Palenques on the Pacific
African-descended communities living along the Pacific coast of Colombia have, since the 1990s, sought to organize community councils and take advantage of state recognition of collective territorial rights. The Pacific coast, a region predominantly peopled by Afro-Colombians, was also historically shaped by the history of slavery, extractive mining, and the forms of slave resistance and manumission, including the foundation of runaway slave communities. Scholars such as Ulrich Oslender have also examined the specific spatiality of the Pacific lowlands, in particular its riverine environment and its impact on Afro-descended communities. However, Afro-Colombian social movements of the 1990s and 2000s were profoundly shaped by the history of marronage in the region. The symbolism of palenques in the region influenced the historical narratives of Afro-Colombian movements and how they conceived of themselves in relation to place, local histories, community, labor, and organization. This occurs even in the context of a region where historical runaway slave communities were less common, such as in the Pacific coast of Colombia. Here, despite the paucity of documented runaway slave communities, self-manumission and the relative autonomy of free black Colombians ensured marronage and the lived history of autonomous black communities would define Afro-Colombian movements of the contemporary era. This paper shall explore this topic first through a historical overview of Afro-Colombian resistance to slavery and the foundation of black communities in the colonial and post-emancipation period. Then, the paper shall discuss how Afro-Colombian social movements have used marronage in relation to the geography and environment of the Pacific Coast. This shall demonstrate that marronage has profoundly impacted Afro-Colombian social movements through a sense of rootedness based on the local geography and coastal environment, shaping the ways in which these communities defined themselves and their historical origins.
The Pacific coast of Colombia is often perceived as the overwhelmingly “black” or predominantly Afro-descendant region of the nation. Unlike the Caribbean Coast, which also features a large Afro-Colombian population, Colombia’s western coast is perceived by Colombians as “blacker” and, according to anthropologist Peter Wade, less racially mixed than the Caribbean coast. Demographic factors such as the high number of African slaves imported into the region and the recent movement of mestizo and white highlanders into the region explain the region’s overwhelmingly Afro-Colombian heritage.[1] The Pacific lowlands are also a part of what anthropologist Norman Whitten described as an Afro-Hispanic cultural sphere extending along the coastline of Colombia and Ecuador, featuring a peasant-proletariat-entrepreneur adaptive mobility that can be experienced by inhabitants at various moments in their lives.[2] This coastline, a product of centuries of African enslavement, manumission, and extractive gold panning in its riverine setting, fell under Spanish colonial rule in the 16th century, but enslaved Africans exploited to pan for gold were often able to purchase their own freedom.[3] This paved the way for a large free black population and an enslaved labor force capable of attaining emancipation without recourse to large-scale escapes which necessitated forming fortified villages independent of colonial authority. While this occurred in Colombia’s Caribbean coast most famously with the Palenque de San Basilio, historically documented maroon settlements in Colombia’s Pacific lowlands appear to have been quite rare, the notable exception being El Castigo on the Patía River.[4] However, enslaved and free blacks were able to, after earning enough to buy their freedom through panning for gold, pursue a subsistence economy combining wage labor, mining, agriculture, and fishing in order to form self-sufficient communities rooted in particular rivers and extended family kinship networks, or troncos.[5] Formed by black miners, these social organizations were modeled on cognatic groups, and used genealogy to construct narratives about the origin of the extended family.[6] These oral traditions in turn shaped cultural practices such as wakes and can be rooted back in the free black, or libre, and runaway slave claims to land, the rights passed on to their descendants.[7]
The tradition of décimas, the “creative source of collective memories, local history and aquatic epistemologies,” similarly drew on the rich oral traditions from the extended family kinship system and the spatial mobility of Pacific lowlands populations.[8] Retelling deeds and ways of life of past generations, they also allow for the community to express cultural values while simultaneously developing what Oslender designates a “hidden transcript of resistance.”[9] Like the oral traditions of the Saramaka community of Suriname in Richard Price’s First Time, décimas change local figures or symbols in history to adapt to new needs and lives of Afro-Colombian communities today. However, Afro-Colombian popular lore in the Pacific region does not recount slavery. Paradoxically, Afro-Colombians in the region refer to themselves as libre, indicating there is a sense in which they are a “free” or “freed” population, but popular tradition does not record chattel slavery. These Afro-Colombian communities, like the Saramaka maroons, recreate their past through memory, thereby adapting their traditions to satisfy new necessities and conditions.[10] Paradoxically, the comparable “first-time” of the Afro-Colombian Pacific coastal populations can be traced to the traditions of the palenque and free blacks, or libres, commemorating local actors, traditions, and relations that act as a fountainhead of identity.[11] The décima additionally acts as a “homeplace,” or social space free from colonial and national control in which communities could feel secure, comfortable, and engage in solidarity.[12] In other words, the oral tradition created a space for Afro-Colombian communities to practice local solidarity, community, and express themselves freely, like the maroon societies of the past. While Oslender highlights the importance of local rivers and environments embedded in this oral tradition, it also reflects the larger migratory patterns of Afro-Colombians displaced by paramilitary conflict, urbanization, and the search for employment opportunities abroad, allowing for some degree of continuity and knowledge to be passed on to the next generation.
These Afro-Colombian communities engaged in panning for gold, migration to work in the haciendas of the Cauca Valley, and by the end of the 19th century, were cultivating rubber for the global market in areas such as the Chocó Department.[13] The Afro-Hispanic culture of the littoral similarly cultivated a unique form of popular Catholicism due to the weakness of the Catholic Church in the region, blending African, indigenous, and European practices for unique cultural practices, such as the velorio, or wakes for the dead and saints, featuring drums and African-influenced music.[14] In addition, the African-derived marimba instrument occupied an important status as musical recreation in the region, particularly in the currulao genre. The rejection of marimba music by dominant white tastes further reflected the cultural resistance of Afro-Colombian communities in the region against white elites and authorities.[15] Their cultural formation, based on adaptive mobility within the region and various subsistence and wage labor practices, resembled to a certain extent the maroon settlements because of their local autonomy, extended kinship structures reflecting African and European influences, and their complex interactions with the (post)colonial state. For example, some runaway slave settlements modeled their government on colonial government titles and requested churches or chapels.[16] Collective labor practices such as the minga likewise connected peasants in their local communities while suggesting the importance of African agrarian practices, since similar cooperative labor practices can be found among peasant descendants of slaves along the Caribbean littoral, Haiti, and Jamaica. Although cooperative labor practices declined as the cash economy and the proletarianization of Afro-Colombian communities expanded in the 20th century, such terminology entered the vocabulary of contemporary social movements, shaping the rhetoric of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras and younger generations of black organizers.[17]
Like the maroon societies of other nations, Afro-Colombians on the Pacific also faced the burden of nationally-sponsored extractive industries and development plans, which infringed on local land rights and territorial claims, pushing some to work in other regions. Afro-Colombians along the littoral were also workers in the sugar haciendas of the Cauca Valley, a department with its own large black peasant population.[18] This migration was a significant aspect of the spatial mobility of the Pacific where inhabitants were peasants, workers, and entrepreneurs along a continuum, adapting to the environment and its geography. This aforementioned pattern of peasants working for wages, such as the migration of coastal farmers to the sugar haciendas of the Cauca Valley, exemplifies this trend. Black residents of the Cauca, like those in other Pacific regions, resisted land encroachment of the haciendas and brought their own African-influenced beliefs into account for wage labor and mitigating its impact on social cohesion. Indeed, according to Taussig, the belief in magic and wage labor’s association with the devil reflected the difference between exchange value and use value among the semi-proletarianized Afro-Colombian workers, which included a large contingency of migrant workers from the coast. According to Taussig, “In the sugarcane plantations of the Cauca Valley and in the tin mines of highland Bolivia it is clear that the devil is intrinsic to the process of the proletarianization of the peasant and to the commoditization of the peasant's world. He signifies a response to the change in the fundamental meaning of society as that meaning registers in precapitalist consciousness.”[19] Moreover, this pattern of using local beliefs, which combined Catholicism with their African-influenced beliefs, to resist the dominant order’s political economy of wage labor and development resembles past maroon societies for their religious and cultural heritage and its threat to the dominant colonial state’s vision of progress, labor, and order. In this case, postemancipation black peasantries sought to resist the dominant logic of hacienda production and the growth of capitalist social relations, which hindered access to land, weakened cooperative labor practices, fueled class inequalities, and subverted local autonomy through the global market. Their “superstitious” belief in magic was thus a product of a culture where magic reflected the values of their enslaved past and the values of freed slaves, thus a direct link to the symbolism of the palenque. In the Pacific lowlands as well, the Catholic saints and their power to intervene are taken seriously by the riverine villages, including beliefs in the abilities of the saints to save villages from natural disasters, as the patron saint of the community of Salahonda supposedly did on two occasions.[20] Indeed, locals develop close ties with their own individual patron saint, a patronato, which they could be possessed by in rituals involving a maestra or sindica who connects a family or community with their saints. Although Afro-Colombians did not develop a tradition comparable to Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santeria, their African-influenced practices of saint worship clearly demonstrate continuity with the practices of the free blacks and runaway slaves of the region in the past.[21] These in turn are part of the larger spiritual and magico-religious perspective of local communities, shaping their resistance in the past and present.
By the 1990s, after land and labor movements sponsored by the Catholic Church and a race-based Afro-Colombian cultural movement which embraced the symbolism of palenques burgeoned, the Colombian state extended territorial land rights to Afro-Colombians in the Pacific with community councils to administer the new collective land titles.[22] Acting in accordance with larger shifts in Latin American state policy regarding indigenous communities and multiculturalism, Afro-Colombians living along the Pacific littoral were also granted collective land rights, like other Afro-Latin American populations, based on an ethnic view of “blackness” tied to heritage, culture, land tenure, and traditions.[23] Thus, the lens of marronage provide a useful analytic lens to explore Afro-Colombian social movements, especially the cultural, historical, and spatial implications of contemporary social movements in the region. Beginning in the 1970s with the overtly race-based Afro-Colombian organizations, such as Cimarron, the symbolic importance of marronage emerges clearly for Afro-Colombians. Cimarronismo as an ideology was promoted by black Colombian organizations in 1970s and 1980s, melded well with Black Power era, African decolonization, and used the history of palenques to assert black autonomy against the state and its mestizo ideal. Derived from the word for feral cattle, these black Colombian organizations were asserting the right for self-determination and autonomy from a racist state, drawing on the example of fugitive slave communities which carved an autonomous existence from the colonial state. To black Colombian organizations and intellectuals of the time, this also meant cultural autonomy from dominant state ideals of race and culture, which were to be defined by Afro-Colombians themselves.[24] Local self-determination or self-definition, a value cherished by palenques and freed blacks, represented again the symbolic power of marronage for black mobilization in the 1970s and 1980s.
However, grounding a movement based on racial identity in a nation where racial dynamics are more fluid than the US rule of hypodescent entailed complications for its capacity for mass mobilization. Thus, a shift toward the ethnicization of blackness and the assumption of cultural custodianship of the Pacific Coast’s biodiversity, combined with a state reading of the multicultural heritage of the black and indigenous minorities as a right to difference in the 1991 constitution, permitted the next stage in the region’s black social movements.[25] Like the historical example of maroon settlements in Colombia, Afro-Colombians were recognized by the state and their rights to their own land and worship, except this time through state-sanctioned community councils established to demarcate collective lands and administer their communities in accordance with local desires. Ley 70 and recognition of land rights imposed an indigenous model onto blacks, defining them in terms of ‘traditional’ modes of production, which ignored diversity of black mobility, labor, and traditions along the Pacific coast.[26] As a result, community councils were established and the new organizations had to confront the spatially adaptive lifestyle of the coastal black population and the ways in which the numerous rivers and the lowland geography shape local communities. Intellectuals such as Carlos Rosero and organizations like the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) survived the transition from pre-1991 constitutional reforms and the establishment of councils for the communal lands, but encountered difficulties because of the problematic ways in which the indigenous model for collective land rights was extended to Afro-Colombians. Unfortunately, guerrillas, paramilitaries, and narco-capitalists have, like the Colombian state’s neoliberal extractive interests, introduced violence, displacement, and environmental degradation into a region which had once been relatively free of the political violence that characterized other departments of the nation.[27] Consequently, Afro-Colombians are paradoxically expected to be custodians of the collective land granted to them by the state, while simultaneously experiencing aggression and dislocation wrought by paramilitary forces, narco-capitalists investing in unsustainable ventures such as palm oil, thereby disrupting the very ability of black communities to preserve their spatially adaptive cultures within the Pacific lowlands. Indeed, Afro-Colombians displaced by the conflicts in the region have ended up in other regional cities of Colombia, and are losing some of their ties to the communities rendered collective territorial rights by the state.[28] In addition, the state’s attempts to curb illicit coca agriculture involves a dangerous process of aerial fumigation which damages other types of crops, as well as poses a health risk for black communities while limiting their capacity for stronger subsistence and commercial agriculture.[29] Likewise, neoliberal reforms and the pursuit of export-oriented agriculture, such as the palm tree venture promoted by the Colombian government in Guapi, have reduced the Pacific’s self-sufficiency, making Afro-Colombian communities more dependent on migration to other regions of the country for employment. Due to low wages and the seasonal labor at the processing plant of the palm hearts, as well as illegal exploitation of palm trees from neighboring areas, such extractive neoliberal development schemes serve to reproduce the Pacific coast’s poverty and displacement of its population.[30] Hence, the neoliberal state’s recognition of multiculturalism has not ended the national state’s interest in development, which, as Arturo Escobar persuasively argued, culminates in displacement, in spite of the rhetoric of cultural politics. Unsurprisingly, the black communities’ interest in autonomous collectivity, inspired by the history of marronage and black resistance, was thwarted.
Modern Afro-Colombian social movements in the Pacific littoral today have inherited this legacy of challenges and contradictions of neoliberalism, racism, and the extractive state. Oslender’s ethnographic work among communities on the coast reveals their diversity and the fundamental way in which the spatial logic of the riverine environment influences their necessities, habits, and labor, creating friction for the organization of councils. According to Oslender, “black communities should therefore be regarded as a heterogeneous group whose members articulate at times different aspirations, interests, and strategies and engage in complex individual and collective negotiations within their own group, as well as with other actors, notably the state and capital.”[31] This vital role of the shape of the river and how it impacts community formation and mobility thereby shapes the form of the community councils. Additionally, the assumption that race-based politics alone will drive the movement is problematic since the spatial logic of the river means that each community will have different interests and relationships with their adjacent waterway. Extended kinship structure and land inheritance also permits movement to different riverine settlements, not to mention generational strife as the younger generation loses touch with previous traditions through migration and urbanization. Thus, these communities are heterogeneous and their spatial adaptation to their environment resembles that of the maroon settlements and free black social formations. They inherit some of the cultural traits of the previous generations but also reveal the limitations of a racially essentialist view of maroon societies. Nor are they frozen in time replicas of the fugitive slave and libre social formations, since they have experienced proletarianization, state penetration of their local economy, race-based and labor movements, and the contemporary ethnic-based politics based on a so-called “traditional” lifestyle. Ricardo Castro, for example, was born in a village in the Pacific lowlands, worked in the sugarcane plantations of the Cauca Valley, became involved in the sugarcane workers’ union, and later returned to his village on the Guajui River to become involved in local politics and contribute to the river organization established as part of the 1993 reforms. Castro’s spatial and occupational mobility prepared him for roles of leadership through labor unions, community institutions, and life experience, an aspect of the cultural life of the region which draws from its maroon heritage.[32] Furthermore, the ideal of direct representation of the members of these communities in the community councils was limited by the environment, which hindered quick transport to attend meetings. In fact, the councils were forced to provide food to locals in order to entice them to attend meetings.[33] In spite of this grim reality of the community councils, they nonetheless reflect the degree to which the heritage of marronage shaped the process of spatially adaptive mobility, which in itself can be restricted by the environment in ways unconducive to large-scale organization.
In conclusion, Afro-Colombian social movements on the Pacific littoral have been profoundly shaped by the history and symbolism of marronage. Despite the relative rarity of maroon settlements in the region because of the high rates of self-manumission, Afro-Colombian communities since the colonial era have forged autonomous spaces across the coastal lowlands. These communities inherited the discursive and religious practices of their free black forebears, adapted to the unique geographic factors in the riverine environment, and have used popular lore to recount their origins while paradoxically omitting their history of enslavement. Subsequent social movements in the Pacific coast and the Cauca Valley similarly reflect these aforementioned patterns of spatial mobility, oral tradition, African-influenced religious practices, and resistance to the extractive notions of development of the state. Contemporary social movements likewise draw on the history of cooperative labor structures, sustainable development, and the symbolic and spatial power of marronage as self-determination and “homeplace” through collective decision-making bodies and councils. Efforts to define themselves in relation to their environment and move beyond a simply race-based politics, have allowed contemporary Afro-Colombians to develop an ethnic politics built around their right to difference within the multicultural neoliberal state, while also ironically placing impediments on their ability to ensure local autonomy and sustainability. The Afro-Colombian movement consequently provides a useful example of how the history of slave resistance and identity formation can develop without formal maroon settlements, unlike the Saramaka in Suriname, yet explaining their origins through similar traditions and historical narratives.
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[1] Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Baltimore: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 87.
[2] Norman E Whitten, Black Frontiersmen: A South American Case (Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co, 1974), 168.
[3] Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia, 87.
[4] Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018), 46.
[5] Karl H Offen, "The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia," Journal of Latin American Geography 2 (2003): 57.
[6] Nina S. de Friedemann, “Troncos among black miners in Colombia,” in Miners and Mining in the Americas, eds. William Culver and Thomas C. Greaves (London: Manchester University Press, 1986), 204, 207.
[7] Ibid, 206.
[8] Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 65.
[9] Ibid, 47.
[10] Eduardo Restrepo, "Ethnicization of Blackness in Colombia," Cultural Studies 18, no. 5 (2004): 701-703.
[11] Richard Price, First-time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 6.
[12] Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space, 72.
[13] Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia, 76.
[14] Norman E Whitten, Black Frontiersmen: A South American Case, 127.
[15] Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia, 212.
[16] Anthony McFarlane, "Cimarrones and Palenques: Runaways and Resistance in Colonial Colombia." Slavery & Abolition 6, no. 3 (1985): 144.
[17] Odile Hoffmann, "Collective Memory and Ethnic Identities in the Colombian Pacific." Journal of Latin American Anthropology 7, no. 2 (2008): 125.
[18] Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 97.
[19] Ibid, 18.
[20] Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space, 87.
[21] Thomas J. Price, Saints and Spirits: A Study of Differential Acculturation in Colombian Negro Communities. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1975), 34, 150.
[22] Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space, 14.
[23] Peter Wade, "The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia," American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 349-350.
[24] Ibid, 344.
[25] Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space, 163.
[26] Peter Wade, "The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia," American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 350.
[27] Arturo Escobar, "Displacement, Development, and Modernity in the Colombian Pacific," International Social Science Journal 55, no. 175 (2003): 159.
[28] Ibid, 164.
[29] Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space, 169.
[30] Ibid, 148-149.
[31] Ibid, 105.
[32] Ibid, 90-91.
[33] Ibid, 199.
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