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. 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. 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. 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 PatÃa River. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. 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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