Black and Indigenous Entanglements: Race, Mobilization and Citizenship in Colombia, 1930-1991

Abstract

Historically, black and indigenous Colombians have been studied separately and through different disciplinary prisms. Whereas indigenous people have been the subject of anthropology and studied through the lenses of culture and ethnicity, black people have been the purview of sociology, and have been studied through the lenses of race and inequality. By instead studying the entangled histories of black and indigenous activism in the 20th century, my dissertation argues that the multicultural shift that took place in the 1990s was paved by decades of shared mobilization in multiracial working-class spaces such as labor unions, peasant leagues and leftist parties. Scholars tend to assume that black and indigenous struggles first coalesced during the multicultural debates resulting in the 1991 Constitution, which censured racial discrimination and allocated collective rights to ethnic minorities. Yet, as my research reveals, for decades black and indigenous activists were at the forefront of progressive struggles and used leftist organizations to demand racial and economic justice.

My project makes three main arguments that center the entangled histories of black and indigenous political mobilization. First, black and indigenous activists were central to working- class multiracial movements, and at times organized together, both as leaders and rank and file, especially in leftist platforms including the Communist Party. Definitions of black and indigenous mobilization must be broadened to include these forms of participation, not only instances in which they made claims on racial or ethnic lines, such as in black or indigenous organizations, as scholars of race and nation frequently do. Second, although black and indigenous activists were central to the development of the left, their class dogmatism made it very difficult for black and indigenous activists to make claims for both economic and racial justice. The inability of the left to confront racial hierarchies reflected the political impact of ideologies of racial harmony and equality, common across Latin American societies, which suggested that class, more than race, explained social inequalities. It also helps explain the expansion of ethnically or racially defined movements by the end of the 1970s. Finally, traditional narratives of 20th century Colombian history underscore partisan violence and class warfare, but often ignore the connections between political violence and processes of racial formation. Violence was not racially neutral. The intensity of state repression of progressive forces during the 1970s and 1980s foreclosed avenues for radical multiracial mobilization, leading many black and indigenous activists to organize around global ideas of human rights and multiculturalism.