hard lines exist between the different reasons that
motivate people to move. Take Wilson’s case above. Is his an economic migration? Is
he a victim of paramilitary violence? Or should the legitimacy of his IDP status be called
into question because he was involved in illicit activity? Clearly, the lines that separate
forced migration from chosen migration, and victim of violence from perpetrator of
violence, are in this case, as in others, quite blurry.
On the other hand, there is the issue of historical continuity. In Colombia, the forced
movement of people due to armed combat, intimidation, and other threats can be
traced at least as far back as the period known as ‘La Violencia’, which historians date to
1948. Of course, the broader history of internal migration in Colombia stretches far
beyond that and includes causes that would today be classified as both violent and
nonviolent. The IDP is therefore a product of a discursive shift, which I trace below. It is
meant to separate those who fled the armed conflict from other itinerants (such as
economic migrants), and to signal the emergence of a ‘new’ problem in the historical
and geographic continuum of human mobility.
In 1994, the Red de Solidaridad Social (hereafter RSS) was launched as an initiative of
the President’s Office with the announced aim of attending to the needs of the poorest
and most vulnerable population sectors in Colombia and to oversee their inclusion in
state-run programs meant to alleviate poverty.5 The RSS’s creation coincided with a
critical turning point of the war that was marked by the institutionalization of a nation-
wide paramilitary force, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, which became
76 R. CÁRDENAS
infamous for its brutal displays of violence, which remain mostly unpunished to date. At
that time, the number of people who were caught in the cross fire between guerrillas,
the army, and the AUC skyrocketed, generating alarming waves of mass rural–urban
exoduses. In Bogotá specifically, the city government managed the situation in an ad
hoc manner that made use of the institutions that had been designed to deal with other
emergency situations such as natural disasters. Thus, the large numbers of people that
were fleeing the escalated violence of their rural homes were incorporated, by default,
into the institutional framework that served ‘vulnerable population groups’.
By 1997, this situation, which had remained unnamed, was gaining greater visibility
worldwide. Following two international conferences that were held in Oslo and
Guatemala in the late 1980s to discuss the plight of refugees, returnees, and displaced
persons in Southern Africa and Central America respectively, the United Nation’s (UN’s)
Human Rights Council urged the secretary-general to examine whether these popula-
tions’ rights were being protected. In response, in 1991 the UN undertook the first
worldwide evaluation of the situation and produced a comprehensive report on dis-
placed persons. In this report, the UN began to draw the contours of a new global
subject: the IDP (Aparicio 2010, 25).
Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the category of IDP emerged simultaneously
as a global and Colombian phenomenon because its very production involved a reci-
procal relationship between international human rights organizations and ‘internal
conflicts’ in the ‘Third World’.6 Put differently, the UN needed evidence from around
the world to effectively claim that a ‘new’ humanitarian crisis was underway, while the
Colombian government needed the UN’s new category to label the problem at home in
order to garner the international funds necessary to address it.
The two most obvious manifestations of this co-constitutive process were the pas-
sage of Law 387 in 1997, known as the Law of Desplazados, and the establishment of the
office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Colombia in 1998.7 The
law defined the IDP as an object of special state protection, created a centralized
information system (SIPOD) to collect national data on IDPs and established a system
of government agencies to oversee the implementation of aid programs (SNAIPD)
(Almario 2004). The establishment of the UNHCR office in Bogotá, on the other hand,
marked Colombia’s recognition as a legitimate recipient of international aid monies to
remedy forced displacement. By 2005, all of the makeshift information systems and
programs, which had sprouted over time and were scattered across the state apparatus,
were consolidated under a single government agency, Acción Social.8 Together, these
developments signal the emergence of the IDPs as a distinct and recognizable subject of
special rights in Colombia.
Once these systems were in place, the judiciary played a key role in further cementing
the desplazado as a new political subject. Specifically, in 2004, the Constitutional Court
issued a ruling that affirmed that the state of affairs for IDPs in Colombia was ‘uncon-
stitutional’ and urged all the newly formed government institutions to improve their
information and service-provision systems for desplazados.9 The Court was also amen-
able to a perseverant group of Afro-Colombian organizations – among them AFRODES
and PCN10 – who had been insisting for some time that programs for IDPs were in dire
need of an ethnic-specific focus. Thus, at the activists’ behest, the Court held a public
hearing in 2007 in which representatives from 22 black organizations presented a
convincing argument about the urgent need to develop differential public policies for
displaced Afro-Colombians. The result of this hearing was the Court’s 2009 passage of a
Decree (Auto 005), which mandated specific government offices to design and imple-
ment ethnic-specific actions for displaced Afro-Colombians. Although Auto 005, which
became known as the Afro-Colombian order, is the clearest evidence of the articulation
that I’m signaling, it is not at the center of my attention here, and I discuss it in great
detail elsewhere (Cárdenas 2012b). Instead, I wish to focus on an analysis of the
consequences of this articulation for the very folks who have taken up the term afro-
desplazado. Before doing so, however, I turn to a brief history of state multiculturalism.
State multiculturalism
In the 1990s Colombia passed one of the most comprehensive sets of multicultural
reforms in Latin America. This resulted from the convergence of two major and seemingly
unrelated processes. On the one hand, a global wave of struggles by indigenous people
was winning recognition of a variety of rights that were redefining homogenous notions
of culture and citizenship. On the other hand, the Colombian state was undergoing a
process of reform aimed at restoring its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizenry. The 1980s
had seen the state’s ability to maintain order eclipsed by the insurgencies of leftist guerilla
groups and the growing power of armed drug cartels. By the 1990s a full-scale, open
counterinsurgency war by Colombia’s armed forces, along with a ‘dirty war’ of extrajudicial
killings and disappearances by paramilitary groups, had not only failed to restore order
but also further alienated large sections of the population. It was then that Colombia’s
ruling circles, while continuing their war, also turned to reform to try to restore order.
In response to this crisis of governance, a student-led group of liberal reform-seekers
called for a constituent assembly, in the hopes that a new Magna Carta would breathe
democratic life into Colombia. What followed was a process in which members of
traditional and new political parties as well as representatives from previously margin-
alized sectors of civil society – including indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations –
were invited to participate in the writing of the 1991 Constitution.
The debates and negotiations surrounding the inclusion of multicultural rights for
indigenous and Afro-descendant people in the new constitution have been well docu-
mented (Agudelo 2005; Bocarejo 2008; Gros 2000; Van Cott and Lee 2000) and I do not
intend to reproduce them here. Instead, I want to focus on the process whereby ‘black
communities’ were recognized as collective subjects of special rights.11 First, it bears to
note that the idea that Afro-Colombians constituted a coherent ethnic group did not
immediately garner wide support. As Peter Wade (1993) notes in his seminal text on
blackness in Colombia, Afro-Colombians had occupied an ambiguous position of formal
inclusion as citizens, on the one hand, and de facto exclusion, via enduring structures of
racism, on the other. Prior to the constitution and the multicultural turn more broadly,
dominant ideas about blackness in Colombia placed it in a subordinate position in the
nation’s structures of alterity – black people were imagined as an obstacle to modernity,
but ultimately as civilizable. Black people’s difference (which was often represented as
inferiority) was understood as being a result of their social and economic underdevelop-
ment, but not as resulting from cultural differences that made them members of a
distinct ethnic group.
78 R. CÁRDENAS
The proposition that black people were members of a culturally distinct collective –
hence the term ‘black communities’ – was fiercely debated both within the constituent
assembly and among groups of Afro-Colombian activists. In the end, the notion of black
ethnic difference gained sufficient traction to be written into law – Law 70 of Black
Communities, passed by congress in 1993 (Ministerio del Interior 1993). Over the last 20
years, it has been profoundly entrenched within the state apparatus and has become a
common sense definition of blackness among both blacks and non-blacks in Colombia
(Paschel 2010). This process, which Restrepo (2013) aptly refers to as the ‘ethnicization of
blackness’, was basically modeled on the precedents of indigenous movements through-
out the region, whose claims to special rights were premised on possessing a culture
distinct from the dominant Euro-mestizo one.
Unlike indigenous people, however, ‘black communities’ could not make a claim to
autochthony, nor did they possess some of the characteristics that unequivocally
signal a group as a pueblo or nation (such as language). Instead, the basis of the
claim to black ethnic difference hinged on the documentation of the ‘traditional
production practices’ of ‘black communities’ in the predominantly rural region of
the Pacific Basin. Within the law, traditional production practices were defined as
‘the techniques and activities of agriculture, mining, forest extraction, cattle farming,
hunting, fishing, and natural product gathering in general that black communities
have customarily used for the conservation of life and sustainable development’
(Ministerio del Interior 1993). As a result of this process, blackness as ethnic difference
became territorialized (Ng’weno 2007).
A lot can be said about the political risks and opportunities of tethering blackness to
territoriality (Cárdenas 2012a). But for now, I simply wish to underline that the ethniciza-
tion of blackness resulted in the further entrenchment of Colombia’s racialized geogra-
phies of difference. For those unfamiliar with Colombia, it bears noting that dominant
imaginaries of the nation (re)produce the idea that Colombia is a nation of regions,
which are profoundly distinct from one another geographically, culturally, historically,
and racially (Appelbaum 2003; Arias Vanegas 2005). Although the taxonomy of regions
has changed over time and is certainly contested and unstable, the Pacific has generally
been constructed as Colombia’s paradigmatic black region (Restrepo 2013; Wade 2000).
Law 70, with its multicultural recognition and attendant discourses and institutions, thus
solidified an already prevalent idea that blackness and black people in Colombia
originate and belong in certain places – and not others.
I want to end this section with two important clarifications. First, I follow other
scholars in taking an anti-essentialist approach to blackness (Gilroy 1993; Hall 1996).
This entails a conceptual openness and an attention to historical specificity. However, as
Stuart Hall (1996) has cogently stated when referring to race, anti-essentialism should
not be read as an endorsement of floating signifiers. To be clear, blackness is not one
unchanging thing, but it is also not any thing. Its possible articulations are grounded in
specific historical experiences and conditions of possibility. Thus, I hope that it is clear
that although I resist essentialist renderings of ‘black communities’ as primitive noble
savages, I also refuse a radically constructivist approach that does away with all identity
categories as spurious.
Second, it is important to note that multiculturalism isn’t confined to the state
apparatus and that we could certainly speak of ‘multiculturalisms from below’.
Organizing by ‘black communities’ against logging companies, shrimping farms, and

other threats to their territorial autonomy in the 1980s was key to the subsequent
mobilizations demanding collective land titles (see Asher 2009; Escobar 2008). Today,
black people within the Pacific and beyond both utilize and challenge the borders of
multicultural rights to wage numerous battles that range from urban organizing against
violence to resistance against new waves of extractivism. Bear in mind that in this paper
I focus on state multiculturalism – its agents, institutions, devices, and effects.
Victimization of blackness
‘Resign yourself to your color the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims’
– Home of the Brave (Robson 1949) cited in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 1967)
My argument in this paper is that the exercise of citizenship as defined in the interna-
tional regime of human rights has become entangled with state multiculturalism in
Colombia. The former produces categories of ‘victimized’ or ‘at risk’ subjects with rights
to special protection, while the latter entitles subjects who successfully make claims to
‘cultural difference’ to special rights. When they converge in defining black IDPs, in a
process that I call the ‘victimization of blackness’, they elide Afro-Colombians’ historical
experiences of racial violence under the rubric of war victims, and conflate their special
status as ethnic others with that of victimized citizens. This convergence is evident in the
opening vignettes of this paper. Although Isaías and Wilson narrate very different life
trajectories, their location at the intersection of these two discursive formations –
victimization and multiculturalism – has resulted in their categorization as black IDPs
or afro-desplazados. And although this is not the only identity category that is available
to them, it has become the most expedient one in resisting historical forms of exclusion
and marginalization.
At the same time, afro-desplazados do not passively accept this category, but actively
shape it. My objective in what follows is therefore not simply to point out the ways in
which this category flattens, elides, and constrains the experiences and identities of so-
called afro-desplazados. While this is certainly occurring, I am also interested in examin-
ing what the category enables. Thus, I approach it as a generative force in the produc-
tion of places and subjects. Rather than being an unambiguously sanguine or pessimistic
perspective, I believe that this approach allows me to remain attuned to the unexpected
outcomes that are generated as afro-desplazados adopt and adapt this category.
‘La Calle de los Negros’

To get from La Calle 19 (literally 19th Street) in downtown Bogotá to ‘the other’ Calle 19
in Cazucá, one has to traverse the entire southern portion of the city. ‘El Sur’, as it is
commonly referred to, spreads more than 80 streets south and 70 streets west of La 19.
It is a massive and densely populated urban, working-class area. Although clearly poorer
than its northern half, its myriad neighborhoods, or barrios, are interspersed with
commercial and recreational areas, and the city government has a well-established
presence throughout. This solid sense of being in the city steadily fades as one gets
farther from La 19 toward the peripheries. At the last bus stop, where the road’s paving
80 R. CÁRDENAS
ends abruptly, the view of the city on a clear day is breathtaking. From this southwestern
corner, it is still possible to make out where La 19 lies, just south of Bogotá’s old financial
district. And at nighttime, the 36 neon colors that light up the nation’s tallest building
unequivocally remind its observers that they are very far from the center.
To get to the other Calle 19, I usually took a third bus – an inter-municipal colectivo –, got
off at the cultural center of the National Association for Displaced Afrocolombians
(AFRODES) in El Oasis, and made my way a few blocks down to La Negra’s fish stand.12 El
Oasis is a barrio that straddles the border between Bogotá and Soacha, the capital’s poor
municipal neighbor to the South. Although I started going there in 2003, I’ve never really
known where El Oasis ends and where La Isla begins; or Los Robles, or Caracolí, or any of the
other adjacent barrios. I did population censuses with teams of local residents for AFRODES
in 2004 and again in 2009, walking up and down the mountainsides for days.13 Although in
2009 we traced the borders of eight neighborhoods in the area and drew maps of each of
them, this exercise only reinforced my sense that their limits are faint and imprecise. Street
numbers too are useless as a geographic reference. Added to their general inconsistency is
the fact that Bogotá’s and Soacha’s municipal grids collide in Cazucá, creating so much
confusion that neither locals nor outsiders use them with any real purpose.
Over the years, I honed a list of landmarks to find my way around the sea of dust,
brick, and tin that people refer to as Cazucá, or more affectionately as ‘El Barrio’.14 In
addition to AFRODES’s cultural center, I identified a Catholic church, a law clinic, a
children’s play center, and the UNHCR’s office whose gigantic blue and white logo
was visible about a mile away. Over time, I used other markers and started to refer to
them not only for spatial orientation but also as central features of the barrio’s life. There
were La Negra’s and Beatriz’s fish stands, Petra’s two-story house, the telecom, the
bakery, the bar where people played cards, and the dance club across the street. All
of these lined the other Calle 19: the periphery’s self-designated center.
There were other kinds of landmarks in El Barrio. There was ‘the hangman’s tree’ atop
the tallest still unpopulated hill where over the years people had become accustomed to
periodically seeing bodies hanging – allegedly those of suicide victims. There was the
precariously paved soccer court where three black teenagers were murdered point blank
in 2005; and the warnings to thieves and troublemakers written on the walls by urban
paramilitary groups. All these landmarks stood as reminders that no matter how hard
local residents worked at building their own Calle 19, they still remained on the urban
periphery: that feared space of crime, vice, and extreme poverty.
Put together, the barrio’s markers and its geographic distance from the city center
make it clear that it is a marginal area, so much on the edges of the urban periphery that
it sometimes falls out of the city’s maps entirely.15 In this sense, Cazucá is not unique; it
is just another squatter area where members of the most recent wave of rural–urban
migrants have settled. But Cazucá stands out amidst the otherwise indistinguishable belt
of poverty-stricken barrios that surrounds the city for two reasons. First, Cazucá and the
city sector (localidad) to which it officially belongs, Ciudad Bolívar, loom large in
Bogotanos’ imaginary as the area that condenses the highest levels of poverty and
violence in the capital (Armando 2012). As such, it has attracted an inordinate amount of
attention as an area in need of intervention. Beginning in the 1980s, Ciudad Bolívar
became the target of all kinds of initiatives to alleviate poverty and reduce crime by
offering local residents entrepreneurship opportunities.
In the 1990s, in concert with the identification of Colombia’s IDP Problem, the public
perception of Ciudad Bolívar as an area of ‘regular’ urban crime and poverty began to
change. In particular, the newer areas within this localidad – such as Cazucá – started to
be associated with desplazados. Although there was already an abundance of state and
NGO interventions in the area, in the 1990s their numbers skyrocketed and their
objectives began to change. Interventions in Ciudad Bolívar shifted from a broad interest
in the alleviation of poverty and crime to a plethora of aid and service providers for IDPs.
In addition to graffiti art courses for delinquent youth and sewing workshops for single
mothers, residents of Cazucá began to be routinely invited to participate in talks on
desplazados’ rights and psychosocial therapy retreats for victims of violence. In brief, the
residents of this area began to be collectively conceived of as war victims.
The identification of Cazucá with desplazados is evident in its landscape. Over the last
15 years, there has been an explosion of IDP attention centers in the area. Some of these
were state and NGO field offices that preexisted the displacement era and were either
gradually transformed or hastily adapted in a moment of crisis. But many more are new
places that were explicitly created to intervene on (behalf of) desplazados. Take the Casa
de los Derechos, which was established in 2005 as a local arm of Soacha’s Office of the
Ombudsman (Personería) in order to gather testimonies from recently arrived IDPs; or
the local UAO (Attention and Orientation Unit), which offers emergency aid, issues
official IDs, and provides IDPs with legal counsel and guidance on how to obtain health,
education, and housing benefits.
My point is that this area is overrepresented and exceedingly intervened in as a space
of desplazados, despite the fact that its settlement precedes the most recent waves of
forced displacement. In fact, although Ciudad Bolívar was only recognized as part of
Bogotá’s Capital District (D.C.) in 1983, the area began to be settled in the 1940s and
1950s by people fleeing from all corners of Colombia from La Violencia. And over the
next few decades, it became one of the preferred destinations for migrants seeking
better fortunes in the nation’s capital. Still, it was only in the mid-1990s that local
residents of Cazucá began to be collectively imagined as IDPs. This is not to suggest
that the area is no longer imagined as a poverty-stricken and dangerous place where
thieves, criminals, and prostitutes abound. But this imaginary has been gradually over-
shadowed by the increasing view of local residents as victims of the war.
The second particularity that sets Cazucá apart from other ‘slums’ and IDP receptor
areas is that it is imagined as a place of blackness. In fact, La 19, the other urban center
on the city’s periphery, is also referred to as ‘La Calle de los Negros’ (Black People’s
Street). This term is used mostly by residents who don’t identify as black and who are in
fact the majority. In a sense then, the very act of calling it La Calle de los Negros
indicates the utterer’s self-identification as non-black, and identifies La 19 as a racialized
space. The clearest indicator of this process of racialization is the circulation of the term
negro and the meanings that it is given.16 Overall, the term is used to describe all dark-
skinned people, irrespective of their geographic origin or cultural particularities. When it
is used by those who do not identify as black, it is usually based on visual cues: skin
color, facial features, hair texture. Thus, it clusters together people from regions as
diverse as the Pacific, the Northeastern highlands, the Caribbean Coast, and even
Bogotá, according to the observable cues of phenotype. For readers unfamiliar with
Colombia, it is important to highlight that racial and regional identities are closely
82 R. CÁRDENAS
related, if not synonymous, in many people’s minds. In addition, regional identities are
extremely marked and differentiated from one another such that a person’s regional
origin is seldom mistaken or overlooked. For this reason, the clustering of people who
are evidently from different regions – as evidenced by their accents and the food that
they eat, for example – into a single category is a telltale sign that racial logics, rather
than those of cultural difference, are centrally at play.
Self-identified negros also use this and other categories to signal racial meanings.
Behind closed doors, my interlocutors, who primarily identified as negros, referred to
their neighbors as blanquitos; another evidently racialized category that would be
loosely translatable as ‘whities’.17 And although they also use other terms that mark
more nuanced cultural and geographical differences between negros – for example, local
differences within the Pacific are constantly evoked – in practice they take up the
category to describe themselves and others who ‘look like’ them. In general, when
used by those who are interpellated and self-identify as negros, this identification of
self and other is both an acknowledgement of racial sameness and an indication of
cultural affinity.
For example, after several months of visiting her home in Cazucá, one day Rosa, a
woman from Antioquia, confessed that before coming to Bogotá she too held ‘the same
[mistaken] idea that some blancos have about negros: that all negros are from Chocó.’ A
few minutes later, when referring to her neighbors in the barrio, she said ‘my people, so
long as they are black, are everything to me.’ Rosa is from a mining region in a
department – Antioquia – that is largely imagined as white. Thus, it is not surprising
that before arriving in Bogotá, Rosa believed two things about negros: (1) that they were
all from Chocó (the quintessentially ‘black’ department in Colombia); and (2) that (there-
fore) she was not one of them. But in Cazucá, her views changed substantially. Due to
her interactions with people from various parts of Colombia, she acknowledged that
blackness and place of origin were not necessarily the same thing (i.e. that many negros
were not from Chocó). And consequently, she began referring to herself as negra
irrespective of the fact that she is from Antioquia. Thus, her primary form of identifica-
tion shifted from a regional to a racial one.
This shift in Rosa’s ideas about blackness is in part a result of her experiences with
racism, instances in which blancos single out negros regardless of where they come from
and what their lives were like before arriving in Bogotá. During this same conversation
Rosa was very clear about this. When describing her impressions of Bogotá she said,
‘people here are very racist, they offend us calling us “you black….”18 But I don’t pay
attention because I am black and I am proud of it.’ Thus, it is clear that negro is also a
racial self-ascription. Rosa has resolved to identify herself as negra, thus placing herself in
the same racial category as her neighbors from Chocó and inserting herself in a racial
community that she identifies as ‘mi gente’ (my people).
In fact, negros’ forms of sociality reproduce and solidify the category as a social reality.
More to the point, in Cazucá many daily forms of sociality are clearly divided by a color
line. On any given day, the great majority of the people playing cards at the bar on La
19, buying fish at La Negra’s stand, or drinking beer at the dance club, are dark-skinned.
The groups of women who gather in each other’s homes to play bingo on a regular
basis are rarely interracial. And although in theory the local Afro-Colombian dance
troupes welcome young people of all colors, in practice only a couple of blanquitos
have joined – while their families raise an eyebrow. I don’t want to paint a picture of
Cazucá as a space of unbridgeable racial segregation. In fact, outside of La 19, which
congregates negros almost exclusively, people of all colors converge in various public
spaces. But on a regular basis, the more intimate forms of sociality such as dating,
visiting each other’s homes, and extending/asking for solidarity do remain largely
segregated by a color line.
The designation of La 19 as La Calle de los Negros is therefore not spurious. And yet, it
is important to underline that La Calle de los Negros is only a three-block strip in the
seemingly endless sea of dust, bricks, and tin that is Cazucá. Put bluntly, within the scope
of the city at large, the other Calle 19 is but a speck on its massive urban landscape, and
the total number of negros who live in Cazucá is a very small minority.19 And still, that
three-block strip looms large in local imaginaries as a place of concentrated blackness.20
Importantly, unlike other concentrated spaces of blackness in Bogotá, the black-
ness that Cazucá evokes is always already victimized. Blackness in Cazucá is not on
the same order as the well-known strip of Pacific Region restaurants in downtown
Bogotá, where ‘white’, middle-class Bogotanos seeking an exotic seafood meal reg-
ularly dine (Serna 2011). Nor is it mentioned in the same breath as the popular Afro
dance clubs that are scattered in small clusters in middle-class areas of the city like
Avenida Caracas, Galerías, or La Primero de Mayo. Cazucá is not even on the same
order as the black neighborhoods in Kennedy, Bosa, or Suba, which tend to be
working-class barrios whose inhabitants are identified as economic migrants rather
than IDPs. Cazucá is unique precisely because it is simultaneously imagined as a place
of blackness and of desplazados.
Given its relatively small size and extreme marginality, Cazucá and its black IDPs could
have easily fallen out of purview. However, not only did Cazucá not remain unremark-
able, but also the particular confluence of blackness and displacement with which it has
become synonymous has gathered a great degree of attention, both locally and in
national politics. For example, in 2011 the mayor of Soacha identified black IDPs as a
significant portion of his constituency and reached out to them by sponsoring events
such as the annual celebration of Afro-Colombian Day. In addition, during the congres-
sional elections of 2010, residents of Cazucá were aggressively targeted as potential
voters for both Afro-Colombian representatives and town councilors.
Why has Cazucá become hyper-visible as the object of so many different kinds of
humanitarian interventions – by NGOs, religious groups, international aid organizations,
and government agencies? I suggest that this is due to the fact that discourses of
multiculturalism (which made blackness visible) and of war victimization (which pro-
duced IDPs as an internationally recognized subject of rights) converged there.
Together, they created the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a category of
racialized victims such as the black IDP or afro-desplazado. Put differently, this magnifi-
cation effect is indicative of the emergence of a broader discursive formation in which
multiculturalism and the politics of war victimization have converged.
Making (oneself as) an afro-desplazado

The magnitude and tragedy of forced displacement in Colombia is difficult to overstate. For
two decades now, approximately one quarter million people have been violently uprooted
84 R. CÁRDENAS
from their homes and forced into extremely precarious and dangerous circumstances
every year (CODHES 2013). Although this number may not be as dramatic as that of other
countries such as Syria, the accumulated number of IDPs places Colombia among the five
countries that together account for more than 60 per cent of the worldwide number of IDPs,
along with Sudan, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (IDMC 2016). Another
way to look at the astounding scale of this humanitarian crisis is to consider that this number
accounts for nearly 15 per cent of the total Colombian population. Furthermore, the
statistics published by both national and international monitoring centers such as the
Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (CODHES) and the Internal
Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) decry a dismal situation that remains unabated,
despite major milestones toward conflict resolution.21 This suggests that, while forced
displacement is undoubtedly tied to Colombia’s armed conflict, it is deeply entangled
with other structures of violence – such as racism and capitalist extractivism – that are
deepened by the war, but not immanent to it.
This becomes painfully obvious when we speak specifically about Afro-Colombian
displacement, which is a result of this vicious conjunction of structural and circumstan-
tial forms of violence in the territories of ‘black communities’. Although a final and
authoritative figure on Afro-Colombian displacement is still unavailable, it is safe to
affirm that forced displacement affects Afro-Colombians disproportionately.22 In fact,
activists and scholars have been documenting the brutality of this phenomenon for
some time, and some have even denounced it as a form of genocide by pointing to the
systematic eradication of both black bodies and the culturally specific forms of liveli-
hood that sustain them (Almario 2004; Arocha 1998; Garavito, Sierra, and Adarve 2009;
Oslender 2016).
A lot has been written to describe the plight of desplazados during their harrowing
journeys and at their sites of arrival (Bello 2004; Bello et al. 2000; Meertens 2000, 2001;
Pérez and Edilma 2004; Agudelo and Jaime 2002; Martínez and Enrique 2004). Although I
believe that it is critically important to reckon with such devastating stories, my intent in
this paper goes beyond that of reproducing them. By describing some of the everyday
experiences of afro-desplazados in Cazucá, I hope to dig beneath the surface of this
seemingly self-evident subject category in order to evidence some of its limitations. I
hope to show that, while expedient in responding to some of the painfully urgent
circumstances wrought by the war, it remains inadequate for righting the structural
injustices faced by Afro-Colombians more broadly. It is therefore necessary, but insuffi-
cient. I am motivated by a sense of caution that warns of the dangers of eliding
temporary and historical demands for reparations. At the same time, however, I am
moved to search for the political possibilities that escape the category’s limitations, to
explore the unforeseen ways in which ordinary folks use it in extraordinary ways. To do
this, I turn to ethnographic description.
One Sunday morning in 2009, like so many others, I stopped by Maria Elena’s
apartment just south of the downtown area so we could ride the bus up to Cazucá
together. Maria Elena, who was secretary general of AFRODES’ board at the time, had
scheduled a meeting for ‘Afro’23 women for that day. As the only woman on the board,
she was in charge of women’s and children’s issues and was responsible for disseminat-
ing information that affected these two IDP population subgroups. Maria Elena started
the meeting by getting a show of hands to determine how many people had received a
cash transfer for underage IDPs, which had recently gone into effect. There was sub-
stantial confusion among attendees because there were many inconsistencies between
the list of beneficiaries that AFRODES had compiled and the group of women who
attended the meeting. Some of the attendees suggested that her lists might be from
another barrio or organization, but Maria Elena disregarded this explanation and later
told me that she thought the discrepancy was suspicious.
Next on her agenda was to inform attendees, composed primarily of black women
with young children, of an upcoming deadline to request a subsidy to purchase an
urban lot. Maria Elena framed it as an opportunity to ‘maintain our ancestral traditions
and historical rural–urban relations’ and encouraged them to claim their plot of land to
grow crops, keep an herb garden, and raise chickens. The rest of the meeting was
dedicated to bringing members up to date on current sources of humanitarian aid.
Specifically, she counseled them on how to apply for the national housing subsidy for
IDPs and to remain alert for an upcoming call for a supplementary subsidy earmarked
specifically for Afro-Colombian women.
Every single person at that meeting, except for myself, self-identified as a desplazado.
Independently of whether they had acquired a state-issued ID, their very attendance at
the meeting indicated their intent to be regarded as such.24 Furthermore, the mix-up
with the lists of beneficiaries was indicative of the overabundance of people whose basic
human right to shelter, food, and health services had been denied, and for whom aid for
desplazados had become a critical means for survival. It also bears noting that, although
there were a handful of non-black attendees, the meeting was explicitly directed toward
black people. This was clearly evident when Maria Elena made reference to Afro-
Colombians as a community of people with particular relations to land – ’our ancestral
traditions’ – a statement clearly in line with Colombian multiculturalism.
While attaining IDP status is oftentimes the only way for people in Cazucá to survive
in their place of resettlement, being an afro-desplazado entitles some people to apply for
additional sources of humanitarian aid that target black victims specifically. This is
because the state and international aid organizations have earmarked funds for Afro-
Colombian victims and because humanitarian NGOs have followed suit by developing
‘ethnic-specific’ programs. However, despite the plethora of state and nongovernmental
humanitarian aid programs and organizations, actual relief for desplazados is insufficient
and difficult to access. Thus, local residents continue to live in abject poverty, most
barrios remain without public services, and violence – both indiscriminate and political –
is rampant. In the absence of other sustainable and effective ways to make a living in
their new urban settings, it is not surprising that many people survive with what
precarious assistance they can secure.
This became painfully evident to me when I conducted a survey documenting
income levels and sources for 200 households with people who self-identified as afro
and as desplazados. When I and the other survey-takers asked respondents about their
sources of income, they repeatedly mentioned el rebusque.25 In Colombia, the term
rebusque refers to any resourceful means to generate income and includes most activ-
ities that would normally fall under the rubric of the informal economy, such as street
sales and non-registered services. But when we asked respondents to be more specific in
describing what these activities entailed, we noticed that they would routinely mention
the search for ayudas (aid), alongside activities such as selling fruit and trash bags on the
86 R. CÁRDENAS
streets and braiding their neighbors’ hair or providing them with childcare. Thus, it
became clear to me that the time invested in accessing humanitarian aid benefits could
be considered on par with the time spent on informal economic activities. In other
words, getting ayudas has become another strategy of rebusque, an occupation that
requires a significant investment of energy and time.
And yet, it is important to note that not everyone is equally willing or savvy enough
to tap into these sources of income. On the one hand, the stigma that comes with being
a desplazado is so strong that some people deliberately distance themselves from the
label. No matter how poor, how recently they arrived in Bogotá, or how lost they might
feel, some people consider the category too degrading to adopt. On the other hand, a
few select people become so well versed in the workings of the complex web of
organizations that provide aid and services for IDPs that they become de facto brokers
between those seeking aid and those offering it.
Wilson’s sister, Dora, is a clear example of this successful brokering. Dora, who is now
in her late 40s, moved to Bogotá when she was 17 to work as a live-in domestic worker
for a well-known media personality. Although she arrived in Bogotá in the 1980s – prior
to the emergence of the politics of war victimization – in 2005 she became an official
IDP. In the course of those 20 years, many things happened. She lived in Chocó with her
husband’s family for a few years and moved back to her town of birth in the southern
Pacific for another few years, but in both instances she had to leave because of the
surrounding violence in each of these areas. Before moving to Cazucá in 1999, she had
lived in several other marginal neighborhoods around the city, as well as in wealthy
areas as a live-in domestic worker.
Dora is a dynamic, sharp, and resourceful woman. When she first moved to Cazucá,
she signed her children up for World Vision’s sponsorship program. But Dora’s motiva-
tions tended to exceed the limits of her own interests, and soon she started to recruit
other children to be sponsored as well. She met Isaías there, who at the time was
participating in World Vision’s urban development efforts in the barrio, organizing local
residents to provide the labor to plot, clear, and sometimes pave the area’s incipient
streets. Isaías, like the rest of the residents, was providing his labor in exchange for food,
and in the process turning the slum into a barrio. One of the main differences between
this barrio and the other ones where both Dora and Isaías had lived before was that in
Cazucá there was a group of Chocoanos who organized meetings where they spoke
about black identity and forced displacement. This group included the extended families
of the founders of AFRODES, all of which were living in Cazucá at the time. Although she
herself is not Chocoana, over time Dora began to feel comfortable among them and
became a regular at their meetings.
Today, both Isaías and Dora are active leaders in the local chapter of AFRODES, and
have become key brokers in helping afro-desplazados access aid. They counsel others on
how to obtain official IDP status and the state benefits that they are entitled to; they
spread news about meetings, workshops, and training classes that target IDPs. Local
organization representatives such as the priest at the Pastoral Social, the social worker at
the Ombudsman’s Casa de los Derechos, the UNHCR officer, and the barrio school-
teacher all know them by name. But Dora and Isaías are not simply IDP spokespeople;
they are explicitly sought out as representatives of afro-desplazados. On any given day,
Dora can get a call from the mayor’s office in Soacha asking her to coordinate the
upcoming events for Afro-Colombian Day, or from a music professor at the Universidad
Javeriana who wants to schedule a public performance with her group of Afro women
singers (cantaoras). In other words, they stand at a critical crossroads as representatives
and members of a very specific population group that has recently come into the
political limelight: afro-desplazados. From their position as cultural brokers, Dora and
Isaías not only secure resources for their own and their neighbors’ survival, but also
facilitate the exchange that effectively produces afro-desplazados as simultaneously
racialized and victimized political subjects.
Conclusion: from objects of humanitarian aid to subjects in struggle?

Although I knew that Dora had been singing alabaos and arrullos with a small group of
women from Cazucá for a few years, I was not prepared for the last performance that I
saw her in. I had seen her perform at various venues and occasions that ranged from the
launching of AFRODES’s latest human rights report to the Municipality of Soacha’s
annual Afro-Colombian Day celebrations, but that evening, as I entered the theater of
one of Bogotá’s most prestigious private universities, I was overcome by her
protagonism.
The tickets and the banner at the theater entrance were printed with a beautiful
close-up picture of her smiling face, and as the evening went by it became clear that she
was the star of the presentation. The theater, though modest in size, was packed with
middle- and upper-class college-aged men and women. Toño, who was the
designated M.C. that night, opened with a question for the audience: ‘What does it
mean to be Afro?’
Next on the program were several short interviews with formal guests. The first guest
was a current graduate student at the university who spoke as an expert on the healing
power of music. She was then joined on stage by Dora and her sister Simona, who were
dressed in color-coordinated outfits complete with lavish jewelry and a head wrap.
Toño’s conversation with Dora and Simona centered not on analysis but on testimony.
He began his set of questions in a low voice, as if conjuring an atmosphere of solemnity.
‘Can you tell us why you are here in Bogotá today?’ he began. To which Dora responded,
‘I am here tonight sharing my culture with all of you, thanks to my forced displacement.’
That evening, Dora sang the lead vocals to a number of alabaos and arrullos, each of
which was preceded by a brief explanation intended to provide the uninitiated audience
with the necessary context to appreciate them. Dora and Simona explained that arrullos
and alabaos were sung during funerals. They related their early childhood experiences
on the Patía River, when they first learned these songs, and shared with the audience
the feelings that the songs stirred inside them. Despite the tone of desolation inherent
to this music genre, Dora’s mood that night was not somber.
The closing act was designed to transform the presentation’s overall tone from
mourning to rejoicing. Toño guided the transition by reminding everyone that Afro-
ness was fundamentally about joy and invited the children to come on stage. Thus, the
evening’s program concluded with several currulaos, the Southern Pacific’s most well-
known music genre with its characteristic melodic marimba that lends itself to dance.
I left the theater with mixed emotions. On the one hand, there was my critical
impulse, which led me to analyze every element of the performance. I was all-too-
88 R. CÁRDENAS
familiar with well-meaning, but exoticizing ‘social projects’ like the one that sponsored
that night’s performance, which tended to find and reproduce exactly what they
searched for: victims. And I was acutely aware of the way in which the event cobbled
together disparate but predictable elements to construct a seemingly cohesive image of
‘black culture’.
On the other hand, I was deeply struck by Dora’s demeanor. She was not a virtuoso and
yet she had adopted the bearings of a star effortlessly. Although she was not generally shy
or insecure, that night while on stage, Dora’s composure was on a different scale: beaming
with self-assurance. Her demeanor, and the sheer joy evident in her performance, led me to
consider that perhaps her status as a desplazada had unexpectedly led her to become a
proud protagonist of black identity. Setting my reservations aside, I thought it possible that
her very tragedy had circuitously enabled her to embark on a conscious self-crafting process
as an Afro-Colombian in a way that had not been available to her when she was ‘just’ a
domestic worker. Her visibility as a proud carrier of black cultural traditions is not only a
result of the increased prominence of multicultural recognition but also of the emergence of
afro-desplazados as recognizable political subjects. In a sense, Dora had been brought into
the limelight to share the precious songs of her childhood with a predominantly mestizo
audience – ‘thanks to [her] forced displacement’.
Of course, this was an ephemeral moment and Dora’s rise to such levels of protagon-
ism is anything but the norm for most afro-desplazados. In fact, even for Dora, the
consequences of this newly attained visibility have not been unambiguous. With the
steady salary that she received from the music project, she has been able to support her
two granddaughters, but the added income has never been enough to give up her job
as a domestic worker. As a result of her position as a cultural broker, she has established
close relationships with foreign NGO and international aid workers, which she has
capitalized on both materially and symbolically. Being the altruist that she is, Dora
used these symbolic and material resources to establish a cultural center for Afro
youth, where she and others pass on musical traditions from the Pacific to the new
generations of Afro-Colombians growing up in Bogotá.
I am not suggesting that Dora is thankful for having been displaced. Nor do I want to
minimize the suffering and profound loss that she and other afro-desplazados have
endured. At the end of the day when the spotlights go off, Dora takes the long bus ride
to her home in Cazucá like any other afro-desplazado. Yet, I want to rescue a hopeful
sense of political possibility that might be opened up by the heightened visibility of the
afro-desplazado. As I sat in the dark theater feeling the powerful resonance of her voice, I
heard her sing a familiar song that helped me find the word I was searching for. The
song was ‘Ronca Canalete’, a coming-of-age song that is most popular in the Southern
Pacific. I had heard Dora complain that the other women in the ensemble, who were
mostly from Chocó rather than the Southern Pacific, did not know the lyrics to the songs
that she sang. But this was not the case with ‘Ronca Canalete’, which she led and the
others followed with great ease. As she sang it with a more polished voice than I had
ever heard, I reflected on the meaning of the canalete.
The glow on Dora’s face that night reminded me of the collective atmosphere on a very
different occasion, when I had interviewed the founders of a black community along the
Mira River, not far from Dora’s birthplace. I recalled their faces as they reminisced about the
land titling process following the passage of Law 70 and spontaneously broke into song,
recalling their community’s anthem, which they had composed. That afternoon, the
members of the Mira River’s black community had repeatedly made reference to the
canalete, or wooden oar with which every single person on the Pacific learns to travel
along their river. For them the canalete was a symbol of the enthusiasm with which they
worked for the recognition of their ethnic and territorial rights. Because it represented the
work of rowing, it was a metonym that expressed their commitment to their black
community. The canalete stood for their collective pride. Some of this pride was associated
with the tenacity with which they worked for their objective: obtaining the collective land
title of their territory. But as a cultural symbol that had become intimately associated with
the Pacific, it was also representative of black pride.
For many black political activists, the dangers of essentializing blackness as victimhood are
numerous and palpable. They are keenly aware that the emphasis on war victimization was
born out of necessity rather than political strategy. As such, it is seen as part of a temporary
answer to the most pressing problems of ‘black communities’. This was clearly expressed by
Jesús, a high-level activist from one of Colombia’s most well-established black organizations, in
a discussion I had with him. When I asked him what he thought of the idea of demanding
reparations for Afro-Colombian victims of the war, Jesús rhetorically asked, ‘if you get a
reparation for being a victim do you stop being black?’ And then, responding to his own
question he stated:
The relevant political subject is the black community, which transcends the current
moment, the conjuncture. Should Afro-Colombians who are displaced claim rights as
desplazados or as ‘black communities’? [They should do so] as members of ‘black commu-
nities’ because displacement is a transitory matter that will pass.
And yet, one cannot help but wonder whether this unexpected moment in the limelight,
albeit as afro-desplazados, has the potential for further strengthening Afro-Colombians’
collective sense of black pride and confidence as political subjects. And whether this might
lead to previously inexistent paths to address the structural (racism) rather than the con-
junctural (war victimization).
Although Dora, Wilson, and Isaías do not state their political analyses of victimized
blackness in such terms, their lives and aspirations reveal a similar perspective. Collecting
humanitarian aid and identifying as afro-desplazados are not ends in themselves; they are
makeshift and temporary expedients. As people in Cazucá repeatedly remind me, despla-
zado is not a noun, but an adjective. Consequently, nobody is a desplazado.
Notes
1. In Wilson’s case, the monthly stipend was $500.000 COP ($239 USD) for food and $300.000
COP ($143 USD) for rent. The lump sum transfer was $1.500.000 COP ($714 USD). The
average exchange rate in 2000 was $2.088 COP to the U.S. dollar.
2. It is important to mention that as I finish the revisions for this paper, an impressive popular
mobilization that articulates basic demands to the state in terms that openly denounce
structural racism has arisen in the city of Buenaventura and has quickly garnered support in
other areas across the Pacific Region. While an analysis of this mobilization is beyond the
scope of this paper, I believe that it is a clear indicator that the logics that sustain black
mobilization in Colombia are substantially shifting to include anti-racist discourses more
directly. However, at the time that the fieldwork for this paper was conducted (between
2004 and 2011), open denunciations of structural racism, such as those made by Cimarrón
90 R. CÁRDENAS
since the 1970s, were the exception rather than the norm. For more information on
Cimarrón see http://movimientocimarron.org/quienes-somos/.
3. For a comprehensive genealogy of human rights and humanitarianism in Colombia, see
Aparicio (2010).
4. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the stock number of
IDPs from Colombia’s war is 7,246,000 as of 2016. In addition, it is very important to note
that recently both multilateral organizations (OCHA) and reputable national research
centers (CINEP and CODHES), have corroborated what AFRODES and other black organiza-
tions had been stating for some time: that a disproportionately large number of IDPs are
black and/or indigenous (cf http://www.internal-displacement.org/americas/colombia/
2014/displacement-continues-despite-hopes-for-peace).
5. More precisely, although the RSS had been operating since 1994, it was officially created as
a national public entity in 1997 (through Law 368). It also bears noting that the idea of a
government office dedicated to vulnerable population groups and the eradication of
poverty had two antecedents in prior administrations: President Betancur’s Secretaría de
Integración Popular and President Barco’s Plan Nacional de Rehabilitación (BID 2011).
6. Following Aparicio, I place the term ‘internal conflict’ in quotation marks to signal that it is a
confounding term that identifies militarized violence in the so-called ‘Third World’ exclu-
sively as a result of disputes that occur within national boundaries and therefore as
unrelated to global relations of inequality and violence.
7. Interestingly, although the UN has never established an agency charged specifically with
overseeing internal displacement, in some cases such as in Colombia, it has granted the
UNHCR – whose mission is to deal with refugees – the necessary authority to intervene on
behalf of IDPs. This responds to an attempt to respect States’ sovereignty by not meddling
in their internal affairs.
8. In 2011 after the passage of Law 1448 known as ‘Victims’ Law’, this unit redefined its mission to
include both socioeconomic stabilization/inclusion and victims’ reparations programs. At this
time its name was changed to Departamento para la Prosperidad Social (DPS).
9. See Meertens (2008) on the central role of the Constitutional Court in creating ‘positive
discrimination’ mechanisms to distinguish gendered and racialized victims.
10. PCN stands for Proceso de Comunidades Negras, or Process of Black Communities.
11. I refer to ‘black communities’ in quotation marks to signal that it is a relatively recent
construction that emerged with state-sanctioned multicultural rights.
12. AFRODES was established in 1999 to address the immediate humanitarian crisis following
the first wave of massive displacements along the Pacific, but over the years has become a
major political actor and interlocutor with the state on all matters related to multicultur-
alism. For a history and analysis of the organization, see Cárdenas (2012b).
13. These censuses were only one of many collaborative efforts that I have participated in with
AFRODES since 2004, when I began working as a volunteer at their national office in
downtown Bogotá.
14. I use the term Cazucá throughout this paper although strictly speaking it does not refer to a
precise geographic or administrative unit. Altos de Cazucá is a registered neighborhood
(barrio) in Bogotá, but Cazucá is a vague term that people use loosely. In my case, I use it to
refer to a hazily defined conglomerate of barrios that straddles the Bogotá-Soacha muni-
cipal border.
15. In 2009, when I was conducting fieldwork, official maps at the national geographic institute
IGAC were literally blank where Cazucá stands.
16. Sometimes the term that is used to signal blackness is ‘Afro’. Although a genealogy of
this term is beyond the scope of this paper, it bears to note that its circulation among
nonactivists is most likely a consequence of the ‘Durban effect’ in Colombia. That is, it is
an offshoot of the adoption of the term ‘Afro-descendant’ which was first coined at
Durban and which has become the most politically correct term to signal blackness in
Colombia.
17. Like with many other uses of the diminutive form of a noun, the term blanquito – as
opposed to blanco – denotes the utterer’s discomfort with the term and an attempt to
minimize displeasure. In this case, it is also evidently infused with contempt toward the
object (white people) that the term signifies.
18. Rosa was referring to the most common racial insult that circulates in Colombia, which is
‘Negro hijueputa’. The phrase could be translated as ‘you black son of a bitch’, but it is
incredibly flexible in its usage and can be combined with practically any other insult.
Because the emphasis in this phrase is on the adjective negro rather than whatever follows
it, it is unequivocally a racial slur.
19. Although I haven’t found disaggregated data for Ciudad Bolívar, according to the 2005
population census both Bogotá and Soacha’s Afro-Colombian population is only
1.5 per cent of the total (DANE 2005). Even if the concentration of Afro-Colombians in
Cazucá were exponentially higher than in the city at large, their numbers are still small.
20. For example, for several years now local organizations have organized a celebration of San
Pachito, Chocó’s largest popular festival and one of the nation’s icons of ‘black culture’ par
excellence, in Cazucá.
21. These milestones include the formal demobilization of paramilitary groups and the nego-
tiations between the FARC and the government, which culminated in the signing of a
Peace Accord in 2016. However, the statistics cited in this paper all correspond with the
period prior to the peace accords.
22. Using different measurement methodologies, several organizations have estimated that
Afro-Colombians make up anywhere from one fifth to one third of the total number of IDPs,
which in any case, attests to the disproportionality of forced displacement among black
Colombians (see CODHES 2013; AFRODES, ORCONE, and CNOA 2008; IDMC 2016).
23. I place the term in ‘scare quotes’ here to draw attention to the fact that ‘Afro’ has been
recently taken up as the most common term for ethno-racial identification, standing side by
side the term ‘negro’ (black) but often replacing it as a more politically correct choice.
24. The process to become an official IDP requires individuals to give a declaration at a state-
sanctioned post. Then, the declaration is verified and a notification of acceptance or
rejection is given. The criteria for determining whether the testimonies rendered are
legitimate or not are inconsistent and opaque. Sometimes the determining factor is mostly
a bureaucratic issue, whereas sometimes the veracity of the story is called into question. In
any case, if the declaration is deemed legitimate, the individual and their designated family
unit are entered into the national IDP database (Registro Único de Población Desplazada,
RUPD) and become eligible for state aid.
25. For the small minority of people who were employed, the two most common occupations
were in construction and domestic service. Although I can’t pause to analyze formal
sources of employment for residents of Cazucá, I cannot overlook the fact that these are
highly gendered and racialized occupations.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Sonia Serna, Matthew Robertson, and Asa Needle for reading and commenting on
drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
92 R. CÁRDENAS
Funding
This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation [grant number 7776]; CONACYT
[206365]; UC Pacific Rim Research Program.
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‘Thanks to my forced displacement’: blackness and

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‘Thanks to my forced displacement’: blackness and the

CONTACT Roosbelinda Cárdenas rcardenas@hampshire.edu

Cazucá, a conglomerate of shantytown neighborhoods in a marginal area of Bogotá,

Organizing by ‘black communities’ against logging companies, shrimping farms, and

‘La Calle de los Negros’

Making (oneself as) an afro-desplazado

Conclusion: from objects of humanitarian aid to subjects in struggle?

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