Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia 3030594394, 9783030594398

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Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia

Laura Rodríguez Castro

Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place “This book vividly demonstrates why Latin American feminisms have become the most vibrant arena of critical thought and struggle in Latin America at present. Throughout its pages, the reader is presented with the incredible richness of feminisms from below. Building on a careful analysis of women’s territorial struggles against territorial dispossession and extractivist projects, the author powerfully shows why ‘the epistemic force of place’ has become the preeminent foundation for a popular-communal feminist politics of place that confronts heteropatriarchal and racist relations while fostering relational modes of re-existence centered on justice, healing and care. Along the way, the book explores in depth the Latin American emphasis on sentipensar as a methodological, theoretical and political research approach appropriate to working with grassroots struggles and transformative initiatives. This farsighted book should be of great interest to students and activists in those fields dealing with issues of gender, environment, development, rurality, and globalization.” —Arturo Escobar, Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA, author of Encountering Development and Designs for the Pluriverse “Through sustained and nuanced ethnographic work and a critically informed reflexive lens, Rodriguez Castro draws on the voices of women in rural Colombia to offer a significant challenge to the dominant ‘white saviour’ narratives and neoliberal development agendas of colonial feminism. Framing her sophisticated analysis is a theory of place, bodies and territories which attends to questions of violence, recognises rural women’s resistance, and addresses crucial subjects for global equality, including food sovereignty and environmental degradation. It is thus a book which speaks powerfully to key contemporary debates not only in feminism, but also in rural geography and political studies.” —Barbara Pini, Professor of Gender Studies, Griffith University, Australia “Rodriguez Castro writes about the body and place, like Spivak, in ways that stir reflexivity. This beautifully written text troubles colonial feminisms and, at its core, is a collaboration with Colombian rural women whose biographies, experiences, sensations and imaginations come alive in this text. This book is a welcome and much needed contribution to studies of rurality and gender.” —Lia Bryant, Professor of Sociology and Social Work, University of South Australia

“A fascinating decolonial journey, operating on two relational scales: on a community level, exploring the struggles of rural women in Colombia, their experiences of violence and their demands for autonomy; and, on a personal level, reflecting on the positionality of an urban white-mestiza in the research, the academy and in the world. This is absolutely brilliant.” —Menelaos Gkartzios, Reader in Planning and Rural Development, Newcastle University, UK “This meticulously researched and richly illustrated book uses detailed participatory engagement to offer critical insight into how we might think about the coloniality of gender and power. Through its pages, the book offers not only an important intellectual roadmap on deconstructing decolonial feminisms but also offers political relevance to all those seeking a more just world.” —Mark Riley, Reader in Geography, University of Liverpool, UK

Laura Rodríguez Castro

Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia

Laura Rodríguez Castro Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research Griffith University Gold Coast, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-59439-8    ISBN 978-3-030-59440-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: (©) Laura Rodríguez Castro This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

A las mujeres de la Colombia profunda.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land where I now live, the Yugambeh/ Kombumerri people. I am forever grateful for the ancestral knowledge embedded in this land and within the Aboriginal custodianship of Country. I would also like to pay respect and acknowledge lxs hermanxs mayores of the lands of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and of the Andes. Quisiera agradecer a todas las mujeres que hicieron parte de los proyectos en Colombia por su hospitalidad, amistad y lucha constante. ¡Para seguir sentipensando nuevos mundos para una vida digna y plena en el campo Colombiano! Agradezco a mi familia y amigxs por su apoyo y amor incondicional, especialmente a Oscar, Beni, Mate, Esteban, Tracy y Armando. Madre, has sido mi inspiración para seguir esta lucha del feminismo. Padre, tu sabiduría me inspira a seguir este camino donde aprender y reflexionar se ha vuelto un hábito. Special thanks to my partner Henrique (and our cat Julio) for bringing music and love to our lives every day and while I was writing this book. To fellow ‘feminist killjoy’ Barb Pini, thank you for your ongoing support and mentorship. I admire you greatly. Special thanks to all my friends, colleagues and mentors at Griffith University who have been supporting my personal and professional growth for over a decade, especially Sarah Baker and Zelmarie Cantillon. To the team at Palgrave Gender Studies, Springer Nature and particularly vii

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Nina Guttapalle and Poppy Hull, thank you for bringing this book to fruition with kindness and enthusiasm. Finally, I would like to thank all of the decolonial, postcolonial, descolonial, communitarian, anti-racist feminists who are my ancestors and those who continue to believe, imagine and enact otros mundos today. Yours in care, Laura I would also like to acknowledge that some texts from the following journal articles appear in chapters of this book: • Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2017. The Embodied Countryside: Methodological Reflections in Place. Sociologia Ruralis 58 (2): 293–311. • Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2020. ‘We are Not Poor Things’: Territorio Cuerpo-tierra and Colombian Women’s Organised Struggles. Feminist Theory. • Rodriguez Castro, Laura. forthcoming. Extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia: A decolonial commitment to Campesinas’ politics of place. Feminist Review.

Contents

1 Introduction: Colonial Feminisms and the Colonial Matrix of Power  1 2 Decolonial Feminisms: Place, Territory and the Body-Land 33 3 Sentipensando and Unlearning 59 4 Politics of Place from the Home and the Vereda 81 5 Violences in the Territories and Body-Lands115 6 Territorio Cuerpo-tierra and Colombian Women’s Organised Struggles143 7 Conclusion: Towards a Compromiso Sentipensante169 Index195

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Locations of projects in map. (Source: Google Maps 2020) 23 Fig. 2.1 Constanza, Juliana and their neighbour rest while sacks of potatoes are loaded. This figure and all images from hereon are used with permission of Laura Rodriguez Castro, who is the rights holder and photographer 41 Fig. 3.1 The co-curated photographic exhibition running in Minca’s farmer’s market ‘Mi Canasta’ 74 Fig. 4.1 These photos, among other displayed in the photographic exhibitions in town, were chosen by the Campesinas of the Sierra 84 Fig. 4.2 Maria makes breakfast on the wood and charcoal stove (right). Maria grinds corn for the arepas (left) 85 Fig. 4.3 Cristina cooks breakfast while her children wait 88 Fig. 5.1 A photo of the road taken from Margarita’s house during a rain-soaked afternoon 116 Fig. 5.2 View from Ana Maria’s farm in Toca. Flower tents are seen in the background 125 Fig. 5.3 Photos taken during Diosa’s daily routine 127

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Research projects addressed in the book Table 6.1 Organisations involved in the in-depth interviews

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1 Introduction: Colonial Feminisms and the Colonial Matrix of Power

1.1 Introduction It is difficult to explain this to a white woman when the conditions for dialogue are not given; look, we do not agree with the imposition of hegemonic feminist criteria, but I recognise and value all of the learning that I have acquired from all the different feminist currents because they have provoked me to recognise myself as an epistemic subject and therefore to think myself from the body and the space where I live to weave my feminist ideas. With that I strengthen the conscious construction of my feminist communitarian identity and at the same time we contribute to the feminist movement of the world. Among other things, the step we need to take is to name our own liberated languages and cosmovisions and the categories and concepts that we are constructing for the analysis of our historical realities of oppression, but also of liberation as native Indigenous, campesinas, rural or of territories. Lorena Cabnal—communitarian feminist Maya-Xinka (cited in Gargallo Celentani 2014, 17).1

The embodied and spatial struggle that Lorena Cabnal talks about in the opening quotation is one that I have experienced during my ongoing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Rodríguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4_1

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journey towards engaging with decolonial and feminist insurgencies. However, in contrast to Lorena Cabnal, my own biography and positionality are deeply implicated in the ‘hegemonic feminist criteria’, which shaped my upbringing and education. Growing up in the 1990s in Bogotá, Colombia, in an upper middle-class family, I was very influenced by my mother’s ideas of feminism and social justice. At the time, my brother and I lived with her and only saw my father on weekends. My first memories of my mother undertaking paid work were visits to her at a non-governmental organisation (NGO) focusing on women’s reproductive rights—which were still highly taboo in our country. My mother, who was the Executive Director of the organisation, wrote a psychological thesis on abortion in a time when these debates were scarce in the country. Thus, I was raised as a feminist, and for that I will always be grateful to my mother. However, my first encounters with feminist ideas were historically placed in the experiences and privileges of white-mestiza women in Colombia, who, like many ‘second-wave feminists’, were primarily concerned with the struggle for reproductive rights. As I started to engage with decolonial, anti-racism and diverse struggles of women’s insurgencies, I started to reflect deeply on the issues of racism and ethnocentrism, which were marginalised in much of the feminisms I had encountered in the past. Like Cabnal, I am thankful for the different currents of feminism that have awakened me to think of myself as an epistemic subject, and that motivated the work presented in this book. There is thus a paradox in my relationship with feminism. The fact that, in both my higher education in sociology in an Australian university and feminist upbringing, I was not directly exposed to decolonial thought is symptomatic of a racist and colonial gaze that remains present in various forms of feminism. As a migrant student based in an Australian university, I spent time contemplating the power relationships and inequalities between what we know today as the Global North and the Global South That is, the Global South understood beyond delineated geographical borders and fixed definitions of nation-states and conceptualised as those places that have been particularly affected by global capitalism (see De Sousa Santos 2014). Then, in 2013, as I embarked on a journey to get to know the Campesina women of my country, sharing with them political spaces and living in

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their territories, the ideas of liberation I had forged in the process of identifying as a feminist were destabilised. As I spent time with the Colombian Campesinas and listened to rural women’s accounts of resistance and re-existence2 through their own cosmovisions, I came to question my own understanding of feminism, and its relationship to colonial power. In the process, I questioned my positionality and the privilege that came with it, and started a journey towards unlearning to feeling-know. As part of this journey, I endeavoured to promote and create the spaces for the types of dialogue that Lorena Cabnal refers to and found sentipensar. Thus, sentipensar became central to my decolonial praxis, destabilising my truths and posing important epistemic questions. I present it here not as a framework to follow, but as a conscious decision to make my presence visible in this body of work. I return to these reflections in Chap. 3 (see also Rodriguez Castro 2017, 2018, 2020). This book aims to support the progressive politics and actions around the world that are dismantling the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP) and the coloniality of gender, while enacting the re-existence of other worlds. I imagine and narrate the enacting of other worlds based on the local herstories, stories, testimonies and narratives of insurgency of rural women in Colombia. The book is embedded in three interconnected projects. The first is the dismantling of some of the actions of colonial feminisms which are examined in this chapter by looking at their historical development and their connections with the coloniality of power and gender. Arguably, colonial feminisms are embedded within the CMP and have contributed to the marginalisation of the majority of women’s voices and experiences. In response, I engage with decolonial feminisms,3 not as a concrete theory, but as a process that is alive, emphasising the openness of identities and the entanglement of ways of thinking (Méndez Torres et al. 2013). I particularly focus on the intellectual and activist struggles of descolonial feminisms in Abya Yala, and specifically, the Mexican Red de Feminismos Descoloniales using the term ‘descolonial’ throughout the book when referring to the particular work of this network (e.g. Méndez Torres et al. 2013; Millán et al. 2014). The second project addresses decolonial praxis through exploring my personal and reflexive stance and my commitment as an intellectual to unlearning in order to learn other

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worlds. As part of this commitment I reflect upon my positionality as a privileged white-mestiza feeling-thinking with rural women in Colombia. The third project of the book is its engagement with the experiences of resistance and re-existence of Campesinas and of rural social leaders in Colombia. I present rural women’s struggles through enacting other worlds where violences against territories and body-lands are confronted. Drawing on the collective experience of undertaking participatory projects I demonstrate that while Campesinas experience social inequality, they subvert places such as the home and the vereda. As such, rural women in Colombia challenge their positioning by colonial projects as lacking agency and in need of saving. In interviews I undertook with social leaders4 it also became evident that there is an urgent need to support autonomous struggles embedded in the collectivity of territories in Colombia, in the context of the ongoing post-peace accord period with the Revolutionary Armed Forces, People’s Army (FARC-EP) and the continuing social conflict involving the murders of social leaders.

1.2 Dismantling Colonial Feminisms This type of feminism does not point to the liberation of women but to their insertion to a society which is not defined in terms of class, national cultures and ideologies and so it is stable for market politics: It is a feminism to govern women. This feminism wears heels, suits, and uses bankcards. They look at themselves in the mirror as “actresses” of a society and not as subjects of a collective political change. It is a feminism, which has disposed the spontaneous organising of women, and neutralised it in non-­ government organisations, foundations, academies and political parties. With that, it has institutionalised the discontent, and avoided the retainment of autonomy of the feminist movement and its capacity to use its own resources for life and for reorganising its objectives in an always changing social scenery in order to pose its alternatives. It is a feminism that does not construct autonomy but asks for equality, assimilating the feminine world into the masculine, in an accelerated race to become Western. It uses some global public policies that tend to force women to a supposed individual liberation, masculinising their interests in the public sphere and

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within a capitalist system that is publicised as the only way possible. (Gargallo Celentani 2014, 44–45)

While communitarian feminist Lorena Cabnal asserts that the white privilege of feminism has marginalised the voices of many women, Gargallo Celentani further explicates the notion of colonial (white) feminism by denouncing its deep relationship to neoliberal discourses and actions. Given that decolonial feminisms frame this book, this section provides an overview of how this work sits within a larger context of various struggles dismantling coloniality (Espinosa Miñoso 2009; Marcos 2010; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; Anzaldúa 2007; Millán et  al. 2014; Gargallo Celentani 2014; Cabnal 2015; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Davis and Spivak 2018). The colonial feminisms I am referring to here are those which have universalised, homogenised and categorised women by excluding the voices of many, especially those of Black women and Women of Colour  (see Mohanty 1988). This is the feminism that Gargallo Celentani (2014) refers to earlier in that it is consistent with a capitalist/neoliberal project of modernity, which is entangled in the coloniality of power (see Quijano and Ennis  2000, 2014). First, I set the context of colonial feminisms within the CMP and then introduce the main critique to colonial feminisms which is its epistemic violence embedded in the ethnocentrism of the coloniality of power. Within the context of epistemic violence, I explore Gargallo Celentani’s contention about colonial feminisms being ‘a gender ideology to govern women’, reviewing the history of the institutionalisation of feminism. I provide these critiques as reflections of the larger struggles identified in the dialogues and projects with Colombian women presented in this book.

1.2.1 D  ecolonial Feminisms and the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP) The concept of coloniality and the CMP in Latin America is central to Anibal Quijano’s groundbreaking work on the coloniality of power. He argues that from the fifteenth century a new axis of power emerged as

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new forms of social domination and new configurations in the structure of labour were legitimised: The new historical identities produced around the foundation of the idea of race in the new global structure of the control of labor were associated with social roles and geohistorical places. In this way, both race and the division of labor remained structurally linked and mutually reinforcing, in spite of the fact that neither of them were necessarily dependent on the other in order to exist or change. (Quijano and Ennis 2000, 536)

Thus, the social/mental construct of ‘race’ became legitimised as a ‘category’ of modernity and was tied to classed divisions of labour (see also Zapata Olivella 1989). This is particularly relevant to the historical division of racial labour that is embedded in the CMP (Quijano 2014), and that has disadvantaged Indigenous and Black populations in Abya Yala since the period of colonisation. Although this racial axis has its origin in the colonial period, Quijano and Ennis (2000, 533) argue that it has proven to be more long-lasting ‘than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality’. In this regard, De Sousa Santos (2010) conceives internalised coloniality as a vast social net that pervades public and private space, culture, minds and subjectivities. It is a way of living and coexisting for those who are privileged by it, and for those who are not (see also Paredes 2017). Quijano  and Ennis (2000) further claim that in the specific construction of the Latin American nation-states a space of domination, via a centralised power, was constructed. Indeed through the formation of the nation-state and imaginaries of patriotism in the region, colonisation has been positioned as a historical period that has been surpassed, and as something that should be left behind as a distant, old memory (see also Cumes 2014). In contrast, it has been demonstrated that the coloniality of power is alive and embedded in a matrix that permeates several domains of life (Quijano and Ennis 2000, 2014; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Mignolo (2007, 156) explains that Quijano’s CMP is made up of four domains that are interrelated: ‘control of economy (land appropriation, exploitation of labor, control of natural resources); control of authority

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(institution, army); control of gender and sexuality (family, education); and control of subjectivity and knowledge (epistemology, education and formation of subjectivity)’. In regard to the dimension of gender and sexuality, Quijano and Ennis (2000, 378) explain that ‘traditional’ or ‘ideal’ gender norms and family structures are constructed during the colonisation period around the logics of the coloniality of power that give ‘the sexual access of the “white” men to the “black” and “indian” women in America, “black women” in Africa, and other “colours” in the rest of the subsumed world’. Thus, heteropatriarchal and racist gender relations are constructed and legitimised through the coloniality of power, or as Lugones (2007, 2008) calls it, the coloniality of gender. She argues that ‘the gender system is heterosexualist, as heterosexuality permeates racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority’ (Lugones 2007, 206). Thus, colonial gender relations are reproduced through the separation of the categories of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ in many realms including in the constructions of colonial feminisms. The separation of the socially constructed categories of gender and race by colonial feminisms has been critiqued by Black women, Women of Colour, and decolonial scholars (see also Marcos 2005; Lugones 2007; Anzaldúa 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; Gargallo Celentani 2014; Cabnal 2015; Davis and Spivak 2018). They contend that coloniality and patriarchy have been enmeshed, yet some feminisms have isolated the gender dimensions of Indigenous, Black and rural women’s lives and embarked on a civilising project, without questioning the universalist and modernist paradigm in which processes of coloniality are forged and racism is legitimised (Cumes 2014). For example, Marcos’ (2005, 82) analysis of feminisms in Mexico states that ‘urban feminist analysis in Mexico has given rise to a hegemony that has often defined Indigenous feminisms as the “other”: exotic, strangely rooted in “culture” and powerless if not nonexistent’. Thus, feminist discourse in Latin America has been implicated in a ‘racist, classist and heterosexist bias’ through a monopolisation by the ‘white and mestiza urban middle-class elite’ (Bastian Duarte 2012, 153). From what have been described as the ‘open cracks’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018) and the ‘borderlands’ (Anzaldúa 2007), Black and People of Colour, Indigenous people and peasants have created forms of resistance

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and re-existence. With their own epistemologies and political actions, they are destabilising the discourses of neoliberal development and the coloniality of power, and offering progressive alternatives for a better life. Hernández Castillo (in Millán et al. 2014) contends that women’s voices, which seem to emerge from the margins, come to destabilise our truths and challenge our perspectives of progress and well-being. These resistances and re-existences are being forged locally, in women’s territories all over the Global South. In Abya Yala, many women are proposing alternatives to contemporary concerns through, for example, communitarian economies, feminine solidarity, body-land and territorial struggles, and anti-militarism, which I explore in the following chapters.

1.2.2 Epistemic Violence and Colonial Feminisms The first critique of colonial feminisms presented here is explained by what Hernández Castillo (in Millán et  al. 2014, 184) calls ‘epistemic violence’ within the feminist movement (see also the ‘political-epistemic violence of modernity’ in Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 138). She posits that this has silenced the voices of Women of Colour, by proposing that there is only one way to see the world, to understand justice and to be set free from domination. During the 1990s politically active Indigenous women denounced the epistemic violence and coloniality their communities were facing, arguing that to fully exercise their rights as women they needed the collective rights of their communities to be acknowledged (e.g. Zapatista uprising). They also reclaimed their cosmovisions and ancestral knowledge and deployed them to question the ‘civilising’ project of the West (e.g. Levantamiento in Ecuador). These voices have gained prominence throughout the years and new alliances have been forged, to denounce the different forms of violence implicated in colonial struggles for ‘women’s liberation’ which include the work of decolonial feminists in Abya Yala and postcolonial feminists around the world. In the production of knowledge and ideals for women’s liberation of colonial feminisms, decolonial feminists have denounced the epistemic violence of the ethnocentric (Eurocentric) accounts of the herstories of the majority of women in the world. They have highlighted two

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dimensions of the epistemic violence of colonial feminisms. Firstly, epistemic violence is manifest in the ‘orientalist’ strategies that represent Indigenous, Black and peasant women as holding ancestral knowledge that is important for white women’s emancipation, which has resulted in processes in which women are tokenised and/or idealised through simplification and abstraction (see Abu-Lughod 2001; Millán et al. 2014). For example, present-day simplification of parity and complementarity as gender equality struggles, can lead to reproducing heteropatriarchal ideals of gender duality that de-situate insurgent practices that are particular to territorial experiences (Cabnal 2010; Paredes 2017; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Moreover, giving Indigenous, Black and/or peasant women the responsibility of ‘saving us’ through their ‘alternative knowledge’ is another form of coloniality that does not feed into the intercultural critical dialogues needed to foster equality (Hernández in Millán et al. 2014, 185). Lorde (2007, 113) makes a similar argument: ‘now we hear that it is the task of women of [c]olor to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought’. Thus, the presence of ethnocentrism, and especially Eurocentric forms of idealisation and of tokenism, is a clear example of how the coloniality of gender and power operates within the feminist movement. A second dimension of the epistemic violence still present in colonial feminisms is separating the socially constructed category gender from race in analysis, thought and action. This is despite the argument that these are enmeshed (see Yuval-Davis 2006; Collins 2019). In the context of slavery in the Americas, Mendez (2015, 55) argues that gender became racialised: If feminists or feminisms, regardless of what kind, have a political investment in using gender to denounce oppressive relations of power and to move us towards anti-racist and decolonial struggle then it becomes important to take seriously the claims made by women of color who insist that the thinking on “gender” has excluded our histories and bodies in the making of “Woman” and ultimately “Man” (kind). 

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The critique of viewing gender as an isolated category from other oppressions is central to the work of Lugones (2007, 2008) and Lorde (2007). Lorde (2007, 116) explains that in the women’s movement ‘white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist’. Lugones (2008) illustrates the historical issues that isolating gender has produced by arguing that the feminism of modernity based its actions and theorising on the perception of women as fragile and weak, as located in the private space and as sexually passive. At the same time, this version of feminism was not explicit about how these features of women’s lives were inflected by race. Thus, despite the advance of intersectionality, which has also been co-opted by colonial feminisms, the historical separation of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ continues to have an effect on the actions and ideas around women’s liberation (see Yuval-Davis 2006; Collins 2019). In Colombia, Lozano (2016) claims that liberal hegemonic feminism is still struggling to accept and recognise women’s diversity, and does not consider addressing racism as part of its main objectives. She argues that the practices of resistance of Black women have been more invisible and unknown than those of white women and Black men. Based on the experiences of the Afro-Colombian, Palenqueras and Raizal5 women in the Pacific region of Colombia, Lozano (2016) explains that their insurgencies are a form of counterhegemonic feminism emerging from the territories. For these women, the construction of decolonial feminism is linked to the indissociable defence of their territory and to the rights of Black people. Therefore, the ‘feminist Colombian movement’ has not resonated with them and they are wary of calling themselves feminists. If they do so, they use adjectives such as ‘decolonial’, ‘Black’ or ‘popular’ in order to contest the essentialist image of the ‘woman’ in colonial feminisms. In a similar way, in other countries in Abya Yala many rural, Black and Indigenous women have not found an answer to their needs in many white-mestiza feminisms that ignore racist, ethnocentric and colonial practices, and reproduce epistemic violence (see Gargallo 2007; Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo 2008; Mendez 2015). In the following section, I illustrate how the ethnocentrism of various forms of feminisms has been institutionalised and entangled in the coloniality of power.

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1.2.3 Dismantling the Institutionalisation of Feminism A concrete example of the effects of the violence of colonial feminisms is seen through the homogenisation, universalisation and institutionalisation of people’s needs and rights around the globe. One particular area of concern for decolonial feminists is the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Espinosa Miñoso 2009; Segato 2010; Millán et al. 2014). The essentialist approach to human rights, and women’s rights within this larger agenda, has erased the voices of Indigenous, peasant, Black, Muslim and queer people. It is a logic that has prioritised the universal over the local, and has assumed only one perspective of rights (Millán et al. 2014). Similarly, its logic presumes that Indigenous and peasant communities ‘need saving’ and that it is acceptable to intervene and violate their rights (Segato 2010). Arguably, this colonial logic has resulted in ‘white saviour’ actions and narratives that continue today. In institutionalised feminist work (academic, NGO, state) it is still common for projects to be focused on creating awareness around Western constructed universal rights in Indigenous, peasant and Black communities. This is premised on the assumption that, for example, Indigenous people are ‘backward’ and need to be educated out of their ‘savagery’ to be incorporated into the Western society by teaching them about a universal construct of rights (see Méndez Torres et al. 2013, 36–37). Here I focus on the development of the institutionalisation of feminism to provide an example of how colonial logics of ethnocentrism and racism operate in gender equality and feminist struggles. The 1980s and 1990s are considered an era of institutionalised feminism, mainly due to the proliferation of NGOs in the Global South (Alvarez 1999; Bastian Duarte 2012). Across these decades, various feminist movements in the Global South structured themselves as NGOs to achieve greater formality (Garcia Castro and Hallewell 2001). This created tensions within various feminist groups which were brought to the fore at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. On one side were those who had a more pragmatic and institutionalised stance that aimed at influencing public policy, and on the other side were

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those who were committed to the autonomy and radicalism of the feminist movement (Bastian Duarte 2012). These tensions led to some feminist and/or decolonial groups and intellectuals re-evaluating their relationship to the NGO model and its associated human rights ideology (see De Sousa Santos 2010; Segato 2010; Millán et al. 2014). Increasingly, feminist movements that were once called autonomous or radical became dependent on the resources and funding of international agencies, external donors and governments that promulgated universalising rights-based discourses (Bastian Duarte 2012; Garcia Castro and Hallewell 2001). The issue for feminist movements that have opted to take a generic path is posed by Garcia Castro and Hallewell (2001, 32): Everyone is talking about human rights and participation, for example, and paying lip service to the importance of women’s rights, and there are programs and specific laws that are of benefit to women in certain ways. But we have to remember that the very president who signs into law a human rights program (see Brazil, Presidency of the Republic, 1996) consistent with all the latest concerns of international agencies and public opinion regarding diversity and the rights to individual identities is the head of a neoliberal government.

This quotation reveals the way neoliberal logics started to establish its presence in the feminist movement, through the homogenisation and institutionalisation of women’s universal rights promoted through the nation-state. This had an impact on the autonomous organising of women’s social movements, especially in the Global South. The human rights discourse has been particularly troubling for the work of grassroots organisations. International institutions such as the United Nations are dominated by imperial powers that support the neoliberal model. This has resulted in promoting ‘First World freedoms’ and ‘Third World oppression’ (Collins et al. 2010, 306). While claims about international human rights have been appropriated and adapted by grassroots movements as tools to advance specific agendas, ‘the negotiations occur between the global discourses of human rights and the many creative, inventive and local engagements with them grounded in specific,

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lived struggles’ (Collins et al. 2010, 303). Taking up this debate, Unerman and O’Dwyer (2010, 483) argue that a universal rights-based approach re-evaluates the relationships between those who aid and those who receive this aid but there is an issue with the ‘complete chain of accountability’. Thus, the issue here is that universal human rights approaches are often prioritised by donors and aid agencies over local and grassroots actions that are more akin to people’s body-land experiences and self-­ governance. At the same time, these top-down approaches reproduce white saviour and colonial actions. An example of the impact of adopting a model of universal gender/human rights has been the growing prevalence of feminist NGOs undertaking and being commissioned work in the Global South including Latin America since the 1990s. Notably, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) within neoliberal economies increasingly contract feminist NGOs to evaluate gender-focused policies, and to develop training programmes for poor and working-class women (Alvarez 1999). This phenomenon has caused tensions as IGOs turn to feminist NGOs as gender experts to speak for civil society, ignoring other popular and grassroots feminist movements and organisations. This allows states to advance gender policies without establishing public forums in which different women can be heard. In this decade, Alvarez (1999) suggested that there was a need to rearticulate the activist and professional-technical faces of NGOs. She contended that this would revitalise the politics of feminist NGO workers, who, apart from their professional role, are part of a wider feminist struggle that has advocated for place-based solutions that acknowledge women’s difference. Indeed Alvarez (2009, 176) revisits the ‘the NGOisation’ of women’s organising in Latin America, and argues that this phenomenon is conflicting and messy and implies ‘wiggle room’ for agency and resistance within feminist NGOs in the region which have also been able to disarticulate some of the damaging practices of the universalisation of women’s rights. Alvarez’s (1999) caution that feminist organising needs to consider place-based solutions is further echoed in more studies, which points to the fact that the institutionalisation of feminisms continues to be

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implicated in colonial practices of other women speaking for ‘subaltern women’ (Spivak 1988, 24). Jasor’s (2015) quantitative study of women’s non-governmental organisations (WNGOs) in Sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates how gender mainstreaming impacts at the grassroots level. The author reports that the unevenness and heterogeneity of the impacts of gender mainstreaming in the region are due to the lack of place-specific development initiatives. Further, she reveals that spheres such as the household and the body are marginally addressed by WNGOs, and that this tends to homogenise the experience as most neoliberal development initiatives have. Jasor (2015, 10) contends that [t]he fact that the poorer and smaller African countries are doing comparatively better than their counterparts in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals draws attention to the need for future research to assess the quantitative and qualitative impact of WNGOs in solving gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thus, bottom-up social change that accounts for women’s contextualised agency and needs, and body-land territorial experiences is proving to be more effective than those projects enacted from the top in Global South localities. In spite of the epistemic and structural violence that the universalisation of the approaches to women’s rights and the institutionalisation of feminism has reproduced in the last decades, the increasing relationships and dialogues among grassroots and decolonial projects led by women all over the world continue to provide alternatives of re-existence. The most transformative practices in Abya Yala are happening in the heights of the Andes and in the plains of the Amazonia jungle (De Sousa Santos 2010). Notions in colonial languages such as socialism, human rights, development or democracy are not present in native languages, but terms6 such as dignity, respect, territory, self-governance, Buen Vivir7 and Mother Earth are being brought to the fore (De Sousa Santos 2010; Kothari et al. 2019). Progressive politics are also evident in the proposals of Indigenous and rural women who are fighting for the recognition of their collective and individual rights in their territories. They are reimagining ‘gender’ and ‘culture’ from conceptions of identities that are not

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essentialist, and through political practices that decentre feminist discourses from urban academic feminisms and from the ethnicism of Indigenous movements (Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo 2008; Espinosa Miñoso 2009). In sum, critiques of colonial feminisms point to the need to approach and support decolonial work by forging dialogues and alliances with women’s struggles that espouse different metaphysical commitments from those of the West, and move away from gender ideologies that govern the majority of women’s bodies and territories. As Espinosa Miñoso (2009, 52) argues, without losing international connections, we must ‘recover the small space of the community (in its plural sense)’ and ‘set our focus on to those local processes happening within entire communities’. It is imperative that feminism not be reduced to an emancipatory movement of modernity in response to patriarchal capitalism, and instead be seen as connected not only to women’s rejection of a hegemonic patriarchy but also to a racial white hegemony constructed during colonisation (Gargallo Celentani 2014). The dismantling of colonial feminisms needs to also be engaged in academia, which is increasingly embedded in a capitalist knowledge economy that privileges Europe and the United States (Roberts and Connell 2016). As such, it is necessary to rethink ourselves, feeling-think ourselves and feeling-know ourselves as human beings, and for that we need to unlearn what we know and unthink the system, research outside of it and in another way (Lopéz Intzín 2013; see also Escobar 2014; Fals Borda 2015).

1.3 Projects Addressed This book draws on participatory feeling-thinking research projects that included periods of veredear8 (Méndez Torres et  al. 2013, 78–79) and photographic documentation; in-depth interviews; groups interviews as onces9 that included photo elicitation (Harper 2002); the collaborative organisation of two photographic exhibitions in the rural towns of Minca and Toca in Colombia (see Appendix 1 for map (Fig. 1.1)); and the support in the organisation of ‘mercados campesinos’ and other local initiatives in these towns. These projects, which underwent institutional and

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Table 1.1  Research projects addressed in the book Period

Description

May to July Conducted a small project with four Campesinx 2013 families that included veredear and photographic documentation. This was followed by in-depth interviews that included photo elicitation (see Rodriguez Castro et al. 2016) February to Conducted participatory feeling-thinking research April 2016 with Campesinxs that included • Veredear accompanied by photographic documentation • Group interviews, as onces that included photo elicitation • Collaborative organisation of a photographic exhibition with local Campesinas at Toca’s farmer’s markets • Provided support for improving the infrastructure of local business run by Campesinxs called Compro Agro11 May to July Conducted participatory feeling-thinking research 2016 with Campesinxs colonos12 that included • Veredear accompanied by photographic documentation • Group interviews, as onces that included photo elicitation • Collaborative organisation of a photographic exhibition with local Campesinas • Provided support for the organisation of the inauguration and establishment of the Mercado Campesino ‘Mi Canasta’ in Minca (see Rodriguez Castro 2017) January to Conducted seventeen in-depth interviews with state, regional and global political leaders who August work closely with issues related to rural women, 2016 including several rural social leaders (see Rodriguez Castro 2020)

Location Toca, Boyacá

Toca, Boyacá

Minca, Magdalena

Colombia

national processes for ethical clearance,10 and further epistemic-­ methodological reflections as explained in Chap. 3 are outlined in Table 1.1.

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1.4 A Brief Context of Colombia The context of Colombia is embedded in the nation’s history of armed conflict, systemic violence, drug trafficking, United States intervention, social inequality, illegal land grabbing, forced displacement and dispossession. Thus, in this book, rather than providing a comprehensive history of rural Colombia (see Reyes Posada 2009; Forero Álvarez 2010), I present a very brief overview of a part of its history, focusing on the most recent issues and the historical struggle for land that underpins the social conflict that continues today, particularly in rural parts of the country. In recent years, Colombia’s context has changed as a result of the 2016 ratification of a peace accord with the largest insurgent group, the FARC-EP. The peace accord is currently being implemented with a focus on territories affected by the armed conflict which are predominantly rural. Notably, the majority of the research presented in this book was undertaken in the months leading up to the peace accord signature in 2016; hence this book is placed at a historical time in which the re/construction of truth, justice and memory is important to support the compliance of the peace agreement.13 The rural population, comprised mainly of Indigenous, Afro-­ Colombians and Campesinxs, remains disproportionally marginalised in Colombia.14 One of the main reasons for this marginalisation is the history of the struggle for territorial control in the country involving the social and armed conflict. Importantly, however, these categorisations are potentially problematic in that they are borne from tensions wrought by historically imposed ethnic and cultural distinctions. For example, they ignore the fact that there can be Black Campesinx communities (Hoffmann 2016). Furthermore, these categories have had varied impacts on the lives of people who make up these communities. For instance, ethnic rights legislation for Indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups, based on specific cultural cosmovisions, has advanced territorial claims for those described by these categorisations (see Bocarejo 2009; Forero Álvarez 2010). At the same time, recognition of the Campesinx communities as subjects deserving of autonomy and rights has been limited, as was demonstrated by the

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refusal of the Colombian government to sign the 2018 United Nations Peasant Rights Declaration (see Duarte 2018).15 Thus, in light of the political imperative to support Campesinx’s struggles of resistance, as they intersect with the struggles of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, I use these categorisations in the following chapters, but also analyse these by looking at the intersections and blurred boundaries of the experiences of the Colombian rural population through a relational understanding of space and place. A combination of factors including the failed agrarian reforms that were to benefit the small and medium farming sectors at the beginning of the twentieth century, the concentration of property in the hands of large landowners and the militarisation of the national territory (guerrillas, paramilitary, national armed forces and drug trafficking groups) has resulted in systemic violence, dispossession and forced displacement (Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (CNRR) and Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales (IEPRI) 2009; Reyes Posada 2009; Forero Álvarez 2010). It is estimated that the armed conflict has caused the forced displacement of almost eight million people, as well as the illegal grabbing of ‘eight million hectares of land’ (Amnesty International 2014, 5; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 2018). Moreover, agroindustrial, agrofuel and mining industries have benefited greatly from forced displacements and land grabs as communities have disappeared from regions to be exploited (Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres 2013; Amnesty International 2014). The consequences of this conflict are seen today as Colombian territorial control is highly fragmented and not state-regulated, but rather controlled by drug traffickers and paramilitary groups (Reyes Posada 2009). Meanwhile, women have historically been affected by the different forms of violence wrought by the armed and social conflict, and have lacked landownership rights (see Meertens 2012). In the last decade, women’s experiences in the armed conflict and their political actions have been slowly made visible through organised initiatives that, although fragmented in the years of war, are slowly gaining prominence since the peace accord negotiations started with the insurgent group FARC-EP in 2012 (see, for example, Casa de la Mujer 2018; Paarlberg-Kvam 2018). Women’s testimonies have condemned ‘the nonsense of war and the systemic actions of the diverse armed actors that have learned to violate their

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bodies, their life spaces, and rights as a form of contempt and intimidation’ (Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres 2013, 115). Similarly, in the post– peace accord period, women’s and feminist movements in Colombia denounced the continuation of patriarchy, hegemony of foreign investment and militarism in the country, and proposed alternative forms of peace-making (Paarlberg-Kvam 2018). Still, rural women’s marginalisation persists in Colombia in various forms including at the state level, and in academic and political debates. Male farmers, male landowners, the capital or the global market have permeated academic and non-academic debates about rurality in Colombia. For instance, Forero Álvarez’s (2010) book El Campesino Colombiano, which has been important to Colombian academic and political debates,16 does not mention women as subjects of the peasantry. Rather, the Campesinos are presented as a homogeneous group undifferentiated by gender. This type of marginalisation of women in discussions about the peasantry in Colombia and elsewhere has a long history. Feminist scholars have demonstrated the contributions made to resistance movements by women peasants, and revealed that their roles in rural development and farm sustainability have all been overlooked in the mainstream academic literature and within social movements (Espino et al. 2012). Indeed, as Carmen Diana Deere (2006) has asserted, there is a dearth of scholarship on gender relations in the Latin American countryside. As such, while there is undoubtedly a lack of visibility of rural people as citizens, which is premised on homogenisation, rural women’s experiences are also subject to this form of epistemic violence. This marginality is not just manifest in scholarly and political debates. It is also evident on a material level, with reports that 60.1 per cent of rural Campesina and Indigenous Colombian women still do not receive their own incomes (Comisión Económica Para América Latina (CEPAL) 2007). To date, the peace accords have not been sufficient to change the realities of Colombia’s rural population and violence directed at social leaders is surging in the post-accord period with 543 murders as last counted on 25 July 2019 (Datasketch 2019). These massacres have been predominantly targeted at communal,17 community, Indigenous and/or agrarian leaders (see Datasketch 2019). Organised social movements are demanding that the state comply with the peace accords and address the systemic violence against social leaders (see Casa de la Mujer 2018). The land

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continues to be a space to enact security agendas focused on territorial control and capitalist and neoliberal expansion, denying ‘an effective process of decentralization and strengthening of local institutions’ (Cairo et al. 2018, 467). Concomitantly, there has been a resurgence of evangelisation in the rural areas of the country (Toro 2016) that is connected to the rise of right-wing political parties, which have, in turn, attempted to obstruct the implementation of the peace accord signed with the FARC-EP and have advanced their war against the so-called gender ideology (see Espitia 2016; Gónzalez 2017). Thus, social conflict and violence continues in other forms that implicate illegal and state actors. In relation to the current implementation of the peace accords in Colombia, sociologist de De Sousa Santos (2017, n.p.) explains that the challenge the country faces is that ‘the peace is not a democratic peace, it is a neoliberal peace’, which ‘makes a pause for the conflict to continue in other forms and with other actors’. This statement demonstrates that the state-sponsored and instrumentalist understandings of the ‘territorial peace’ are being used to centralise and benefit the economic interests of the country’s elites (see Cairo et al. 2018). For the Colombian state, the land and territory continue to be spaces to enact a national security agenda, and to foster capitalist/neoliberal/colonial expansion.

1.5 Structure of the Book The relationship between colonial feminisms and the coloniality of power explained earlier provides a rationale for focusing on the stories, voices and plural worlds of rural women in Colombia from a decolonial feminist standpoint. Having provided an overview of the intersections of the coloniality of power and gender, and colonial feminisms in this chapter, I demonstrate, in Chap. 2, how decolonial and communitarian feminists seek to dismantle the perspectives of progress and well-being embedded in modernity and coloniality, and enact other worlds through an engagement with the politics of place and territorio cuerpo-tierra. I introduce decolonial feminisms, not as a concrete theory, but as a process that is alive, emphasising the openness and the entanglement of ways of thinking (Millán et al. 2014). I argue that decolonial feminisms open up spaces

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to think from the places, bodies and territories of resistance and re-­ existence. In this chapter I also I introduce Lorena Cabnal’s (2015) territorio cuerpo-tierra and emphasise its epistemic and political importance. Thus, I demonstrate how Cabnal’s (2015) territorio cuerpo-tierra brings to the fore various forms of violence against women’s body-land and strengthens territorial struggles. Building on Cabnal’s territory body-­ land, I then move on to review the literature that relates to a core argument of the book highlighting the relationality and multiplicity of place/lugar. Following this conceptual review, I go on to narrate its entanglement with the epistemic–methodological processes of the projects presented here. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the conceptual–epistemic–methodological context for the book. Chapter 3 details my own journey and reflections of unlearning in order to learn other worlds through veredeando, forging dialogues and sentipensando with Campesinas and social leaders in Colombia. I take a socio-historic, geographic and place-based approach to address my positionality engaging with critical feminist reflexivity, decolonial and anti-­ racism work. Further, I narrate how I arrived at a feeling-thinking commitment as an epistemic–methodological position that emerged from my reflexive and decolonial praxis. This chapter aims to make my presence and epistemologies visible in the stories I narrate in the following chapters. In Chap. 4 I focus on Colombian Campesinas politics of place. By outlining the vexed nature of different places where Campesinas spend their everyday lives, such as the home and vereda, this chapter contributes to place-based and politically engaged understandings of women’s experiences, insurgencies and negotiations. By narrating the plural worlds of the home and vereda, I unveil the political possibilities of exploring the processes and relationships of place by taking seriously its epistemic and political forces. In the final section, I narrate how colonial processes are entrenched, tracing the trajectories of place in the context of rural Colombia, from the countryside to the city. Chapter 5 relates the politics of place and body-land experiences of Campesina women in Toca and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in order to reveal how colonial violence manifests there. Drawing from an understanding of violence as embodied, epistemic and experienced in a

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continuum, I explicate notions of this as merely emerging from war, and focus on its presence in territory body-lands of rural women in Colombia. I illustrate how the continuum of violence is felt in women’s bodies, not only due to the armed conflict, but also in relation to the dispossession of rural territories. First, I present a case study of the development of agroindustries in Toca and its links to territory body-land dispossession, and then I narrate a case study of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in which tourist mobilities are linked to dispossession and to environmental devastation, on the basis of ‘green pretexts’. Chapter 6 turns its attention to the organised struggles of women in Colombia in the context of the pre-accord signature period in early 2016. I relate Lorena Cabnal’s territorio cuerpo-tierra with seventeen in-depth interviews of women leaders of rural social movements and other organisations in Colombia. This chapter presents the testimonies of social leaders who condemn violences that are epistemic, systemic, militarised and transcending into all ambits of life. They denounce how the coloniality of power operates in place, and in the territories. At the same time they propose alternatives for a better life from their own cosmovisions, enacting food sovereignty and constructing feminisms from below. The chapter also narrates women’s anxieties, tensions and hopes in the lead-up to the post-accord period in Colombia, which is currently ongoing. Finally, Chap. 7, the conclusion, brings to the fore the main arguments of the book emphasising on a compromiso sentipensante and the epistemic forces of place. In this chapter, I also question whether we are able to engage with decolonial praxis in the context of the neoliberal university and call for the need to dismantle heteropatriarchy in Colombian rural debates and struggles. In the following chapters, I narrate the plural worlds of Colombian women, bringing to the fore decolonial feminist, place-based and sentipensante praxis in dialogue with the ongoing projects, dismantling the coloniality of power and gender, and Colombia’s rural territorial struggles for social justice and peace.

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Appendix 1

Fig. 1.1  Locations of projects in map. (Source: Google Maps 2020)

Notes 1. I have translated all original Spanish quotations into English. 2. Re-existence is defined here as ‘the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity’ (Achinte Albán 2008, 85–85) (translation from Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 182). 3. I use the term decolonial feminisms here as an umbrella term, but it is worth noting that there are other forms in which these are presented, such as descolonial (e.g. Méndez Torres et al. 2013; Millán et al. 2014) and communitarian (e.g. Cabnal 2010; Paredes 2017), which I introduce with the appropriate terminology when referring to particular ideas, geographies and propositions in the book. 4. A term used throughout the book as a translation to the current language used by líderes sociales in Colombia. 5. Palenqueros are the native population of Palenque de San Basilio, while Raizales are the native population of San Andres and Providencia. Both of these groups of the population have distinctive cultural traditions and languages. 6. Approximate translations.

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7. An emerging discourse in Latin America that refers to a lived practice in which living well is determined by life in the community and sustainable relationships with the environment. There is no static definition for this concept, as it is emerges from territorial experiences. 8. Méndez Torres et al. (2013, 78–79) refer to veredear as the process of walking through the rural regional subdivisions of Latin America—and they explain: ‘finding light when walking through these places, observing other ways, recognising other ways of thinking and feeling, and through that light we construct a world from other visions and logics’. 9. A light meal, eaten either in the late morning or in the afternoon, and social gathering typical of Colombian and other Andean regions. 10. Griffith University provided ethical clearance in April 2013 for the project conducted in 2013 (GU Ref No: HUM/13/13/HREC). A Full National Ethics approval was granted in June–July 2015 for the projects conducted in 2016 (GU Ref No: HUM/16/15/HREC). Following the ethical conduct of research, informed consent to participate in the projects and to publish the results was obtained from individual participants including the guardians of minors directly and/or indirectly involved in the projects. 11. See Las2orillas (2016). 12. Here, I predominantly worked with coffee farmers, who identified as Campesinx colonos and/or costeñxs. Vallejo Silva et al. (2012) explain that coffee production was responsible for the colonisation of the Minca region, with coffee growers from other areas of the country settling on farms. Guilland and Ojeda (2012, para. 33) note that ‘up until the first half of the twentieth century the colonos were seen as the workforce able to “abrir monte”, opening up the agricultural borders for the “progress” of the nation’. Thus, this population’s history is entangled in colonial expansion and capitalist market logics, but also forced displacement and dispossession. 13. The re-/construction of truth, justice and memory is not unproblematic in the context of the ‘post-accord’ period in Colombia. For instance, in terms of the government-led construction of historical memory through the National Centre for Historical Memory, it has faced deep scrutiny. This is due to the appointment of the Centre’s director, Darío Acevedo, who openly supports Duque’s government. Under Acevedo’s direction there has been a national debate on the militarisation and instrumentalisation of the institutionalised construction of historical memory in the country (see Orozco Tascón 2019).

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14. I problematise these categorisations further in Chap. 3. 15. At the state level, the Campesinx sector in Colombia also remains largely marginalised due to normative models of industrial development, such as those promulgated in national development plans (e.g. Bases del Plan de Desarrollo 2010–2014). Forero Álvarez (2010) argues that this development plan positioned Campesinxs as a pre-modern group incapable of change, with no rights to landownership and useful only for cheap labour and as a provider of cheap food. He reflects that this is the case despite the fact that the peasant sector in Colombia has historically produced 65 per cent of the nation’s food for direct consumption. 16. As demonstrated in the commentaries in the last chapter of the book by various future presidential candidates (German Vargas Lleras, Gustavo Petro, Jaime Araujo, Álvaro Leyva—see pp. 129–140). 17. According to Datasketch (2019), communal leaders include those who lead community action and/or local administrative boards.

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De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2010. Descolonizar el Saber, Reinventar el Poder. Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce. ———. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm. ———. 2017. Dialogo con Boaventura de Sousa Santos Sobre Perspectivas de Paz en Colombia se Llevó a Cabo en la UAIIN-CRIC. CRIC Colombia, 12 June. https://www.cric-colombia.org/portal/dialogo-con-boaventura-desousa-santos-sobre-perspectivas-de-paz-en-colombia-se-llevo-a-cabo-en-lauaiin-cric/. Deere, Carmen Diana. 2006. ¿La Feminización de la Agricultura? Asalariadas, Campesinas y Reestructuración Económica en la América Latina Rural. Revista ALASRU 4: 77–136. http://www.alasru.org/pdf/REVISTA4/ REVISTA4Alasru.Cap4.pdf. Duarte, Carlos. 2018. ¿Gallina Campesina o Pollo Asado? Una Guía Para Pensar en la Declaración de la ONU Sobre los Derechos Campesinos. La Siniestra, October 2. https://lasiniestra.com/gallina-campesina-o-pollo-asado-unaguia-para-pensar-la-declaracion-de-la-onu-sobre-los-derechos-campesinos/. Escobar, Arturo. 2014. Sentipensar con la Tierra: Nuevas Lecturas Sobre Desarrollo, Territorio y Diferencia. Medellín: Ediciones UNAULA. Espino, Norma, Pamela Sanchís, Ana Paula Caro, Emilia J. Lopes, Magdalena León, and Martha Lanza. 2012. Alternatives Under Construction in Latin America. Development 55: 338–351. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2012.39. Espinosa Miñoso, Yuderkys. 2009. Etnocentrismo y Colonialidad en los Feminismos Latinoamericanos: Complicidades y Consolidación de las Hegemonías Feministas en el Espacio Transnacional. Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer 14 (33): 37–54. Espitia, Monica. 2016. LGBT in Colombia: A War Within. CUNY Academic Works, December 16. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gj_etds/150. Fals Borda, Orlando. 2015. Una Sociología Sentipensante para América Latina. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Forero Álvarez, J., ed. 2010. El Campesino Colombiano: Entre el Protagonismo Ecónomico y el Desconocimiento de la Sociedad. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Garcia Castro, Mary, and Laurence Hallewell. 2001. Engendering Powers in Neoliberal Times in Latin America: Reflections From the Left on Feminisms and Feminisms. Latin American Perspectives 28 (6): 17–37. www.jstor.org/ stable/3185104.

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Gargallo, Francesca. 2007. Feminismo Latinoamericano. Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer 12 (28): 17–34. http://ve.scielo.org/scielo. php?pid=S1316-37012007000100003&script=sci_abstract. Gargallo Celentani, Francesca. 2014. Feminismos Desde Abya Yala. Ideas y Propocisiones de las Mujeres de 607 Pueblos en Nuestra América. Ciudad de México: Editorial Corte y Confección. Gónzalez, Andres. 2017. Colombia’s Christian Alt-Right. Jacobin, May 13. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/colombia-christian-righthomophobia-peace-referendum-bigotry. Guilland, Marie-Laure, and Diana Ojeda. 2012. Indígenas ‘Auténticos’ y Campesinos ‘Verdes’. Los Imperativos Identitarios del Turismo en Colombia. Cahier des Amériques Latines 71: 1–22. https://doi.org/10.4000/cal.2689. Harper, Douglas. 2002. Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies 17 (1): 13–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725860220137345. Hoffmann, Odile. 2016. Divergencias Construidas, Convergencias por Construir. Identidad, Territorio y Gobierno en la Ruralidad Colombiana. Revista Colombiana de Antropologia 52 (1): 17–39. https://doi. org/10.22380/2539472X1. Jasor, Océane M. 2015. Do Local Needs Matter?: The Relevance of Women’s NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Gender, Place & Culture 23 (5): 1–20. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2015.1058757. Kothari, Ashish, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta. 2019. Pluriverse: A Post-development Dictionary. Delhi: Authors Upfront Tulika Books. Las2orillas. 2016. Compro-agro, el Invento de una Campesina Boyacense que Tiene Corriendo a Surtifruver. Las2orillas, 2 September. https://www.las2orillas.co/ compro-agro-el-invento-de-una-campesina-boyacense-que-tiene-corriendoa-surtifruver/. Lopéz Intzín, Juan. 2013. Ich’el ta muk’: La Trama en la Construcción del Lekil kuxlejal (vida plena-digna-justa). In Senti-pensar el Género: Perspectivas Desde los Pueblos Originarios, ed. Georgina Méndez Torres, Juan López Intzín, Sylvia Marcos, and Carmen Osorio Hernández. Guadalajara: Red Interdisciplinaria de Investigadores de los Pueblos Indios de México; Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Kindle edition. Lozano, Betty Ruth. 2016. Feminismo Negro—Afrocolombiano: Ancestral, Insurgente y Cimarrón. Un Feminismo en—Lugar. Insterticios de la Política y

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la Cultura 5 (9): 23–48. https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/intersticios/ article/view/14612. Lugones, María. 2007. Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System. Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/206329. ———. 2008. Colonialidad y Género. Tabula Rasa 9: 73–109. http://www. revistatabularasa.org/numero-9/05lugones.pdf. Marcos, Sylvia. 2005. The Borders Within: The Indigenous Women’s Movement and Feminism in México. In Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, ed. Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, 81–113. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. Cruzando Fronteras: Mujeres Indígenas y Feminismos Abajo y a la Izquierda. Chiapas: Universidad de la Tierra Chiapas. Meertens, Donny. 2012. “Forced Displacement and Gender Justice in Colombia: Between Disproportional Effects of Violence and Historical Injustice.” International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and the Brookings-LSE Project, July n.d. https://ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Brookings-­ Displacement-Gender-Colombia-CaseStudy-2012-English.pdf. Mendez, Xhercis. 2015. Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminist Methodology: Revisiting the Race/gender Matrix. Trans-Scripts 5: 41–59. http://sites.uci. edu/transscripts/files/2014/10/2015_5_mendez.pdf. Méndez Torres, Georgina, Juan López Intzín, Sylvia Marcos, and Carmen Osorio Hernández. 2013. Senti-pensar el Género: Perspectivas Desde los Pueblos Originarios. Guadalajara: Red Interdisciplinaria de Investigadores de los Pueblos Indios de México; Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. Mignolo, Walter D. 2007. Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking. Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 155–167. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09502380601162498. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics and Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kindle edition. Millán, Márgara, Aura Cumes, Gisela Espinosa, Mariana Favela, Oscar González, Raquel Gutiérrez, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, Verónica López Nájera, Mariana Mora, Sylvia Marcos, Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez, Guiomar Rovira, and Ana Valadez, eds. 2014. Mas Allá del Feminismo: Caminos Para Andar. México, D.F.: Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1988. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Feminist Review 30: 61–88. https://doi. org/10.2307/1395054.

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Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. www.jstor. org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt155jmpf. Orozco Tascón, Cecilia. 2019. “La Memoria y la Verdad se Convirtieron en Botín Político”: Gonzalo Sánchez. El Espectador, August 24. https://www. elespectador.com/colombia2020/pais/la-memoria-y-la-verdad-seconvirtieron-en-botin-politico-gonzalo-sanchez-articulo-877648. Paarlberg-Kvam, Kate. 2018. What’s to Come is More Complicated: Feminist Visions of Peace in Colombia. International Feminist Journal of Politics 21 (2): 194–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1487266. Paredes, Julieta. 2017. El Feminismocomunitario: La Creación de un Pensamiento Propio. Corpus 7 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.4000/ corpusarchivos.1835. Quijano, Aníbal. 2014. Antología Esencial: De la Dependencia Histórico-estructual a la Colonialidad/Descolonialidad del Poder. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. https://muse. jhu.edu/article/23906. Reyes Posada, Alejandro. 2009. Guerreros y Campesinos: Despojo y Restitución de Tierras en Colombia. Bogotá: Ariel. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010. Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa. Una Reflexión Sobre Prácticas y Discursos Descolonizadores. Buenos Aires: Editorial Retazos/ Tinta Limón. Roberts, Celia, and Raewyn Connell. 2016. Feminist Theory and the Global South. Feminist Theory 17 (2): 135–140. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1464700116645874. Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2017. The Embodied Countryside: Methodological Reflections in Place. Sociologia Ruralis 58 (2): 293–311. https://doi. org/10.1111/soru.12172. ———. 2018. Feeling-thinking for a Feminist Participatory Visual Ethnography. In Structuring the Thesis—Matching Method, Paradigm, Theory and Findings, ed. David Kember and Michael Corbett. Singapore: Springer Nature. ———. 2020. ‘We are Not Poor Things’: Territorio Cuerpo-tierra and Colombian Women’s Organised Struggles. Feminist Theory. doi:https://doi. org/10.1177/1464700120909508. Rodriguez Castro, Laura, Barbara Pini, and Sarah Baker. 2016. The Global Countryside: Peasant Women Negotiating, Recalibrating and Resisting Rural Change in Colombia. Gender, Place & Culture 23 (11): 1547–1559. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1219322.

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Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres. 2013. La Verdad de las Mujeres: Víctimas del Conflicto Armado en Colombia. Bogotá: Diakonia, Institut Catalá International Per La Pau, ONU Mujeres, Oxfam, PCS. Segato, Rita Laura. 2010. Género y Colonialidad, Claves de Lectura y Vocabulario Estratégico Descolonial. In La Cuestión Descolonial, ed. Aníbal Quijano and Julio Mejía Navarrete. Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 24–28. London: Macmillan. Suárez Navaz, Liliana, and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo. 2008. Descolonizando el Feminismo: Teorías y Prácticas Desde los Márgenes. Madrid: Catedra. Toro, Juan José. 2016. Las Comunidades Indígenas que Expulsan Iglesias Evangélicas de sus Territorios. VICE, 26 October. https://www.vice.com/es_ co/article/5gvnjk/wiwas-indigenas-evangelicos-pastores-expulsadosjehova-pentecostal. Unerman, Jeffrey, and Brendan O’Dwyer. 2010. NGO Accountability and Sustainability Issues in The Changing Global Environment. Public Management Review 12 (4): 475–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/1471903 7.2010.496258. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 2018. Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018. https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2018/. Accessed 3 Oct 2018. Vallejo Silva, F., P.  Anaya Rios, W.  Renán Rodríguez, and L.A.  Martínez González. 2012. Minca: Memoria y Conflicto. Colombia: Agencia de Cooperación Internacional del Japón y Ministerio del Interior de la República de Colombia. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1350506806065752. Zapata Olivella, Manuel. 1989. Las Claves Mágicas de América. Bogotá: Plaza y Janes.

2 Decolonial Feminisms: Place, Territory and the Body-Land

2.1 Introduction Decolonial praxis responds to and dismantles the coloniality of power, while also contributing to proposing and enacting other worlds. Thus, decoloniality is ‘a form of struggle and survival, an epistemic and existence-­based response and practice—most especially by colonized and racialized subjects—against the colonial matrix of power in all of its dimensions and for the possibilities of an otherwise’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 437). It is also a political need that has a historical and theoretical Latin American genealogy preceding the mestizo and Anglo-Saxon academic discussions. For instance, Indigenous women, in their diversity, brought decolonial debates to feminism in different languages, and via varied textual and discursive practices decades ago (Méndez Torres et al. 2013). As they challenge colonial feminisms, Indigenous women in Abya Yala have been questioning and dismantling the stereotypes assigned to them from their environments and from the white and white-mestizo cultures (Anzaldúa 2007; Méndez Torres et al. 2013). Through organising and agitating they have created spaces for dialogue and for learning

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other worlds, advocating for epistemologies from the feeling of the senses and from the ‘corazonar’ (heart-ing) (see Méndez Torres et al. 2013, 36). Decolonial feminist praxis is concerned with the construction of worlds where women’s autonomous struggles are possible (Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo 2008; Méndez Torres et al. 2013; Millán et al. 2014; Gargallo Celentani 2014; Lozano 2016). These claims are embedded in resistances of dismantling everyday patriarchies and racism, as well as the fight against a colonial, neoliberal and capitalist project. Many Indigenous, Black and Campesina Latin American women dismantle and destabilise Western individualism and construct a worthy life beyond the logics of property and possession (Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo 2008). In this respect, Paredes (2017) argues that to depatriarchalise, we must decolonise. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a conceptual and practical framework for the chapters that follow. Thus, it is no way a comprehensive review of the literature on decolonial feminisms, which would deny the heterogeneity and relationality in which these feminisms are entangled, imagined and enacted in places around the world. The first focus is on conceptualising decolonial feminisms based on the work of insurgent and intellectual women in Abya Yala including Sylvia Marcos, Margara Millán, Gloria Anzaldúa, Betty Ruth Lozano, Francesca Gargallo Celentani and Aida Hernández Torres. I particularly focus on the literature of the Red de Feminismos Descoloniales1 and communitarian feminist Maya Xinka Lorena Cabnal’s territorio cuerpo-tierra, which resonated deeply in my heart and in the dialogues with Colombian women. Decolonial and communitarian feminisms seek to destabilise ‘truths’ and question the perspectives of ‘progress’ and ‘well-being’ embedded in modernity and coloniality, through an engagement with women’s place-­ based struggles and herstories. Referencing the Zapatista claim that ‘another world is possible’, the Red de Feminismos Descoloniales in Millán et  al. (2014, 9) state that their political and theoretical intention is to rethink feminism as part of the processes of descolonisation happening in the world. They called for a feminist agenda that is not racist and that does not silence or exclude Indigenous and Black women. Noting also that beyond conducting feminist analysis, we require a decolonising

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epistemology with an objective to produce feminist knowledge and doing from multiple places and many voices. Using the metaphor of being entangled, the Red de Feminismos Descoloniales explain that descolonialism is not a concrete theory, but involves the intention to explore a terrain that emerges from the openness of reflection of the ‘doings’ of descolonialism (Millán et al. 2014, 9–14). From this ongoing praxis, they argue that we can deploy and disaggregate ‘thematic pluriverses’ in which we can find our own descolonial praxis (Millán et  al. 2014, 11). Descolonialism is therefore a process that is alive, playing with the openness of identities and theories and operating in the entanglement these different dimensions provoke. It is to question how to develop our own thinking that accepts concepts and theories that exist, but that, at the same time, opens up spaces to think the new—from the localities and social spaces of activism and research (Millán et  al. 2014). Thus, Millán et  al. (2014, 11) argue that descolonial feminists entangle decoloniality in their praxis, but their reflections overpass any specific ‘school of thought’. Similarly, in this book I present Colombian rural women’s insurgencies as entangled with decolonial, communitarian ideas emerging in Abya Yala, but deeply rooted in their own differentiated territory body-land experiences. That is, blurring any closed boundaries and categorisations characteristic of Eurocentric linear epistemologies. Indeed, descolonial feminist thought resonates with broader feminist and decolonial work such as Escobar’s (2015) imagining and design for the pluriverse, Harcourt and Escobar’s (2005) and Lozano’s (2016) politics of place, and Anzaldúa’s (2007) borderlands and border thinking (see also Lugones 2010; Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo 2008; Millán et al. 2014; Gargallo Celentani 2014; Lozano 2016). The entanglement of feelings, thoughts and struggles of decolonial feminisms have provoked my own reflections on the importance of the territory and the body-land to the construction of decolonial other worlds that are being forged in the Colombian countryside. The constant reflection of descolonial feminists is embedded in those temporalities and subjects that are not evident in colonial feminist thought. Those temporalities in which ‘epistemic horizons are denied’ and where there is some sort of ‘blindness’ to the ‘other’ as a subject who is ‘active’ and ‘fulfilled’ (Millán et  al. 2014, 11). Rural Black, Indigenous and Campesina women in

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Colombia experience epistemic violence that creates structural ‘blindness’ to their differentiated experiences. While confronting various forms of violence, they are also constructing autonomous other worlds from the premises of heterogeneity and relationality for a vida digna. The second focus entangled in the decolonial feminisms of this book is an emphasis on territories which have been spaces for the ‘collective insurgent praxis of ancestral peoples’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 905). Taking into account the complex, conflicting and always changing explanations of territory, I present its various dimensions as enacted in the Colombian countryside in the chapters that follow. For instance, the peace accord of the current Colombian government is premised on a public/private dichotomy that constructs the territory as a public demarcated space that can be subjected to intervention by neoliberal projects that claim to ‘restore’ communities and spaces (Courtheyn 2017). Fuelled by the painful experiences of the armed conflict, the local populations in Colombia are creating and enacting alternative realities to the post–peace accord period that considers a broader understanding of territory, like the peace community in San José de Apartadó (see Courtheyn 2017). Also, in an interview with the Campesina leader of Mesa de Incidencia Política de las Mujeres Rurales de Colombia, a national initiative that gathered various rural women’s organisations and proposed and passed the Rural Women’s Law 731 in 2002 (Ley 731), the second of its kind in Abya Yala, a social leader explained her understanding of territory: ‘everything is done in a space, and that space is the land itself. The land with people in it, with activities, collectivity and rights, is called territory. And the collectivity with other communities and municipalities that are not part of my territory is called territoriality’. Thus, place-based understanding of territory and, therefore, resistance and re-existence in the territories are understood as unique to the historical experiences of the body-land of people and their communities. This demonstrates the deeply intimate connections between the body, the land and the networks created through territoriality. Indeed, territoriality in this context is decolonial praxis—it is struggle, survival and the body-land construction of an otherwise embedded in the collective construction of the territory.

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2.2 Territorio Cuerpo-Tierra Rooted in the herstorical struggles of women in Abya Yala the body has become a site of resistance and re-existence through the defence of the territories and lands. Cabnal (2015, n.p.) explains that women in Abya Yala are at the forefront of the various forms of violence present in the territories-bodies: For Indigenous women, living in territories where the state has not resolved the effects of war, which are impoverished places, and that are far from the peace accords, it becomes a somber horizon. Still, it is important to say that throughout history Indigenous women have rebelled against the oppressions of dispossession, looting and other forms of violence against their bodies. There are numerous testimonies of resistance; from the grandmothers and great-grandmothers against the forms of colonial domination; even the contemporary women, who bring their bodies to the forefront of the attack to defend life.

In the context of colonial intervention, extractivism, patriarchy, violence and racism illustrated by this excerpt, Cabnal (2010, 22) argues that the territorio cuerpo-tierra is a political statement: ‘it implicates the conscious recovery of our first territory body, as an emancipatory political act and in the feminist coherence of “the personal is political”, “what is not named does not exist”’. She asserts that to understand the body as territory is to awaken the consciousness to the historical experiences and structural oppressions of that body—which include patriarchy and coloniality—to acuerparnos (Cabnal 2016, n.p.). Accordingly, Cabnal (2010) explains  that the embodied resistances of the territory contribute to a historical and communal struggle for land. Latin American rural social struggles have been historically characterised through the communal fight for land and territorial rights. In the region, conflicts among landowners, armed groups and corporations persist (Teubal and Ortega Breña 2009). These struggles for land and territory are also gendered and racialised. Despite women’s important roles in environmental and social movements, leftist movements in the Latin American region have historically subjugated women in their struggles

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and positioned gender and its intersections of race and ethnicity as secondary issues, which have restricted women’s access to land (Palacios Sepúlveda 2012; Meertens 2012; Lozano 2016). For example, in Colombia women’s land claims are limited due to the lack of understanding of their gendered experiences in male-dominated organisations and patrilineal inheritance. As a result, women have opted to form their own organisations or demand spaces for autonomous organising within these (Meertens 2012). In Colombia, the peasant reserve zones are an example of successful and autonomous land claims, and territorial and women’s organising. Currently in Colombia there are mechanisms in place to redistribute land to peasants that had been lost due to the armed conflict, and to preserve rural territories for some communities through, for example, Law 160 of agrarian reform and peasant development (Forero Álvarez 2010). The law aims to promote the conservation of the environment, sustainable living and rural property ownership for Campesinx communities (Ley 160 1994). The ninth object of the law allows for the creation of ‘peasant reserve zones’ (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, ZRC), which have enabled access to small rural properties and land. Bernal-Morales (2010) also explains that Law 160 provides economic alternatives to reduce the migratory flux of rural populations to cities due to violence and poverty. Semana (2010), a Colombian investigative magazine, has argued for the importance of the ZRC as an alternative to land restitution that provides more safety, resistance and support in the context of the armed conflict. In addition, within the processes of the organisation representing the ZRC, the Asociación Nacional de Zonas de Reserva Campesina (ANZORC), Campesinas have constructed spaces to organise, learn and claim their territorial rights through ongoing national and local meetings, and regional organisation of committees. Women in the ANZORC have advanced their rights within the organisation and enhanced their political impact regionally and nationally through their own cosmovisions and experiences embedded in solidarity, political influence, peace-­ building and ‘protection and permanence in the territory’ (see, for example, Coordinadora de Mujeres de la ZRC–VRC 2017, 8). Women’s organising processes in the ANZORC resonate with other initiatives in the country and within organisations in which Campesina, Indigenous

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and Black women have contested the centrality of the individual, and advocated for collective action for rights and land access from their own cosmovisions and territorial experiences (see, for example, Proceso de Comunidades Negras in Colombia). While women’s bodies are at the forefront of the fight for land and territory, these bodies experience a continuum of violences. In a context of conflict, impunity and war, these violences are experienced in dramatic ways in certain Colombian territories (CNNRR and IERRI 2009; Reyes Posada 2009). The comprehensive Ruta Pacífica de Las Mujeres report (2013, 17), which was part of the Commission for Truth and Memory for a peaceful and negotiated end to the Colombia armed conflict, conceptualises the different forms of violence women experience as ‘the continuum of violences’ referring to ‘how violence permeates all of the ambits of life and relationships traversing any social and institutional divisions, not only in war, but in the private, familial and social spaces in times of peace’ (see also Viveros-Vigoya 2016). Gathering the testimonies of more than 1000 women, they report that ‘more than one quarter of the women interviewed declared having experienced violence when they were children, more than one third noted that they had experience domestic violence, and fifteen per cent had experienced sexual assault’ (Ruta Pacífica de Las Mujeres 2013, 17). As a form of re-existence in a context of the continuum of violences the report rejects victim narratives and explains that women are ‘survivors’, noting that there are three forms of resistance in women’s fight for preserving life: ‘resist and mobilise in the name of union’, ‘redo the conditions of being human’ and ‘knit collective living’ (Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres 2013, 22–27). Colombian women’s embodied experiences of violence resonate with Cabnal’s construction of the territorio cuerpo-tierra as a political statement to consciously recover women’s first territory, which is the body. Illustrative of the efforts of women ‘survivors’ of the Colombian armed conflict, resisting and re-existing in place are the actions of Black women in the Pacific region. Through reclaiming comadrazgo women reconstruct communitarian links that have been damaged by the armed and social conflict, while at the same time resist violence in place. Lozano (2016, 42–43) explains that Black (and decolonial) feminisms reclaim ancestral cosmovisions such as the comadrazgo or partería from a standpoint that

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does not essentialise these cosmovisions but questions them through the defence of life in all its forms. The territory-body practice of comadrazgo opens up the blood relationships to include ‘the neighbour and the companions of misfortunes. It constitutes spiritual kinship that is unbreakable and that pertains [to] the affective and economic support among comadres, compadres y ahijados’ (Lozano 2016, 44). Black women in the Pacific region of Colombia through comadrazgo enact other worlds that demand the end of all forms of violence in a context in which men are often mobile due to the armed conflict and poverty. This practice is indeed resistance, survival and re-existence in place. The place-based dimensions of the comadrazgo point to the final argument of this chapter which relates to the importance of focusing on a politics of place for autonomous struggles of the territorio cuerpo-tierra. By focusing on the intimate relationships of the body-land, I reject the ways in which women’s bodies and women in the Global South have been respectively constructed as ‘objects’ or as ‘victims who need saving’. I do this through a politics of place.

2.3 Place/Lugar In Fig. 2.1, Constanza and Juliana and their neighbour rested after a day spent harvesting potato and cooking for the labourers in one of Toca’s veredas. At the end of the day, everyone came by the crop and collected the leftover produce for household consumption. That day, Constanza and Juliana, who are part of the two families who invested economically in the crop that was being harvested, cooked lunch for the labourers while the other people from the vereda were collecting potatoes. In Toca, both men and women work the jornal due to economic hardship, but women are still predominantly responsible for cooking for labourers during the harvest season. This story foregrounds the importance of understanding rural places within ideas of heterogeneity and multiplicity, of the meeting up of histories and herstories. Indeed rural sustainability and well-being have been highly dependent on women’s emotional care and physical labour, which is often undervalued and continues to be largely unpaid. Still, rural women are central to the politics of place of many

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Fig. 2.1  Constanza, Juliana and their neighbour rest while sacks of potatoes are loaded. This figure and all images from hereon are used with permission of Laura Rodriguez Castro, who is the rights holder and photographer2

localities in the countryside of the Global South, which are constantly enacted for survival, for resistance and for the construction of other worlds. Inspired by Doreen Massey (2005, 4) and the stories of the Colombian countryside, I present territory and place/lugar3 relationally, viewing these concepts through an understanding of multiplicity and openness: ‘What might it mean to reorientate this imagination, to question that habit of thinking of space as a surface? If, instead, we conceive of a meeting up of histories, what happens to our implicit imaginations of time and space?’ Massey (2005) calls for an epistemological shift to reposition space within a set of ideas of heterogeneity, multiplicity and relationality, instead of notions of space as static and closed. This allows for thinking through space as political, and enables a reformulation of its definition and effects. A focus on the multiplicity of space opens up possibilities to think from the here and now, to construct the pluriverse through

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territoriality and to contest colonial and neoliberal logics of possession and linear development projects. Massey (2005, 15) further argues for the importance in understanding the multiplicity of place and its relationality with space to ‘work towards a groundness that—in an age [in] which globalisation is so easily imagined as some kind of force emanating always from “elsewhere”—is vital for posing political questions’. Indeed, in the modern period, places in what the colonial language has called ‘underdeveloped’ continue to be violently intervened through practices (e.g. extractivism, fracking) that claim the need to ‘develop’ and homogenise life in all its forms, while negating ancestral knowledges’ potential for political transformation. In this respect Escobar (2015, 549) explains that ‘once in the modern period, the world comes to be increasingly built without attachment to place, nature, landscape, space and time—in short, without reference to hic et nunc (the here and now)’. Massey (2005) has also cogently argued that globalisation is a neoliberal project and not an overarching force that undeniably changes places (see also Woods 2007; Featherstone and Painter 2012; El Khoury 2015). For example, in delineating the ways in which rural places are potentially being remade by ‘globalisation’, Woods (2007), drawing on Massey’s (2005) notions of space and place as relational and interconnected, argues against the types of understandings of globalisation that historically have enjoyed considerable currency in rural studies (see Rodriguez Castro et al. 2016). This notion of globalisation brings uncontrollable and overarching change to local rural places. These places, contextualised in traditional ideas of rurality, are understood as slow, and unchanging. However, this understanding fails to recognise the making of place and space through specific social processes. Thus, imagining space and place as a process allows for openness, and it provides an opportunity to dismantle the discourse of modernity as determining the future. Highlighting the characteristics and power relationships of modernity in relation to place is also critical to avoiding generalisations that ignore the current instability of neoliberal governments that have faced global recession and financial crises (Harrison 2010). El Khoury (2015) argues that neoliberal processes have often been portrayed as highly successful, despite the negative consequences of deregulation, stagflation,

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unemployment and privatisation (see also Harrison 2010; Birch 2015). In response to the linear narratives of neoliberal globalisation, El Khoury (2015, xiii) redefines globalisation as ‘infraglobalization’, bringing the state, grassroots movements, everyday citizens and transnational forces together as actors who can potentially, and have already, proposed and enacted alternative developments (see Kerala example in El Khoury 2015, 241). She argues for an ontological shift towards multiplicity and action towards propositional politics from the bottom. Based on James C. Scott’s (1990) scholarship, she argues that the infra underlies a less visible scale of globalisation that is often undermined through a ‘public transcript’ given by a corporatist lens (El Khoury 2015, 1). Although the mere concept of globalisation is problematic, and therefore does not frame the book’s conceptual praxis, El Khoury’s work illuminates the importance of shifting our focus to a politics of place and its multiplicity. Once we shift our understanding to place, then all of our experiences are embodied and our thoughts, feelings and politics are constantly negotiated in place. The people, the social relationships, the animals, the climate, the landscape are all recognised as agents and epistemic subjects constructing the multiplicity of place. As Graham (2002, 22) asks, ‘Why place? Because unless we re-signify the local as “places”, with all their specificity and independent possibility, we risk being continually recaptured within the global/local binary of mainstream (and oppositional) globalization discourse’. In the previous chapter, I have discussed the consequences of such local/global binary logics of domination as the workings of colonial feminisms in the homogenisation and universalisation of women’s rights. The effects of modernity reproduce a domination logic in which the universal is prioritised over the local and only one perspective of rights, justice and emancipation is afforded currency (Millán et al. 2014). The types of narratives of modernisation, development, capital accumulation and cosmopolitanism that are often attached to discourses of globalisation suggest that women in the Global South are suffering and need saving through incorporation into the neoliberal market—constructing the majority of women, as the failed subjects of colonial feminisms and of neoliberal globalisation. In contrast to the deficit narratives in which neoliberal globalisation has positioned the majority of women, the multiplicity and politics of

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place have become resistance, negotiation, re-existence. For example, El Khoury (2015) argues for the importance of the informal order for grassroots alternative developments as women are often positioned within the realm of informality (e.g. informal economies). Through engaging with the multiplicity of place, she argues that women who are not active in the public political arena are often portrayed as passive subjects confined to the private. Therefore, if the informal economies and places in which women live their everyday are brought to the foreground, ideas on new developments can arise. When informal order and places are regarded as essential to the formation of social reality, women are agents and political actors within these geographies. These contentions are particularly important given that, as demonstrated by the example of Toca in Fig. 2.1, rural women have historically supported their communities through subsistence informality, but are often not recognised or rewarded for this. Having said that, place is not merely resistance to the global, the colonial, the neoliberal (Featherstone and Painter 2012). In romanticising place, we can fall into the same trap of understanding and conceptualising place and the body as being ‘surface’, as being closed, as being isolated. Thus, Escobar reflecting on Massey’s work argues that there is a ‘need to always think of place within networks of relation and forms of power that stretch beyond places’ (in Featherstone and Painter 2012, 169), perhaps as ‘meshwork’ (Harcourt and Escobar 2005, 14). This resonates with Mohanty’s (2003, 501) early critique to Western feminisms that claimed that ‘cross-cultural feminist work must be attentive to the micropolitics of context, subjectivity, and struggle, as well as to the macropolitics of global economic and political systems and processes’. Here, I attempt to engage with an understanding of place in all its multiplicity, and through the embodied constructions of places through a ‘politics of place’ that engages with such macropolitics and meshwork. Harcourt and Escobar’s (2005, 1) conceptualisation of a ‘politics of place’ is relevant to this book in revealing the political dimensions of the place making of Colombian women (see also Featherstone and Painter 2012; Lozano 2016). Initially, Harcourt and Escobar’s (2005, xi) project on the politics of place aimed to document ‘how women in place are living their lives at different levels of resistance and creativity in the face of what are often perceived as overwhelming and largely abstract global

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forces’. Their project rearticulated the politics of place, focusing on the body, the environment and the economy, in all their diversity, and emerging from place-based women’s mobilisations happening all around the world (Harcourt and Escobar 2005). Thus, they defined place as ‘what women define as their environment and what determines their livelihoods, being, and identity: that is, body, home, local environs, and community—the arenas that women are motivated to defend, define, and own politically’ (Harcourt and Escobar 2005, 2). This body of work presents women’s place making as non-static, as always changing, as rearticulating—as women reinhabiting their bodies and places. Through engaging with the politics of place, Lozano (2016) explains that since African women’s arrival to the American continent they have developed, defended and reconstructed place, in order to create community. African women and their descendants endured political struggles through practices such as the cimarronismo—that is, the people who during the colonial period escaped slavery and formed communities in the jungle known as Palenques in Colombia. Black rural women then constructed, occupied and resisted in place with their families, not only in the home, but also in many places beyond it. This political contribution has nevertheless been disputed economically, politically and epistemologically through violent actions embedded in the actions of patriarchies, racisms and neoliberal projects. Indeed, there are many more examples in which territory and place are central to rural endeavours of communities in Colombia, such as those concerning the Nasa peoples and the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC). Another illustrative example of the politics of place is the way rural Latin American organised women have reclaimed and rearticulated the home, the farm, the kitchen as places in which they can potentially enact their sovereign right to produce food (Caro 2011; Espino et al. 2012). Caro (2011, 10) argues that this contention is likely to be greeted with scepticism by Western feminists who have equated emancipation with ‘freedom from the kitchen’, but contends that for rural women, the kitchen may be a space of power. A range of feminist studies emerging from the Global South have demonstrated through particular experiences how the kitchen can be a place of power where food preparation and conservation take place (see Christie 2007; Wardrop 2007; Robson 2007;

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Ahmed 2019). That is without romanticising ‘the home’ and ignoring the networks and power structures of oppression, misogyny and violence against women that relate to the place making of the home (see Little 2017). Ultimately, the multiplicity of place allows for challenging homogeneous narratives about particular places. Featherstone and Painter (2012, 172) reflecting on Massey argue that it ‘is not about choosing between working “at home” [and] “over there”. Rather, our challenge is to explore, explain and act upon the multiplicity of relations within and between many homes and many distant actors, as well as the structures that shaped, and are shaped by them, across scales’. Here, I take up this challenge, as I narrate the stories of Colombian rural women, with a focus on the stories of place of Campesinas. On the farms, veredas, homes of Colombian Campesinas in the Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, I found the enacting of heterogeneous politics of place for survival and construction of an otherwise. At the same time, in these places, I found and interacted with body-land experiences of violence in their continuum. All of these stories of the body-land were embedded in the CMP, and felt in place. At the same time, these stories of place connect to the organised struggles of rural women in Colombia who in their multiplicity are constructing other worlds to resist and re-exist.

2.4 V  eredeando in the Colombian Countryside In addressing the three interconnected projects of this book, in this final section I start to explore my personal and reflexive stance by making my positionality present in the concept-making and entangling processes of my decolonial praxis. Here, I explore how territory, body, place became important during my time in Colombia while sharing with Campesinas in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and in the Andes, undertaking the participatory projects outlined in Table  1.1. I address Massey’s (2005) reorientation of place beyond surface through a reflexive exploration of my experiences of walking through rural places, or veredeando (see

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Rodriguez Castro 2018). Thus, a reconfigured notion of place enlivens our political and intellectual commitments, in which affect and embodied knowledge are important. Once we establish our understanding of ‘the research field’ as a surface through the relationality of space and place, it is important to embrace the relationship between emotional and thinking processes which are embodied and experienced in place (Méndez Torres et al. 2013; Escobar 2014; Fals Borda 2015). Carolan (2008) supports an understanding of the interconnections between feeling and thinking, arguing that space is more than representational, and therefore lived processes are important to understanding the knowledge we create about the countryside. Our understandings of space are influenced by the embodied interactions that we have with the environment over time—we think with the body (Carolan 2008). Thus, our embodied experiences influence our understanding of the countryside. By bringing together all of the aforementioned intellectual work into conversation during my time in rural Colombia, I embraced and explored how human and non-human actors shaped the spaces of the projects and informed and intersected with my own everyday embodied lived experiences. In doing so, I explored notions of the countryside beyond the mere ‘surface’. My place of residence during the three months I spent in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (hereafter Sierra) was the rural home of a woman leader, Nieves Martinez,4 who I met during the early days of my arrival. Nieves did not live permanently on the farm. She resided in the nearest city,  Santa Marta but visited the farm every second weekend. Nieves introduced me to her sister, Maria, who became my host, and a close companion. Maria lived with her teenage daughter on the farm. She received constant visits from her fourteen brothers and sisters who were mostly residents of, Santa Marta. Like many other rural residents in the Sierra, Maria’s siblings were displaced by the armed conflict several times. Given the economic mobility of the family they were able to settle in the city, and have not returned permanently to the country. Maria’s family has a long history in the Sierra. In my journal, I detailed the first conversations I had with Maria during the rain-soaked

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afternoons which were about her family’s history in the area. In one of these entries I wrote: Over the rain this afternoon we sat down and talked to Maria and Javier [a cousin] about the history of their family, about the time when their grandparents colonised the region [as Campesinxs colonos5] and there was not any roads so they used mules to open up the dirt road for transport [they think it was in the 1960s]. Then, they built the road and now they are paving it.

During my time at the Martinez farm, when I was not visiting other participants of the project, I walked, watched soap operas with Maria and her daughter, helped with the kitchen and farm chores, and learned about coffee growing. Maria also became the central person who introduced me to the communities that participated in the project. The Martinez family has a strong and positive reputation in the region. For instance, Maria and Nieves used to introduce me as the ‘new cousin’ in town. Thus, there was an embodied dimension to being brought into the Martinez family, which highly impacted on my feelings of safety when navigating rural places in the Sierra (I discuss ‘these feelings’ and positionality in the following chapter). In the Sierra, the process of embodied reflexivity and ‘being in place’ was also exacerbated by particular infrastructural and environmental conditions in which there was limited mobile phone reception and a prolonged rainy season. Thus, we were always finding ways to occupy our afternoons when it rained heavily. This was often in the company of Maria and her daughter. I woke at six each morning and would sit down with Maria while she served black coffee and arepas6 for breakfast. We would speculate about the day’s weather, discuss my farm visits and her plans for the day. If Nieves, her sister, was visiting, I would often stay on the farm and wait for her to catch up. In the meantime, I accompanied Maria to check on the home garden and the donkeys. I collected oranges with her daughter or visited the neighbours for more tinticos (black coffee). Being so deeply enmeshed in Maria’s rural life and that of her family, friends and neighbours also gave me new insights into the countryside, and heightened my commitment to sentipensar as what I understood at the time as ‘research practice’.

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In Minca, the veredas I visited were up to three hours’ walk from the Martinez farm. In Toca, I stayed at a farm that was twenty minutes’ walk from the town’s centre. Therefore, walking through the veredas became an important part of the projects presented here and transformed deeply my own understanding of my praxis. Méndez Torres et  al. (2013, 78–79) refer to this as veredear—the process of walking through the rural regional subdivisions of Abya Yala—and they explain that ‘finding light when walking through these places, observing other ways, recognising other ways of thinking and feeling, and through that light we construct a world from other visions and logics’. Walking was a social affair as I constantly encountered people I had met previously who asked about the research and the farmer’s markets’ progress. While walking, I often tried to catch a ride on the bikes, trucks or cars passing by when it was safe to do so. Other times, as I walked through the veredas, I took the chance to catch up with people walking by, who I had met previously. Lucia, who was part of the participatory project in the Sierra, sold medical products part-time in the community. She often walked all over the region to deliver merchandise or to claim payments. One day, as I was walking over to visit her, we met on the gravel road. I walked with her to the next farm she needed to visit. While she had told me about her part-­ time work in a previous interview,7 veredear brought her narrative to the body-land experiences of the territory. In the interview, she had talked about her sales work as important to her independence, stating that ‘I mean I try not to feel useless and relegated to the house, like that I am just useful for the house’. The walking required by her work was not burdensome, but welcome, as mobility represented independence and a more equal sharing of domestic labour—in her absence, her husband cared for her two young children. While Lucia had mentioned this in the interview, it was not until this walk that I understood the importance of this mobility to her own life. It also gave me insight into how this was embodied in the territory. This was also the case with Diosa in Toca. Diosa rode her bike with me on board several times across the veredas, from the flower plantations where she worked to pick up her daughter, and then to her parent’s house to help with the farm chores. It was only after experiencing this that I developed a different understanding, in place, of the heavy workloads

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that many women in Colombia who work in the agroindustries of flowers face every day. These experiences, veredeando, allowed me to feeling-­ think how women’s heavy workloads are felt through body-land experiences of resistance and re-existence in place, including the importance of their informal labour to the subsistence of the Colombian countryside (see Rodriguez Castro et al. 2016). The knowledge I acquired from walking with Lucia and Diosa was replicated as I continued to veredear with other Campesinas in Colombia. For example, I wrote in my journal about a day spent with Milena in Minca: Then, she took the mattock and we went to a house/farm down the road that a wealthy man from Santa Marta owns and uses as a holiday house. Today she was getting paid $25,000COP (US$8) for a daily jornal. This is where she told me her life story as we walked through the steep terrain and she used the mattock and threw fertiliser. When she was talking about the armed conflict she said that all that was left were the stories.

It was in the moment illustrated in this extract that Milena shared the details and feelings of a very difficult moment in her life when she lost her husband in the armed conflict. As the morning progressed, we kept conversing about the armed conflict, and, in the afternoon, we had a tinto at her house and chatted as people passed. In a subsequent group interview, Milena’s accounts of the armed conflict were brief because of time constraints and the fact that women were sharing several stories at the same time. This demonstrates the value of the nuanced knowledge that we can acquire in place, over time, and through embodied and territorial experiences such as veredear. In both Minca and Toca, walking necessitated confronting and understanding the weather conditions of the region. In Minca, I dealt with heavy rains. In contrast, Toca was experiencing a prolonged period of drought in which the sun was strong during the day but the temperature dropped dramatically at night and during the early mornings. As such, I witnessed how the climate influenced the everyday lives of rural inhabitants, while at the same time we shared embodied reactions to the weather, and witnessed the clear effects of climate change. Interestingly, over time

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in the Colombian countryside, I confronted my own feelings of fear, which were related to being ‘unfit’ emotionally and bodily for navigating rural places (see Jokinen and Caretta 2016), due to my urban upbringing. More importantly, I started to sentipensar deeply about the struggles of the everyday of many rural peoples due to the historical governmental abandonment of the countryside in Colombia. For instance, the climate during the months of May to July in the Sierra is marked by heavy rain in the afternoons and, as a consequence, during my time in this region the gravel roads were flooded. This presented terrible road conditions that were coupled with inadequate infrastructure to handle heavy rains and thunderstorms, and the lack of medical centres in the remote regions of the Sierra—the closest one was an hour’s bike ride away in Minca’s town centre. One day, after a heavy rainfall and thunderstorm, a bike rider came into a house I was visiting. The rider told me and the occupant, Margarita, that the cook of the regional school, Andrea, who had been part of the participatory project, was hit by lightning and rushed to hospital on a motorbike despite the dangerous conditions of the road. As the three of us gathered in the living room, we were joined by Margarita’s husband. The group shared stories of previous accidents with lightning. They recalled that requests for government funding for a lightning rod for the local school had been made to no avail. Deep distress was expressed about Andrea’s condition and the welfare of her three daughters and son. The helplessness and apprehension felt by Margarita and the people in the house, including me, reflect how the different rural actors (the climate, the roads, the people) affect and impact upon how we understand the space of the countryside. Moreover, they reveal how emotions and rationalisations around the situations in the Sierra are embodied in place. The distress that we experienced due to the lack of appropriate infrastructure and basic services (health) in an environment experiencing extreme weather is deeply tied to historical legacies such as the state abandonment of the Colombian countryside (see Vallejo Silva et al. 2012). This particular community in Minca has responded to this abandonment by collectively organising when rough weather hits the region, either by giving each other emotional support or by offering physical help when

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disasters occur. The progressive familiarity of being in place for some time illustrated how these processes were embodied. The embodied encounters I have described reveal historically grounded experiences of the Colombian countryside. Further, these embodied experiences over time unveiled the heterogeneity of the countryside as a relational space which deeply influenced how I engage with sentipensar and decolonial praxis today. Further, critical feminist and place-based reflexivity facilitated the collective construction of meanings, which I explore further in the following chapter. Once we shift our understanding of the countryside as an embodied relational space, the people, the social relationships, habits, norms, animals, climate, landscape, and the regional, the national and the global are all recognised in place. If space is not just ‘surface’ (Massey 2005, 4), then all of the latter play prominent roles in our praxis while contributing to sociospatial understandings. Therefore, our experiences are embodied and our thoughts, feelings and politics are constantly negotiated.

2.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have outlined some of the entanglements that exist between decolonial feminisms, territorio cuerpo-tierra and the politics of place. In learning and unlearning about my own feminist politics I came across decolonial feminist work emerging from Abya Yala, which continues to resonate deeply in my heart, and which got entangled in the sentipensar of the projects presented in this book. In reflecting on the testimonies and experiences of resistance and re-existence of Black, Indigenous and Campesina women in Colombia, territory, territoriality and the body-land emerged as intimately connected. Thus, I do not present these as ‘frameworks’ that can be detached and reapplied to any context, but rather as decolonial feminist praxis playing with the openness of ‘thematic pluriverses’ (Millán et al. 2014, 11); that is, in an attempt to amplify and stand with the politics of place of rural Colombian women. Working from decolonial praxis I have argued that Cabnal’s (2010) notion of territorio cuerpo-tierra and the politics of place, as understood through multiplicity, destabilises the disconnection of the body and the

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land, as closed or bounded surfaces and/or objects to be possessed. Thus, I reject  the ways in which women’s bodies and women in the Global South have been respectively constructed as ‘objects’ or as ‘victims who need saving’ and colonised. Indeed territorial struggles highlight the power of women in the Global South to self-determine our autonomy and liberation in place. Cabnal’s focus on the territory and the body-­ land as intimately connected and relational also resonates with the political and epistemic importance of the place-based insurgencies of women and rural communities in Colombia enacting other worlds. Before I turn to the core of this book (Chaps. 4, 5 and 6), I narrate, in the next chapter, the processes of unlearning to forge dialogues and feeling-­ think that I continue today.

Notes 1. Especially books such as Mas allá del Feminismo: Caminos para andar (Millán et al. 2014) and Senti-pensar el Género (Méndez Torres et al. 2013). 2. All of the photographs presented in this book follow ethical consent procedures with the people depicted. 3. In reflecting on Massey’s conceptualisation of place, Featherstone and Painter (2012, 173) note that ‘territories may be defined by extraction, disposal, residence, refuge, commerce, creativity—and always, encounter and relation’. 4. All names have been changed for ethical purposes. 5. The colonos is a large population of the Colombian countryside that has been displaced by epochs of violence and has resettled and organised in new territories, where they can develop similar agrarian practices, finding regions that were similar to those from where they have migrated (see Molano Bravo 1987). 6. A thick tortilla-style dish made of ground corn dough typical in Colombia. 7. She was unable to participate in the group interviews, as her daughter got sick during my time in the Sierra. Therefore, she was interviewed separately.

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Reyes Posada, Alejandro. 2009. Guerreros y Campesinos: Despojo y Restitución de Tierras en Colombia. Bogotá: Ariel. Robson, Elsbeth. 2007. The ‘Kitchen’ as Women’s Space in Rural Hausaland, Northern Nigeria. Gender, Place & Culture 13 (6): 669–676. https://doi. org/10.1080/09663690601019869. Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2018. Feeling-thinking for a Feminist Participatory Visual Ethnography. In Structuring the Thesis—Matching Method, Paradigm, Theory and Findings, ed. David Kember and Michael Corbett. Singapore: Springer Nature. Rodriguez Castro, Laura, Barbara Pini, and Sarah Baker. 2016. The Global Countryside: Peasant Women Negotiating, Recalibrating and Resisting Rural Change in Colombia. Gender, Place & Culture 23 (11): 1547–1559. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1219322. Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres. 2013. La Verdad de las Mujeres: Víctimas del Conflicto Armado en Colombia. Bogotá: Diakonia, Institut Catalá International Per La Pau, ONU Mujeres, Oxfam, PCS. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Semana, Debate. 2010. Zonas de Reserva Campesina: Otra Fórmula para Restituir las Tierras. Semana, 29 September. https://www.semana.com/ nacion/articulo/zonas-reserva-campesina-otra-formula-pararestituir-tierras/122641-3. Suárez Navaz, Liliana, and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo. 2008. Descolonizando el Feminismo: Teorías y Prácticas Desde los Márgenes. Madrid: Catedra. Teubal, Miguel, and Mariana Ortega Breña. 2009. Agrarian Reform and Social Movements in the Age of Globalization: Latin America at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century. Latin American Perspectives 36 (4): 9–20. https://doi. org/10.1177/0094582x09338607. Vallejo Silva, F., P.  Anaya Rios, W.  Renán Rodríguez, and L.A.  Martínez González. 2012. Minca: Memoria y Conflicto. Colombia: Agencia de Cooperación Internacional del Japón y Ministerio del Interior de la República de Colombia. Viveros-Vigoya, Mara. 2016. Masculinities in the continuum of violence in Latin America. Feminist Theory 17 (2): 229–237. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464700116645879.

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Wardrop, Joan. 2007. Private Cooking, Public Eating: Women Street Vendors in South Durban. Gender, Place & Culture 13 (6): 677–683. https://doi. org/10.1080/09663690601019927. Woods, Michael. 2007. Engaging the Global Countryside: Globalization, Hybridity and the Reconstitution of Rural Place. Progress in Human Geography 31 (4): 485–507. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507079503.

3 Sentipensando and Unlearning

3.1 Introduction In Latin America, Indigenous and Black women have challenged whitemestizas to recognise our privilege. Decolonial feminists have argued that urban, white-mestiza identities are privileged and embedded in the violences of mestizaje—a process that has denied the plural worlds that exist in Abya Yala (Espinosa Miñoso 2009, 2017; Bastian Duarte 2012). The violences of mestizaje have privileged a ‘rational, liberal and modern’ subject through nation-building, racism and the colonial construction of modernity (Espinosa Miñoso in Barroso Tristán 2014, n.p.; Espinosa Miñoso 2017). From dismantling coloniality from within, I commenced this book by narrating the privileges with which I do my work. Those privileges include my upbringing in a capital city (Bogotá) in an upper middle-class family who has accessed higher education, and my white-mestiza and white passing privilege as an immigrant in Australia. I do this, because one of the three interconnected projects of this book is about demonstrating the importance of making our ‘subjectivities, views, voices’ visible in the stories we narrate (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 245). I also want to make © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Rodríguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4_3

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visible the process of unlearning as the departing point of my decolonial praxis. In this chapter, I question my positionality with a focus on race, ethnicity and class, which are often ignored in colonial feminist work. In the context of Latin America, these are inseparable as the CMP is premised by a construction of race alongside economic colonial superiority through the division of labour that concerns class (see Zapata Olivella 1989; Quijano and Ennis 2000). In the first section of this chapter, I explore my racialised and classed identities. I do this being aware of the issues of essentialising racial identities, naturalising identity politics and decolonial critiques to feminist reflexivity. Therefore, I take a socio-historic, geographic and place-based approach. Specifically, I focus on the collective construction of reflexivity based on feminist decolonial and antiracism work. I explore my positionality in connection to the histories and geographies of place where I conducted the projects in Colombia with Campesinas and other rural women, and in my current geographical location as an adjunct in a Western university and living on stolen Indigenous land in Australia. In the final section, I elaborate on sentipensar, as an epistemic–methodological position that emerged from my reflexive and decolonial praxis.

3.2 U  nlearning from Anti-Racism and Critical Feminist Reflexivity Feminist reflexivity is an embodied practice that unveils shifting and intersectional processes that reject masculinised and objective research practices (Harding 1992). However, uncritical feminist reflexivity that takes whiteness and/or heteronormativity as the norm and natural occurrence, and fails to engage with questions of power beyond gender, can reproduce colonial feminist logics. Indeed from a decolonial standpoint the construction of knowledge moves beyond self-identifications to take into account ‘geopolitics, race, class, sexuality and social capital, among other positionalities’ (Mendia Azkue et al. 2014, 53). Thus, I am concerned here with critical feminist reflexivity that questions power and

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privilege from a socio-historic and geographical perspective. I am particularly interested in questions of race, ethnicity and class, which are inseparable in the decolonial and anti-racism work I continue to do every day in order to unlearn and dismantle white supremacy from within. That is, moving away from naturalising these categories and towards a grounding in political values, and shifting geographies (Yuval-Davis 2006). In addition to the work of communitarian and decolonial feminists in Abya Yala, I am grateful to Layla F.  Saad (2018) and her ‘Me and White Supremacy’ workbook (see Saad 2020), and Rachel Cargle’s anti-racism work (e.g. 2018), which continues to disrupt, call out and demonstrate how white supremacy operates, and how we are complicit if we do not do the work every day. Their anti-racist work in communities, social media accounts, writing and talks regularly remind me why anti-racism matters and its urgency if we are ever to be ‘good ancestors’ (Saad 2020, 20). Meertens et al. (2008, 183) explain that ‘in the Colombian context the classifications according to racial categories have an origin in the experiences of colonialism and slavery, that led to the establishment of a racial order of contradictory existence of the “indigenous”, the “mestizo” and the “white”’. Such contradictory existence has been supported through structural and essentialist practices in Colombia’s construction of the nation-state, and via the division of labour. The recognition of the multiethnic and pluricultural identities of the Colombian population emerged in the 1991 Constitution granting ethnic groups such as Indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians specific rights, which have been important to advance territorial struggles (see Bocarejo 2009). However, authors have argued that within these essentialist typologies created by the 1991 Constitution, there is now a problematic hyperlocality of ethnicity in Colombia in which ‘under this spatial order indigenous people belong to the resguardos, the Afro-Colombians to the riveras of the rivers that go through the Pacific coast, and the campesinos to the parcelas’ (Guilland and Ojeda 2012, para. 32; Bocarejo 2009, 312). Arguably, under these essentialist categorisations the white-mestizxs belong to the city (see, for example, Meertens et al.’s 2008 work on Blackness in Bogotá). Thus, the historical, political and spatial experiences of mestizaje, coloniality and nation-building continue to reproduce unequal power relations where white-mestizxs are privileged. Within the historical context explained

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earlier I situate my reflexive practice working with Campesinx communities in the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and conversing with rural women including Indigenous and AfroColombian social leaders. The town of Toca located in the region of Boyacá in the Colombian Andes is predominantly comprised of a Campesinx population with low levels of official education and high levels of extreme poverty (Plan de Desarrollo Toca Boyacá 2012). The landscape reveals a rural life with cattle, chickens, potatoes, onions, barley and a growing flower industry. The town is named after the Muisca chief Tocavita who was beheaded after colonisation and evangelisation of the region. Thus, the violence of colonisation precedes the existence of the current Campesinx population, and continues today through structural inequalities that the population faces. Langeabaek (2019) argues that Indigenous populations such as the Muiscas in the Andean region did not disappear entirely but rather that they transformed into Campesinxs during the violent process of colonialism and mestizaje. Therefore, in the town of Toca, the local population mainly identifies as Campesinxs Boyacenses. Thus, in Toca my identity as a white-mestiza often ‘passed’ as I was known as a ‘Boyaca’ (demonym) for having being born in Tunja, a nearby city in the region of Boyacá. Having familial and ancestral ties to the Boyacá region has afforded me a heartfelt connection to this territory, and a sense of familiarity and trust among the community. However, this familiarity and trust were also afforded as I was the ‘doctor’s daughter’—a wealthy and urban young woman whose father worked in the nearest city hospital. As various people in the town had been my father’s patients, I was often introduced as la hija del doctor, which points to the intersecting privileges I have due to social class and cultural capital. In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, however, the socio-historical, spatial and political particularities of the region and its inhabitants (human and non-human—as discussed in Chap. 2) resulted in different experiences in which my positionality was questioned along the axis of race, ethnicity and class. The veredas of Minca where I did my work in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta have a particular history where diverse Indigenous populations (e.g. Arhuacos, Kogui, Wiwa) coexist alongside Campesinxs colonos, white foreigners, and those who often do not identify

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as Afro-Colombian and/or Black, but rather morenxs or costeñxs. That is because, in Colombia, Blackness (negritud) rather than being solely about skin colour is ‘related to African ancestry that guarantees cultural specificity’ (Meertens et  al. 2008, 212). Thus, during the first days in the Sierra, and particularly when arriving and staying in the town of Minca, I was greeted with a ‘hello’ and was positioned as another white tourist arriving in town. This experience speaks to the way that white passing operates in place. As I started to spend time in the Sierra, I was no longer confused to be a  foreigner, but continued to experience white-mestiza privilege reflected in feelings of trust and care. In addition, the community of Campesinxss in the veredas where I spent most of the time in the Sierra came from Santander; therefore there was a sense of familiarity as we shared experiences of ‘el interior’,1 such as our favourite carrangas.2 However, the sense of trust, familiarity and care in both Toca and Minca was not embedded in a romanticised equal relationship. What these cases reveal is the way in which whiteness (as tied to class privilege and social and cultural capital) operates in Colombia, affording feelings of trust and care to those of us who hold white-mestizx privilege. My experiences, for example, are different from those of Black people undertaking research projects and being confronted with experiences of mistrust due to racism (see Faria and Mollet 2014). In my experience with Colombian Campesinas I had access to the intimate aspects of their lives as we had conversations about reproductive health and cooking, which, in a traditional context like the countryside of Colombia, are ‘women’s business’. This positionality gave me an entrée into the places where women spent most of their time, but this was no doubt also tied to the white-mestiza privilege. In these places, I was able to take photographs and share intimate conversations. On the other hand, as a young woman, I often felt unsafe walking by myself. Men often whistled at or catcalled me, saying things like ‘Why such a beautiful girl walking alone?’ Thus, I often had to modify the way I presented myself and/or change routes, and used the strategy of saying that I had a partner at home to alleviate these risks. I was also questioned several times in more intimate contexts as to why I was not married to my partner, as both communities were predominantly Christian and Catholic. These experiences demonstrate how patriarchy manifests in

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place by upholding traditional religious values in Colombian culture. At the same time, it points to the intersections of heteronormative privilege in my interactions as I used my heterosexual relationship to alleviate feelings of discomfort. As Ahmed (2017, 123) contends, ‘heteronormativity functions as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape’. The stories presented here aim to untangle positionality, and call for reflexive practice that takes socio-historic, racial and geographical perspectives seriously. This stance has allowed me to understand how my positionality is entangled within the coloniality of power, and how it operates in place in the Colombian countryside through:  1. Socio-historic dimensions reflected in heteropatriarchal relationships reproduced through the ongoing evangelisation of places and bodies. 2. Racism and classism, as deeply intertwined, which continue to privilege white-mestizxs in Colombia. 3. Political instruments that unveil how Colombia’s ethnic hyperlocality as constructed through the 1991 Constitution essentialises race and ethnicity producing bodies that do not fit in certain places. 4. Geographically specific processes of racialisation (e.g. diverse Campesinx, People of Colour and Black people). This is particularly important given that mainstream feminist reflexivity and identity politics that have hyperfocused on the self ignore the structures and processes that sustain the coloniality of power (see also Yuval-Davis 2006; Mendia Azkue et al. 2014). In this context, I turn to explain how anti-racism work got entangled in the production of the narratives and knowledge of the following chapters as an immigrant in Australia.

3.2.1 Unlearning from the Borderlands To live in the Borderlands means you are neither hispana india negra española ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed Caught in the crossfire between camps While carrying all five races on your back

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not knowing which side to turn to, run from; To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years, is no longer speaking to you, the mexicanas call you rajetas, that denying the Anglo inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black. (Original emphasis, Anzaldúa 2007, 216)

Gloria Anzaldúa’s work has touched the hearts of many mestizas who have had experiences of migration. Her articulation of the physical, sexual, classed, racialised and mental borderlands through ‘developing a tolerance for ambiguity’ and turning ‘ambivalence into something else’ (Anzaldúa 2007, 101), including her unapologetic use of Spanglish, has resonated with my experiences as a Colombian or how I am known here, a ‘Latina’ immigrant working in the Australian academy. Her work has allowed me to feel at home in the borderlands, to find peace, to find meaning in my rage and to continue to question the contradictions of the plural worlds I inhabit. However, identifying myself through an unproblematic Latinidad contributes to the singular narrative of this identity which erases the ethnic and racial experiences of Indigenous and Black people in Latin America. As Zapotec cultural critic, artist and academic Pelaez Lopez in conversations with Salazar (2019, n.p.) states about Latinidad, ‘this identity is rooted in land and geography when it should be rooted in understanding settler colonialism in the Americas. I would be invested in a political Latinidad that first and foremost fought for indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation. If it doesn’t do that, I don’t see the purpose’. Indeed, Anzaldúa (2007, 216) had warned us about the dangers of ‘denying the Anglo’ inside us being ‘as bad as having denied the Indian or Black’. Thus, it is from this anti-racist and decolonial standpoint that I exist in the borderlands I inhabit. Adding to the ambiguity of existing in the borderlands is the fact that I immigrated to a land where colonial violence persists. Since 1788, colonial Australia has denied the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through settler colonial logics, violence and dispossession. The

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work of Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000, 2015) among that of other critical race and Indigenous scholars (e.g. Bond 2014; Carlson 2016; Bargaille 2020; Fredericks et al. 2020) has demonstrated how white possessive logics operate in Australia structurally and in the everyday through racism and racialisation. All of us who experience racism through racialisation in Australia should be reminded that this is premised on the experiences of ongoing colonisation of First Nations peoples. Moreton-Robinson (2015, 353) explains that ‘in the Australian context, the sense of belonging, home and place enjoyed by the non-Indigenous subject—colonizer/migrant—is based on the dispossession of the original owners of the land and the denial of our rights under international customary law’. This quotation recognises that as migrant settlers, if we deny ongoing colonialism and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty, we contribute to white possessive logics that underpin white supremacy in Australia. Therefore, initiatives and actions that demand the rights of immigrants in Australia, but deny Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’s struggles for sovereignty, contribute to the violence of settler colonialism. Examples of this denial are the state-sponsored ‘multicultural’ projects premised on assimilation—a violent historical process that was first experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia. Indeed, Australia has been a multicultural society ‘before migrants arrived’ and ‘it is estimated that more than five hundred language groups held title to land before colonisation’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 511). Thus, supporting Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty through strong and ongoing solidarity networks and relationships that understand the socio-historic and geopolitical experiences, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ connection to Country,3 should be central to our existence and resistance as migrants settlers in Australia. Engaging with and understanding the workings of the coloniality of power in Latin America have contributed to the way I engage with the Australian academy and society. From very different histories and contexts, I still recognise Western and Eurocentric logics and actions of dispossession and violence and colonial-settler white supremacy in Australia and Latin America. Therefore, dismantling these systems is a common goal. From the ambiguities and ambivalences of the borderlands I inhabit,

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the ongoing processes of critical reflexivity embedded in feminist and decolonial epistemologies is that I encountered sentipensar, which has guided much of my being-doing-feeling-thinking.

3.3 Sentipensando The process of recognising and valuing the knowledge of the other–rejecting dogmas and absolute truths, learning to live together with our differences, knowing how to communicate and share what we have learned. Introducing the gender, popular, multiethnic perspectives in our projects and in many other perspectives that are positive, altruistic and democratic. For us, an emergent paradigm will produce an articulation of science with consciousness and of the heart in rhythm with reason. (Fals Borda 2015, 336)

Embedded in Abya Yala’s ancestral knowledge, sentipensar (feelingthinking) has developed as a way of feeling and knowing the world. From the experiences of Colombian fishermen (Escobar 2014; Fals Borda 2015) to the ancestral living of the Mayan Tzeltal in the Chiapas highlands of Mexico (Méndez Torres et al. 2013), feeling and thinking processes are experienced as interconnected and fundamental to living in harmony with Mother Earth. Here, I present my own journey into embodying and understanding sentipensar, which addresses the epistemic questions of the projects presented in this book. Specifically, I question how I can move away from the colonial anthropological/research paradigms of ‘studying people/places/nature’ to doing knowledge with. Indeed, for descolonial feminists there is a question of how to develop knowledge that accepts concepts and theories that exist, but that at the same time opens up spaces to think the new—from the localities and social spaces of activism (Millán et al. 2014). It is important to note here that I am not arguing that just by feelingthinking I have achieved ‘decolonial research’ or that the methodologies presented here are decolonial as this will ignore that those of us working from the academy are complicit in the reproduction of the coloniality of power. Rather I present my own journey into destabilising my truths, to

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forge dialogues and practices sentipensantes entangling epistemologies and methodologies that Western thought often separates. I also move on from engaging with abstract theories through narrating particular experiences of my doctorate in 2016 (see Table 1.1) and the specific body of work of the Colombian sentipensantes and those who followed. As I commenced my postgraduate studies in Australia, and started to recognise the epistemic violence embedded in the production of knowledge of the Global North, I encountered the work of the Colombian sentipensantes including Orlando Fals Borda and Camilo Torres, and those who continued the work such as Alfredo Molano. The sentipensantes constructed a historical understanding of how the Colombian countryside was constructed among violences, contradictions, social conflict, and feeling-thinking beings and worlds. Their work reminded us of the need to break existing paradigms and to create understandings of the social world that were grounded in place, through a commitment to knowledge production that was premised on walking in the veredas, establishing feeling-thinking relationships and contributing always to the political causes of those most affected by social inequalities in the Colombia profunda (see Molano Bravo 2017). Fals Borda (2015, 243) explains ‘the  compromiso’ as the moment in which one becomes aware of belonging to the society and the world of our time, and therefore ‘quits the position of simply [a] spectator in order to position oneself to the service of a cause’. Indeed, this resonates with Espinosa Miñoso’s (2009, 53) articulation of the ‘feministas comprometidas, who have big debts to the dispossessed women’ to recover and move our focus to the place-based processes of communities, rather than the distanced and disconnected alliances that many transnational feminisms have contributed to, as coloniality persists. A recent example of the compromiso in Colombia was Alfredo Molano Bravos’ involvement in the Truth Commission, an extrajudicial mechanism built in 2017 in the context of the Colombian Peace Accord, which aimed to know the truth and the violations committed during the armed conflict in order to ‘offer society a broader and more complex explanation of what happened during the conflict’ (Comisión de la Verdad 2017, n.p.). Referring to his appointment in the Truth Commission, Molano Bravo (2017, n.p.) stated that he would continue his work looking with

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‘the silenced eyes of the people. It is time for light, even if it is soft, so it allows us to see a glimpse of the tragedy we have lived. Let the windows open!’. Following Molano’s legacy, my hope is that this book contributes to the light and glimpses of the Colombia profunda. The sentipensante texts resonated with my experiences in the rural Andes (Fals Borda 2017) where I had spent time with family and friends since I was a child, and the Caribbean mountain ranges of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia where I also spent time during my doctorate and subsequently visiting friends (Galeano 1989; Escobar 2014; Fals Borda 2015). In Colombia, Fals Borda (2015, 10) explained that he encountered the construction of sentipensar in the cultura ribereña of the Río Grande of Magdalena that flows into the Atlantic Ocean: The hombre-hicotea4 knows how to endure the struggles of life and is able to overcome these. In the adversity he shuts in to come back into existence with the same energy as before. He is also the feeling-thinking man that combines reason and love, the body and the heart, to get rid of all of the (mal)formations that dismember harmony, in order to tell the truth.

Fals Borda (2015, 17) developed sentipensar within the specific history of Colombia explaining that [d]ifferent from the old comfortable privileged generations, the active and feeling-thinking generation has been able to accumulate practices and knowledge that are superior and better able to act in order to address national realities. They have not feared to go in the field despite the dangers and misunderstandings, in order to relearn with joy and cheer about our tropical environment, combatting the traditional intellectual and political coloniality of the “Northerners” and rediscovering the regional and provincial cultures and traditions of our origin peoples: the Indigenous, the AfroColombians, the anti-manor campesinos, and the internal colonos. And they are respectful of these peoples’ fundamental values, which we have to rejuvenate and project towards the present and future.

Alongside other sentipensantes, Fals Borda planted a seed for those of us who aim to contribute to the feeling-thinking of other worlds in Colombia (see Karl 2017). His proposal of an agrarian reform, although a romantic

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one, demonstrated the importance of grounding our work in social justice, political commitment and respect. He contributed to destabilising the academy from the inside through questioning the Northeners’ episteme and by proposing participatory action research committed to political and social change. However, it is important to note here that the work of the sentipensantes in Colombia was often seen through a male gaze that presented predominantly the Campesino, not the Campesina or those who are gender-diverse, and living in the Colombian countryside, and the ‘ethnographer/storyteller’ as masculine (see also Espitia Beltrán et  al. 2019). Thus, I departed from the Colombian sentipensantes, as a seed planted, and engaged with decolonial feminisms as a way forward.

3.3.1 Sentipensando Epistemic– Methodological Considerations It was in the process of tracing my ancestors, finding the sentipensantes, as well as questioning my positionality that I started to analyse and redefine my understanding of ‘doing research’. Although my work is still entangled in established research methods such as interviewing, journaling, reflexivity and participatory/arts/visual approaches, I embraced the relationship between emotional and thinking processes as complementary aspects. In the context outlined earlier, I grounded the ethical and epistemic–methodological processes presented here in the lived experiences of place and the affective processes of forging dialogues including a commitment to the diverse political causes of rural women in Colombia. As Favela Calvillo (in Méndez Torres et al. 2013, 108) notes, ‘the truth is that the one who thinks that thinking is not feeling, does not think, just talks and talks alone’. I narrate some of the biographies of these processes next. During the dialogues I had with rural women, women activists and social leaders, it became evident that I had to deconstruct and unlearn my own ideas if I was to engage in an open dialogue. These conversations led me to question my feminist politics. Given the violences they had experienced through colonial forms of feminism, many social leaders had understandably rejected feminism. For instance, in conversation with the leader of the

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Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá, Timbiquí she explained that feminism was not central to the network’s struggle because they were working on issues that were actually affecting them as Black women in the territory: Laura5: So do you work within or with feminist politics in your network? Matamba y Guasá: No, not really … what we want to negotiate with our major is to define and consolidate the public policies of the women of Timbiquí … in order to create more real lines of the actual work we need to do. … It is born from our need to make our processes visible … because we need the legal work, the arguments … so it is a struggle with más carne.6

We later talked about the obstacles the network has had in finding resources and in eliciting ongoing support from NGOs, including feminist organisations based in Bogotá. In this context, feminism failed to address the real needs of Black women in the network. Hence, in Chap. 6 I present organised women’s testimonies through territorio cuerpo-tierra as politically grounded in the diverse struggles of Colombian social leaders. Another example of how feminist decolonial praxis and sentipensar affected the decisions I made during my time with Campesinxs in the Sierra and Toca in 2016 was by proposing a place to conduct dialogues and to co-construct knowledge that took into account diverse and differentiated embodied experiences. For instance, I conducted group interviews as onces in places like the farm and/or the local canteen in the veredas where we often gathered in the afternoon for coffee, rejecting standardised models of focus group research. As Johnson (1996) explains, a significant criticism of the focus group as a methodology is that historically it has served the powerful in fields such as marketing, public relations and politics. These onces were relevant to the context of the Campesinas participating in the projects, where extreme climate (e.g. drought and heavy rains) and heavy workloads made it difficult to travel to places outside the veredas and/or to find the time. As a result, I made the decision to invite the women I had spent most time with in the previous months to nominate where, with whom and when they thought we should meet, while I took charge of most of the logistics. Indeed, the

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sensitivities wrought by the sentipensar of the project resonate with decisions that can only be made in place, through time and through embodied experiences veredeando. These onces became spaces to sentipensar other worlds collaboratively in place. We produced collective testimonies and visual narratives of friends and neighbours around food (see Madriz 1998; Kritzinger 2002). In the onces on the farms we cooked and served tamales, hot chocolate, coffee and/or bread. As we finished one of the onces undertaken in Antonia’s living room in Minca, the women chatted about how they should do this more often. Despite being neighbours, they rarely had the opportunity to meet and talk for long periods of time and their meetings were often reduced to a quick cafecito. Women’s solidarity and admiration for each other as friends also came to the fore in the onces. This was the case between the women employed in flower factories in Toca. When asked about their workloads, they chatted: Diosa: It is very hard! Do you know what it is to get home after almost nine hours of work, rest an hour and then keep working? Violeta: And you didn’t even have the photos of tirando manguera,7 Virgen Santa! Isabel: Particularly I spend lots of time with Diosa … I go often to Diosa’s house to spoil the girls and to help them with the homework, to do this and that, for dinner. (Diosa smiles) Rosalina: Then you have to tidy up, sweep, and organise the house. (Diosa sits proud) Isabel: Yes, for Diosa it is very tough. And we admire her. Imagine going to the countryside and working and all of that … And still Diosa does not give up because in the company she is always active, active, active.

The onces created a space for constructing collective testimonies of Campesinas, and brought to the fore women’s diversity, relationships, agency and affective experiences, which I narrate further in the following chapters.

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Like the testimonies, the visual narratives I present in this book are embedded in sentipensar. Through photography and photographic exhibitions, I endeavoured to understand women’s gestures, the places they inhabit, and their relationships with the people, the animals and the objects they loved. In this endeavour of centring visual arts practices I encountered detailed stories, anecdotes and narratives that other methods would not have revealed (see also Araya Gómez 2003; Rodriguez Castro 2017; Gkartzios et al. 2019). In this process, places such as the farm, local farmer’s market and the kitchen became sites of knowledge production, where women created extended narratives based on the photographs. For instance, Esperanza explained to me during the onces what she understood of ‘the countryside life’ after looking at the photographs of women’s daily routines: Esperanza: Well, the photos show this Laurita, the countryside life, that is the daily life! While the people in the city spend their time in offices, in their jobs. It is different. The countryside living is that one, to live with the animals, to look after them … Like what the photo is showing, the animals, the cattle and the hens. To look after the children, to cook for the labourers, mmm … Yes! That is the countryside life! Thus, the visual narratives also spoke to an understanding of the countryside as embodied and relational. However, the photographs are not intended to be read as objective representations, given that my own gaze has shaped the construction of each image. Ethically, I have purposefully omitted any photograph that women disliked or which inadvertently captured other people who had not given consent. I found it imperative to allow enough time in every step of the creation of the visual narratives. I involved women in the creation of photographs, asking multiple times for verbal consent, but also took into account that their workloads limited their involvement. Still, they often pointed to places, or talked about daily routines they wanted me to photograph. These reflexive and ongoing processes of consent and dialogue also applied to the narratives presented in the photographic

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Fig. 3.1  The co-curated photographic exhibition running in Minca’s farmer’s market ‘Mi Canasta’

exhibitions of the projects in 2016 during the farmer’s markets, as the one depicted in Fig. 3.1. The exhibitions’ biographies were mediated through our collective choices of the images and quotations, which were embedded in negotiations, and the critical reflexive practices narrated earlier in this chapter. By being clear on the way the visual narratives were co-constructed, I wanted to briefly address the biographies of the visuals in this book (see Pink 2007; Rodriguez Castro 2018).

3.4 Conclusion Unlearning was my departure point to endeavour to create the dialogues that Lorena Cabnal reminds us are difficult to establish with white woman, when the conditions are not given. Challenging my own understanding of liberation through decolonial and anti-racism work has been fundamental in aiming to establish a dialogue with rural women in Colombia. In conversation with critical feminist reflexivity, this work has

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allowed me to start to unlearn in order to learn about how the sociohistoric and geographical processes of place construct coloniality and other worlds in Colombia. Anti-racist and decolonial feminisms reveal how race, ethnicity and class are inseparable, and important to address in constructing understandings of how the coloniality of power operates. Isolating ‘gender’ as a category is problematic as it contributes to the silencing of the racialised/ classed experiences of people, while reproducing colonial forms of feminism. I have also demonstrated how heteronormativity and patriarchy are entangled in the CMP producing bodies that fit and do not fit through binary logics. Through untangling my positionality from an approach that reveals structural over individual complexities, I presented the work of Anzaldúa and Moreton-Robinson as important to my experiences working and living in Australia. Indeed, understanding the coloniality of power in place has been fundamental to endeavouring to ground my work in politically engaged struggles. In Australia, this has meant understanding that my experiences of confronting racism are premised on the processes of colonisation and racism that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience, and so is ‘Latinidad’ in relation to Indigenous and Black peoples’ struggles in Abya Yala. By bringing decolonial feminist and sentipensante methodological– epistemic positions into conversation in the work I did with rural women in Colombia, I embraced and explored all of our shared and differentiated lived experiences of veredear (see Chap. 2), of dialogue, of struggle and of the enacting of other worlds. For instance, embedding all of the epistemic–methodological and ethical decisions in sentipensar as a commitment facilitated a collaborative environment for dialogue. At the same time, sentipensando, I reached an understanding of the countryside as a relational space, where politics of place are constructed (Rodriguez Castro 2018). For instance, places like the farm and the kitchen became places of resistance, agency and negotiation in the stories narrated next. I am cognisant that my unlearning is ongoing, messy and deeply affective. To this day, I continue to consider epistemic questions in my intellectual and political struggles. Claiming to work within decoloniality and anti-racism requires collaborations and dialogues about how

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to destabilise our truths with fellow colleagues, peers and the communities that matter to us. It means thinking about our racial, ethnic and classed positionalities at every step of our work. It also requires grounding our reflexive practices in politically and geographically engaged perspectives that bring structural complexities to the fore. It necessitates, as well, tracing the history of our ancestors. As we continue to dismantle the epistemologies that Eurocentric/white privileged research has claimed as the only way possible we must ask ourselves the following questions: What implications do our epistemologies have to the voices that emerge, to the communities that matter to us and to the way we construct and reproduce knowledge? How are we constructing knowledge from political praxis? And in which ways are we implicated in reproducing the coloniality of power? I return to these questions in the concluding chapter.

Notes 1. Referring to the regions of Colombia, which are away from the borders and/or coasts. 2. Carranga is a music genre from Boyacá, attributed to Jorge Velosa who gave it its name in the 1980s. It is often known as Campesinx music (see Piñeros 2018). 3. A term used to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ ‘territory/land of origin or a person connected to the same piece of land’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 511). 4. Refers to a freshwater turtle. 5. ‘Laura’ in the dialogues presented in this book refers to the author. 6. Approximate translation: ‘meaty’. 7. This is an expression that means ‘throwing hose’. It refers to the work of carrying and extending the hose for fertilising or watering the crops, which usually requires two people on the job. These hoses can be heavy and long depending on the terrain.

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Araya Gómez, Gabriela. 2003. Etnografía Audiovisual y Escrita: Una Reflexión desde la Antropología Feminista. Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales 7 (2): 153–164. https://doi.org/10.4206/rev.austral.cienc.soc.2003.n7-12. Bargallie, Debbie. 2020. Unmasking the Racial Contract: Indigenous Voices on Racism in the Australian Public Service. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Barroso Tristán, Jose María. 2014. Feminismo Decolonial: Una Ruptura con la Visión Hegemónica, Eurocéntrica, Racista y Burguesa: Entrevista a Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso. Iberoamérica Social, 3 December. https://iberoamericasocial.com/feminismo-decolonial-una-ruptura-con-la-visionhegemonica-eurocentrica-racista-y-burguesa/. Bastian Duarte, Ángela Ixkic. 2012. From the Margins of Latin American Feminism: Indigenous and Lesbian Feminisms. The University of Chicago Press, 38, no. 1: 153–178. https://doi.org/10.1086/665946. Bocarejo, Diana. 2009. Deceptive Utopias: Violence, Environmentalism, and the Regulation of Multiculturalism in Colombia. Law & Policy 31 (3): 307–329. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9930.2009.00297.x. Bond, Chelsea. 2014. When The Object Teaches: Indigenous Academics in Australian Universities. Right Now, 14 November. http://rightnow.org.au/ opinion-3/when-the-object-teaches-indigenous-academics-in-australianuniversities/. Cargle, Rachel Elizabeth. 2018. When Feminism Is White Supremacy in Heels. Harpers Bazaar, 16 August. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/ a22717725/what-is-toxic-white-feminism/. Carlson, Bronwyn. 2016. The Politics of Identity: Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Comisión de la Verdad. 2017. ¿Qué es la Comisión de la Verdad? Accessed 17 May 2019. https://comisiondelaverdad.co/la-comision/que-es-la-comisionde-la-verdad. Escobar, Arturo. 2014. Sentipensar con la Tierra: Nuevas Lecturas Sobre Desarrollo, Territorio y Diferencia. Medellín: Ediciones UNAULA. Espinosa Miñoso, Yuderkys. 2009. Etnocentrismo y Colonialidad en los Feminismos Latinoamericanos: Complicidades y Consolidación de las Hegemonías Feministas en el Espacio Transnacional. Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer 14 (33): 37–54.

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———. 2017. Hacia La Construcción de la Historia De Un (Des) Encuentro: La Razón Feminista y la Agencia Antiracista y Decolonial en Abya Yala. Revista Praxis 75 (3): 1–14. http://desde-elmargen.net/hacia-laconstruccion-de-la-historia-de-un-desencuentro-la-razon-feminista-y-laagencia-antirracista-y-decolonial-en-abya-yala-2/. Espitia Beltrán, Ingrid, Diana Ojeda Ojeda, and Claudia Rivera Amarillo. 2019. La ‘Princesa Antropóloga’: Disciplinamiento De Cuerpos Feminizados Y Método Etnográfico. Nómadas (51): 99–115. https://doi.org/10.30578/ nomadas.n51a6. Fals Borda, Orlando. 2015. Una Sociología Sentipensante para América Latina. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. ———. 2017. Campesinos de los Andes y Otros Escritos Antológicos. Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Faria, Caroline, and Sharlene Mollett. 2014. “Critical Feminist Reflexivity and the Politics of Whiteness in the ‘Field’.” Gender, Place & Culture 23 (1): 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2014.958065. Fredericks, Bronwyn, Debbie Bargallie, and Bronwyn Carlson. 2020. ‘Nothing About Us, Without Us’: Performative Allyship and Telling Silences. Croakey, 1 July. https://croakey.org/nothing-about-us-without-us-performativeallyship-and-telling-silences/. Galeano, Eduardo. 1989. El Libro de los Abrazos. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores S.A. Gkartzios, Menelaos, Julie Crawshaw, and Marie Mahon. 2019. Doing Art in the Country. Sociologia Ruralis 59 (4): 585–588. https://doi.org/10.1111/ soru.12255. Guilland, Marie-Laure, and Diana Ojeda. 2012. Indígenas ‘Auténticos’ y Campesinos ‘Verdes’. Los Imperativos Identitarios del Turismo en Colombia. Cahier des Amériques Latines (71): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.4000/cal.2689. Harding, Sandra. 1992. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. New York: Cornell University Press. Johnson, Alan. 1996. ‘It’s Good to Talk’: The Focus Group and the Sociological Imagination. The Sociological Review 44 (3): 517–538. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1996.tb00435.x. Karl, Robert A. 2017. Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kritzinger, Andrienetta. 2002. Rural Youth and Risk Society: Future Perceptions and Life Chances of Teenage Girls on South African Farms. Youth & Society 33 (4): 545–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x02033004003.

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Langeabaek, Carl Henrik. 2019. Los Muiscas: La Historia Milenaria de Un Pueblo Chibcha. Bogotá: Debate/Penguin Random House. Madriz, Esther I. 1998. Using Focus Groups with Lower Socioeconomic Status Latina Women. Qualitative Inquiry 4 (1): 114–128. https://doi. org/10.1177/107780049800400107. Méndez Torres, Georgina, Juan López Intzín, Sylvia Marcos, and Carmen Osorio Hernández. 2013. Senti-pensar el Género: Perspectivas Desde los Pueblos Originarios. Guadalajara: Red Interdisciplinaria de Investigadores de los Pueblos Indios de México; Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. Mendia Azkue, Irantzu, Marta Luxán, Matxalen Legarreta, Gloria Guzmán, Iker Zirion, and Jokin Azpiazu Carballo. 2014. Otras Formas de (Re)Conocer: Reflexiones, Herramientas y Aplicaciones Desde la investigación Feminista. Bilbao: UPV/EHU. Meertens, Donny, Mara Viveros, and Luz Gabriela Arango. 2008. Discriminación Étnico-racial, Desplazamiento y Género en los Procesos Identitarios de la Población Negra en Sectores Populares de Bogotá. In Pobreza, Exclusión Social y Discriminación Étnico-racial en América Latina y el Caribe, ed. María del Carmen Zabala Arguelles, 181–214. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores y Clacso. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics and Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kindle Edition. Millán, Márgara, Aura Cumes, Mariana Gisela Espinosa, Oscar Favela, Raquel González, Rosalva Aída Hernández Gutiérrez, Verónica López Castillo, Mariana Nájera, and Sylvia Marcos Mora. 2014. In Mas Allá del Feminismo: Caminos Para Andar, ed. Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez, Guiomar Rovira, and Ana Valadez. México, D.F.: Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. Molano Bravo, Alfredo. 2017. Mientras Regreso… El Espectador, 18 November. https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/mientras-regreso-columna-723813. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2000. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. ———. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j. ctt155jmpf. Pink, Sarah. 2007. Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage Publications. Piñeros, Luisa. 2018. La Carranga Sigue Viva. Semana, 8 June. https://www. semana.com/contenidos-editoriales/boyaca-todo-nace-aqui/articulo/ la-carranga-sigue-viva/578353.

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Plan de Desarrollo Toca Boyacá. 2012. Por la Integración, la Reconstrucción y el Desarrollo de Toca 2012–2015. Boyacá: Alcaldia Municipal de Toca. Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South 1, no.3: 533–580. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/23906. Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2017. The Embodied Countryside: Methodological Reflections in Place. Sociologia Ruralis 58 (2): 293–311. https://doi. org/10.1111/soru.12172. ———. 2018. Feeling-thinking for a Feminist Participatory Visual Ethnography. In Structuring the Thesis—Matching Method, Paradigm, Theory and Findings, ed. David Kember and Michael Corbett. Singapore: Springer Nature. Saad, Layla F. 2018. Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Accessed 10 January 2019. http://laylafsaad.com/meandwhitesupremacy-workbook. ———. 2020. Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor. Naperville: Sourcebooks. Salazar, Miguel. 2019 The Problem with Latinidad. The Nation, 16 September. https://www.thenation.com/article/hispanic-heritage-month-latinidad/. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 193–209. https://doi. org/10.1177/1350506806065752. Zapata Olivella, Manuel. 1989. Las Claves Mágicas de América. Bogotá: Plaza y Janes.

4 Politics of Place from the Home and the Vereda

4.1 Introduction As outlined in Chap. 2, linear and bounded conceptualisations of place have often understood place as static and unchanging. For instance, rural places and their inhabitants have frequently been perceived as unchanging in the context of the ‘progress’ of modernity and neoliberalism. This is despite the constant change and multiplicity of rural places. Moreover, colonial feminisms have conceptualised certain places as empowering or disempowering for women, without taking into account the multiplicity networks of places such as the home. However, places do not have a simple coherence; places are not inherently empowering or disempowering. Places are woven together as ongoing stories and processes that constantly change (Massey 2005). By outlining the processes in which Colombian Campesinas construct places in their everyday lives, this chapter contributes to politically engaged understandings of women’s experiences and insurgencies—their politics of place (Harcourt and Escobar 2005). Massey (2005) argues that places, entities and identities form relationships, and that these should be the focus of politics. Thus, the stories in this chapter also respond to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Rodríguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4_4

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political need to bring to the forefront Campesina women’s contribution to rural insurgencies, given their historical marginalisation in mainstream debates about rurality. Campesinas have made a significant contribution to the livelihoods and enacting of other worlds of rural communities. Through the stories of here and now this chapter focuses on two places where Campesinas spend most of their day. That is the home and the vereda. In the first section, I narrate the stories and processes that make the home a subversive place to re-exist. In doing so, I bring to question the disempowering narratives related to the home that colonial feminisms have promulgated in order to ‘save poor women’ through ideas of ‘progress’ embedded in the CMP (see also  Christie 2007; Wardrop 2007; Robson 2007; Espino et al. 2012; Caro 2011; Ahmed 2019). Following this, I narrate women’s place making of the vereda as a place that is historically and politically relevant to Colombian rural resistances and insurgencies. By recounting two stories, based on two of the veredas where the participatory projects took place, I unveil the political possibilities of exploring the processes and relationships of place by taking seriously its epistemic forces (Escobar 2015; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). In the final section, as I trace the trajectories of these places in the context of Colombia, the chapter moves relationally from the countryside to the city where young people are seeking ‘a better future’ due to the inequalities embedded in the persistence of coloniality.

4.2 The Home The argument that rural women’s workload is marked by a triple shift in which women do the domestic work, the farm work and the reproductive work of bearing and raising children has been widely documented (see Suárez 2005; Madrid and Lovell 2007; Rodriguez Castro et  al. 2016). Indeed, most of rural women’s work remains unremunerated, with only the farm work producing a small wage. Women transit the place of the home, the garden, the farm and the vereda throughout their days, but it is often in the home where non-remunerated labour occurs. In this context, the home is a place inscribed by structural inequalities embedded in colonial/patriarchal violence. However, no place is inherently

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disempowering. In this section, I detail how women’s experiences of home reveal the vexed nature of this place. In recounting the women’s stories, I present a nuanced account of home, taking into consideration that the family unit (in all its forms) is an important aspect for Campesinxs’ social, cultural, political and economic struggles in rural Colombia (Hocsman 2013; Forero Álvarez 2010). Revealing the conflicting relationships that define the home, I further a project of central concern to this book, which is related to dismantling and unlearning colonial feminisms’ ideas and actions about an ‘all women’s liberation’. Western feminisms have often claimed that women’s liberation requires reprieve or severance from the home, and an inclusion in a neoliberal system in which labour is precarious for poor women. In a cross-national study from the United States, the former Soviet Union and South-East Asia, Radhakrishnan and Solari (2015, 785) argue that ‘empowered women’ and ‘failed patriarchs’ have become the gender discourse of neoliberalism. Moreover, they contend that the incorporation of poor and working-class women into the workforce, within the context of global capitalism and supported by feminist ideas of waged work as inherently empowering for all women, allows poor women’s labour to remain cheap. Such a claim ignores the realities and understandings of women who see the home, the kitchen and the garden as sites of sovereign food production, re-existence and the defence of life (Caro 2011). In a remote vereda in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Carla reminisced on the photos displayed in Fig. 4.1. Carla: They [women in the photos] are beautiful! The way they are there, knitting, planting, and cooking. I love it, because I am one of those. Yes, because I am not a woman who studied to go and open an enterprise, but my enterprise is my kitchen. Carla’s narrative shows how women might also consider the home as a subversive place, in a context in which the colonial discourse of women’s liberation often silences the diverse political propositions emerging from rural places such as the farm, the home and the kitchen. This is a contention articulated by Lorena Cabnal, who writes that ‘among other things, the step we need to take is to name our own liberated languages and cosmovisions and the categories and concepts that we are constructing

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Fig. 4.1  These photos, among other displayed in the photographic exhibitions in town, were chosen by the Campesinas of the Sierra

for the analysis of our historical realities of oppression, but also of liberation as native Indigenous, Campesinas, rural or of territories’ (cited in Gargallo Celentani 2014, 44–45). Sentipensando with rural women, I started to understand that the home became an important site of negotiation. This was particularly evident in their conceptualisations of labour which were predominantly embedded in reflexivity around patriarchy and inequality. For instance, Esperanza in Toca was highly reflexive about how the colonial/patriarchal matrix affects Campesina women. The inequalities that she experienced, were not explained as merely related to patriarchy, but were about the dismantling of other forms of oppression. In conversation with Gloria during one of the onces, Esperanza explained: Esperanza: And it is what I was saying before, we work and work and we get so little, like a cent. It is not worth it. In this moment, being a Campesina is one of the most ungrateful things in

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life. And so is the labourer, you know what? The ones that are earning are the intermediaries … Gloria: They are the ones keeping the profit. Esperanza exposes the fact that the marginalisation of Campesinas needs to be viewed within a larger system of exploitation tied to neoliberal practices that have distanced production from consumption and affected small farmers. Esperanza’s claim also speaks to the decolonial argument that patriarchy is tied to coloniality and the unequal division of labour (Zapata Olivella 1989; Gargallo Celentani 2014). Mignolo and Walsh (2018) explain that the CMP is made up of the coloniality of economic, political and military power, alongside with racism, sexism and the naturalisation of the living. Thus, places like the home do not inherently disempower women; rather, disempowerment occurs in the matrix of patriarchy and coloniality. The home is also where Campesinas construct politics of place in which other worlds are enacted in balance with other living beings. Maria was a single mother who lived with her daughter in the Sierra on her family’s farm. As illustrated in Fig.  4.2, she often cooked on the charcoal and wood stove when the gas had run out or there was a big family lunch. Some mornings, she woke up early to grind the corn and to make home-made arepas from scratch. Maria took pride in her cooking. Her brothers and sisters, who visited often, praised her cooking skills.

Fig. 4.2  Maria makes breakfast on the wood and charcoal stove (right). Maria grinds corn for the arepas (left)

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Who taught you how to cook? My father. He would go with us to the kitchen and I remember that he would come in when I had to cook. He made chilli and I would make cuchuco [traditional soup]. And he liked making food that was with condiments. My mother liked it more plain.

Maria is one of the Martinez sisters who are part of a coffee-farming family originally from Santander introduced in the previous chapters. Displacement was first experienced by the family as Campesinxs colonos, coming from Santander during the La Violencia period (1948–1958)1 (see Molano Bravo 1987; Karl 2017). After this period, the new generations of the Martinez were displaced by the FARC-EP, military and paramilitary conflict during the 1990s, with some of the family members moving to the nearest city Santa Marta. During the group interview, the women in their family often talked proudly about the knowledge they had acquired in the home and on the farm where they grew up. Despite being forcibly displaced, they have carried these teachings with their bodies to their new urban locations. Beyond being physically present in place, the Martinez women still talk about their home in the Sierra as important to their sense of body-land and belonging to the countryside. The home is also an important place in which women pass on their knowledge through generations. For example, Pilar explained how she became interested in knitting: Pilar:

Well, since I was seven years old I would see my mother knitting so it grabbed my attention. I was the same age that my daughter is now. Then, there are girls that see you knitting and it grabs their attention and the ones who like it, learn easily … And since then I have been knitting. I am slow [at] making things because I do not have the access to the Internet, where you see many beautiful things to do … So I do … whatever comes to my mind. I like doing things for my daughter. Laura: Do you live out of that now? Pilar: Well partly I do, when I can. Thank God I sell what I do and they ask me to do more and that is my income.

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The passing of knowledge through knitting provided Pilar with a skill that could sustain her family after losing her husband. Knitting also promoted the formation of a community of women in the vereda who often got together to knit and to exchange skills. Thus, knitting in the home was important to how Campesinas constructed a politics of place in this vereda. Another story about the home was related to landownership. Campesinas explained that having a home provided a sense of safety and belonging. As Andrea explained, Laura: And how does it feel to have your own house? Andrea: Wow! It feels good, obviously, you feel like … when you have your own house you have to be there. I mean we moved so much with the kids, here and there, flying from one mountaintop to the other. The things we had got damaged… So when you are in your own house, well you know that you are there, that you do not need to move your things and you can have stuff… If you were moving all the time you have to take it with you or sell it. Those women, including Andrea, who had been affected by forced displacement expressed valuing deeply the sense of security embedded in owning land. This also resonates with Latin American debates that have focused on the importance of rural women’s legitimate access to land and land titling (see Meertens 2012). Furthermore, the home garden, the stove and the kitchen are essential sites for the subsistence and well-being of women, families and communities. Rural women in the developing world are the main agents of food security (Espino et al. 2012). The home, and specifically women’s home gardens, is where food sovereignty struggles start. Women transit the home and the garden constantly in their everyday. As Margarita explained, ‘[l]ike sometimes I am in the kitchen and I get out and I go to the garden, to look after the plants, to plant something or to walk around. Sometimes I do not want to do anything in the kitchen so I go all the way there’. The garden was also important to feed the family, as Eduarda from the Sierra explained: ‘I really like planting my own garden. To be able to use it for

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cooking. I had a garden. On my farm, we planted tomato and we always had them for cooking, for seasoning’. During the time I talked to Eduarda, she was working for a large landowner in the Sierra on his farm, and living away from the small plot of land they owned with her family in another vereda. In terms of well-being, the kitchen and the stove provide a place of familiarity for gatherings of family and friends. Cristina, from Toca, explained this based on Fig. 4.3. Cristina: I like the kitchen because at the dinnertime is when we get together, and you are like ‘What happened? What did you do today? What did you eat for lunch? What did you get in the school restaurant?’ This and that. ‘How was your day, Cristina?’ [referring to her husband]. And it is mainly at dinnertime that we have some time, because we don’t have much time at the moment. So, the dinnertime is when we tell each other everything that happened during the day.

Fig. 4.3  Cristina cooks breakfast while her children wait

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This feeling of familial intimacy and connection embedded in the kitchen and the stove was also echoed in Minca: Jimena:

What you do first thing in the morning is turn on the charcoal stove is the tintico, the breakfast … So at three in the morning the stove is on. And you are in the kitchen. Paola: It is the first thing you do in the morning. Take that tinto for this cold. Viviana: Yes, there is nothing you can do without the stove. Nothing. These stories of home demonstrate how women conceptualise it as a site of knowledge production, of food security and of well-being. While presenting these stories of home, I am cognisant of not romanticising the domestic realm and of negating the fact that it is also the home where violence against women and misogyny are perpetrated (see Little 2017). Indeed, this complex relationship that women have with the home came to the fore as Campesinas described the way in which shifts in gender relations could be herstorically related to domestic places. Rosa and Delfina in the Sierra explain: Laura: Rosa:

What is the biggest achievement of Campesina women? The independence! Look at the history. The woman was always in the kitchen and she would feed the labourers and help out. But now it is not like that. Now the woman is in the kitchen, but also goes to a meeting, gives her opinion, joins an association, goes out and speaks out for the community somewhere else. You even have the right to say to them [their partners]: “Look, I am going out today and if you can stay, stay and take care of this because I have a meeting”. It is not like before that the man would go out and he even took the woman to the meeting. Do you know what I mean? Not anymore. Delfina: And the man gets used to it, the husband … At the beginning, I used to ask my husband permission to go anywhere and not anymore. Now I go over there to the neighbours and I do not even tell him.

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Women in Toca were equally reflexive about the machismo in their lives. As Isabelle reflected, ‘I mean there’s so much machismo …You feel it more here [referring to the countryside]’. Thus, the home is not just a site in which rural women passively practise traditional femininity, but where gender norms are negotiated and challenged. Despite often being conceptualised as victims of patriarchy, Campesinas revealed that they were active agents in negotiating with machismo, and that the home was a key site of their subversive engagements. Notably, the stories around the home revealed that some of the Campesinx population are cognisant of women’s potential marginalisation in place. Across the research projects I conducted since 2013, there were numerous stories that demonstrated that the home is now often a site of place-based negotiations (Rodriguez Castro et al. 2016). This was evident in the short interviews conducted in 2016 with members of the communities during the photographic exhibitions. These included Lucia’s husband, Javier, in Minca, who explained how he understood the progressive change was happening: Javier: I believe we are in a time where the Campesina woman has taken the reins. They have always been really strong, but at some point, they were really subsumed to the machismo that reigns in Colombia. But now they are much more conscious that they can be in equal conditions. They are very hardworking. And I think that an exhibition like this aims for that, to highlight and visualise that work that is so important. They work in their house, but a lot of them also work in the fields and in the farm, as the Campesinos do. Indeed, Javier and Lucia often negotiated and shared unpaid care and domestic work in place. A similar story of shifting gender relations was conveyed at the Toca exhibition. A female community leader, who was selling baked products in the farmer’s market where the exhibition was located, explained how she believed women’s work could be alleviated: Carmenza: As women we have the opportunity to be leaders. We do not have to spend all of our lives being the wife and the

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homemaker. We also have that right to be someone else in life and to exploit our knowledge. As leaders and women we need to strive further … I am a merchant. I used to be [a] baker and I learned to do many things like cakes and empanadas … and we are selling those today in the park [referring to the town’s main square]. Laura: And how do you think we can alleviate women’s workloads? Carmenza: To include the men. To make a meeting with the men, so they value their wives, their sisters and their mothers in the house. I would like it to be an association of women getting together from the countryside, from the town centre and from the veredas. Carmenza’s statement demonstrates how politics of place operate and are entangled with ideas of organised resistance and re-existence, which are already impacting younger generations in her town. For instance, her view of involving men in changing gender relations was furthered by younger men like Mateo in Toca, who commented on the photographs of Campesinas hard at labour: Mateo: Laura: Mateo:

It is tough. And how do you think we can alleviate that? Help them as men in the house.

In summary, the farm and the home are places where Campesina women experience conflicting relationships in which marginalisation, negotiation and subversive engagements occur. The home continues to be a troubled place in rural Colombia, but it is not inhabited by passive subjects or victims who are unreflexive and in need of saving. Rather, in the projects undertaken for this book, the home and the farm were often constructed as places for subverting and/or negotiating gendered roles— as processes. At the same time, from the diverse knowledge embedded in places such as the kitchen and the garden Campesina women are proposing and enacting progressive politics from their own cosmovisions that speak to the struggle of dismantling coloniality that affects their territories and body-land and creating other worlds.

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4.3 The Vereda During my time spent in rural Colombia, I also became acutely aware of the importance of places that contributed to community building in the lives of Campesina women. This resonated with organised struggles such as the demand for communal rights in agrarian reforms in Latin America in the last century (Teubal and Ortega Breña 2009), and the communal paradigm that underpins the Buen Vivir in Ecuador (Huanacuni Mamani 2010). Beyond the home, Campesinas mobilise daily in their neighbours’ homes to exchange produce, to work the jornal, to buy from the local store, to attend the local school and community meetings, or to have a tinto and to socialise with friends nearby. This mobility contests the discourse of ‘private female sphere and a male public sphere’ that ignores the unity of experience of women’s everyday lives and their contributions to their communities (Stephen 1997, 7–8). In the Colombian countryside, rural communities are geographically divided into veredas. The veredas are a geographical space where rural communities live and wherein certain collective projects are developed. Beyond its geographical definition, the vereda is a social entity that has power in the communal unions that negotiate with the state. Therefore, Campesinxs are independent citizens who perform productive activities within the family, who belong to a rural community (vereda) and who identify with a broader context that includes the town, the city and the country (Forero Álvarez 2010). In the vereda, people construct place through social, cultural and economic relationships. In this section, I focus on the multiplicity and relationality that construct veredas. My particular focus is on the informal processes that women undertake in veredas as a politics of place (see El Khoury 2015). I will narrate two stories in the veredas of Toca and Minca. It is important to note here that these are not isolated cases. Rather, in the Colombian countryside, there are numerous instances of women’s local and community organising among the rural populations living in particular veredas (see, for example, Courtheyn 2017).

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The first of the veredas is located within a 15-minute bike ride from Toca’s town centre. It is part of the Municipality of Toca, which is made up of seven veredas. Ana and I met through a mutual friend. We first met in town after she had finished teaching at the local school one afternoon. As I chatted with her about the project, Ana offered to take me to her vereda the following day to show me the enterprise she had established a year earlier. Ana, the community members and I subsequently met several times over three months, forging a relationship that reflected feeling-­ thinking processes emerging from the Colombian territories (Fals Borda 2015). Ana’s enterprise is called Compro Agro. The enterprise processes onions that are sold in a major supermarket in Colombia every week. Employees peel and measure the onions to meet the quality standards of large supermarket chains. Ana’s work is to source the onions locally for the weekly orders. Her son and daughter have created a web platform to source potential buyers and sellers. In an interview, Ana explained that the aim of Compro Agro is to eliminate intermediaries, who often keep most of the profit and take advantage of small producers. How this enterprise originated is a clear example of how communal networks within the vereda organise. These organised efforts often start from the family unit, as Ana explained when I inquired as to the history of Compro Agro: Ana:

It was born when the Ministry of Technology and Education came to my children’s school. The Ministry told them [students] to sign up to a contest they were doing with any idea they had, no matter how crazy it was. So they [son and daughter] called me and that is when we talked about the idea that it would be cool if we could get rid of intermediaries [when selling the produce]. So we needed to create a web platform to do it … We won the contest over several rounds and in the last round we presented the project to the Minister. And he really liked the idea, and everyone did. Especially because we are from the countryside, and my children are minors, and that grabbed their attention—young people

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that were not worried about music or hair dos, but that were interested in supporting the countryside. So tell me about this idea of eliminating intermediaries? Well, for example, we [producers] used to take the onions to Corabastos [Bogotá’s largest food market/intermediary], and from Corabastos the produce was bought by a wholesaler and then sold to the supermarket chain, who then sold it to the housewives. So to sustain themselves, they [intermediaries] need a piece of the cake, so imagine how much money is taken along the way.

Unfortunately, when I met Ana again a year later, government funding for the business had ceased and Compro Agro was being sustained from her work as a teacher and previous profits. The project’s economic support was withdrawn when a new minister was elected. Still, Ana continued with the enterprise and had several ideas for expansion: Ana:

It will be ideal to have a supermarket in Bogotá called Compro Agro, so the housewives can come and buy directly. Imagine that! Right now we are only working with one major supermarket chain, but many more people have called us. But with this terrible verano [drought] there is not enough produce to sell, so we cannot commit without knowing if we can perform.

Despite the difficulties faced due to lack of government support and an extreme drought in the region of Boyacá, Compro Agro continued to deliver weekly orders and Ana kept sourcing the onions in town. It became evident that the workers in the vereda were relying on this business for subsistence given the tough conditions of the countryside due to the extended drought. Compro Agro pays the workers daily by weight, a similar wage to the jornal. More importantly, Ana mostly employs women from the vereda who have been her extended family and/ or neighbours for generations.

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How did you find the women that work nowadays in Compro Agro? Well, they are the neighbours! The lifelong neighbours! … Since we knew them, we started telling them, well “We are going to create this [Compro Agro]! Are you interested?” … Only two women came one day and did not like it, but the rest did. And, as any other job, during the first day we were not that efficient, but with experience, the performance improved and now their wages are better.

Ana explained that having raised her children as a single mother, she was aware of the difficulties that women face in the countryside, and she wanted to help out. When I commented on the number of women working in Compro Agro, she said: Ana:

Laura: Ana:

When my children were born I experienced very tough times, so for me this is like social responsibility. I want women to be the ones managing their own money and having at least something, because the situation in the countryside is very difficult. So have things improved in the business? Well, right now the situation is complicated. As I told you, we cannot find onions … but the situation for the women has improved greatly because they have some money now … Like, for example, now that the children started school they had the money to buy their school supplies and their things. And so they feel good.

The feelings of well-being and economic independence generated by this project were widespread. One of the group interviews conducted in Toca was mainly comprised of women employed by Compro Agro. Sofia, who was initially working in Compro Agro when I was there, had to leave as she was offered a better job opportunity with a more stable income and a formal contract at the local school near the town’s centre. At the same time, she expressed sorrow at leaving the vereda, as beyond economic gains, it was a place where women had a chance to share with each other:

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That is what I mean about “the onions” [Compro Agro]. The ladies there have a great time … really! When I was there it was a beautiful environment because I recochaba.2 It is a beautiful environment because we share … and it is a change from the house routine. Like sometimes we do not have the right to share and recochar, and there [Compro Agro]—you talk. Laugh. I mean, you share.

These comments were reinforced amongst the other women in Compro Agro in the onces: Sofia: I mean, when you work there is not enough time. Estrella: The days seem short. Juliana: The day goes by and you do not even feel it. Constanza: I am at the house Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday. The other days I work in Compro Agro. At home I am alone, alone! My husband goes to work and I stay at home, doing the house chores. So who do I argue with? With Pirulo, the dog! (The group laughs) Laura: Yeah, who can you gossip with? With the dog, because who else! Constanza: Or I have to get on the phone and send messages and Whatsappiar.3 (The group laughs) These narratives bring to life the everyday stories that co-create places like the vereda. The well-being that Ana’s project has brought to many women of her vereda is experienced in place. Despite the socio-economic challenges, and the difficult situation of drought, rural women continue to resist in place while looking after each other. Compro Agro was only one example of how this vereda facilitated community building. Later in the onces women from the vereda where Compro Agro is based referred to how informal economies operate:

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I mean what happens here [the countryside] is that we cannot buy good shoes. We have to buy ones for 20,000 pesos (USD$6), but, for example, I mean … What we say here is that at least we have milk, meat, eggs, cheese, potato … We have the possibility of going to the neighbours and say[ing], “Can I borrow some potatoes and so on?”. Or maybe that the neighbour had some harvest, and there are potatoes for us, so you go and get some.

Thus, despite the difficult economic situation of the countryside, the vereda is a place of economic and cultural resistance for communities, in which informality becomes re-existence in place. In Minca, the vereda was also an important unit for women’s organising. Rosa, Milena and Margarita are part of a group of women who live in a vereda of the Sierra. This particular vereda is characterised by the proximity of the houses as they are within a five to ten-minute walk from each other. In the other neighbouring veredas where I spent time in the Sierra, houses were up to an hour’s walk away from each other. The geographical proximity of this particular vereda creates a sense of spatial familiarity. They often get together to do crafts, have tintos and snacks, and share care work. Rosa, as they told me, was the group’s leader. Her parents had lived in the region for decades, and she moved to this particular vereda when she was a teenager. She said it was when she came back to the Sierra that she discovered she had the qualities of a community leader: Rosa:

Well the strange thing is that I come from the city … I came back to the countryside when I was 16 or 17 and I started as a teacher here. The school principal saw me working with the children and I do not know, she discovered me! I mean like that side of being a leader and she told me: “Look Rosa, let’s start working like this with the children”. Then, she introduced me to the community and I started working with the community action board and I liked it … I like to talk, give my opinion. I do not like to remain silent with the things

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that matter! Yes, I like pushing people and telling them: “Let’s not get stuck, we are here, this is beautiful!” And did you get to this vereda or to another one? I arrived to this one. I am one of the first ones4 in this vereda, with Doña Milena here, right? We are like the founders. And how long ago was that? It has been 28 years since I have been here, in this little spot, and the Miss here (points at Rosa), when she got here, she was like 15 years old. I mean she was arriving and my son was starting his high school.

The sense of belonging to this particular vereda, wrought by their shared experiences as Campesinxs colonos settling in this region, united Milena and Rosa. Additionally, the particular situations of each of the women in this group brought them closer together. Women from this vereda constantly drew from their community during tough emotional times brought by the armed conflict or difficult weather. For example, Delfina became a mother figure to Jacqueline when she migrated to the Sierra after being displaced by violence. In the onces they chatted about this moment: Jacqueline: My mother died when she was 36 years old. Margarita: The second mother has been her. (Points to Delfina). Delfina: They arrived to my house, all of them. And, well, I supported them for some time and then they left and all of that, but I never neglected them. They left but I was always looking after them. Jacqueline: We came from the Cesar [a region of Colombia] because there was violence. From the paracos and the guerrilla, they killed my cousin. In the town where I used to live the Campesinxs will come down every weekend to buy groceries. And then the paracos would come in and they would kill and all of that. So we decided to come here … We were here for four months in Santa Marta until my mother died, and then we came here.

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It was very tough for them, because they were very little and I felt pity. And I told my husband that we had to support them, because imagine! The children were little, like the oldest one was nine years old, or eight.

While Delfina and Jacqueline created a strong relationship borne out of the horrors of the armed conflict, Pilar, Rosa and Milena were bounded by a similar familial structure in which their partners were not present. Rosa’s husband worked away in Colombia’s Lost City Trek.5 He returned home once a month depending on the season. Pilar had lost her first husband in an accident and her current partner lived away in another region, while Milena lost her husband in the armed conflict at the hands of the paramilitary. Women in this vereda had drawn from their community networks to respond to their experiences of violence and family rupture. As heads of households, Colombian women are much more likely to experience poverty (see Deere and León 2001), but it is from their insurgence in place that they construct forms of well-being under these circumstances. For instance, in the onces with these groups of women they reflected on how the geographical proximity in the vereda has helped them confront the unease that comes with extreme weather conditions like strong winds and rain: Rosa:

Milena:

When there is a storm at night and I start thinking, “God, if something happens and I am here by myself with my children!” It is not like when you have a partner that you tell him, “Okay, go and have a look what is going on, if the water is inside of the house”. So if you have leaks he can go and fix that. But no! I have had to go with my daughter at two in the morning. I am the opposite in the house. I mean I am not scared, well fear as such, not really!

As we talked, Milena and Margarita recounted some more incidents related to rough weather in the vereda.

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Margarita: When we first arrived here, there was a season of strong winds that ripped off roofs. It left us with half a corridor. Milena: For me it was the room’s roof. Margarita: And yes, in Milena’s house it was a bunch of zinc tiles, and she was by herself with the children. Milena: Like a year ago it also started. A strong wind, but I did not even leave the room, and well it blew off two or three zinc tiles from the roof. Margarita: Yes, so I was very scared because I was used to my other house where the roof tiles were made of concrete. So that does not lift as much as the zinc. And so I was very nervous when that happened. And Milena has helped me get used to the fact that you need to be strong. So I got used to it and I am not scared anymore. Now when there is a breeze, I sleep or I sit down to pray sometimes and then it goes away. The fear that Margarita talks about has been mitigated by the strong friendships forged with the women in the vereda, as they intersect with experiences that entangle non-human actors in the construction of place. On the other hand, the women heads of households in this vereda were very reflexive about patriarchal power and its implications for women. They encouraged married women members to be economically independent from their husbands. They chatted about this in the onces: Rosa:

I mean we are all independent because, look, Doña Delfina also does crafts and now she sells tamales. Delfina: And sometimes if people come and they ask me to make lunch, I make it. Margarita: And in my house as well. Rosa: Jacqueline also makes desserts and has her store, and Milena is the same. Married women, like Margarita, have had to negotiate with their husbands as they have acquired economic and social independence as a result of organising with other women of the vereda. In the onces she explained:

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Margarita: I am going to tell you something. When I came here 13 years ago, the women were already here and they had started to get organised … When I arrived it cheered me up. I came here to rest, because in the house over there I left everything, but I was tired of so much. First, when raising my children I locked myself in so much that I abandoned myself. I was left in a bad place so I wanted to go to another place … So I came here and I saw how my mind was clearer and I calmed down … I think my husband has not gotten used to [it] here, because sometimes he tells me he wants to live somewhere else. And I have been here strong, telling him that I do not want to leave … And when I started in the group with them [women] a lot of things changed because it has helped me a lot. I have helped myself. In that sense, it is me who has learned to guide myself and help [economically] in the house more because I was not used to that. And then it was the fact that we did not have those customs of women working separately from what the husband works on. Gargallo Celentani (2014) notes the importance of the spontaneous organising of women. Margarita’s reflection brings to light how important this spontaneous and place-based organising can be as a way of contesting patriarchies from within. As a result of their actions, the group of women in this vereda saw a future in place, where they could continue to grow individually and communally. In the same vereda, Pilar was constructing her own house further up the hill, as she had been living with her mother Delfina since her husband died. Laura: Pilar:

Pilar, you are you constructing your house nearby, do you see your future in the vereda? Yes, like they were saying, it is beautiful! Yes and for self-­ betterment and for the children. And sometimes you think like there is not enough level of education compared to the city, but then the weather and all of that, the environment and well I think it is better here.

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Indeed Massey (2005, 140) argues that ‘what is special about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or of the eternity of the hills’. Rather, it is the throwntogetherness of these veredas. It is about the stories of the past and the present, the herstories that continue to construct place and other worlds through the relational politics of place.

4.4 Trajectories of Place to the City It became evident throughout my experiences in 2013 and 2016 that the trajectories and constructions of place of younger generations6 were different from those of most of the middle-aged women who got involved in the participatory projects. In my time in rural Colombia, I met and talked with several teenagers from the countryside, some of whom I forged good friendships with as we walked to the local shop for snacks and talked about school. Some of the younger women sporadically joined the onces. They provided a perspective that signalled a changing trajectory engrained in the herstories of place of their ancestors (living and passed) in the countryside of Colombia. Undoubtedly, in both Toca and Minca, the accounts of most of the younger women led to the city. Estrella, who has two sons living in the city explained: ‘Well, we never wanted them to leave our side. We wanted to always have them there for us, but the life in the countryside is very tough right now’. Estrella’s quotation, along with the following excerpt, from one of the groups in Toca, encapsulates a sentiment that was widespread in both towns among the parents of younger generations: Constanza: So what is the point of telling your children to work in the countryside? To plant? If that does not give them … Juliana: Although sometimes it happens to them that they go the city, and it’s not easy. Sofia: Anyway, I think here it is very tough too, and what are they going to do if they stay here? Ana: So they have to leave, maybe there they can find something better, at least they study.

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A better future. They study and well you know they have to struggle but at least they won’t be struggling their whole life. While if you stay here you need to find a husband and have two babies, and you stay in the same routine.

A sense that there was no dignified future in the countryside permeated women’s accounts, and therefore they encouraged their children to seek a future elsewhere in the city. Issues discussed earlier about the context of the Colombian countryside influenced this sentiment—that is, poverty, government abandonment, climate change, displacement, patriarchy, corruption and continuing violence and social conflict. Women’s reflexivity around these issues present in their lives led them to encourage their daughters to access higher education and a life outside the countryside. Sara was a young, single mother from Toca who had a bachelor’s degree, and had been living in between the countryside and the city during the past years. In early 2016, Sara lived in the town centre in a small apartment with her daughter. She was currently unemployed and finishing a diploma degree by distance after her undergraduate studies. She was very reflexive about women’s marginalisation in the countryside and was seeking a future in a nearby city. She explained: ‘I would go and work in the countryside to provide for my daughter. Right now is not an option because the countryside is not providing economically. So you find other options’. Sara was part of a group interview conducted with younger women who lived in the town of Toca. Although they no longer aspired to a life like that of their parents in rural areas due to the difficult conditions, their experiences of place had been very different. Maria Paula worked in the local store selling phones and gadgets, and still lived with her parents in the countryside. Her sister, Isabella, had studied psychology and lived in Tunja, the nearest city, but was currently unemployed. She was applying for jobs in different cities in Colombia. Johanna was a single mother who had two children and lived in town with them. The children’s father sustained them economically. All of them, except for Johanna, were looking for opportunities in the city. They elaborated in the onces:

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Isabella:

In my case, I left the house because I wanted to keep studying and that was the biggest reason. Otherwise I would be in the countryside, I think … It was tough, but I had to leave. I was the oldest one … In the end I got used to it and I had a scholarship throughout my high school. Laura: And Sara, why did you decide to study? Sara: Well, in that moment it was because although there was a lot to do in the countryside next to my mother there was not … Mmm so it is more a decision because you want to earn your own money, because there is not much on offer in the countryside. I mean, as a woman, to jornalear,7 personally I do not think so … So it was because of that reason that maybe I left to go to Tunja and then I started working there. And I had the possibility of returning to the countryside to work but I did not. Laura: Right, and Maria Paula, why did you decide to try to find work in the town? Maria Paula: Well I think that the countryside no … is that right now with the situation is not that easy and well the option of working in the town was like … I mean, as a woman, you need your things, so you do not want to be asking for them, well she [sister] taught me that. Laura: And Johanna why did you leave the countryside? What was the reason? Johanna: The labour is very heavy. Well, I have seen my mother and it has been a lot of suffering for my mother. Laura: Suffering in what sense? Johanna: Because that is horrible, to help my father lift the hoses, the pipes that derail the water. Oh no! That you need to help him lift the containers of liquid for the pump. No! Although their life stories were different, these young women were cognisant of the hard labour that women undertook in the countryside.

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Therefore, most of the younger women were seeking a future in the city through tertiary and vocational education. In the Sierra, Andrea’s daughter, Adriana, talked about her feelings of moving out to the city: Adriana:

I am scared of going there to study, of course, because when they [city people] finish high school, it is not the same as us because they do not give us all the subjects we need, while in the city they do. So you do not finish as prepared. I know I am not going to get in [to university]. And it is going to be hard. I mean I first need to think about finishing this year and then the next year I will apply to the SENA8 and that is it. Then I can go into the university.

Similarly, Emilia from Toca had been waiting for months to get into the SENA. She explained: Emilia:

Well, I finished high school a long time ago, but I have not been able to get into studying more, a more advanced career. But I have thought about getting into the SENA, to study, but for now I am helping my mother so she can help me after … Because I do not have the income, the necessary resources to study.

Adriana’s and Emilia’s testimonies demonstrate how inequality is lived in place by young people who study in the countryside under precarious conditions. This marginalisation limits their opportunities to access further education. The lack of opportunities for young people from the countryside affected not only them, but also their families. As a mother, Juliana, in Toca, also found her children’s graduation from high school to be a difficult time. Juliana:

Because it is difficult, like, for example, Camilo, he finished high school, and, as a mother, it is tough to see him there every day working in the jornal because he has not had the opportunity to like study. That is very difficult, very tough.

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Because you do your best to give them the high school graduation and that is difficult … And then to see them there, waiting as if nothing happened. During the time I was in Toca, Camilo worked with his mother in the jornal peeling onions in Compro Agro. He had not achieved the necessary score in the national test to access public university or vocational education and had to wait to sit the exam again. Given the family’s economic situation, he had to enter the workforce through the jornal while he waited. Rural young people are further disadvantaged in accessing higher education if they experience poverty. As Emilia explained, a move to the city for Colombia’s rural youth can mean being forced to take on low-paying employment. She stated that while she had not been accepted into SENA, she still relocated to the city. Her only option in terms of employment was as a store attendant. After working for some time in the store, she lost the job and had to come back to the countryside. Emilia:

Laura: Emilia: Ana: Emilia:

Laura: Emilia:

It was hard for me to come back because I even forgot how to milk. I forgot to wash, and so on. Do you know what I mean? Because it was just from work to the house to sleep and then go back to work. Of course, it is very different. And what did you do in the city? I worked in a fruit shop … I worked 14 hours [a day]. They were also exploiting her. And well, the man that offered me the job allowed me to stay in his place, and so I took advantage of that opportunity. A miracle happened, but I do not know … And then he said that it was the end of my time. And would you like to go back? Yes, yes of course.

Overall, the previous testimonies are powerful in illustrating the vexed feelings of many young Campesinxs in Colombia. They are seeking a better future by moving to urban areas, but such a trajectory is problematic

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for them because of ongoing structural inequalities and precarious working conditions. As Adriana, Juliana and Emilia explain, rural youth compete on an unfair playing field for university and college places as the urban youth often have access to better quality education. Therefore, as these trajectories of place take young rural women to the city, coloniality persists, creating other marginalisations based on exploitation, especially in terms of labour, as illustrated in Emilia’s experience. Notably, many rural women in Latin America obtain employment in the service and domestic sector in the cities under precarious working conditions (see Echeverría Echeverría 2016). This is an example of how the coloniality of power persists in Campesinas lives. It is important to note here that younger generations do not conceptualise the countryside as a space that is inherently disempowering. Rather, they maintain that it is the historically embedded social and economic relationships of marginalisation that have left them without opportunities (the CMP). The few young people who have decided to stay in rural areas have sought new forms of ‘neoliberal’ work in the flower (Toca) or tourism (Minca) industries in order to improve their economic capital. Violeta, from Toca, worked in the flower industry, and hoped to continue to enjoy a rural life into the future. As she chose her favourite photos from a collaborative collated portfolio for the exhibitions, she said: ‘I mean, because, to be honest … I identify with all of these [photos], because I lived my first fifteen years in the countryside … because I like it very much. Personally, if God gives me life and license and the Virgin allows me, I want to have a house in the countryside’. Across the women I encountered veredeando, there was an underlying heartfelt and body-land connection to the countryside. However, most of them also expressed the view that it was not economically tenable. As Sara said: Sara:

Well, I really like the countryside … Right now, you cannot live out of there, but in the future, I would like to have a farm. Maybe not as an economic investment, but more like for leisure because it is not like I do not like it. What happens is that we need to leave the countryside to find economic

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opportunities, because if the countryside life was good I would like it. Notably, all women were passing on knowledge to future generations, including the difficult conversations of experiencing generational inequalities, and the ways forward to contest these. Sara:

Yes, of course. It is our roots. It comes from our crib, and you improve over time, because of the education … So what happens is that when you learn too much about what you need, because of education, then you would not just conform and stay in the countryside … I mean, you have to give them [children] an education, a career, not only to get better work … but to know how to defend themselves in life … To teach them [children] to say, “I have this and I know my rights, and I am able to defend myself in society”.

Significantly, there was a shared belief that rural ancestral knowledge and pride were important. For instance, in the group interviews, I asked women to explain what they thought characterised a woman from the Sierra. Milena:

Berraca. Resistant to everything that comes her way (laughs). That is it for me. I am not sure for the rest. Margarita: To resist to whatever is coming and what is gone, what comes and goes. Resistance! Jimena: That is how the Minqueña [from Minca] women are. We work in whatever is available. In a later group interview with Andrea’s teenage daughters, it transpired that the belief that women of the Sierra are ‘berracas’ was an intergenerational notion. Although they did not fully dedicate their lives to the countryside or anticipate a future in the Sierra, young women’s beliefs resonated with those of their older women relatives: Laura:

How do you know you are a Campesina?

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How do we know? We just know we are. I mean we know more than the girls from the city. Like they do not know … I mean you learn more how to cook and work. Yes, to work. Of course, like, for example, it is not hard for them to go in the monte, and like that right? Like the ones that live in the city they are scared of going in the monte, they feel like … right? While we are like more confident and maybe in terms of going in the monte and so on … And well because you are kind of used to walking like that around here.

Therefore, the relationality and knowledge of place continues to be passed on and transformed through generations. The herstories of place become subversive epistemic forces for resistance and re-existence.

4.5 Conclusion By taking on the entanglement of conceptual frameworks of the politics of place and the work of intellectuals and activists engaging with decoloniality, I have demonstrated in this chapter that the countryside continues to be a contested space, constructed by heterogeneous experiences of place. In particular, I have revealed how place is constructed relationally, and therefore I have questioned linear narratives of women’s empowerment, which are often embedded in the discourses and actions of colonial feminisms. For example, I have exposed how the home, the kitchen, the garden and the stove are not inherently disempowering for women. At the home garden, Campesina women continue to plant and to grow food for their subsistence, and in support of food security and food sovereignty struggles, subverting a global capitalist system that marginalises peasant economies and livelihoods. In the kitchen and farm, Campesinas build community and pass on knowledge. At the same time, as the domestic space may offer rural women productive possibilities, it is also where patriarchies are entrenched, but also negotiated. This chapter has

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demonstrated that Campesina women in Colombia are responding to machismo in the home with awareness, reflexivity and strategies for re-­ existence. For example, they have addressed unequal gender/labour relations by organising community networks in their veredas, talking with their partners and working collectively. In tracing the trajectories of place through local stories and herstories this chapter explored the multiplicities that constitute the places of the countryside. As I demonstrated, coloniality continues to reproduce in the lives of young rural women who move to the city, as they are employed in precarious conditions and struggle to access quality education. The spatial approach I adopted contributes to the argument that coloniality is a modern phenomenon that concerns not only possessive logics to control territories and land, but also bodies. In spite of the inequalities that rural women face in Colombia due to the CMP, they are not passive or ‘failed subjects’. Indeed Campesina women continue to subvert coloniality, epistemic violences and patriarchies in place through ‘plural ways of making the world’ (Escobar 2015, 450). Importantly, the Campesinas’ stories presented in this chapter align with the testimonies of leaders of rural social movements in Colombia whose proposals involve an emphasis on local autonomy and equity, and a detachment to a neoliberal project that continues to disadvantage their communities (see Chap. 6). In the next chapter, however, I continue to complicate a romantic gaze to rural places, by exploring the violences of the body-land that Campesinas experience in Colombia.

Notes 1. La Violencia was a ten-year civil war between the Conservative and the Liberal parties, which was aggravated with the assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1949) in Bogotá and greatly affected the countryside in the next ten years. 2. A common way to say ‘play around’ in Colombian slang. 3. To chat in WhatsApp. 4. This is contested as Indigenous people from the region have been living in the Sierra for centuries.

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5. A tourist trek that is part of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where Indigenous people live and consider it a sacred place. 6. I refer to young people in this book as teenagers, or the daughters of many women who participated in the research projects. 7. To work in the jornal. 8. A national technical provider for vocational tertiary education.

References Ahmed, Sarah. 2019. ‘I am my own person,’ Women’s Agency Inside and Outside the Home in Rural Pakistan. Gender, Place & Culture: 1–19. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1664420. Bengoa, José. 2003. 25 Años de Estudios Rurales. Sociologías 5 (10): 36–98. Caro, Pamela. 2011. Feminist Perspectives towards Transforming Economic Power. AWID 1: 1–13. https://www.awid.org/publications/feministperspectives-towards-transforming-economic-power-food-sovereignty. Christie, Maria Elisa. 2007. Kitchenspace: Gendered Territory in Central Mexico. Gender, Place & Culture 13 (6): 653–661. https://doi. org/10.1080/09663690601019828. Courtheyn, Christopher. 2017. Territories of Peace: Alter-territorialities in Colombia’s San José de Apartadó Peace Community. The Journal of Peasant Studies 7 (7): 1432–1459. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1312353. Deere, Carmen Diana, and Magdalena León. 2001. Land and Property Rights in Latin America: Empowering Women. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press. Echeverría Echeverría, Rebelín. 2016. Mujeres Indígenas Rurales Trabajadoras Domésticas: Exclusión Social en el Espacio Urbano de Méruda Yucatán. Revista Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 25: 93–110. https://doi.org/10.20983/ noesis.2016.12.7. El Khoury, Ann. 2015. Globalization, Development and Social Justice: A Propositional Political Approach. Oxon: Routledge. Escobar, Arturo. 2015. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durnham: Duke University Press. Kindle edition. Espino, Norma, Pamela Sanchís, Ana Paula Caro, Emilia J. Lopes, Magdalena León, and Martha Lanza. 2012. Alternatives under Construction in Latin America. Development 55: 338–351. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2012.39.

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Fals Borda, Orlando. 2015. Una Sociología Sentipensante para América Latina. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Forero Álvarez, J., ed. 2010. El Campesino Colombiano: Entre el Protagonismo Ecónomico y el Desconocimiento de la Sociedad. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Gargallo Celentani, Francesca. 2014. Feminismos Desde Abya Yala. Ideas y Propocisiones de las Mujeres de 607 Pueblos en Nuestra América. Ciudad de México: Editorial Corte y Confección. Harcourt, Wendy, and Arturo Escobar. 2005. Women and the Politics of Place. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press. Hocsman, Luis Daniel. 2013. Campesinos y Productores Familiares en el Desarrollo Territorial Rural en Argentina. Paradigmas y Horizontes Políticos, Aportes al Debate. Paper presented at VIII congreso Latinoamericano de Sociologia Rural, Porto Galhinas, Brazil, 15–19 November. Huanacuni Mamani, Fernando. 2010. Buen Vivir/ Vivir Bien: Filosofía, Políticas, Estrategias Regionales Andinas. Lima: Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas. Karl, Robert A. 2017. Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Little, Jo. 2017. Understanding Domestic Violence in Rural Spaces: A Research Agenda. Progress in Human Geography 41 (4): 472–488. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132516645960. Madrid, Gilma, and Terry Lovell. 2007. Working with Flowers in Colombia: The ‘lucky chance’? Women’s Studies International Forum 30 (3): 217–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2007.03.003. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE Publications. Meertens, Donny. 2012. Forced Displacement and Gender Justice in Colombia: Between Disproportional Effects of Violence and Historical Injustice. International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and the Brookings-LSE Project, July n.d. https://ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-BrookingsDisplacement-Gender-Colombia-CaseStudy-2012-English.pdf. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics and Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kindle edition. Molano Bravo, Alfredo. 1987. Violencia y Colonización. Paper presented at the Seminario Internacional de Economía Campesina y Pobreza Rural, Fondo DRI, Bogotá, Colombia.

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Radhakrishnan, Smitha, and Cinzia Solari. 2015. “Empowered Women, Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties.” Sociology Compass 9: 784–802. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12290. Robson, Elsbeth. 2007. The ‘Kitchen’ as Women’s Space in Rural Hausaland, Northern Nigeria. Gender, Place & Culture 13 (6): 669–676. https://doi. org/10.1080/09663690601019869. Rodriguez Castro, Laura, Barbara Pini, and Sarah Baker. 2016. The Global Countryside: Peasant Women Negotiating, Recalibrating and Resisting Rural Change in Colombia. Gender, Place & Culture 23 (11): 1547–1559. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1219322. Stephen, Lynn. 1997. Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below. Austin: University of Texas Press. Suárez, Nelly del Carmen. 2005. Políticas de Mujer Rural en Colombia, Una Aproximación Analítica Desde la Perspectiva de Género. Revista Agronomía 13 (2): 77–93. Teubal, Miguel, and Mariana Ortega Breña. 2009. “Agrarian Reform and Social Movements in the Age of Globalization: Latin America at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century.” Latin American Perspectives 36 (4): 9–20. https://doi. org/10.1177/0094582x09338607. Wardrop, Joan. 2007. Private Cooking, Public Eating: Women Street Vendors in South Durban. Gender, Place & Culture 13 (6): 677–683. https://doi. org/10.1080/09663690601019927. Zapata Olivella, Manuel. 1989. Las Claves Mágicas de América. Bogotá: Plaza y Janes.

5 Violences in the Territories and Body-Lands

5.1 Introduction Figure 5.1 depicts the road that connects the homes of Milena, Delfina, Rosa and Margarita. This road also connects to other places in the vereda such as the local school. In the past, this road also led to a military station. Today, the military station is no longer in use, and has been replaced by a natural reserve for the world-famous variety of endemic bird species of the Sierra. On the other side, the road connects to the main road that leads to Minca’s town centre and Santa Marta, the capital city of the state of Magdalena. On different occasions, I sat by this road in Margarita and Milena’s house. Indeed, people who pass by often use both of their houses as a resting point. Margarita had a small store in front of her house, which is seen in Fig. 5.1 on the left. Up the road is Milena’s house. Milena always offered tinto while we talked on rain-soaked afternoons, which were a common occurrence during my time in the Sierra. On one particular day, after talking about the armed actors (military, paramilitary and FARC-EP) who used to transit the road and walk towards households or the bush in the vereda, I made the following journal entry: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Rodríguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4_5

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Fig. 5.1  A photo of the road taken from Margarita’s house during a rain-soaked afternoon

She [Milena] says that the biggest problems were with the paracos [paramilitary] … Milena and a local visitor talk about how they [armed actors] used to come into the house and ask her to make lemonade, soup or other things. How they used to send their teenage daughters to the monte1 when they were coming because they were afraid. How there was el carro de la muerte that used to pick up people and disappear them. They laugh but they also say that they were cagados2 all the time because it was very scary. It was them against a group of armed men.

In the onces Milena provided further explanation of the situation: Milena: Well, horrible mija because sometimes those cars will go by and they were full and you were always thinking, “Who are they going to take this time?” That was horrible … And because you lived by the road, and you had your children. You know how that is … I would not like to remember that!

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I remember Milena pointing out to the road where the carro de la muerte would pass and to the bush where they would send their teenage daughters to hide. Both excerpts bring to light that, in place, there were always actions to mitigate the violent effects of the armed conflict in women’s body-lands. These effects were immediate and elicited immense fear. They also reveal the complex and unenviable positioning of women as carers for armed personnel in a militarised and patriarchal context. On another day, as I accompanied Milena while she was working the jornal in a nearby house, she told me about her husband’s murder at the hands of the paramilitary fourteen years ago. He was coming up from Santa Marta in a truck with their thirteen-year-old daughter when they were stopped by the paramilitary and he was shot. When the paramilitary noticed that he was still alive they cut his throat in front of his daughter. The family was able to recover the body and transport it back to the vereda the same day. Fearing for her life and that of her five children, Milena packed a few things and left with her offspring for Santa Marta. They were away for more than four months waiting for the danger to subside. In a group interview, she also talked about this incident: Milena: Because from all of the ones that are here [women], the one that went through (Milena cries), something that I never expected was when my husband … so you never forget. And you can say that you are happy and all of that, but there are moments that you would like to have your husband because it is very tough. Because when you are taught to be with your husband, that is very hard to go to a meeting and know that … that happened to me … So I would go to a meeting or a party or something like that, and everyone goes with their husband … So look that is one of the most horrible things that can be in this world! The tactics of terror used in the armed conflict have been the subject of extensive discussion in Colombia (see Reyes Posada 2009; Grupo de Memoria Histórica 2013). Milena’s story is not an isolated case. It brings to light how violence, dispossession, displacement, fear, widowhood and abuse are felt in the body, as the first territory, and as part of the land that armed actors have occupied and terrorised.

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In this chapter, I illustrate how violences are felt in women’s body-­ lands, not only due to the armed conflict, but also in relation to the dispossession of rural territories through, for example, colonial practices of tourism and of new-export crops. Overall, this chapter  complicates notions of violence as merely emerging from war and focuses on its presence in territories and body-lands of Campesina women in Colombia. In the following chapter I also make these connections to the experiences of the organised Indigenous and Black women in the country. Within these different forms of violence I explore how social and economic processes are felt and embodied in the place-meaning processes of Colombian Campesinas. In rural Colombia, these forms of violence are marked by the historical struggle for land that has resulted in human rights violations, displacement, dispossession and violent confrontations. Moreover, I explore the gendered dimensions of experiencing the continuum of violence in the body-land that encompasses all ‘ambits of life’, even after the apparent end of the armed conflict with the FARC-EP (Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres 2013, 17–22). It is important to reiterate here that land and territory are not simply physical spaces, but have histories, feelings, lives and memories. They encompass embodied experiences, and power relations between human and non-human actors. In this chapter, when recalling the armed conflict stories, I mainly focus on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. In contrast to other parts of Colombia, Toca has been relatively immune to the armed conflict, largely because, unlike the northern and western regions of Boyacá (e.g. Puerto Boyacá), it does not connect to key regions of armed conflict such as Casanare and Arauca. This means that the town has been of limited strategic importance to insurgent groups (ACNUR 2003–2007). In summary, there is a sense of continuity in the history of Toca’s territory, as it has not been dramatically disrupted by violence wrought by the armed conflict. Thus, I present the stories of violence in Toca which are better illustrated through the territorial struggles between the local Campesinx population and the flower industries.

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5.2 The Armed Conflict The most prevalent debates that concern the analysis of violence in the Colombian countryside have focused on the armed conflict amongst the FARC-EP, the paramilitary, the Colombian army and other allies which lasted over fifty years (see Reyes Posada 2009). As argued earlier, in Colombia, violence persists despite the 2016 signature of the peace accord between the government and the largest insurgent group, FARC-EP. This is, for example, evident in the announcement by the FARC-EP leader Iván Márquez in September 2019 who, alongside a small group of dissidents, returned to the armed struggle following President Ivan Duque’s lack of compliance of the 2016 peace accord (see Semana 2019). While comprehensively reviewing the current situation of the Colombian armed conflict is outside the scope of this book, this is a topic that I cannot escape as it is central to the country’s collective territorial experiences. Karl (2017) argues that historically violence and peace have been central to the construction of Colombia’s local, regional and national identity. Our history is a reflection of ‘how societies seek to move beyond collective violence, and how that search molds notions of belonging—local, regional, and national—as well as understandings of the past’ (Karl 2017, 2). Indeed, the armed conflict’s body-land experiences of Campesinas in the Sierra emerged in the stories I collected about women’s politics of place. As Milena explained, in reflecting on the aftermath of the armed conflict between the FARC-EP and other armed actors in the Sierra: ‘Lo único que queda son historias [what remains are the stories]’. Thus, there is political importance in reconstructing the herstories of the body-land of Colombian rural women in which, despite their resistances, there continues to be a continuum of violence. In the context of the peace process, the reconstruction of historical memory, with a focus on the experiences of women, has been central to the actions of many organisations and groups in the country3 (see, for example, Gallego Zapata et al. 2015). I now turn to those stories I collected in the Sierra.

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Margarita recalled a similar confluence of body–territory loss as enunciated by Milena. She recounted her move from another vereda, as a result of the armed conflict in conversation with Rosa: Margarita: I moved from [the original vereda] because I could not stand it anymore. Like I told you, I came here to see what was going on in my head because I could not stand it anymore. So it was around me, not like inside my house but around my house. There were very tough things happening and that affects you. You know why? Because all of those families are like family to you. Others are friends of many years! So that affects you, but that is how we have to deal with war, and see it pass. And God takes care of us and keeps us here. But it is hard. You don’t forget that. You don’t! Rosa: I mean they are marks that are never erased. The pain and fear that women expressed in the onces resonated across the stories I heard in the Sierra. In another group interview, Antonia stated the following: Antonia:

It was very scary because it was scary to talk. I mean like, for example, a group will pass by over here and they would ask for a hen and you would give it to them. And then if another group arrived you also had to give it to them because you needed to be like, I mean like in a straight line, not here or there. The people who were in favour of a certain group were the ones who died, while if you were in the margin they would not mess with you. I mean they still scared us.

The power of illegal armed actors like the army, the paramilitary and the guerrilla over women’s body-land was immense during the armed conflict periods and has had deep consequences in the Colombian territories. These excerpts illustrate how women’s bodies experience this fear in place, at the home and on the farm, and how this affects the social fabric of their communities. How each death deeply affected the communities further shows how it is imperative to take into account the intimate and affective relationship that exists between the body and the land

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in the actions of peace and memory reconstruction of the Colombian armed conflict. These body–land connections become important to those who, like Margarita and Milena, have experienced forced displacement and dispossession of the body-land. While Milena decided to return to her land, millions of Colombians have not done so. Forced displacement has been a tactic of war used by armed groups to secure new territory, and in doing so gain power over the land and the bodies inhabiting that land (Balcells and Steele 2016). Colombia has the second largest number of forcibly displaced people in the world at eight million (UNHCR 2018). The Martinez family is part of this statistic as Campesinxs colonos, coming from Santander during the La Violencia period (1948–1958) (see Molano Bravo 1987; Karl 2017). After this period, the new generations of the Martinez family were also forcibly displaced by the FARC-EP, military and paramilitary conflict during the 1990s. Despite the fact that they had lived in Santa Marta for most of their lives, the Martinez women still identify as Campesinas and care deeply for their farmland and territory. Nieves Martinez is the communal leader of her vereda, even though she does not live there permanently. During the group interview, all of the Martinez women attending recalled a happy and peaceful childhood that was suddenly disrupted by violence: Bianca:

We grew up in a time that was very healthy, because the Sierra, as such, is a settlement of Santandeareanos,4 people that came fleeing the violence and made their homes there. And it was very peaceful. It was a haven of peace, despite the poverty, the lack of education, and well of the lack of services … It was very healthy and, at any time, in the night you could go to the neighbours and they would welcome you. Then, the moment arrived in which they knocked the door and you wanted to die because the guerrilla was there.

The Martinez women’s second experience of displacement occurred when the guerrilla forces killed one of their brothers in 1991. From that year, the family was threatened by different armed actors as they owned a large amount of land. In this period, the number of murders in the community increased dramatically. Over time, most of the Martinez family relocated to Santa Marta.

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I mean it was a horrible thing because when the issue of the armed conflict was terrible we had our brother murdered. And the day that he was killed it was a thing like it had no explanation. Like you do not know how that happened, with that pain that we felt and when we came to bury him … Daniela and Bianca were teachers and I was a nurse nearby … and we had to work knowing that those people were all over the region. And then the men [brothers] all left and we were left alone there. And it was horrible. For my mother that was very hard. The death of my brother and for my father—due to that my father died. He got sick because he really felt that. And he was grieving and he never did a party again. Poverty was left after that.

As people who have been forcibly displaced the Martinez family brought their embodied experiences of their trauma to new places, in this case, the city of Santa Marta. In the excerpt Gloria notes how the women of the Martinez family continued to inhabit the territory and contribute to their community’s social fabric as their brother escaped the threat of violence. Thus, the women’s feelings of fear, grief and trauma were embodied and felt in place, in the territory. Observing the gendered impact of displacement in Colombia, anthropologist Donny Meertens (2012) has argued that women struggle more with the rupture of community and familial relationships. She contends that once fissures occur in women’s networks, they have issues adapting to the new urban spaces and experience poverty. This contention was given voice in the onces with the Martinez women. Gloria talked about her family’s experience of adapting to a new urban context when they moved to Santa Marta: Gloria:

And then we slowly adapted to the city and we got jobs doing this and that. Each one of us knew something but we did not know how to look for work in the city. And we were corronchos,5 like they say, and yes, because for the Campesinx to move to the city is hard. The Campesino is not used to the cities, like the man of the city is not used to the countryside. They mess up because they do not know what to do and that

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happens to the Campesino as well when they arrive to the city … And as everyone was looking for the city to sustain themselves and be safe you would look for family members that could help you. And everyone was doing that. All of the people that were displaced. It was horrible. Despite the challenges, the Martinez family refused to sell or leave their lands. They eventually returned to the countryside at the beginning of this century, and today continue to farm coffee while living safely in the city of Santa Marta. Due to the family’s social and economic mobility, they were able to retain a connection to the land and territory, while avoiding reliving the trauma. Women talked about a responsibility they had for their land and territory. Laura: Bianca: Gloria: Laura: Bianca:

And have you ever thought about selling your land? Not me. Me neither. (They all agree shaking their head) Why do you think it is important? Because I think that what we are seeing now is a lot of foreigners are taking those places. And the Sierra is such an important thing worldwide. And the oxygen over there, the water, the Sierra is the heart of the world.

The actions of the Martinez family to this date demonstrate place-­ based resistances to the various forms of violence present in the Colombian territories. Moreover, Bianca’s quotation introduces another form of violence present in the territory and body-land of the rural population: that is, the physical, symbolic, epistemic, structural violence brought by territorial dispossession due to neoliberal logics of foreign investment embedded in the project of ‘development’ (Kothari et al. 2019). This is explored further in the following section through two case studies: one of dispossession in Toca due to the flower agroindustries and one of foreign tourism and conservation under ‘green pretexts’ in the Sierra.

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5.3 Territorial Dispossession of the Body-Land Territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala, which focused on extractive practices of the body-land of Indigenous territories (Cabnal 2010). Such colonial practices are still evident in neoliberal logics of development experienced, for example, by rural populations in the Global South. In rural localities in the Global South there has been a historical experience of dispossession through the presence of mining, agroindustries, new-export crops and foreign conservation initiatives in the territories. Cabnal (2010, 23) notes that in the modern period, ‘[t]he historical process of oppression against nature and its goods is linked with the current neoliberal system’s extractivism, that in its vision of Western development pretends to “improve the life of the peoples” with strategies of participation and inclusivity in extractivism labour, which claims to improve the conditions of poverty’. In both the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and in Toca in the Colombian Andes, I witnessed the processes of territorial dispossession embedded in the pretexts of development and conservation, and its violent effects. In the Sierra, it was through the expansion of a foreign conservation/tourism initiative, and in Toca, through the expansion of the agroindustry of flowers for export. Here, I focus on the stories that illustrate how territorial dispossession is lived and felt and thereby demonstrate its nuances and its tensions (see also Rodriguez Castro forthcoming). These stories are embedded in a politics of place, in which Campesinx populations are not passively being oppressed but are rather resisting and negotiating within these processes. Indeed, territorial dispossession ‘presupposes and element of coloniality’ (Quijano and Ennis 2000, 533). 

5.3.1 Toca In Toca, the marks of neoliberal development are manifest in the flower company tents that are now part of the landscape as seen in the background in Fig. 5.2. Locally grown flowers are housed on site until mature, then trucked by refrigerated transport to Bogotá for export to multinational supermarket chains. Women encompass the majority of workers in

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Fig. 5.2  View from Ana Maria’s farm in Toca. Flower tents are seen in the background

the agroindustries of the flower companies in town. This means that, as a result of neoliberal expansion, Campesinas in the town of Toca have made a transition into the remunerated work of these industries. At the same time, many flower industry workers in town have sold their lands and moved to the town centre, resulting in the dispossession of their land tenure for farming, as forms of extractive labour and proletrisation of the peasantry emerge (see Fals Borda 2015). Through the logics of the coloniality of gender, mainstream discourses around new-export crops have produced narratives in which women are positioned either as empowered through neoliberal economic logics of investing in poor women as a ‘win-win’ unproblematic situation between the neoliberal market and their empowerment (see Daily 2019) or as mere victims of these new industries (see Radhakrishnan and Solari 2015). Gargallo Celentani (2014, 44–45) has elaborated upon the former, asserting that the logics of white capitalism and colonial feminisms, which have assumed that gender equality is premised on access to paid work, ignore the intersections of class, ethnicity and race in the lives of

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rural women in the Global South. Despite the prevalence of discourses of empowerment/disempowerment concerning the lives of rural peasant women and paid work, the stories from Toca demonstrate that women are neither inherently empowered nor disempowered through employment in the agroindustries, but rather that they negotiate within these spaces in conflicting ways. It took me several weeks to obtain access to the flower companies in Toca despite my contacts with local landlords and managers of large flower companies in the region.6 Refusal was explained by reference to the busyness of the period (January–March), given that the Western Valentine’s Day celebration was approaching, and that there were large orders to fill. I was also informed that I needed to talk to the senior manager who lived in the nearby city. While this was difficult as he only came to Toca intermittently, I did initiate contact, but he did not return my calls. The fact that the manager was located in a distant urban environment exemplifies Woods’ (2007) observation that the neoliberal context of rural development increasingly scales up authorities from the rural populations, which can result in long bureaucratic processes that impact on workers’ agency. As I continued to struggle to overcome the obstacles to accessing the largest flower corporation in town, I met a young man at the local transport service7 who said he knew of a smaller flower company run by a couple who lived in Toca. He took me there, and this is where I met Diosa and the group of women who became part of the project in 2016. The images in Fig. 5.3 were taken during the days I spent with Diosa and her family who at the time, lived in a small unit in the town’s centre. During this period, I followed Diosa’s daily routine, which included farm work, care work, domestic work and waged work. When Diosa finished cooking lunch, she and her husband helped their daughters get ready. Diosa and her husband left to work in the flower fields around 5:30 a.m. and dropped their youngest daughter at the babysitter on the way. Their older daughters (aged 10, 11 and 12) made their own breakfast and went to school. When Diosa arrived at the flower fields she was greeted by her workmates, who she referred to as friends. As the day went by, and over their work and lunch break, women shared their personal experiences, pleasures, joys, fears and anxieties. When Diosa finished work at around 3 p.m., she often biked for 15 minutes to her elderly parent’s farm, to

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Fig. 5.3  Photos taken during Diosa’s daily routine

help them with the chores of milking and gathering the harvest. During the onces conducted with Diosa and her friends/co-workers, they explained that it was important to them that their work relationships were akin to family: Carolina: Where we are, is just us, well there are people from other places, but the majority are people who know each other. Because let’s say in [the largest flower company in town] there are people from Tunja, Siachoque and other places, so the environment at work is not the same. There [workplace], we treat each other as family. It is a very pleasant environment, and that makes life happier. It’s not like just going to work and that’s it. (The rest of the women nod) Regardless of the challenges of employment, including the long working days, women drew on support and care from their colleagues in the same way as they would from their family members. In establishing

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and maintaining work relationships, which are similar to familial networks, they demonstrate how informality assisted them in adapting and recalibrating their incorporation into agroindustrial labour. They brought the values, meanings and beliefs of being Campesinas to the neoliberal workplace. Despite their lack of time, given the length of their shifts in the flower industry, their family and community networks remained strong. These networks  were crucial to their well-being and extra economic income. For instance, women often asked for permission if they had to leave work to attend school meetings or to address urgent family matters, and as the supervisors were often part of their networks, they did whatever they could to grant them permission. Isabel and Violeta were caring supervisors who had strong friendships with employees, including Diosa, who often invited them over to her parent’s farm for Sunday lunch or for a trip to the ‘countryside’ as they both lived in the town centre. Thus, women entering the workforce have not broken down the cultural importance of family and community networks. Rather, such structures sustain their families’ livelihoods in the everyday. This was highlighted as women explained that they shared responsibilities such as cooking, farm work and care work with other family members, colleagues and friends. In turn, these livelihoods sustain the success of agroindustries such as the flower industry (see Bair and Werner 2011). Despite the accounts of Diosa and her friends, it is important to be reflexive about the way in which we conceptualise agency, particularly in light of the scholarship on female employment in the Latin American flower companies. Friedemann-Sánchez (2012) observes that, despite undertaking paid work in the flower industry, rural women still have traditional roles as mothers and caregivers, suggesting that women have not replaced their identities as mothers for that of workers, but rather combined them (see also Madrid and Lovell 2007). These findings resonate with the experiences I collected of local Tocan women whose workloads have also increased due to the patriarchies in which their everyday lives are embedded. Most of the women arrive home to cook for their families, care for children and clean the house, despite the physical and mental stress of working long hours. Notably, the women from the flower industry were very reflexive about patriarchal violence and  traditional gender roles and negotiated with

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these in their everyday lives by asking their husbands to contribute to the housework, asserting their economic independence or divorcing abusive partners. As she thought about her life since she entered the flower industry, Diosa said: Diosa: And because you get used to having your money since you are young, so you are not like … you cannot stand to get told off at home, if for example you did not contribute for the groceries, but no! I can also contribute and give … To some extent it is because of the machismo. … There is this idea that the woman needs to cook, but we have had our liberation. Now we manage our own money however we want. Although there is still considerable work to do to reduce the triple shift8 (Suárez 2005) that permeates the lives of rural women in Colombia, the previous excerpt demonstrates that the position of women is not one that is homogeneous, or inevitably subjugated. Tocan women did not narrate stories as victims of patriarchal structures, but rather as agents negotiating with and resisting such structures. So, despite women retaining a sense of connection to peasant values, they are also contesting the machismo that is traditionally embedded in the Campesinx society. In this respect, the Campesinas’ struggles for liberation resonate with those of many Indigenous women who, as communitarian feminists explain, must challenge structural patriarchy from society, and also within their communities, while confronting territorial dispossession and other colonial practices affecting their body-lands (see Cabnal 2010; Paredes 2017). While mainstream accounts of neoliberal globalisation in the countryside would suggest that rural women in Colombia are at the behest of the global flower industry, evidence demonstrates that they also utilise the industry to their own advantage and then leave when their goals are met. These goals may be to achieve their own economic independence, access health cover, overcome periods of poverty or save some money to raise their children. My sense of how women understand their involvement in the flower companies in Toca is that they use their employment in this arena as a temporary solution. Constanza and Ana explain in two different instances in the group interviews:

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Laura:

Why did you decide to leave after 15  years? What happened in your life? Constanza: Because my children grew up and my goal was to give them the possibility of studying until 11th grade. I said from then on they are going to have to keep going by themselves. Ana: Yes, and for example in the company, you get sick and you get sick leave and can sleep on that day. While in the countryside you get sick and the stove needs to get started and you need to go and look after the cows. Nowadays Constanza works the jornal whenever she needs to and stays at home working in the house and the garden. On the other hand, Ana has raised and educated her children, who are now at university, through working in the flower industry. After they finished high school, she started Compro Agro the onion-processing business in town. She also teaches at the local school in her vereda. Thus, as Sofia also explained, women made decisions about working in the flower industry on the basis of their own individual needs and situations. Laura: Sofia:

So how do you make the decision of okay, I need to go and work in the flower company? Well, you look at whatever is best, where you see that you will get more money, because obviously, right now finding anything is difficult, so what can you do? Wherever you get something and that is it.

Indeed, in rural Colombia people still rely on the jornal or other informal income to alleviate everyday economic stress. This is due to the consequences of severe climate change (e.g. extensive drought), the results of social inequality brought by neoliberal restructuring and the government’s abandonment of rural Colombia (see Rodriguez Castro et  al. 2016; Rodriguez Castro 2020). Altogether, Toca’s case study demonstrates how practices of women’s inclusion into the paid workforce are not inherently effective in reducing poverty in the long term. These practices are embedded in colonial logics

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and a neoliberal development project that allow for the labour of the rural poor to remain cheap, while perpetuating precarious living and working conditions. Although mainstream rural development literature might not construct this as violence, I argue that these practices are indeed violence embedded in dispossession logics of the body-land.

5.3.2 Sierra Similarly, in Colombia, Diana Ojeda and other critical geographers (see Devine and Ojeda 2017) have asserted that tourist mobilities can be linked to dispossession, environmental devastation and different forms of violence. These contentions were evident in Minca’s town centre and also in the more remote veredas of the Sierra. The Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta mountain range is home to many endemic bird species. Furthermore, the Sierra’s biosphere reserve status by UNESCO gives the landscape great environmental value. The apparent peace, brought by the demobilisation of armed actors from the territories of the Sierra, has seen increased interest in land by foreign investors. Such investors are attracted by cheap prices, which have been at the expense of a dispossessed local population. Then, on the basis of ‘green pretexts’, investors have attained state support for neoliberal tourism and conservation (Ojeda 2012, 357; Gascón and Ojeda 2014; Devine and Ojeda 2017). Here I document a case study of several adjacent veredas of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Although the armed conflict has ceased on the road, as depicted in Fig. 5.1, tourist mobilities are now visible as foreigners pass by Milena’s house in four-wheel-drive cars to visit an internationally owned natural reserve for birdwatching. The increasing presence of this foreign-owned natural reserve and tourists travelling to birdwatch at the top of the mountains (literally) elicited several concerns, which were discussed in the onces: Nieves: That [natural reserve] is destructive. Noema: But let me tell you something, the ones that have moved up over there is beneficial for them. And just for them because they are not helping the Sierra, or the community, or the young people from the community.

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[The natural reserve] is damaging whatever is left. They are building cabins that are one million pesos (US$330) for the night.

In informal conversations with the rural population of the community of the Sierra, people remarked that the establishment of the reserve had resulted in the privatisation of land. They also commented that the reserve has contaminated the water sources that originate at the top of the mountain. This demonstrates the ways ecotourism and neoliberal conservation practices cause environmental degradation and the privatisation of natural resources. It also shows how local populations are dispossessed for ‘green purposes’ of biodiversity and conservation. In Colombia, the state has supported and allowed these processes of dispossession, as historically the Campesinx population has been conceptualised as environmental predators (Ojeda 2012). I was afforded another perspective on the reserve by those who were charged with its care. I came to know them as they often drove by Milena’s and Margarita’s houses. In conversations with me, they talked about the reserve’s social responsibility of involving the local community (this is also stated on their website). However, over time, it became evident that the reserve managers did not adequately support the local population, and often ended up creating additional pressures. For example, one of their projects involved asking local women to host foreign tourists under the reserve’s conditions and standards. This was problematic as women said they tried to host foreign tourists, but the expected standards were hard to achieve. Margarita told me they required them to have a certain quality of plates and bed sheets that were too expensive. Importantly, these are ways in which tourism sells people as objects of consumption and undermines the cultural capital of the local communities (see Devine and Ojeda 2017)—a common colonial practice of dehumanisation. At the same time, tourism becomes highly commoditised, with increasing demands for the hosts (Brandth and Haugen 2011, 2014). It places the burden of tourism on women, creating expectations for them to perform traditional roles in the domestic sphere without proper remuneration, as this is expected and not considered to be work (see Brandth and Haugen 2011). Overall, this type of tourism can

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become a form of symbolic, epistemic and structural violence that ‘others’ and dehumanises local inhabitants and increases women’s workloads (Devine and Ojeda 2017). The Campesina women closest to the reserve were also involved in a crafts project, making jewellery with local seeds to sell at the reserve’s shop. One afternoon, I attended a meeting in Margarita’s house with the woman overseeing one of these crafts projects. At the meeting, it became evident that there were very high-quality standards required of the products women were being asked to produce. Women often had difficulty meeting these standards, particularly as they had limited training and time. As a result, many of the products were returned, and women were not paid for their work. As a means to meet cumbersome quality provisions, women in the vereda with more advanced skills in craft sometimes initiated gatherings to assist with the meeting of standards, but these initiatives did little to challenge broader inequalities. This was not an isolated case; the women of the Sierra often stated that they were tired of the ‘proyecticos’ (small projects) that visitors and foreigners imposed on their communities. This statement further demonstrates that Campesina women who have had past experiences with the proyecticos are aware of the exploitative nature of these. Having had many conflicting experiences over time with the reserve, the women from the adjacent veredas were very reflexive about the forms of marginalisation that new foreign tourist/conservation mobilities brought to their lives. Just as Campensina women in Toca used the flower industry, they sought to utilise the tourism industry for their own gains and on their own terms. They did so by conceptualising tourism as an ‘alternative way of work’, rather than the ‘only way possible’. Importantly, they were proposing their own ideas of tourism that aligned with their cosmovisions and experience. Rosa explained this eloquently in the group interview: Rosa: I always knew tourism and I know how it can be, but here we have an example, we see it as an alternative and not like we would live off tourism or that we are now. This is something that we have decided to put in our heads … Back then it was like the boom. And I said, “Well as long as people are still doing their home gardens and not building a huge infrastructure, to do the

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super room [for tourists]” … Because the idea for example, of a foreigner or a person that has lived all their lives in the city is that they want to see a Campesino. Do you know what I mean? Like how a garden is built, how a house of mud is made … All of that! … The idea is that the tourism does not become a vice, but simply an alternative of work. So people continue here normally, working in their farms, and in their plots of land, planting the berries, the plantain, the cassava … There was a time when we started to accommodate people in a normal room the same way we lived and if it was not good enough for them. Well, they could leave to a hotel! You need to know you are going to a Campesino house. You are going to a place where you will cook or see someone cooking in the charcoal and wood stove. And you will see how an arepa is made from scratch. Rosa’s quotation brings to light the often-ignored place-based forces that shape global processes such as global tourism mobilities. Although tourism was mainly seen as problematic for the region, when the local population had some ownership over these processes they saw it differently. Moreover, by placing farming practices and cultural values at the centre of their tourism activities, women destabilised colonial practices and discourses embedded in the new forms of tourism brought to the region. For example, Antonia had transformed her farmhouse into a hostel, while continuing to farm coffee on the land she owned: Antonia:

So far I think it has been very good because a lot of people come. And at least you learn to communicate with people from other countries. And the good thing is that they leave money. The other thing is that you need to know who you are going to welcome in your hostel because I cannot welcome everybody because I get scared. I mean they are always recommended. They call me and they come r­ ecommended by someone. And I like that I have had a good run with the tourists.

Antonia had the economic resources to promote her hostel and to choose the tourists she hosted. Therefore, she had agency by administering the hostel and receiving the remuneration herself, which, in turn,

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gave her more influence on the farm. Notably, this region of the Sierra in 2016 still had limited road access, which had an impact on the flow of tourist mobilities. As the advancement of a paved road project develops and reaches these veredas, it is likely that more dramatic changes will occur, as is happening in Minca’s town centre and nearby regions in the Colombian Caribbean.

5.3.3 The Town of Minca Minca’s town centre is easily accessible by bike, taxi or car from Santa Marta. It houses an increasing number of hostels that promote an experience of ‘connection to nature’, as well as infrastructure common to other Western hostels. Its most famous hostel, Casa Elemento, offers a giant hammock that overlooks the Sierra’s pristine landscape. It also has a menu that boasts a variety of Western food like ‘veggie burgers’. In Minca, the impact of tourism was palpable. Tourists arrived daily in the town’s main street. In one of the town’s hostels, I met a European man who, after a week of being in Minca, had decided to buy land. Indeed, foreigners owned most of the famous hostels. In Minca, these modes of (neo)colonialism intersected with other forms of violence as a result of the presence of seemingly demobilised groups, who still controlled the flux of cocaine in the region and the transport. Once while heading to Minca from the remote veredas in a construction truck, we were stopped and told that this was the last day trucks would be allowed through until the construction company paid the vacuna. This is a bribe for armed actors and required from civilians seeking to transit the territory, build roads or own businesses. Devine and Ojeda (2017) explain that in Colombia, tourism functions by rendering invisible local experiences of violence. After spending some time in Minca, it became evident that the territory was still controlled by illegal actors. These people decided who was entitled to offer the famous mototaxi9 service, transit the roads and, in some cases, sell cocaine to tourists. As a result of this situation, young men from all over the region saw the value in becoming mototaxistas. Local women explained this situation to me:

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You know what has also changed? The mentality of the youngsters. Firstly, because they have lost themselves in drug addiction. Unfortunately, they want easy money and people are like that … And really, it is all about saving money. But the youngsters do not want to get out of the mototaxi because they handle money every day. And then there are young women who earn a living easily as well. They do not want to work. They do not have to make an effort, or sweat for it … And that has also changed the mentality of everyone here. Like in the issue of selling land, they offer you 10 million pesos (US$3300) and they think you are the millionaire of the world. And then people go and sell their land that is worth much more than that. So that has happened, that the mentality has changed here. Yes, that’s right.

All women in the urban and rural region of Minca echoed concerns about how colonial forms of tourism were affecting the younger generations. As Bianca said, ‘before the youngsters were very healthy and now there are drugs because the tourism comes and damages the community’. These narratives demonstrate how experiences in place are enmeshed in global processes of colonial dispossession. In summary,  apart from the evident economic extractivism wrought by tourist and foreign conservation mobilities, it is also epistemic violence that challenges the well-being of communities and the younger generations. In the Sierra, the resilience of the Indigenous and some of the Campesinx population is palpable as they construct their own politics of place embedded in autonomous claims of the body-land.

5.4 Conclusion In November 2018, during the ‘International Symposium on the Global Countryside’, which gathered various scholars working on the European Research Council ‘Global Rural Project’ (see Global-Rural n.d.) from

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Brazil, Colombia, Chile, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, China, Australia and New Zealand, I was asked to talk about global rural futures and setting a research agenda. In thinking through this topic, I argued for the importance of considering violence when we discuss global rurality, if we are ever to take seriously how the coloniality of power operates in place. That is, violence in its continuum, and not only when referring to armed conflicts and wars present in rural territories of the Global South. Indeed in the narratives emerging from the Global North, the different forms of violence, especially those affecting rural women, continue to be underrepresented despite the fact that violence has a historical presence in many rural  places, especially in the Global South. Michael Woods (2007), who is one of the leaders of this international project, had argued in an earlier work that one of the characteristics of the ‘global countryside’ is that it is a constantly contested space. He noted that due to the multifaceted nature of globalisation tensions can arise in different ways in rural localities. However, as I have argued in this chapter, we need to analyse this conceptualisation beyond ‘contestation’ and ‘tensions’ and describe what is occurring as the advancement of colonial logics of extraction and disposession embedded in the project of neoliberal globalisation; that is, the physical, symbolic, epistemic, structural violence embedded in the dispossession of the body-­ land, and in the reproduction of poverty and precarious labour. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, Campesinas are subjected to  dispossession and extractivist practices in place that transcend the more visible violences of the Colombian armed conflict, and continue today in other forms in the post–peace accord period (e.g. exploitative tourism and agro-export practices). The territorial and embodied violences experienced in rural Colombia implicate actors, and neoliberal economic development ideologies and policies that are far but felt in place. As scholars committed to understanding rurality in place, while supporting the struggles of the body-land, we must feeling-think and support the dismantling of all forms of colonial violence in the countryside. At the same time, this chapter has contributed to the book’s argument that it is imperative to move on from victim narratives of ‘subaltern’ women (Spivak 1988, 24). In a historical context of colonial dispossession, rural women in Colombia continue to resist and survive in place the

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continuum of violence, while advancing their cosmovisions for equality and dismantling the multiple patriarchies embedded in their lives. As rural places continue to change, Campesina women are creating resistances in place that are addressing the everyday subsistence of their family and communities, while also proposing progressive ideas that contest colonial logics of ‘progress’. They are doing this in relation to gender and labour inequalities, climate change and territorial violence. These place-­ based resistances and negotiations are deeply related to the political agendas of the organised rural social movements led by women in the country, which I will explore in the following chapter.

Notes 1. Approximate translation: ‘bush’. 2. A colloquial expression that relatively translates to being ‘scared shitless’. 3. The reconstruction of historical memory in the country is not unproblematic as, in the context of the ‘post-accord’ period, the government-led construction of memory through the National Centre for Historical Memory has faced deep scrutiny. That is due to the appointment of the Centre’s director, Darío Acevedo, who openly supports Duque’s government. Under Acevedo’s direction there has been a national debate on the militarisation and instrumentalisation of the institutionalised construction of historical memory in the country (see Orozco Tascón 2019). 4. People from the State of Santander in Colombia. 5. Colloquial term used in Colombia to refer to people who do not possess ‘high culture’, are extravagant and dress with ‘bad taste’. 6. I conducted a small project in town in 2013 as outlined in Table 1.1. 7. The local transport service in Toca to the different veredas is made up of informal and privately owned four-wheel drives. Young men who just graduated from high school are usually the drivers. 8. The triple shift encompasses the domestic labour of household chores, the reproductive work of bearing and raising children, and agricultural and farm labour (Suárez 2005). 9. A taxi service on motorbikes offered by the locals in Minca.

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Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South, 1 (3): 533–580. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/23906. Radhakrishnan, Smitha, and Cinzia Solari. 2015. Empowered Women, Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties. Sociology Compass 9: 784–802. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12290. Reyes Posada, Alejandro. 2009. Guerreros y Campesinos: Despojo y Restitución de Tierras en Colombia. Bogotá: Ariel. Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2020. ‘We are Not Poor Things’: Territorio Cuerpo-­ tierra and Colombian Women’s Organised Struggles. Feminist Theory. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1464700120909508. Rodriguez Castro, Laura, Barbara Pini, and Sarah Baker. 2016. The Global Countryside: Peasant Women Negotiating, Recalibrating and Resisting Rural Change in Colombia. Gender, Place & Culture 23 (11): 1547–1559. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1219322. Rodriguez Castro, Laura. forthcoming. Extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia: A decolonial commitment to Campesinas’ politics of place. Feminist Review. Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres. 2013. La Verdad de las Mujeres: Víctimas del Conflicto Armado en Colombia. Bogotá: Diakonia, Institut Catalá International Per La Pau, ONU Mujeres, Oxfam, PCS. Semana, Política. 2019. “El Proceso de Paz Continúa”: Grupo Defendamos la Paz. Semana, August 29. https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/ reaccion-de-defendamos%2D%2Dla-paz-ante-el-anuncio-de-ivanmarquez/629695. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 24–28. London: Macmillan. Suárez, Nelly del Carmen. 2005. Políticas de Mujer Rural en Colombia, Una Aproximación Analítica Desde la Perspectiva de Género. Revista Agronomía 13 (2): 77–93. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 2018. “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018.” Accessed October 3, 2018. https:// www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2018/. Woods, Michael. 2007. Engaging the Global Countryside: Globalization, Hybridity and the Reconstitution of Rural Place. Progress in Human Geography 31 (4): 485–507. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507079503.

6 Territorio Cuerpo-tierra and Colombian Women’s Organised Struggles

6.1 Introduction Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN): At a personal level, there is a personal growth that places you in a dimension where you can make sense of your world and your role in it … The political activity takes you out of an individuality, of thinking of yourself for yourself, as you start recognising yourself in others and their needs … The PCN is my life project and is part of myself, so there are complex personal implications because you put all your energy and effort, but financially you do not get anything. So the majority of the PCN members have to have a job and be activists at the same time.

The Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), was founded in 1993 and is today one of the largest organised groups of Black communities in Colombia. Like many social leaders that I interviewed, the PCN social leader narrated her involvement in the movement from an understanding of her body as deeply connected to collective political action. Within this context, the body as territory experiences various forms of violence, but is also intimately connected to the land, and the struggles to defend life. In this respect, Cabnal (2010, 2016, n.p.) calls for understanding the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Rodríguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4_6

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body as the first territory to recognise historical and structural oppressions and states that to acuerparnos (embody ourselves) is not only for caminar juntas (walking together) but to recognise the oppressions and the victimisation. Indeed, as demonstrated in previous chapters, the body-land of Colombian rural women is at the forefront of various forms of violence. In spite of these marginalisations, from the farm, the vereda and in more organised forms of resistance happening in the territories, Colombian rural women are constructing plural politics of place. In this chapter I engage with Colombian rural women’s organised resistance and re-existence as a means of continuing the projects of decolonial feminisms. To do so I relate Lorena Cabnal’s territorio cuerpo-tierra with in-depth interviews with women leaders of rural social movements and other organisations in Colombia. In the interviews, social leaders denounce violences that are epistemic, systemic, militarised and transcending into all ambits of life. They denounce how the coloniality of power operates in place, and in the territories. At the same time, they propose alternatives for a better life from their own cosmovisions enacting food sovereignty and constructing feminisms from ‘below’. Not only do their narratives highlight the intimate relationship of the body with the land, but I argue that we must follow their lead in order to dismantle the coloniality of power (see Rodriguez Castro 2020). In the final section of this chapter, I explore some of the tensions and hopes in the ongoing post-accord period in Colombia foregrounding the testimonies of social leaders in the pre-accord period. I present social leaders’ testimonies in the context of a particularly important historical moment in the nation—the government’s negotiation of the peace agreement with the FARC-EP—which was under way as I was conducting these interviews in the first half of 2016. In September 2012, after more than 60 years of war, the government of ex-president Juan Manuel Santos started negotiations with the insurgent group. Following the efforts of several community, civilian and political activists from different sectors of the country, the agreement was finalised and ratified on 29–30 November 2016. It came into force on 1 December 2016. The agreement included the assignment of twenty-three different rural zones (called Zonas Veredales Transitorias de Normalización) for the reinsertion of the FARC troops into civilian life. The United Nations

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mission also established eight camps for the disarmament of the troops, which resulted in the submission of more than 7000 weapons (Brodzinsky 2017). Given that the armed conflict has particularly and severely affected rural communities, the peace accord implementation is mainly located in the countryside. In early 2016, we all watched the finalised negotiations occurring in Cuba expectantly. Therefore, at the time of the interviews, social leaders were particularly concerned about the future of their lives and communities. In the interviews, it became clear that there was fear, anguish, hope and uncertainty for the future of the rural territories where different women practised their activism. As I have argued across this book, rural women experience violence in a continuum and rural change in differential ways, given their connection to the territory and body-land. It is also worth reiterating here that these interviews were conducted in the context of a larger project that aimed to understand and forge dialogues with rural Colombian women in 2016 through the epistemologies of sentipensar. Thus, the dialogues forged in these interviews were entangled with my experiences of living, collaborating, veredeando, unlearning with Campesinas in the Andes and in the Sierra. For instance, in Chap. 3, I narrated how the dialogues with social leaders destabilise hegemonic white-mestiza ideas of feminism, as they call out racism, and ground their struggles in addressing their needs in their own terms. From sentipensar, I present social leaders’ testimonies here as a dialogue. Specifically, I narrate the testimonies gathered through seventeen in-­ depth interviews conducted, which included representatives from feminist NGOs such as the Casa de la Mujer, rural grassroots organisations such as the Red de Mujeres del Pacifico Matamba y Guasá, feminist insurgent groups such as Mujer Fariana and the national initiative of the Mesa de Incidencia de Mujeres Rurales de Colombia. The full list of organisations to which social leaders and activists belonged is provided in Table  6.1.1 It highlights the heterogeneity of organised resistances in Colombia which is embedded in ethnic, racial and territorial complexities and histories that are not homogeneous, but rather ‘messy’, conflicting and always changing.

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Table 6.1  Organisations involved in the in-depth interviews Organisation Name

Region

Type of organisation

Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC) Federación Nacional Sindical Unitaria Agropecuaria (Fensuagro) Compro Agro Mesa de Incidencia Política de las Mujeres Rurales Colombianas (Mesa de Incidencia) Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas, Negras e Indígenas de Colombia (ASODEMUC) La Ruta Pacífica de Las Mujeres (Ruta Pacífica) Fundación San Isidro Asociación Nacional de Zonas de Reserva Campesinas (ANZORC) Oxfam Colombia (Oxfam) Mujer Fariana Casa de La Mujer

Transnational

National

Representative of Indigenous, Afro and Campesinx movements Union federation

Toca, Boyacá National

Initiative National collective

National

Association

National

Feminist movement

Boyacá National

Campesinx Foundation Association

Transnational National National

Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá – Timbiqui (Matamba y Guasá) Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia– Amazon (ONIC)

Cauca Pacific of Colombia

Global NGO Feminist insurgent group Feminist non-profit organisation Network or group of organisations

Amazon/ National

Proceso de Comunidades Negras National (PCN) Cundinamarca Federación Departamental de Mujeres Campesinas de Cundinamarca (FEDEMUCC) Federación Nacional de Cafeteros Magdalena/ National Fura Asociación (Fura) Toca, Boyacá

Organisation representing the Indigenous people of Colombia Process Union/federation

Federation non-profit business organisation Local Association

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6.2 Territories and the Body-Land The understanding of territory as a multifaceted, conflictual and relational space was prevalent in the narratives of Colombian women social leaders. Their construction of space, as territory, revealed an embodied connection to the Earth that privileged ancestral knowledge, and to historically grounded struggles to defend life. As expressed by the Campesina leader of Mesa de Incidencia presented earlier in the book, ‘the land with people in it, with activities, collectivity and rights, is called territory’. In further elaborating on this theme the leader of Casa de la Mujer, a long-standing non-profit feminist organisation in Colombia founded in 1982, stressed the heterogeneity of Colombian rural women’s experiences and explained that they had different embodied relationships with the territories: Casa de la Mujer: Well, we understand the territory as complexity. It is a multidimensional look at the space that women inhabit. For example, when we talk about territorial contexts in relation to women, we understand that the conception of space is very different for an Afro, compared to an Indigenous, or to a Campesina woman. Its development has been in accordance to specific cultural and ancestral practices and its relationship to the environment. From the appropriation of that space is that we understand the territory.

Thus, the land and therefore resistance in these rural territories are understood as unique to the ancestral and historical experiences of the body-land in that space. The Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá, a network of women in Timbiquí founded in 1997, represents women who live along the lowlands of the Caucan Pacific, a region where armed conflict, government abandonment and racism are severe (see Asher 2004; Lozano 2016). One of the network’s leaders also reflected on black women’s resistance in their territory: ‘Women continue to be attached to the territory. We are the ones who do the cultural practices, the vecindad2 and the camaraderie’. For illustration, she explained that along the river women have organised to preserve ancestral practices such as traditional medicine and to pass on knowledge through coplas.3

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Alongside the diverse understandings of territory, activists also denounced the violations to their territories and body-lands in the interviews. The ASODEMUC (Campesinxs) and ONIC (Indigenous) representatives were particularly worried about the expansion of national and international neoliberal projects, which were destroying natural resources. In the biodiverse páramo4 region of Sumapaz, in the Andean mountain range, the Campesina leader from ASODEMUC elaborated on the issues her region is facing: ASODEMUC: Well, I was born 53 years ago in Sumapaz, which is a conflict region. So we have always been under the threat of war, even now that we are in negotiations. We are located in the largest humid páramo of the world. We have under our protection an immense water source that supplies South America through two mountain slopes. So, it is no surprise that por mis venas,5 and of many women that are around my age, we have assumed that the public is ours because our parents and grandparents have been political activists. And we are going to have to continue because we have many enemies, and they are not the Colombian government or the local mayor. They are bigger enemies, like multinationals.

Given the environmental importance of the Andean region, people cannot farm in the páramo. As a result, ASODEMUC’s Campesina leader explained that from her perspective and lived experience many women play an important role in conservation and resistance from the territory, since many of their partners undertake other farm and/or labour work in Bogotá or in nearby regions and thus are not as present in the territory. In light of the presence of mining and multinationals in rural territories (e.g. fracking), resistance based on the demand for territorial rights has intensified in the Colombian countryside. In this regard, Cabnal (2010) argues for the importance of looking at the neoliberal processes of extractivism, as coming from a colonial history of dispossession. As illustrated in the previous chapter, dispossession is embedded in the logics of  colonial violence. Thus, the strengthening of territorial struggles becomes important to rural resistance in regions in which the dispossession of the body-land continues.

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6.3 Land Claims and Territorial Struggles Land claims have been a central concern of rural social movements across Latin America and Colombia (Reyes Posada 2009). Here, territorio cuerpo-tierra is useful to understand how women’s relationship to the territory and the body-land operates in place and within the communities’ own cosmovisions. Indeed, it brings to the fore the importance of land access and tenure processes in Colombia, while taking into account diverse experiences of place and of the body-land. The representative of the PCN explains how territorial and land rights are connected with the social movement’s demands: PCN: The territorial rights are connected to the collective land titles of the collective property of the ancestral territories … We struggle to make effective the right to have property over the ancestral territories that we have inhabited. So what [in our claims] we contend that we have a collective property in spite of the land titles that each family has.

This quotation foregrounds the importance of geohistorical approaches to land rights that take into account how communities construct territory ancestrally. For Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific region, an important achievement in their struggles for autonomy has been the processes of collective titling which emerge from their cosmovisions, and which have been part of the process of reparation for communities severely affected by displacement and armed conflict. However, during the interview with representatives of the global NGO Oxfam, which is one of the largest global organisations working closely with rural women’s movements in Colombia, interviewees, who were mestiza women and ‘gender experts’, questioned collective titling, arguing that in a context of patriarchy it may make women invisible. The tensions among the PCN and Oxfam demonstrate how organisations in Colombia problematise and understand women’s access to land differently by, for example, prioritising territorial experiences and ancestral knowledge (PCN), or focusing on institutionalised forms of gender equality (Oxfam). Indeed the access to land of rural peoples in Colombia

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is a complex issue that involves addressing the various forms in which the CMP operates. A representative of Casa de la Mujer explained: Casa de la Mujer: We see a shortcoming in the norm because it does not achieve depth in the historical relationship of rural women to land owning. Because obviously the way women access property is through other people that have a lawful title … The ones that have all the knowledge on the process of possession and land tenure are the men … There is also the psycho-social damage of the victims [of the armed conflict], especially women going back to the territories. The judge might have different ways to interpret and determine whether there was damage to women’s lives … So there is a legal rigidity that sometimes, due to the lack of economic resources, and knowledge about the process, affects women’s access to land.

In light of the historical inequalities Colombian rural women face when attempting to access land, the representative of the insurgent group Mujer Fariana (founded 2013), as well as representatives from other women’s rights organisations, placed the issue on their political agenda as part of the peace accord negotiations in 2016. This was articulated in 2014  in the gender subcommission, which was created as part of the peace negotiation in Cuba. In the interview, Mujer Fariana’s leader explained: Mujer Fariana: In the accord on the integral rural reform and the one on illicit crops it is written that they must guarantee women’s access to land, prioritising their condition as single mothers or widowers. We know that the majority of victims that survived the war in Colombia are women who have lost their land … That is why we propose that women are protagonists in the transformation of the Colombian countryside. So that step-by-step we can close the gap between men and women.

In the context of war and social conflict explained by the representatives of PCN, Oxfam, Mujer Fariana and Casa de la Mujer, there is evidence of the ‘differential ways in which social divisions are concretely enmeshed and constructed by each other’ in organised struggles for land in Colombia (Yuval-Davis 2006, 205). A focus on the historical body-­ land relations of women and their construction of territory reveals these

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‘differential ways’, while challenging the homogenisation of rural women’s struggles. According to the interviewees the historical marginalisation of rural women’s land access is also connected to their body-land experiences. The Campesina representative of the Mesa de Incidencia explained: Mesa de Incidencia: There is an important principle, and it is that the land is like the blood for Campesina women. And so some of us have it more engrained in our hearts, our passions and our work. So if the woman of the countryside does not have her economic independence and the possession of her land, she cannot reclaim herself as a woman, as a wife, as a mother.

This quotation signals the ways in which rural women reclaim themselves, differentially, from the body through their ancestral connection to land and territory, from the pluralidad de los cuerpos (plurality of the bodies) (Cabnal 2016, n.p.). They advance their political struggles blurring the boundaries of their social collectivities (Yuval-Davis 2006), while grounding these in the socio-historic, geographic and affective connections of the body-land through emotions that ‘show us how histories stay alive’ (Ahmed 2014, 202).

6.4 R  esisting Violences as a Struggle of the Territorio Cuerpo-tierra While women are at the forefront of resistance to colonial practices, such as neoliberal development and extractivism, they are also in the frontline of other forms of violence. As illustrated in the previous chapter, rural women in Colombia experience violence in a continuum permeating all ambits of life (Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres 2013; Viveros-Vigoya 2016). In a context of conflict and war, these violences are experienced in dramatic ways in certain territories (CNNRR and IERRI 2009; Reyes Posada 2009). This was an issue addressed by the representative of Casa de la Mujer, who recounted the work her organisation had undertaken in

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Buenaventura, a port city that has been at the centre of the armed conflict due to its strategic location for territorial control: Casa de la Mujer: What the armed conflict does is that it aggravates the economic precarities and those everyday violences … So, for example, in the context of the armed conflict, sexual violence … is perpetrated with more brutality and depth … In Buenaventura, we have evidence that femicides and violence against women have increased. We have seen how men start to perpetrate violent practices like torture that are learned in the context of the armed conflict against women. So these inherited, learned practices are brought to the everyday of women and perpetrated by their partners.

Many organisations, including the FEDEMUCC union, the global NGO Oxfam and the grassroots network Matamba y Guasá, also denounced the violence experienced by women in the armed conflict that continued to transgress into their everyday lives. Interviewees contended that once the physical violence of war passes, there are other types of violence that persist, and that these are predominantly directed at women. The leader of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá noted: Red de Mujeres Mataba y Guasá: How many women have been killed by the conflict? Not many, but we are the ones left with the suffering, if your son is killed or if they disappear your husband … And then you have the sexual violence. And the labour violence because they force women to do jobs that are not well remunerated.

This excerpt demonstrates Cabnal’s (2010) conceptualisation of bodies as territories that are marked by historical oppressions wrought by persistent violence, and which Colombian women experience on a continuum. In narrating colonial violence the social leaders also discussed economic violence, militarisation and racism. For instance, the interviewee from a feminist insurgent group, Mujer Fariana, explained what happens within the FARC-EP: Mujer Fariana: The conditions are different since we are within a military-­ political structure. So those in charge give orders and the rest obey, so there is a principle of subordination within the army. In these conditions, it is

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really easy for machista and patriarchal behaviours to entrench in men and in some women. But at the same time, we are also a political organisation and we can debate and judge any behaviour.

This excerpt reveals how machismo is reinforced with military structures. At the same time, it unveils how women within the FARC-EP organise, negotiate and resist machismo within these military structures. The violence of the coloniality of power is also manifest in the lives of rural women who are poor and have heavier workloads. The leader of ‘Fura’, an organisation mainly composed of Campesinas in Toca, explained how labour burdens affect women’s capacity to be politically active: ‘Women struggle to come to the meetings because the countryside demands too much. They have too many chores, like, for example, if they have labourers working in the crops, they need to cook for them’. This quote demonstrates how colonial structures of labour continue to be legitimised, affecting rural women disproportionally. Thus, the issue of the heavy workloads of rural women and economic violence was a common axis of action for many rural organisations’ gender equality initiatives. The leader of the Campesina federation FEDEMUCC based in the region of Cundinamarca and founded in 1998 explained how they addressed these issues in their actions for gender equality: FEDEMUCC: Washing, cooking and ironing have become the natural state of the work of rural women … So, we had to appropriate a discourse and we tell women, “Look at all the work you do. Let’s make a list. And now let’s have a look at what men do”. So then they realise it.

In this excerpt, FEDEMUCC’s leader brings to light the fact that non-­ remunerated work continues to be a burden for women living in the countryside, but that women are not passively or unreflexively continuing to accept this as natural, which resonates with the stories narrated in the previous chapter. Rather, from the experiences of understanding the oppressions of the body, they are constructing alternatives by, for example, questioning the discourse that has historically surrounded their everyday lives.

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In the neighbouring region of Boyacá, the leader of Fundación San Isidro (founded in 1980), a Catholic foundation that has operated for more than three decades, explained that they have worked on gender equality struggles for many years from the basis of action. This was even when it was taboo to talk about machismo in the region and within the organisation, which has strong Catholic values: Fundación San Isidro: Sister Teresa was a very intelligent woman, that even in an environment like the church where everyone bows to the priest, she had the strength to say, “No! Women are equal!” And she always defended women’s rights. Laura: How was it different back then to talk about machismo? Fundación San Isidro: It was terrible. Of course, there was more machismo. Nowadays they [men] have been changing. And by introducing the topic, we can talk to them a little bit about that. Back then we could not talk about that, but we taught them with actions. So, for example, when we meet for workshops or gatherings there are women and men participating.

The experiences of Fundación San Isidro and FEDEMUCC illustrate that Colombian rural women’s social movements have herstorical struggles for gender equality that precede Western interventions of gender equality initiatives of the ‘NGO-isation’ of Latin America in the 1990s (see Alvarez 2009, 176). They promulgate struggles from a geopolitical standpoint that often contests Western ideas of women’s liberation. Indeed the responses to patriarchy and machismo in Colombia are diverse, embedded in the body-land experiences, and based on the specific territories in which the organisations operate. The Colombian coordinator for La Vía Campesina (CLOC’s) leader in Colombia explained how the organisation has worked in the communities to negotiate with patriarchal structures: CLOC: To depatriarchalise consciousness is very difficult and it has to be done between men and women … In the Andean schools we have worked on the topic of gender from 2010 and we are constructing the popular Campesinx feminism … But we also consider that there has to be a space just for women, because if we do not become aware that we are discrimi-

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nated, that violence is not natural and all of that, we are going to continue to do the same.

This resonates with Cabnal’s (2016, n.p.) ideas of acuerparse, to recognise the body as the first territory for struggle, but also to understand oppression and victimisation, and Paredes’ (2017) claim that to depatriarchalise, we must decolonise. In moving away from framing women as victims of violence, activists discussed the ways they are re-existing in their struggles to preserve life from place. Next, I present the most recurrent form of re-existence of the territorio cuerpo-tierra mentioned in the interviews which was women’s initiatives of food sovereignty.

6.5 F ood Sovereignty as a Struggle of the Territorio Cuerpo-Tierra Social leaders explained that one of the most important struggles that rural women are leading is for food sovereignty. Women re-exist from their gardens and homes, enacting their own liberation from patriarchal and neoliberal structures, while reclaiming their rights to land and to food production. The CLOC, the organisation that officially proposed food sovereignty as a global rural endeavour in 1996 during the Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Rome, detailed the organisation’s commitment to this cause: CLOC: Food sovereignty is a principle that does not only talk about the right to food, but also the right to access land, because if you are going to produce, where are you going to do it? And within this [food sovereignty principle] you have implicit the topics of native seeds with no chemicals, of agroecology. When we are talking about food sovereignty, we are talking about the sovereignty of the people … Nowadays they import many agricultural products so the Campesino has had to stop producing because there is no profitable demand. And they are importing products that are transgenic so we are losing sovereignty.

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By placing the goal of food sovereignty in the context of Colombia, the CLOC demonstrates that neoliberal expansion in the country affects these efforts. However, as neoliberal expansion is experienced relationally, and place-based processes also impact global networks, the Campesinx population continues to organise, as is evident in the ANZORC’s efforts to gain autonomy over their territories, which I introduce next. As one of the largest mixed associations of Campesinxs in the country, ANZORC (founded 2010–2011), which demands the demarcation of zones where peasant communities can have political and agricultural autonomy, has also incorporated food sovereignty struggles into its agenda: ANZORC: We believe that all the programs that are being supported in the country like the economic expansion, the free trade, and all of those international policies have directly affected the Campesino economy. So from the ANZORC we are going to continue to support the sowing of seeds and traditional crops.

Indeed, Campesinxs’ struggles for food sovereignty contribute to their political recognition of their autonomous territorial rights, which continues to be limited nationally and internationally, and in the context of the post-accord period (see Duarte 2018). The Comisión de la Verdad (2019) has argued for the importance of centring Campesinxs in the processes of reparation in order to take back the political and economic power that large landowners have had in the Colombian countryside. In addition to the importance of food sovereignty as a struggle to contest neoliberal expansion and to construct sustainable peace in the country, these practices led by rural women have also worked to contest patriarchy and patriarchal practices. Through food sovereignty, Black women have created community networks in the rural Pacific, and in the rural Andes, Campesina women have formed independent economic avenues. The leader of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá observed that women’s neighbouring relationships in the Pacific region provided the impetus for the food sovereignty initiatives, especially among women heads of households. She reflected that ‘while the men were dedicated to the coca crops, women stayed there producing the food for their people’. In a similar respect in the Andes, the experience of Fundación San Isidro’s

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agro-ecological projects shows how food sovereignty actions led by Campesina women promoted gender equality and environmental sustainability causes: Fundación San Isidro: [The women’s] lives change in many aspects. In the food they eat, in the family’s nutrition. Even the contact with the land makes their behaviours change. Along the way, you see women changing their behaviour from watching TV all day. And on the economic side, they stop buying the lettuce or the carrot, but rather they produce it and save the 30,000 pesos (US$9.80).

Women’s food sovereignty initiatives in Fundación San Isidro have been effective not only in facilitating economic independence, but also in challenging the damaging agro-productive practices, such as monocultures, that have negatively affected the environment in the Boyacá region. Across Colombia, food sovereignty is constructed through women’s territories and body-lands. Embodied re-existence through food sovereignty becomes inscribed on the landscape as a solution to environmental degradation, questioning capitalist agro-productive practices historically led by men. Moreover, food sovereignty provides opportunities to negotiate traditional gender roles, and it encourages women’s organising.

6.6 Towards Decolonial Other Worlds As demonstrated throughout the previous chapters, women’s different forms of resistance and re-existence are entangled in their experiences of territorio cuerpo-tierra. However, their resistance is circumscribed by the continuity of the discourses of linear ‘progress’. Implicated in ‘neoliberal progress’ are the actions of colonial feminisms that have utilised ‘genderwashing’ and top-down approaches to ignore the marginalisation of the majority of women in the world. For instance, such ‘genderwashing’ operates by excluding racial and ethnic experiences by homogenising women’s experiences through using only a ‘gender lens’ (see Rodriguez Castro 2020).

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It is unsurprising, therefore, that social leaders had different identifications with feminism as a form of resistance and re-existance. Of the seventeen women interviewed, ten identified as feminists. Of this group some used additional descriptors to characterise their feminism such as Black (PCN), and popular and Campesina (Fensuagro and CLOC) or agrarian (Mesa de Incidencia and ASODEMUC). The leader of the PCN noted: PCN: Now I have to emphasise that we are talking about Black feminism … Because that is the other thing that is related to the language itself, that we are not just talking about feminism … I think it is important that we identify like this, because part of the topic [feminism] being taboo and creating certain resistances is because, in general, what is known about feminism is that it is a feminism that is fundamentally white, where the racial questions do not fit, and where the gender relations are raised from another point of view.

Indeed, Lozano (2016) claims that liberal forms of feminism in Colombia are still struggling to accept and recognise women’s diversity, and do not consider addressing racism as their main objective. She argues that the practices of resistance of Black women have been more invisible and unknown than those of mestiza women and Black men. In the context of Campesinas, the social leader of ASODEMUC identified colonial practices that emanate from institutions that do not take into account their localised needs: ASODEMUC: They go over there and do a workshop on necklaces where Campesina women are cultivating fruit, have milk and make cheese. Also, the projects are not consecutive … Colloquially, I say that we are like old cars, from workshop to workshop every fortnight, but that is all we get. They do not give women seed capital. There are no follow-ups, no support. It usually gets to a point when women say, “Okay. I got here and now what?”

In contesting aid training that does not take into account experiences of the body-land, the social leader echoed views expressed by the Campesinas in the Sierra in relation to the ‘proyecticos’ narrated in the previous chapter.

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Notably, representatives from NGOs like Oxfam, which has a very extensive presence in Colombia, highlighted that there are obstacles to the sustainability of their projects. For example, the gender representative of the NGO explained that a project they had established in Boyacá around care work and gender equality was impeded by the lack of what they referred to as ‘incidencia política’.6 This term, which means to influence policy through the effort of advocacy work, often arose in interviews with social movement leaders, who also argued that this was impeded due to the lack of political will of the Colombian state to work closely and consistently with grassroots and women’s organisations. Despite the obstacles, all of the organisations involved in the interviews have had significant achievements in their advocacy for and with rural women. Illustrative of this achievement was the implementation of Agrarian Law 160 that created subsidies for the acquisition of land for the rural population and Rural Women’s Law 731 of 2002. The former was the culmination of an enormous organising process of thousands of women in Colombia in the Mesa de Incidencia Política de las Mujeres Rurales Colombianas (see Gutiérrez 2003). In March 2016, I attended a public meeting on the accountability of the law. The meeting gathered women leaders from all over the country who travelled from their territories to meet in Bogotá and demand compliance of Rural Women’s Law 731. They exposed the lack of resources and political will of the state to operationalise the law. The Minister for Agriculture, while invited, did not attend. This experience can be conceptualised as an act of epistemic violence that demonstrates the government’s lack of political will to address rural women’s demands. The leader of ASODEMUC ruminated on what she believed to be the core factor behind the dearth of the state resolve to address the needs of rural women: ASODEMUC: I think it is the neoliberal model that does not allow … We find an institutionalisation that is closed, and it is not because they do not open their offices but because the government officials have a complete lack of awareness … We have an indolent society that is not interested in the situation of rural women … There is an economic interest that prevails over the rights, even the right for life.

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Various social leaders also reflected that the efforts of their organisations to create political change are curtailed by the failure of government to engage with the rural population of the country in a genuine and ongoing way. The process of peasant reserve zones (ZRC) by the ANZORC, which continues to develop, illustrates the lack of engagement by the state in the context of the ‘post-accord period’ and Law 160: ANZORC: The topic of ZRC is in the agrarian point of the Havana’s agenda, so we have all the process stuck while we wait for the negotiations to advance there. Of course, what we think is that this is an excuse of the government because the ZRC are constituted through the Law 160 and what they need to do is comply with the law … But we have continued to advance in the organising process.

According to social leaders, aggravating the problem of the lack of compliance with laws is the state’s lack of capacity and will to deal with the rural population, especially rural women, due to ‘institutionalisation’. The activist from Casa de la Mujer elaborated on the ‘institutionalisation issue’ during the interview: Casa de la Mujer: There is also the issue of institutionalisation, which is a structural challenge that is an obstacle for the guarantee of rights and our exercise as defendants of human rights … The institutions do not have the right tools to work with women … Especially in the rural areas because they find public employees that have no knowledge of their duties and responsibilities, so it is like talking to someone that does not know how to listen.

Social leaders asserted that the structural challenges they face with government organisations are also due to sexism, racism and ethnocentrism. The Amazonian representative of the ONIC described how patriarchy and institutionalisation intersect in relation to the government aid for malnutrition in her territory: ONIC: On the topic of malnutrition in our territory, the government, the organisations and the laws decide the management of the resources of the

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state for our children. They do not take into account that, as women, we have not been able to access those resources because it has to be through organisations that are usually run by men … And what outrages me is that when men are managing the resources, they are not using them for well-­ being, but asking for their quota or participation.

As she continued to elaborate on this theme, the ONIC leader illustrated how national aid programmes directed at the children of their Indigenous rural communities are also ethnocentric. She argued that while women should be given autonomy in these programmes to decide on what is best for their children, they are marginalised: ONIC: We have seen so many cases of children that get into the government programs and they gain weight but then in a month puff! … Because these are not programs that take into account how children eat in their homes … In our context we make them a fresh fish stew from the fishing of that day, but in the centres they give them paiche [Amazonian fish] meat that is frozen for a month or 15 days, so it does not have the same substance as fresh fish.

The increasing institutionalisation, combined with lack of knowledge about Colombia’s diverse rural populations, including Indigenous peoples, has real consequences for communities like those in the Amazon. In turn, this affects the political influence of organised political groups, including the ONIC. Responding to the epistemic violence of the coloniality of power embedded in top-down development and gender equality actions, and the lack of political will of the state, the grassroots movements are proposing alternatives including those embedded in the food sovereignty struggles narrated earlier. For example, rural women in Colombia have forged important alliances. This is evidenced in the dialogues between the different communities of rural women in organised social movements like the CLOC: CLOC: So we had many debates with the Indigenous comrades who were talking about complementarity, and we found that yes, we couldn’t really see ourselves without el otro [approx. trans. ‘the other’], we needed to

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defend complementarity. And that feminism doesn’t really resonate with us … So we started talking from our own realities and those corresponding to our communities … And the comrades [Indigenous] told us things such as: “we also had to do this and that since we were young. We had to live this and that”. So we are constructing our feminism from below, from our own realities.

In working from ‘below’, and with their own visions of liberation the leaders of the social movements have had many successes in addressing gender inequalities. This is the case of the peasant reserve zones led by the organisation ANZORC: ANZORC: For example, in [rural town] we have a beautiful experience in a vereda … where there are some women’s organisations working with farmer organisations. And we go and do the workshops with men and women. And the comrades [men] are the ones who prepare and serve the food, because we always do a community pot. So the men can understand easier that the chores can be divided equally and that they can support us even when they have to work in the countryside.

The successful collective actions of rural women in Colombia are changing not only the place-based lived realities of women in veredas but also the narratives around their lives. They are not ‘victims who need saving’, but politically active subjects who enact change locally and nationally through their territories and body-lands. As the Colombian peace process with the FARC-EP progresses, there are emerging challenges, tensions and hopes that rural women and social leaders are also facing today.

6.7 Post-Peace Accord: Tensions and Hopes The testimonies of the social leaders illustrate the complex situation in which the peace accord with the FARC-EP is being implemented. The themes of women’s differentiated experiences and proposals for overcoming inequalities grounded in their territory and body-land experiences, and their multifaceted advocacy work and political activism are

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particularly important to take into account in what is a moment of historical change in Colombia. Social leaders’ anguish, fear and anxiety in the months leading up to the implementation of the agreement are now being realised across the country as the violence against rural leaders and activists has been steadily rising (Pacifista 2017; Datasketch 2019). In early 2016 social leaders noted that one of the most prevalent consequences of being politically active for rural women in Colombia is being subjected to violence and forced displacement. This was exemplified in an anecdote shared by the representative of the Mesa de Incidencia: Mesa de Incidencia: Well, you are talking to a widow. There are many consequences like permanent threats. I have been displaced seven times from different regions. They have hit me in the street here in Bogotá. I have had three attempts of kidnapping. Other women have been kidnapped because of me. They are exiled now … My partner was assassinated a long time ago.

During this time they also explained to me that the accord would most likely not lead to peace in rural areas because the root of the social conflict had not been addressed. Fensuagros’ leader stated bluntly that there is no ‘post-conflict’ situation in Colombia, and, in fact, militarisation would continue, as would social confrontation, because deep socio-­ economic issues not only remain, but have been aggravated by government policies. With a sense of considerable frustration, she observed: Fensuagro: We believe that social confrontation is going to rise … Right now, everything that the National Development Plan says is contrary to what is being discussed in the Havana … The government is not interested in resolving the social conflict. The Free Trade Agreements are going to deepen because now they are going to be able to extract natural resources without any problem. So the challenges we have now are much bigger.

Like the leader of Fensuagro, the representative from ASODEMUC asserted that the countryside would be the site of ongoing conflict in the so-called post-conflict landscape, because it is a space where social and economic marginalisation are deeply manifest. She posited that in the new environment, social movements focused on addressing the position

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of rural women would need to be even more politically active. She ruminated on the questions that her organisation had begun to ask in light of the accord: ASODEMUC: Who is the problem? Is it those who arrive? Is it us who are there already? … We live in a country where there is an unresolved social conflict … So all of us need to contribute and commit … I think what we need to do in the territory is to continue our commitments to sustain the family and to construct society and community in the post-conflict period.

Observing what she saw occurring across the country, the Casa de la Mujer spokesperson explained that the root of the violence against women leaders is embedded in traditional gender stereotypes that deny women’s visibility as political subjects: Casa de la Mujer: In terms of safety, there are very big challenges. I think that to challenge the gender stereotypes that women have in a context that is so traditional like Colombia where the principal leaders and those recognised in public spaces are men, position us as a target. So we are constantly targeted by people who do not agree that women should have a political role, or influence policy in a state level, or denounce what is happening to women in this country … And it is not only in the context of the armed conflict, but we also talk about the fact that the state needs to pay attention to femicides and look at it from a societal point of view.

Despite the negative consequences of activism in their sense of safety, all leaders maintained that these were immaterial when considered against the positive outcomes that could be achieved through communitarian struggle to create systemic change. Illustrative of this optimism in early 2016 were comments from Mujer Fariana’s and ANZORC’s representatives: Mujer Fariana: We have hope that the government is going to comply with their commitments. It is the state’s responsibility to guarantee the safety … of any political party or social movement that wants to participate in the transformation of Colombia.

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ANZORC: I think we are going to be protagonists of the peace … because we are tired of this war! … We want the money invested in war to be used for peace … so we can construct the country that we have always dreamed of.

The PCN woman leader, like other women working in well-established organisations in the country, argued that the fight against patriarchal and racist structures must continue in the post-accord period: PCN: We really need to evaluate and discuss the post-accord period because the conflict does not finish with this agreement with the FARC. We continue to have war in the territories with other armed groups … So one thing that we need to take into account is that women have been central to the resistance of territories … So we have a lot to contribute in terms of reconciliation and the reconstruction of the social and cultural fabric. Also, we must make ourselves visible because at the level of Afro-descendants in Colombia the political presence is mainly masculine.

This demonstrates that in the post-accord period it is important that women’s political activism and struggles continue to be strengthened with a territorial focus that takes into account the historical and plural experiences of the body-land. As the peace process progresses, post-accord, social leaders’ predictions on the exacerbation of violence and the continuation of the conflict have become real. In Colombia’s post-accord period, social leaders are experiencing systemic violence as the social conflict continues in other forms (e.g. proliferation of neo-paramilitary groups). Organisations are using alternative news and social media, and looking to national and international advocates to require the current government to abide by the peace accords and to recognise that the violence targeted at social leaders is systemic (e.g. Davis 2019). At the same time, those in the territories, without strong support and safety networks, are experiencing threats of violence, including murder (Pacifista 2017). Social leaders are rightly asserting that if the peace accord agreements were being fully implemented, social movements, including those presented in this chapter,

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would have mechanisms to organise and strengthen their territorial struggles and land claims. Thus, the struggles of social leaders in Colombia continue to be embedded in the resolution of a social conflict that precedes the peace accord with the FARC-EP, and the continuing insolence and lack of political will of a neoliberal and conservative state. In this context, rural women’s heterogeneous struggles, emanating from their experiences of their territorio cuerpo-tierra, need to be centred in the way we construct social justice, peace-making and decolonial feminist worlds.

Notes 1. The pool of interview participants was limited due to lack of resources and mobility. There is consequently a prevalence of representatives from national organisations as I was unable to visit more remote regions of the country. This reflects how as scholars we might be complicit in reproducing geographical hierarchies, and the need to reflect critically on the partiality of knowledge arising from our research decisions, as these are not instrumental matters but deeply imbued in power relations. 2. The social and cultural practice of constructing relationships with neighbours. 3. A copla is a type of poem or popular song in Colombia. 4. A low temperature ecosystem and plateau that is present in South America, especially in the Andes. 5. Referring to the ancestral blood that runs through her veins. 6. There is no exact translation in English for this term.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Alvarez, Sonia E. 2009. “Beyond NGO‐ization?: Reflections from Latin America.” Development 52 (2): 175­ –184. https://doi.org/10.1057/ dev.2009.23. Asher, Kiran. 2004. Texts in Context: Afro-Colombian Women’s Activism in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia. Feminist Review 78 (1): 38–55. https://www. jstor.org/stable/3874405.

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Brodzinsky, Sybilla. 2017. ‘Welcome to Peace’: Colombia’s Farc Rebels Seal Historic Disarmament. The Guardian, 28 June. https://www.theguardian. com/world/2017/jun/27/colombia-farc-weapons-war-government. Cabnal, Lorena. 2010. Feminismos Diversos: El Feminismo Comunitario. Madrid: ACSUR-Las Segovias. ———. 2016. Lorena Cabnal - Red de Sanadoras Ancestrales del Feminismo Comunitario en Guatemala. Accessed 14 November 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CSiW1wrKiI. Comisión de la Verdad. 2019. La Tierra en Colombia No Se Usa Para Producir, Se Usa Para Especular. Comisión de la Verdad, 28 February. https://comisiondelaverdad.co/actualidad/noticias/alejandro-reyes-dario-fajardo-tierraen-colombia-se-usa-para-especular. Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (CNRR) and Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales (IEPRI). 2009. El Despojo de Tierras y Territorios: Aproximación Conceptual. Bogotá: Kimpres Ltda. Datasketch. 2019. Líderes Sociales. Accessed 16 November 2019. http://lideressociales.datasketch.co/. Davis, Angela. 2019. Angela Davis Denounces Attacks on Afro-Colombian Social Movements. Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network. Accessed 19 May 2019. https://afrocolombian.org/2019/05/06/angela-davis-denouncesattacks-on-afro-colombian-social-movements/. Duarte, Carlos. 2018. “¿Gallina Campesina o Pollo Asado? Una Guía Para Pensar en la Declaración de la ONU Sobre los Derechos Campesinos.” La Siniestra, October 2. https://lasiniestra.com/gallina-campesina-o-polloasado-una-guia-para-pensar-la-declaracion-de-la-­onu-­sobre-los-derechoscampesinos/. Gutiérrez, Myriam C. 2003. La Ley para las Mujeres Rurales en Colombia Alcances y Perspectivas. Revista de Trabajo Social 5: 56–80. https://revistas. unal.edu.co/index.php/tsocial/article/view/8440. Lozano, Betty Ruth. 2016. Feminismo Negro  - Afrocolombiano: Ancestral, Insurgente y Cimarrón. Un Feminismo en - Lugar. Insterticios de la Política y la Cultura 5 (9): 23–48. https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/intersticios/ article/view/14612. Pacifista. 2017. Estos son los Líderes Sociales Asesinados Desde el Inicio de la Implementación. Pacifista. https://pacifista.tv/notas/lideres-socialesasesinados-inicio-implementacion/. Paredes, Julieta. 2017. El Feminismocomunitario: La Creación de un Pensamiento Propio. Corpus 7 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.4000/ corpusarchivos.1835.

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Reyes Posada, Alejandro. 2009. Guerreros y Campesinos: Despojo y Restitución de Tierras en Colombia. Bogotá: Ariel. Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2020. ‘We are Not Poor Things’: Territorio Cuerpo-­ tierra and Colombian Women’s Organised Struggles. Feminist Theory. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1464700120909508. Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres. 2013. La Verdad de las Mujeres: Víctimas del Conflicto Armado en Colombia. Bogotá: Diakonia, Institut Catalá International Per La Pau, ONU Mujeres, Oxfam, PCS. Viveros-Vigoya, Mara. 2016. Masculinities in the Continuum of Violence in Latin America. Feminist Theory 17 (2): 229–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1464700116645879. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1350506806065752.

7 Conclusion: Towards a Compromiso Sentipensante

7.1 Introduction CLOC: We are not “poor things”. We are not “poor things from the countryside”. We are not “poor things because we are poor”. Women are able to do many things. And the reason why we are in this position is the system that we are fighting against. And we are convinced we need to do this with our comrades.

This statement from the Campesina leader of CLOC summarises a central argument of this book, which is how ongoing constructions of ‘bodies as things’ and rural women as homogeneous are highly problematic. Constructions of the majority of women’s bodies as objects to be empowered reproduce the same logics of the systems ‘we are fighting against’, and are indeed implicated in colonial feminisms. Rural women in the Global South, especially those living in poverty, continue to be constructed as in need, as lacking, as subjects who are passive and unfulfilled. Thus, their bodies are seen as in need of intervention and of training so that they are appropriately empowered as ‘good neoliberal subjects’.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Rodríguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4_7

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In this book I have departed from Quijano’s conceptualisation of the coloniality of power and how it was historically constructed through the division of labour and socially constructed racial divisions. Further, decolonial feminisms including Lugones’ (2008) explanation of the coloniality of gender, elucidate how the coloniality of power is tied to geohistorical places and identities, and premise the construction of gendered, sexualised and racialised divisions. Together, these concepts demonstrate how rural Women of Colour and Black women in the Global South are positioned in the frontlines of the violent effects of the coloniality of power. In place, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta I witnessed territorial dispossession of the body-land through green pretexts of conservation, and neoliberal tourism development. In this context, women in the veredas confronted extractive practices, which tokenised and dehumanised their existence. In Toca, the coloniality of power was manifest in the neoliberal expansion of agroindustries that contributed to the dispossession of the body-land, allowing women’s labour to remain cheap, and perpetuating precarious living and working conditions. The West’s development project might characterise these processes as ‘empowering for women’ and ‘good for business’, but as I have argued, this is the coloniality of power manifest in place. Through the plural worlds of rural Colombia, I have demonstrated that there are women who are active and fulfilled, and who are denouncing how the coloniality of power operates in place, and in the territories, while enacting other worlds to re-exist. For example, women continue to denounce the continuum of violence, which in Colombia is epistemic, systemic, militarised and transcends into all ambits of life. Their struggles point to the need to address land access from a perspective that takes into account herstorical, ancestral and affective body-land connections. At the same time they re-exist and propose alternatives for a better life from their own cosmovisions enacting food sovereignty, acuerpandose in order to dismantle and disrupt the patriarchies, ethnocentrism and racism present in their lives. Rural women are also questioning capitalist agro-­ productive practices and proposing feminisms from ‘below’.

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7.2 Dismantling Heteropatriarchy I am aware of the decolonial critiques that have warned us about romanticising people and places. Presenting rural women’s struggles in Colombia and my narrations here as unproblematic deny how we are all embedded and complicit in colonial practices that persist. In Chap. 3, for example, I have demonstrated how colonial practices continue to privilege white-­ mestizas such as myself, which has had an impact in the access and narrative power from which the stories and actions of Colombian rural women and social leaders are presented here. Another example of the limitations I found as I reflected on the dialogues I had with diverse rural women in the country was that the testimonies presented are prevalently heteronormative constructions of rural struggles in Colombia. This important issue points to the need for more critical work within rural debates and social movements in the country that do not marginalise the experiences of those who are gender-diverse and/or sexually diverse in the Colombian countryside. In the context of continuing conflict and militarisation, LGTBQIA+ people in the Colombian countryside are at higher risk of being targets of violent attacks, murder, displacement and intimidation, especially at the hands of conservative paramilitary forces but also the military and left-wing guerrillas (Espitia 2016; Payne 2016). The inclusion of LGTBQIA+ rights in the peace accord with the FARC-EP in 2016 was indeed a matter of debate, and one of the main reasons why those who voted ‘No’ in the plebiscite justified their position through their opposition to the so-­ called gender ideology (see Espitia 2016; Gónzalez 2017). This example reinforces the need to dismantle heteropatriarchy as part of the decolonial struggle, and within the particular context of Colombia. In this respect, communitarian and decolonial feminists in Abya Yala have, for example, highlighted the importance of challenging colonial heteronormativity and ancestral ‘heterorealities’ (Cabnal 2010, 16; Paredes 2015). Lugones’ (2007, 187–188) critique of Quijanos’ narrow conception of gender and sexuality posed important questions regarding the need to ground understandings of heteropatriarchy in the historical debates of the coloniality of power. She argues:

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How do we understand heterosexuality not merely as normative but as consistently perverse when violently exercised across the colonial modern gender system so as to construct a worldwide system of power? How do we come to understand the very meaning of heterosexualism as tied to a persistently violent domination that marks the flesh multiply by accessing the bodies of the unfree in differential patterns devised to constitute them as the tortured materiality of power?

Thus, in our intellectual work as decolonial feminists, we have an important role to play in challenging the idealisation and simplification of parity and complementarity struggles that do not push for critical debates that dismantle heteronormativity. We must resist the naturalisation of mandatory heterosexuality and gender binaries as central to the construction of decolonial other worlds (Espinosa Miñoso 2007; Lugones 2007, 2008; Paredes 2015). This contention also points to the need to actively support territorial struggles, generate dialogues and knowledge, and forge new alliances that are politically, historically and geographically grounded in the struggles of activists, social leaders and communities, while at the same time continuing to dismantle how the coloniality of power operates in the organisation of women’s movements and in our own lives. Next, I return to the three interconnected projects of this book and draw conclusions on the lessons learned from the sentipensar of other worlds in rural Colombia.

7.3 D  ecolonial Feminisms and a Compromiso Sentipensante (Feeling-Thinking Commitment) The three interconnected projects of this book were to first demonstrate how colonial feminisms are implicated in the colonial matrix of power by grounding this contention on lived experiences of how these processes are forged in Colombia; second, to make my presence visible in the stories narrated here through a focus on how the coloniality of power operates in the production of knowledge; and, finally, to illustrate how decolonial

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feminisms are entangled in the struggles of women in rural Colombia who are resisting and re-existing in place for the construction of other worlds. These projects are premised on the need to unlearn, to sentipensar and to reconstruct feminism as part of the praxis of decoloniality. I have argued that a way forward is to place our compromiso—in the feeling-­ thinking, political and epistemic sense explained in Chap. 3—on the experiences of women in the Global South who are at the frontline of dispossession and violence in its continuum, and who are fighting from the territorio cuerpo-tierra. How to ground this compromiso in genuine and politically grounded alliances and dialogues continues to be a central question of my sentipensar. I began this book with two quotations by Lorena Cabnal and Francesca Gargallo Celentani. The first quotation by Cabnal emphasises that the conditions of dialogue with white women are not given, pointing to the failures of colonial feminisms. Gargallo Celentani’s quotation (2014, 44–45) further characterises colonial feminist failures as disposing ‘the spontaneous organising of women’ and their autonomy through institutionalisation in ‘non-government organisations, foundations, academies and political parties’, as being in an ‘accelerated race to become Western’, as ‘stable for market politics’, as ‘assimilating the feminine world into the masculine’, and as advocating for women’s liberation from individualised and masculinised global public policies ‘within a capitalist system that is publicised as the only way possible’. Thus, it is a feminism to ‘govern women’. Here, I have demonstrated how the ideas and actions advanced by colonial feminisms and neoliberal projects have impacted Campesinas in the veredas and social leaders in their organising in Colombia with ‘proyecticos’ that deny their agency, knowledge, experiences and connections of the body-land. At the same time, insurgent, Black, Indigenous and Campesina social leaders are denouncing how institutionalisation processes in Colombia continue to impede their struggles for social justice, and critique the impact this has had on their communal organising, well-­ being and vida digna. For instance, in Chap. 6, one of the Amazonian leaders of the ONIC explained how patriarchy, ethnocentrism, institutionalisation and bureaucracy impede women’s autonomy to feed their children, because state aid programmes do not take into account their

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ancestral knowledge of the body-land. This narrative and other experiences presented in the book illustrate how neoliberal development projects and top-down aid programmes continue to advance in Colombia with the support of the state. Thus, a question that remains in my ongoing decolonial feminist praxis is how, as feminists and intellectuals, are we complicit in top-down and/ or state-sanctioned actions designed to govern women’s body-land (e.g. through institutionalisation, ‘proyecticos’, discursive power)? Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso (2009) ruminated on similar questions in her important critique of the consolidation of transnational feminist hegemonies (including those in Latin America) which are embedded in ethnocentrism and coloniality. She called on us to shift our compromiso to the plural communities where local processes are happening. In disaggregating thematic pluriverses, engaging in constant reflection and playing with the openness and entanglements that these processes provoke (Millán et  al. 2014), I ground my feminist decolonial praxis in a compromiso sentipensante. Decolonial feminist praxis and a compromiso sentipensante have been personal, political and intellectual endeavours that have troubled the way I understand my own body, my feminist politics and my engagement with knowledge and its reproduction. Indeed, decolonial praxis rejects a linear path—it is a process that is messy, entwined, uneven and ever-­ evolving. For me, it has involved ongoing anti-racism and political work as a white-mestiza, as an immigrant in Australia and as a Colombian citizen committed to the end of the social conflict in my country. The compromiso sentipensante, to me, is a commitment to politically and geographically grounded knowledge, to narratives and languages that can communicate and forge dialogues with active processes of social change, justice and resistance, to the politics and epistemic forces of place and to ongoing alliances embedded in seeking justice and not just distributing aid. But are we able to do this working from institutional and neoliberal academic spaces?

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7.3.1 A  Feeling-Thinking Commitment in the Neoliberal University? Another question that emerges as I finish this book is based on the reality that, increasingly, universities are embedded within a neoliberal context of managerialism and profit-making that demands fast-paced and quantifiable research outputs, and rewards hierarchical forms of knowledge (Connell 2019). While undertaking my doctorate in 2016 in an Australian university, I was faced with the demand to complete my thesis under a three-year deadline before my scholarship finished. I was also questioned on the length of the eight months of ‘fieldwork’, the ‘risky fieldwork sites’ and the non-linear approach to the research, which left too many variables undefined. As I finish writing this book today, more than two years out of my doctorate (September 2020), I have been precariously employed in contract, adjunct and sessional positions, and do not have any stable job prospects. I continue to witness how white possessive logics operate in Australian academic spaces, and experience racism and sexism in academia (see Bond 2014). Thus, reflecting on the limitations of the academic context, I question whether we can genuinely engage with decoloniality within these spaces. Can universities support decolonial projects that require the resources and a critique and dismantling of the same systems in which these institutions are embedded? Can we create long-lasting alliances that politically support the ongoing processes of social justice for decolonial other worlds? Can we dismantle, disrupt and transgress the hierarchies and privileges that the academic contexts continue to perpetuate? Although I do not have concrete answers to these questions, I believe that decolonial and other projects committed to dismantling how the coloniality of power operates in academia are necessary (Mohanty 1988; Spivak 1988; Espinosa Miñoso 2007; Bond 2014; Ahmed 2018; Fredericks et al. 2020). For instance, the work of Sara Ahmed (2018) on institutional complaints has been important in destabilising neoliberal academies that deny the racist, sexist and classist structures on which they are built. In a public lecture Ahmed explained this thesis eloquently drawing on a metaphor on how institutions are built: ‘And maybe [it is]

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to do with being in an institution and the way they are built; long corridors, doors with locks on them, windows with blinds that come down, to seems to sort of imbue every part of it with a cloistered feeling, there is no one, it feels suffocating’ (Ahmed 2018, n.p.). So how are we contributing to the cultivation of those cloistered and suffocating feelings that reproduce elitism and epistemic violences through politically disengaged1 production of knowledge? Ahmed’s commitment to a post-institutional life is one worth considering, but one that might only be possible for those who are privileged in the Global North. Ultimately, I believe we need to move beyond our offices and into the communities in which resistances and re-existences are being lived and experienced in plural ways—to veredear, to listen and sentipensar with commitment. We also need to commit to anti-racism work, especially those of us who benefit from white or white mestizx privilege. In doing this, we must find spaces within the institutions to push for projects that require time, and to question and dismantle epistemic privileges. For those of us working within Global North academies, I also believe that we must commit to politics of citation that endeavour to overturn some of the power of the ‘English global knowledge system’ and of the ‘knowledge economies’ of the United States and Europe (Roberts and Connell 2016, 135). In the entanglement of decolonial feminisms I have learned to constantly reflect on when to remain silent, on when to listen and on when and how to show up for those people constructing other worlds in the territories. As Cabnal (cited in Gargallo Celentani 2014, 17) notes, there is a need for the ‘conscious construction’ of feminism as being proposed from the territories, in the languages and cosmovisions of Black, Indigenous, Campesina and rural women.

7.4 The Epistemic Forces of Place Working from a compromiso sentipensante and the thematic pluriverse of decolonial feminisms I arrived at an important contribution that grounds the ideas presented here: the importance of the epistemic forces of place to decolonial feminist praxis (see also Escobar 2015; Mignolo and Walsh

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2018), through understanding place as process, as relational, as embedded in multiplicity, and as connected to ancestral and historical lived experiences (see Massey 2005). The focus on place and Colombian rural women’s heterogeneous experiences, as articulated through territorio cuerpo-tierra and their politics of place, has revealed the importance of the construction of veredas, homes, gardens and territorios as political places for resistance and re-existence. In these places, women are active, subversive, insurgent and enacting other worlds. In tracing the trajectories of place through stories of ‘then and there’ and ‘here and now’ (Massey 2005, 140) I revealed the plural worlds and herstories of the Colombian countryside or of the Colombia profunda as articulated by Alfredo Molano Bravo. For example, in Chap. 4, through an understanding of rural places as process, as always changing, I illustrated how colonial practices continue to be reproduced in the lives of young rural women who move to the city, as they are employed in precarious conditions and struggle to access quality education. This understanding of place as not bounded, as not mere surface, reveals how coloniality is a phenomenon of modernity that concerns not only possessive logics to control territories and land, but also gendered and racialised bodies, which continue to be constructed through the logics of the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007, 2008). Lorena Cabnal has proposed the concept of territorio cuerpo-tierra, from the experiences of colonial domination of women’s body-lands in Abya Yala. By engaging Cabnal’s territorio cuerpo-tierra to understand rural women’s connections to their body-land in Colombia, I have revealed how women reclaim their bodies as their first territory, recognising oppression, violence in its continuum and victimisation. At the communal, national and global levels, rural women in their heterogeneity continue to be at the forefront of resistance to extractive and destructive logics that are affecting their territories. Their affective and intimate connections to the body-land reveal the political and epistemic importance of this relationality to the construction of peace, of territorial resistance and of re-existence in Colombia. In the veredas women continue to organise community and family gardens, advocate for agroecology, protest large mining projects and promote food sovereignty initiatives, while continuing to sustain life in the

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everyday. The focus on the politics of place of the veredas reveals how informal economies, which are predominantly sustained by women in rural Colombia, are central to the communities’ well-being. Thus, the vereda in its multiplicity is a place where plural worlds are being created through informal ways of being–feeling–thinking. In the home and the garden, Campesina, Indigenous and Afro-­ Colombian women continue to plant and to grow food for their subsistence, and in support of food sovereignty struggles. In the kitchen, many women strengthen their community and pass on knowledge. The stories of Campesinas presented here align with the testimonies of many of the social leaders of rural social movements in Colombia, whose proposals for food sovereignty involve an emphasis on local autonomy, food security, equitable land access and tenure, and peoples’ self-determination. At the same time, these processes in place are in a network with the macropolitics of the Colombian state that denies the contributions of rural women, Campesinx economies and communities, and refuses to recognise them as political agents deserving of rights. As the testimonies presented here reveal, it is also in the home that heteropatriarchies are entrenched and felt in place. Thus, many women respond to the machismo in the home with awareness, reflexivity and agency. For example, in Chap. 5, I narrated how women in Toca and in the Sierra address machismo by organising community networks in their veredas with their comrades working collectively to dismantle colonial practices in place. Women’s negotiations with machismo are also manifest in the progressive politics and actions of social movements led by rural women in Colombia who are proposing the dismantling of patriarchies within the context of their territory and body-land struggles. Through the epistemic forces of place, the plural constructions of the territorio have also become important in the struggles of the territorio cuerpo-tierra of rural peoples in Colombia. Here, I am not referring to the instrumentalised territory construction that the neoliberal state promotes as a space to enact national security agendas, top-down aid and liberal peace processes. I am referring to the construction of territorio through territoriality, in which the geohistorical and ancestral processes of each community are taken into account, including the heartfelt relationality to the Earth.

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Politically, a focus on territorial struggles strengthens a much-needed decentralisation of the institutionalisation phenomenon in Colombia, which allows for local organising processes to grow and continue. For example, the Zonas de Reserva Campesina (ZRC) are an important political process for the construction of decentralised, autonomous and collective other worlds, in which Campesinx economies and cosmovisions are legitimised and constructed collectively. Other examples of the territorial constructions of the pluriverse include the organising processes of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) and the Consejo Regional Indigena del Cauca (CRIC) in Colombia. The organising process of the Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres in Colombia is also an important example that grounds women’s diverse territorial experiences. The Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres continues to make visible the effects of the social conflict in women’s body-lands, and advocate for political change embedded in territorial plural worlds. Thus, the territorio and territorialidad become processes of political collectivity in Colombia. Revisiting Massey (2005, 140), ‘what is special about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or of the eternity of the hills’; rather, it is about the stories, processes and networks of the past and present, the histories and herstories that continue to construct place and other worlds through the relational politics of place.

7.5 Conclusion Decolonial feminisms are entangled in the struggles of women in Abya Yala. From the plural worlds of decolonial feminist struggles we are re-­ enacting feminism as an essential part of decolonial praxis by denouncing that it is not merely a gender matter. This book is an attempt towards decolonial praxis, not as an end goal that has been achieved, but a process that is alive. In the entanglement of decolonial praxis, I have argued that a feeling-thinking commitment to the epistemic forces of place is needed. As the Colombian peace process with the FARC-EP continues to advance, the voices of rural women need to be heard in their multiplicity. Their actions in the territories need to be legitimised and supported, not

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as victims, but as people enacting other worlds to live well, resist and reexist. Women in rural Colombia are forging strong alliances, establishing and supporting social justice while continuing to resist in their territories with their bodies at the forefront. They have been outspoken and visible in promoting peace that takes into account the specific histories and herstories, and the ancestral knowledge of place. They continue to condemn the armed conflict in their territories and body-lands and to advocate for addressing the social conflict that persists in the country. Ultimately, we must continue to denounce the systemic violence that rural people and social leaders are experiencing in the Colombian territories and say their names. Nos están matando (they are killing us). The following list includes the names of the social leaders massacred since day one of the peace accord ratification on 1 January 2016, until the last count on 25 July 2019 (Datasketch 2019). For them, and the many other people who have died in impunity in Abya Yala. Every three days a social leader is assassinated in Colombia. (Datasketch 2019, n.p.) Francisco Jaramillo Moreno Víctor Jaramillo Moreno Willinton Andres Bañol Mario Alexis Tarache Perez Robinson Avila Ortiz Senelia Regifo Gómez Marco Aurelio Diaz Isaias Penagos Aníbal Coronado Edwin Yonda José Armides Collo Lipons Miguel Muñoz Fernandez Iván Yardani Burbano Hanner Sebastián Corpus Marisela Tombe Gilberto de Jesús Quintero Willar Alexander Oime Alarcon Hernando Perez Iriarte Noel Salgado Klaus Zapata William Castillo Chima Gil de Jesus Salgado James Balanta Mera (continued)

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(continued) Luis Elviar Vergel Orlando Olave Luis Enrique Ramirez Rivera Carlos Ariza Erney Alvarado Omar Zambrano Victor Andres Florez Cristian Anacona Castro Samuel Caicedo Portocarrero Esteban Rodriguez Vega Oswaldo Hernandez Gutierrez Rubiela Coicue Jesus Adilio Mosquera Palacios John Edwar Bermeo Diego Cenen López Wilson Hoyos Olano Manuel Dolores Pino Perafán Jose Albino Solarte Arvinson Florez Gonzalez Gonzalo Rentería Mosquera William Cuetia Trochez Gregorio Carrasco Adrian Quintero Moreno Manuel Chima Pérez Willington Quibarecama Naquirucama Arnulfo Gonzalez Velasquez Gersain Ceron Ramon Eduardo Acevedo Rojas Yolay Robinson Chica Jaramillo Laureano Pill Ramos Amado Gomez Nolberto Martínez Macana Luis Fernando Ortega Rubio Wilson Manuel Cabrera Mendoza Evaristo Dagua Troches Diomedes Muñóz Gersain Peña Pito Sebastiana Ulcué Naimen Agustin Lara Beatriz Nohemi Morano Joaquín Emilio López Nhora Alba Cuicue Viquis Primitivo Silva Chaté Ivan Dario Soto (continued)

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(continued) Luis Alfonso Leiva Peña Maria Fabiola Jimenez de Cifuentes Nohora Rocío Hernández Roberto Ballena Suarez Oriana Nicoll Martinez Raul de Jesus Perez Camilo Roberto Taicus Bisbicus Alberto Pascal Ariel Sotelo Diego Alfredo Chirán Nastacuas Joel Meneses Guzman Nereo Meneses Luciano Pascal García Libio Antonio Álvarez Salvador Acosta Simón Alvarez Cecilia Colcué Armando Bedoya Fabra Nestor Ivan Martinez Ovidio Arley Bustamante Chavarría Jose Gustavo Perez Gutierrez Ferney Losada Jose Augusto Pérez Murcia Wilmer Arnubis De la Cruz Isagi Ramiro Culma Carepa Carlos Arturo Mosquera Duvan Andres Lopez Diaz Gilberto Hernandez Sanchez Jose Alfredo Ayala Henry Jose Romero Perea Henrri Narvaez Delgado Espolita Casiana Teheran Acosta Lina Sierra Salcedo Yimer Alberto Chávez Rivera Jhon Faber Espinal Holguin James Londoño Jimenez Javier Alexander Salazar Norberto Ruiz Jhon Jairo Rodriguez Torrres Jose Luis Prieto Tristancho Jose Andres Cabarcas Jose Antonio Velasco Taquinas Didier Losada Erley Monroy Fierro (continued)

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(continued) Rodrigo Cabrera Cabrera Gustavo Bermudez Froidan Cortés Henry Saavedra Marcelina Canacue Jorge Ramirez Guzman Diomedes Perdomo Marly Yuliet Gomez Shirley Dayana Lozada Ramírez Vicente Borrego Luis Carlos Tenorio Samir Lopez Bisbal Nataly Salas José Abdón Collazos Hoyos Mario José Martinez Jose Mauricio Bernal Alzate Gilmar Alejandro Possú William Garcia Cartagena Eder Mangones Carlos Jiménez Denver Potes Girón Rafael Lubo Aguilar Guillermo Veldaño Martín José Martinez Anuar José Álvarez Yaneth Alejandra Calvache Karla Báez Torres Aldemar Parra García Juan de la Cruz Mosquera José Yimer Cartagena Úsuga Moisés Mosquera Moreno Olmedo Pinto García Edmiro León Alzate Emilsen Manyoma Joe Javier Rodallega Ángel Yunda Jairo Andrés Mosquera Nelly Amaya Perez Everto Julio Quiñonez Miranda Faiver Cerón Gómez Fredys Cogollo Mora Marcelino Pastrana Fernández Gustavo Alberto Suárez Osorio Carlos Yama (continued)

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(continued) John Fredy Concha Hernando Murillo Armijo Yoryanis Isabel Bernal Varela Porfirio Jaramillo Botagallo Miguel Ángel Hoyos Edilberto Cantillo Mesa Jose Arbey Mensa Leonardo Cano Luz Herminia Olarte Danna Méndez Berrío Anuar Alegría Érika Yisel Galindez Eberto Julio Gómez Mora Wilfredy Gómez Noreña Wilmer de Jesús Montoya César Augusto Parra Luis Carlos Falla Lozano Éder Cuetia Conda Leonidas González Pérez Ruth Alicia López Guisao Fabián Antonio Rivera Arroyave Luz Ángela Anzola Tejedor José Antonio Anzola Tejedor Javier Oteca Pilcue Albenio Isaias Rosero Jairo Arturo Chilito Muñoz Eliver Buitrago Josefina Cuetia Ramos Gustavo Ortega Jeiler Chalá Camilo Alberto Pinzón Galeano Nolberto Lozada Ramón Ever Goyes Jhonny Marcelo Cuajiboy Pascal Pedro Nel Pai Pascal Rubiela Sanchéz Vanegas Gerson Acosta Salazar Severino Grueso Caicedo Mauro Tálaga Campo Diego Fernando Rodríguez Jose Manuel Pushaina Irene Perez Ruiz Alberto Román Acosta Nelson Miguel Fabra Díaz (continued)

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(continued) Jhon Jaime Londoño Agudelo Jorge Chantre Achipiz Jáider Jiménez Cardona Daniel Felipe Castro Basto Argemiro Tovar Mario Andrés Calle Correa Katherine Escalante Castilla Jhoan Felipe Yatacue Vargas José Reyes Guerrero Gaitán Álvaro Arturo Tenorio Cabezas Edenis Barrera Benavides Segundo Víctor Castillo Donaldo Antonio Rodriguez Diaz Carlos Augusto Paneso Hector Javier Riascos Duberney Gomez Efren Santo Diego Andres Garcia Wilmar Felipe Barona Ricardo Córdoba Washington Cedeño Otero Juan Artunduaga Johana Alarcon Bernardo Cuero Bravo Narda Barchilón José María Lemus Téllez Mauricio Fernando Vélez López Juan Sebastian Mayorga Yatacue Jhonatan Ferney Rodriguez Guanga Eugenio Rentería Martínez Fabián Alberto Alvarez Héctor William Mina Ezequiel Rangel Juana Almazo Uriana Epiayú Manuel Jaime Arango Wilmer Hernández Caicedo Luis Édilson Arango Gallego Jesús María Morales Morales Luis Genaro Ochoa Sánchez Nidio Dávila Idaly Castillo Narváez Fernando Rivas Asprilla Alcibiades De Jesús Largo Hernández Manuel Ramírez Mosquera (continued)

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(continued) Harold Eusebio Benavides Leonardo Ballesteros Rodríguez Jose Adalberto Torijano Maritza Yuliana García Vinasco Nelson Eduardo Velandia Ortiz Carlos Mario Hincapié Javier Sevilla Álvarez Luis Alfonso Villadiego Alfonso Taicus Taicus Diego Escobar Dorado Jaimen Guanga Pai Janier Usperto Cortés Mairongo Nelson Chacuendo Calambas Jimmy Humberto Medina Jorge Luis García Berrio Óscar Tenorio Sunscue Ezquivel Manyoma María Efigenia Vásquez Astudillo Ofelia Espinosa de Lopez Luis Fernando Gil Liliana Patricia Cataño Montoya José Jair Cortés Eliécer Carvajal Liliana Astrid Ramírez Martínez Miguel Pérez Eduar Andres Aponza Lasso Ramón Alcides García Zapata Aulio Isarama Forastero Luz Yeni Montaño Arboleda Albert Martínez Juan Carlos Martínez Botero Mario Jacanamijoy Mario Castaño Bravo Édison Marcial Ortiz Bolaños Luis Alfonso Giraldo Hernán Bedoya José Rafael De La Hoz Villa Alfonso Pérez Mellizo Pablo Oviedo Guillermo Javier Artuz Mario Dumar Rojas Hector Everson Hernández Alirio Sanchez Diana Luz Romero Mogales (continued)

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(continued) Diana Luz Solano Víctor Manuel Morato Jorge Jimy Celis Plinio Pulgarín Leidy Xiomara Peña Naveo Luis Diaz Lopez Miller Diaz Lopez Hernán Enrique Agames Victor Manuel Barrera Jose Olmedo Obando Harley Johanny Mogollon Becerra Fares Carabalí Carbonero Jose Fernando Castillo Miguel Eduardo Parra Rondon Manuel Eusebio Osorio Escobar Prisciliano Manuel Mercado Garcia Eleazar Tequia Bitucay Mario Elias Carrascal Nader Franyer Gómez Buendía Temistoclés Machado Berber Víctor Velasquez Vitola Nicomedes Payán Segura Leidy Amaya Ramirez Nixon Mutis Sossa Humberto Manuel Escobar Mercado Antonio Maria Vargas Madrid Yolanda Maturana Daniel Cabrera Diana Patricia Mejia Fonseca Carlos Eduardo Melo Ramirez Sandra Yaneth Luna David Alexis Narvaez Jonathan Cundumi Anchino Jesus Orlando Grueso Obregon Deiver Quintero Perez Omar Arbey Martinez Cristian Camilo Toro Rodas Elkin Fabian Toro Juan Emilio Habran Solano Flover Sapuyes Gaviria Soneyda Figueroa Duarte Cristian Emilio Jaimes Triana Berlinda Gomez Julio Cesar Urango Sanchez (continued)

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(continued) Hermilsun Larraonda Rendon Éider Arley Campo Hurtado Luis Arturo Royet Campo Victor Hugo Martinez Barragan Tomas Barreto Moreno Juan Gabriel Pascal Taicus Luis Fernando Hernandez Hernandez Juan Mena Gildardo Antonio Valdés Jorge Gomez Daza Silvio Duran Ortiz Javier Bernardo Cuero Ortiz Jose Anibal Herrera Jose Alcidez Ospina Arango Jorge Miguel Polanco Avila Victor Alfonso Zabaleta Oviedo Lisandro Antonio Hernandez Triviño Jose Wilson Escue Vitonco Israel Fajardo Maria Magdalena Cruz Rojas Belisario Benavides Ordoñez Hector Janer Latin Álvaro Perez Saul Mendieta Yovany Velazco Ariza Wilson Arnulfo Quetama Claudio Chavez Efren Zuñiga Dorado Obdulio Angulo Zamora Simeon Olave Angulo James Luis Jimenez Estrada Maria del Carmen Moreno Hugo Albeiro George Perez Iber Antonio Angulo Zamora Luis Alberto Torres Montoya Ramon Ascue Harold Lerma Palacio Pablo Emilio Moreno Yadira Sucerquia Macias Felix Castañeda Cristian Andres Lozano Luis Eduardo Dominguez Victor Correa Gabriel Muñoz Muñoz (continued)

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(continued) Jefferson Monroy Juvenal Silva Adriana Montero Parra Amilcar Yagari Siagama Pablo Emilio Dagua Taquinas Dalmayro Reyes Carlos Jimmy Prado Gallardo Hermes Angulo Zamora Julio Cesar Montalvo Orlando Negrete Yurgen Soto Gutiérrez Yeison Ramirez Francisco Jose Guerra Guerra Holman Mamian Cristian Andrey Rodriguez Sánchez Arnulfo Catimay Blanco James Alberto Hidrobo Navia Luis Carlos Cabrera Segura Evelia Francisca Atencia Perez Adrian Perez Anderson Ortiz Pérez Janer Alberto Correa Arboleda Isaac Navarro Mora Hector Santiago Anteliz Jose Abraham Garcia Julio Cesar Sucerquia Ivan De Jesus Lazaro Mazo Gabriel Adolfo Correa Chavestan Leonedis Aleiser Sierra Ortiz David Mejia Prieto Santa Felicinda Santamaria Luis Barrios Machado Ana Maria Cortes Mena Margarita Estupiñan Uscategui Ancízar Cifuentes Luis Erardo Fernadez Velazco Dario Dovigama Francisco Dovigama Alexander Castellano José Fernando Jaramillo Oquendo Fernando Gómez Frank Dairo Rincon Ruben Dario Ruidiaz Guerra Carlos Alberto Ruiz Restrepo (continued)

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(continued) Luis Eduardo Dagua Juan de Jesus Moreno Ibes Trujillo Contreras Robert Emiro Jaraba Arroyo Homero Ortega Horacio Triana Parra José Osvaldo Taquez Kevin Julian León Rivera Libardo Moreno Luis Gabriel Gomez Fabián Rosales Niño Luis Francisco Vargas Johan Alexis Vargas Raul Buitrago Perdomo Frederman Quintero Guillin Valentín Tezada Rua Alfredo Alonso Ruiz Higuita Hernán Darío Chavarría Uriel Rodríguez Alejandro Jacanamejoy Emiliano Trochez Alfredo Manuel Palacio Jimenez Jorge Eliecer Roa Patino Jose Garcia Amariles Luis Alberto Rivas Gomez Marco Tulio Grajales Holmes Alberto Niscue Huber Hoyos Jefferson Arévalo Hector Fabio Montoya Luis Henry Vera Gamboa Jorge Enrique Monsalve Giraldo José Alberto Pineda Morales James Escobar Óliver Herrera Alirio Antonio Arenas Gómez Norberto Alonso Gutiérrez Leidy Correa Ómar Pallarés Alipio Salazár Avilés Jaime Rivera Jhorman Arlex Ipia Óscar Adolfo Quenán Toro Óscar Aníbal España (continued)

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(continued) Dioselí Noriega Henry Alexander Hernández Jesús Manuel Colmenares Quevedo María Caicedo Muñoz Eladio de Jesús Posso Espinosa Javier Ancizar Fernández Edilberto Niño Cristancho Carlos Barón Luis Tarazona Salamanca Jorge Yepes Mendoza Héctor Fabio Almairo Álvaro Gómez Garzón Otoniel Barreto Londoño Gladis Rivera Champeño José Antonio Navas Héctor Ramiro García Arturo García Luis Neider Prado Medina Edwin Dagua Ipia Gilberto Antonio Zuluaga Ramírez Jesús Ignacio Gómez Ávila Gilberto Valencia Jesús Adier Perafán Correa José Rafael Solano Wilson Pérez Ascanio Wilmer Antonio Miranda Maritza Isabel Quiroz Leiva Miguel Antonio Gutiérrez Faiber Manquillo Gómez Leonardo Nastacuás Rodríguez Víctor ManuelTrujillo Luis Alfredo Contreras Ortega Maritza Ramírez Chaverra Samuel Andrés Gallo Lede María Ortega Ortíz José Jair Orozco Dilio Corpus Guetio Jorge Castrillón Gutiérrez José Arquímedes Moreno María Nelly Bernal Andrade José Víctor Ceballos Epinayu Zonia Rosero Gonzalez Alexander Cunda Alfonso Correa (continued)

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(continued) Argemiro López Pertuz Joaquin Emilio Jaramillo López Ebel Yonda Ramos Lucero Jaramillo álvarez Policarpo Guzmán Mage Aquileo-mecheche-baragon Nixon Willigton Valencia Andrés Mauricio Rojas Diofanor Montoya Urrego Marco Antonio Adrada Viana Miguel Angel Alpala Belisario Arciniegas García Mauricio Lezama Wilmer Carvajalino Daniel Edurdo Rojas María del Carmen Flórez Benedicto Valencia Guillermo León Rengifo Paula Andrea Rosero Concepción Corredor Libardo Montenegro Luis Joaquín Trujillo Dagoberto Álvarez Claro Jader Manuel Pertúz Polo Jader Leonel Polo Baltazár Luis Fernando Velásquez Julián Quiñones Uñate Carlos Valencia Acosta María del Pilar Hurtado Carlos Biscué José Arled Muñóz Giraldo Tatiana Paola Posso Espitia José Orlando Ordóñez Vanegas Humberto Díaz Yamile Guerra Arbey Ramón

Note 1. Here I am talking about a geographical and epistemic disengagement with the lived realities, struggles, resistances and the making of other worlds in place.

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2018. “On Complaint.” Wheeler Centre Broadcasts, 24 October. https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadcasts/sara-ahmed-on-complaint?. Bond, Chelsea. 2014. “When The Object Teaches: Indigenous Academics in Australian Universities.” Right Now, November 14. http://rightnow.org.au/ opinion-3/when-the-object-teaches-indigenous-academics-in-australianuniversities/. Cabnal, Lorena. 2010. Feminismos Diversos: El Feminismo Comunitario. Madrid: ACSUR-Las Segovias. Connell, Raewyn. 2019. The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing. Datasketch. 2019. “Líderes Sociales.” Accessed 16 November, 2019. ­http:// lideres-sociales.datasketch.co/. Escobar, Arturo. 2015. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durnham: Duke University Press. Kindle edition. Espinosa Miñoso, Yuderkys. 2007. Escritos de una Lesbiana Oscura: Reflexiones Críticas Sobre Feminismo y Política de Identidad en América Latina. Buenos Aires and Lima: En la Frontera. Espinosa Miñoso, Yuderkys. 2009. “Etnocentrismo y Colonialidad en los Feminismos Latinoamericanos: Complicidades y Consolidación de las Hegemonías Feministas en el Espacio Transnacional.” Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer 14, no.33: 37–54. Espitia, Monica. 2016. LGBT in Colombia: A War Within. CUNY Academic Works, 16 December. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gj_etds/150. Fredericks, Bronwyn, Debbie Bargallie, and Bronwyn Carlson. 2020. ““Nothing About Us, Without Us”: Performative Allyship and Telling Silences.” Croakey, July 1. https://croakey.org/nothing-about-us-without-us-performativeallyship-and-telling-silences/. Gargallo Celentani, Francesca. 2014. Feminismos Desde Abya Yala. Ideas y Propocisiones de las Mujeres de 607 Pueblos en Nuestra América. Ciudad de México: Editorial Corte y Confección. Gónzalez, Andres. 2017. Colombia’s Christian Alt-Right. Jacobin, May 13. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/colombia-christian-right-homophobiapeace-referendum-bigotry.

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Lugones, María. 2007. Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System. Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/206329. ———. 2008. Colonialidad y Género. Tabula Rasa 9: 73–109. http://www. revistatabularasa.org/numero-9/05lugones.pdf. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE Publications. Datasketch. 2019. “Líderes Sociales.” Accessed 16 November, 2019. http://lideres-sociales.datasketch.co/. Mignolo, Walter and Catherine Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics and Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kindle edition. Millán, Márgara, Aura Cumes, Gisela Espinosa, Mariana Favela, Oscar González, Raquel Gutiérrez, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, Verónica López Nájera, Mariana Mora, Sylvia Marcos, Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez, Guiomar Rovira, and Ana Valadez, eds. 2014. Mas Allá del Feminismo: Caminos Para Andar. México, D.F.: Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30: 61–88. https://doi. org/10.2307/1395054. Paredes, Julieta. 2015. The Neocolonial Queer. In The Global Trajectories of Queerness, ed. Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala. Leiden: Brill. Payne, William J. 2016. Death-squads Contemplating Queers as Citizens: What Colombian Paramilitaries are Saying. Gender, Place & Culture 23 (3): 328–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2015.1013442. Roberts, Celia, and Raewyn Connell. 2016. “Feminist Theory and the Global South.” Feminist Theory 17, no.2: 135–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1464700116645874. Rodriguez Castro, Laura. 2020. ‘We Are Not Poor Things’: Territorio Cuerpo-­ tierra and Colombian Women’s Organised Struggles. Feminist Theory. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1464700120909508. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 24–8. London: Macmillan Education.

Index1

A

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, 65, 66, 76n3 Abya Yala, 3, 6, 8, 10, 14, 33–37, 49, 52, 59, 61, 67, 75, 124, 171, 177, 179, 180 Academia academic institutions, 175–176 neoliberal academies, 175 neoliberal university, 22 Activism, 35, 67, 145, 162, 164, 165 Acuerparnos, 37, 144 See also Acuerparse Acuerparse, 155 Affect, 47, 51, 91, 120, 150, 153, 156, 161 Africa, 7 Afro-Colombian, 10, 17, 18, 61, 63, 69, 149, 178

Agency, 4, 12–14, 72, 126, 128, 134, 173 Agrarian, 18, 19, 38, 53n5, 69, 92, 158, 160 agrarian reform, 18, 38, 69, 92 Agroecology, 155 Agroexport, 137 Agroindustrial, 18, 128 Agroindustries, 22, 50, 123–126, 128, 170 See also Agroexport; Agroindustrial Ahmed, Sara, 64, 82, 151, 175, 176 Aid, 13, 158, 160, 161, 174, 178 Alliance, 8, 15, 68, 161, 172, 175, 180 Amazon, 161 Ambivalence, 65, 66

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Rodríguez Castro, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59440-4

195

196 Index

Ancestral ancestral knowledge, 8, 9, 42, 67, 108, 147, 149, 174 ancestral practices, 147 Andes, 14, 46, 62, 69, 124, 145, 156, 166n4 Anglo-Saxon, 33 Animals, 43, 52, 73 Anti-militarism, 8 Anti-racism, 21, 60–67, 74, 75, 174, 176 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 5, 7, 33–35, 65, 75 Armed conflict, 17, 18, 22, 36, 38–40, 47, 50, 68, 99, 117–123, 131, 137, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 164, 180 Arts research visual research, 70, 73 Asociación Nacional de Zonas de Reserva Campesina (ANZORC), 38, 156, 160, 162, 164, 165 Zonas de Researva Campesina (ZRC), 38, 160, 179 See also Peasant reserve zones Australia, 59, 60, 64–66, 68, 75, 137, 174 Autonomous, 4, 12, 34, 36, 38, 40, 136, 156, 179 Autonomy, 4, 12, 17, 53, 110, 149, 156, 161, 173 See also Autonomous B

Belonging, 66, 68, 86, 87, 98, 119 Berraca, 108 Bike, 49, 51, 93, 135

Binary, 43, 75, 172 Binary logics, 43, 75 Biography, 2, 70 Blackness, 61, 63 negritud, 63 Black women, 7, 10, 34, 39, 40, 59, 71, 158 Body, 1, 3, 9, 14, 15, 19, 21, 22, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44–47, 52, 53, 64, 68, 69, 75, 86, 110, 117, 120, 121, 143, 144, 151–153, 155, 169, 172, 174, 177, 180 Bogotá, 2, 59, 61, 71, 110n1, 124, 148, 159, 163 Borderlands, 7, 35, 64–67 Border thinking, 35 Bottom-up, 14 See also From below Boyacá, 62, 76n2, 94, 118, 154, 157, 159 Bush, 115, 117, 138n1 monte, 108, 116 C

Cabnal, Lorena, 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 21, 22, 23n3, 34, 37, 39, 52, 53, 74, 83, 124, 129, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152, 155, 173, 176, 177 Campesina, 1, 2, 4, 19, 21, 34–36, 38, 46, 50, 52, 60, 63, 71, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89–92, 107, 109, 110, 118, 119, 121, 125, 128, 129, 133, 137, 138, 145, 147, 148, 151, 153, 156–158, 169, 173, 176, 178 Campesino, 19, 61, 69, 70, 90, 155, 156

 Index 

Campesinx, 17, 18, 24n12, 25n15, 38, 62–64, 71, 76n2, 83, 86, 90, 118, 122–124, 129, 132, 134, 136, 148, 154, 156, 178, 179 peasant, 7, 9, 11, 19, 25n15, 38, 109, 126, 129, 156 See also Campesina; Campesino Capitalism, 2, 15, 83, 125 Care, 40, 63, 90, 97, 120, 121, 126–128, 132, 159 caregiving, 128 Casa de la Mujer, 18, 19, 145, 147, 150–152, 160, 164 Catholic, 63, 154 Childhood, 121 See also Children Children, 39, 49, 69, 73, 82, 88, 95, 103, 105, 108, 116, 117, 128–130, 138n8, 161, 173 Cimarronismo, 45 City, 21, 38, 47, 59, 61, 62, 73, 82, 86, 92, 102–110, 115, 122, 123, 126, 134, 152, 177 Class, 4, 10, 60–63, 75, 125 Climate change, 50, 103, 130, 138 Coast, 61, 76n1 Coffee, 24n12, 48, 72, 123, 134 cafecito, 72 tinto, 50, 92, 97, 115 Collective, 4, 7, 8, 14, 36, 39, 52, 60, 72, 92, 102, 119, 143, 149, 162, 179 See also Collectivity Collectivity, 4, 36, 147, 151, 179 Colombia, 2, 17–20, 36, 60, 82, 117, 143, 170

197

Colonial feminism, 1–23, 43, 82, 83, 109, 125, 157, 169, 172, 173 Colonialism, 6, 61, 62, 65, 66, 135 Coloniality of gender, 3, 7, 9, 170, 177 Coloniality of power, 3, 5–10, 20, 22, 33, 64, 66, 67, 75, 76, 107, 137, 144, 153, 161, 170–172, 175 Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP), 1–23, 33, 46, 60, 75, 82, 85, 110, 150, 172 Colonisation, 6, 7, 15, 62, 66, 75, 124 Colonos, 24n12, 53n5, 69 Campesinxs colonos, 24n12, 48, 62, 86, 98, 121 Comadrazgo, 39, 40 Comisión de la Verdad, 68, 156 truth Commission, 68 Communitarian feminism, 9, 23n3, 34, 129, 171 Community, 8, 11, 15, 17–19, 24n7, 25n17, 36, 38, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 61–63, 68, 76, 82, 87, 90, 92, 93, 96–99, 110, 120–122, 128, 129, 132, 133, 136, 138, 143–145, 149, 154, 156, 161, 162, 164, 172, 174, 176–178 communal, 19, 25n17, 37, 92, 93, 121, 173, 177 Complementarity, 9, 161, 162, 172 Complicit, 61, 67, 166n1, 171, 174 Compro Agro, 93–96, 106, 130 Compromiso sentipensante, 22, 169–192 feeling-thinking commitment, 21, 172–176

198 Index

Conflict armed conflict, 17, 18, 22, 36, 38–40, 47, 50, 68, 98, 99, 117–123, 131, 137, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 164, 180 social conflict, 4, 17, 18, 20, 39, 68, 150, 163–166, 174, 179, 180 Connell, Raewyn, 15, 175, 176 Consent, 24n10, 53n2, 73 Conservation, 38, 45, 123, 124, 131–133, 136, 148, 170 Conservative, 110n1, 166, 171 Constitution, 61, 64 Continuum of violence, 22, 39, 118, 119, 138, 170 Cooking, 40, 63, 83, 85, 88, 126, 128, 134, 153 Corporation, 37, 126 Corruption, 103 Cosmovision, 1, 3, 8, 17, 22, 38–40, 83, 91, 133, 138, 144, 149, 170, 176, 179 Countryside, 19, 21, 41, 47, 48, 50–52, 53n5, 63, 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 82, 86, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 102–110, 110n1, 119, 122, 123, 128, 129, 137, 145, 148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 162, 163, 171, 177 Crafts, 133 Critical race studies, 66 Crops, 40, 76n7, 118, 124, 125, 150, 153, 156 Cultural capital, 63, 132

D

Danger, 69, 117 Decolonial feminist praxis, 34, 52, 174, 176 Decolonial praxis, 3, 21, 22, 33, 36, 46, 52, 60, 71, 174, 179 Deficit narratives, 43 Dehumanisation, 132 See also Dehumanise Dehumanise, 133 Descolonial feminisms, 3 See also Feminismos Descoloniales Development, 3, 8, 11, 14, 19, 22, 25n15, 38, 42–44, 123, 124, 126, 131, 137, 147, 151, 161, 170 Dialogues, 1, 3, 5, 9, 14, 15, 21, 22, 33, 34, 53, 68, 70, 71, 73–75, 76n5, 145, 161, 171–174 Dignified life, 103 Dispossession, 17, 18, 22, 24n12, 37, 65, 66, 117, 118, 121, 123–137, 148, 170, 173 Diversity, 10, 12, 33, 45, 72, 158 Domestic, 89, 107, 109, 132 domestic labour, 49, 138n8 domestic work, 82, 90, 126 Domestic violence, 39 Domination, 6, 8, 37, 43, 172, 177 Drought, 50, 71, 94, 96, 130 E

Earth, 147, 178 Economic economic capital, 107 economic independence, 95, 129, 151, 157 economic mobility, 47, 123

 Index 

Education, 2, 7, 62, 101, 105–108, 110, 121, 177 higher education, 2, 59, 103, 106 tertiary education, 105, 111n8 Elite, 7, 20 Embodiment, see Body Emotions, 51, 151 Employment, 106, 107, 126–129 unemployment, 43 See also Job(s) Empowerment, 109, 125, 126 disempowered, 126 Entanglement, 3, 20, 21, 35, 52, 109, 174, 176, 179 Enterprise, 83, 93, 94 Environmental, 22, 37, 48, 131, 132, 148 environmental degradation, 132, 157 environmental sustainability, 157 Epistemic epistemic-methodological, 16, 21, 60, 70–75 epistemic subject, 1, 2, 43 Equity, 110 Essentialism, 10, 11, 15, 40, 60, 61, 64 Ethics, 16, 24n10, 53n2, 53n4, 70, 75 Ethnicity, 38, 60–62, 64, 75, 125 ethnic, 17, 61, 64, 65, 76, 145, 157 Ethnocentrism, 2, 5, 9–11, 160, 170, 173, 174 Eurocentric, 8, 9, 35, 66, 76 Evangelisation, 20, 62, 64 Exhibition, 90, 107 Extractivism, 37, 42, 124, 148, 151

199

F

Fals Borda, Orlando, 15, 47, 67–69, 93 Family, 2, 7, 40, 45, 47, 48, 59, 69, 83, 85–88, 92–94, 99, 105, 106, 117, 120–123, 126–128, 138, 149, 157, 164, 177 familial, 39, 62, 89, 99, 122, 128 FARC-EP, 4, 18, 20, 86, 115, 118, 119, 121, 144, 152, 153, 162, 166, 171, 179 Farm, 19, 24n12, 45–50, 71–73, 75, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 91, 107, 109, 120, 123, 125, 126, 128, 134, 135, 138n8, 144, 148 Farmer’s markets, 49, 73, 74, 90 mercados campesinos, 15 Fear, 51, 99, 100, 117, 120, 122, 126, 145, 163 Femininity, 90 Feminismos Descoloniales, 3, 34, 35 Feminist identification, 158 Feminist movements, 1, 4, 8, 9, 11–13, 19 Field, 47, 69, 71, 107, 126 First Nations, 66 Flower industry, 62, 107, 118, 125, 128–130, 133 Focus groups, 71 Food food security, 87, 89, 109, 178 food sovereignty, 22, 87, 109, 144, 155–157, 161, 170, 177, 178 Forced displacement, 17, 18, 24n12, 87, 121, 163 Foreign investment, 19, 123 Free trade, 156

200 Index

Friendship, 100, 102, 128 From below, 22, 162 See also Bottom-up G

Garden, 48, 82, 83, 87, 88, 91, 109, 130, 133, 134, 155, 177, 178 Gargallo Celentani, Francesca, 1, 5, 15, 34, 35, 84, 85, 101, 125, 173, 176 Gaze, 2, 73, 110 male gaze, 70 Gender gender relations, 7, 19, 89–91, 158 gender roles, 128, 157 gender stereotypes, 164 traditional roles, 128, 132 Genderwashing, 157 Generational, 108 Geography, 23n3, 44, 60, 61, 65 Global countryside, 137 Globalisation/globalization, 42, 43, 129, 137 Global North, 68, 137, 176 Global South, 2, 8, 11–14, 40, 41, 43, 45, 53, 124, 126, 137, 169, 170, 173 Government abandonment, 51, 103, 130, 147 See also State abandonment Grassroots, 12–14, 43, 44, 145, 152, 159, 161 Green pretexts, 22, 123, 131, 170

H

Harvest, 40, 127 Health, 51, 63, 129 Here and now, 41, 42, 82, 177 Hernández (Torres), Aida, 34 Herstory, 3, 8, 34, 40, 102, 109, 110, 119, 177, 179, 180 Heterogeneity, 14, 34, 36, 40, 41, 52, 145, 147, 177 See also Heterogenous Heterogeneous, 46, 109, 166, 177 Heteronormativity, 60, 64, 75, 171, 172 Heteropatriarchy, 22, 171–172, 178 Heterosexuality, 7, 172 Hierarchies, 166n1, 175 Historical memory, 24n13, 119, 138n3 Home, 4, 21, 45–48, 63, 65, 81–110, 115, 120, 121, 128, 130, 131, 133, 155, 161, 177, 178 Homogenisation, 11, 12, 19, 43, 151 Hope, 22, 69, 143–166 Hostels, 134, 135 Human, 15, 39, 47, 62, 118 Human rights, 11–14, 118, 160 Husband, 49–51, 87, 88, 90, 99–101, 117, 126, 129, 152 I

Identity politics, 60, 64 Immigration, 59, 64–66, 174 See also migrant, 66 Impunity, 39, 180 Incidencia política, 159 Inclusion, 83, 130, 171

 Index 

Independence, 49, 95, 100, 129, 151, 157 Indigenous, 1, 6–9, 11, 14, 15, 17–19, 33–35, 37, 38, 52, 59–62, 65, 66, 69, 75, 84, 110n4, 111n5, 118, 124, 129, 136, 147, 148, 161, 162, 173, 178 Indigenous feminisms, 7 Inequality, 2, 4, 14, 17, 62, 68, 82, 84, 105, 107, 108, 110, 130, 133, 138, 150, 162 Informal economies, 44, 96, 178 Informality, 44, 97 See also informal economies, 44, 96, 178 See also Informal order Informal order, 44 Infraglobalization, 43 Infrastructure, 51, 133, 135 Institutionalisation, 5, 11–15, 159–161, 173, 179 Instrumentalisation, 24n13, 138n3 See also Instrumentalised Instrumentalised, 178 Insurgent, 9, 17, 18, 34, 36, 118, 119, 144, 145, 150, 152, 173, 177 Intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), 13 Intermediaries, 93 Internalised coloniality, 6 Intersectionality, 10 Intervention, 17, 36, 37, 154, 169 Interviews, 4, 15, 22, 36, 49, 90, 93, 144–146, 148–152, 155, 159, 160, 166n1 group interviews, 50, 53n7, 71, 86, 95, 103, 108, 117, 120, 121, 129, 133 Intimate, 36, 40, 63, 120, 144, 177

201

J

Job(s), 73, 76n7, 95, 103, 106, 122, 143, 152, 175 Jornal, 40, 50, 92, 105, 106, 111n7, 117, 130 Journal, 47, 50, 115 Justice, 2, 8, 17, 24n13, 43, 70, 166, 173–175, 180 K

Kitchen, 45, 48, 73, 75, 83, 87–89, 91, 109, 178 Knitting, 83, 86, 87 Knowledge, 7–9, 15, 35, 42, 47, 50, 60, 64, 67–69, 71, 73, 76, 86, 87, 89, 91, 108, 109, 147, 149, 150, 160, 161, 166n1, 172–176, 178, 180 L

Labour division of labour, 6, 60, 61, 85, 170 remunerated/paid work/labour, 2, 82, 125, 126, 128, 152 unpaid labour, 40 (see also Non-remunerated labour; Unpaid work) Land land claims, 38, 149–151, 166 (see also Land rights) land rights, 149 land tenure, 125, 150 (see also Landownership) See also Property Landowner, 18, 19, 37, 88, 156 Landownership, 18, 25n15, 87 See also Landowner

202 Index

Language, 1, 14, 23n4, 23n5, 33, 42, 66, 83, 158, 174, 176 Latin America, 5, 7, 13, 24n7, 24n8, 59, 60, 65, 66, 92, 107, 149, 154, 174 Latinidad, 65, 75 Latina, 65 See also Lantinx La Vía Campesina, 154 La Violencia, 86, 110n1 Law, 12, 38, 66, 159, 160 Law 160, 38, 159, 160 Ley 160, 38 Law 731, 36, 159 Ley 731, 36 See also Rural Women’s Law Left, 6, 50, 85, 101, 107, 115, 117, 126, 152, 175 Leftists, 37 Left-wing, 171 See also Left; Leftists LGTBQIA+, 171 Liberal, 10, 59, 110n1, 158, 178 Livelihoods, 45, 82, 109, 128 Local/global, 43 Lorde, Audre, 9, 10 Lugones, María, 7, 10, 35, 170–172, 177 M

Machismo, 90, 110, 129, 153, 154, 178 Macropolitics, 44, 178 Magdalena, 115 Mainstream, 19, 43, 64, 82, 129, 131 Marcos, Sylvia, 5, 7, 34

Marginalisation, 3, 17, 19, 82, 85, 90, 91, 103, 105, 107, 133, 144, 151, 157, 163 Margins, 120 Market, 4, 19, 24n12, 43, 49, 73, 74, 90, 125 Masculinity, 4, 70, 165, 173 Massey, Doreen, 41, 42, 44, 46, 52, 53n3, 81, 102, 177, 179 Memory, 2, 6, 17, 24n13, 118, 121, 138n3 Mercados campesinos, 15 Mesa de Incidencia Política de las Mujeres Rurales de Colombia, 36, 159 Mestiza, 2, 4, 10, 59, 62, 63, 65, 145, 149, 158, 171 Mestizaje, 59, 61, 62 Mestizo, 33, 61 Mexico, 7, 67 Micropolitics, 44 Militarisation, 18, 24n13, 138n3, 152, 163, 171 See also Military Military, 85, 86, 115, 121, 153, 171 Minca, 15, 24n12, 49–51, 62, 63, 72, 74, 89, 90, 92, 97, 102, 107, 115, 131, 135–136, 138n9 Mining, 18, 124, 148, 177 Misogyny, 46, 89 Mobilities, 22, 47, 49, 92, 123, 131, 133–136, 166n1 Modernity, 5, 6, 8, 10, 15, 20, 34, 42, 43, 59, 81, 177 Molano, Alfredo, 68, 69, 86, 177 More than representational, 47 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 5, 66, 75, 76n3

 Index 

Mototaxi, 135, 136 Muisca, 62 Mujer Fariana, 145, 150, 152, 164 Multicultural, 66 Multinationals, 124, 148 Multiplicity, 21, 40–44, 46, 52, 81, 92, 110, 177–179 Murder, 4, 19, 117, 121, 165, 171

203

New-export crops, 118, 124, 125 Non-government Organisation (NGO), 2, 4, 11–13, 71, 145, 149, 159, 173 Non-human, 47, 62, 100, 118 Non-remunerated labour, 82 O

N

Nation national identity, 119, 172 nation-states, 6, 12, 61 Nationalism, 4, 16, 18, 20, 24n13, 24n15, 36, 38, 52, 69, 83, 106, 111n8, 119, 138n3, 145, 148, 161, 165, 166n1, 177, 178 Naturalisation, 85, 172 See also Naturalised; Naturalising Naturalising, 60, 61 Natural reserve, 115, 131 Nature, 21, 42, 67, 83, 124, 133, 137 Negotiation, 12, 18, 21, 44, 75, 84, 90, 91, 138, 144, 145, 148, 150, 160, 178 Neighbours, 40, 41, 48, 72, 92, 94, 121, 166n2 neighbouring, 97, 154, 156 Neoliberal, 5, 8, 12–14, 20, 22, 34, 36, 42–45, 83, 85, 107, 110, 123–126, 128–132, 137, 148, 151, 155, 156, 159, 166, 170, 173–176, 178 See also Neoliberalism Neoliberal academies, 175 Neoliberalism, 81, 83

Objectification, 38, 40, 53, 73, 132, 169 objects, 38, 40, 53, 73, 132, 169 things, 1, 63, 83, 101, 116, 117, 134, 158, 162, 165, 169 Onces, 15, 71–73, 84, 96, 98–100, 102, 103, 116, 120, 122, 127, 131 Oppression, 1, 10, 37, 46, 84, 124, 144, 152, 153, 155, 177 Organisation, 2, 12, 13, 15, 22, 36, 38, 71, 119, 144–147, 149–155, 159–162, 164, 165, 166n1, 172 Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC), 148, 160, 161, 173 Orientalist, 9 Othering other, 7, 35, 133, 161 Other worlds, 3–4, 20, 21, 33–36, 40, 41, 46, 53, 69, 75, 82, 85, 91, 102, 157–162, 170, 172, 173, 175–177, 179, 180 P

Pacific, 10, 39, 40, 61, 149, 156 Paradigm, 7, 67, 92

204 Index

Paramilitary, 18, 86, 99, 115–117, 119–121, 171 paracos, 116 Páramo, 148 Paredes, Julieta, 6, 9, 34, 129, 155, 171 Parity, 9, 172 Participatory research, 15, 70 Passing, 49, 59, 63, 87, 108 Patriarchy, 7, 15, 19, 34, 37, 45, 63, 75, 84, 85, 101, 103, 109, 110, 128, 129, 138, 149, 154, 156, 160, 170, 173, 178 Peace liberal peace, 178 peace accord, 17–20, 36, 37, 119, 145, 150, 162, 165, 166, 171, 180 (see also Post-accord) peace process, 162, 165, 179 (see also Peace negotiation) Peace negotiation, 150 Peace process, 119 Peasant reserve zones, 38, 160, 162 Zonas de Researva Campesina (ZRC), 38, 160, 179 Peasantry, 19 peasant, 7, 9, 11, 19, 25n15, 38, 109, 126, 129, 156 See also Campesinx Photo elicitation, 15 Photographic exhibition, 15, 73–74, 84, 90 See also Exhibition Photography, 73 Place-based, 13, 21, 22, 34, 36, 40, 45, 52, 53, 60, 101, 123, 134, 138, 156, 162 Planting, 83, 87, 134

Plebiscite, 171 Plurality pluralidad de los cuerpos, 151 plural worlds, 20–22, 59, 65, 170, 177–179 Pluriverse, 35, 41, 174, 176, 179 Political action, 8, 143 Political will, 159, 161, 166 Politics of citation, 176 Politics of place, 20, 21, 35, 40, 43–46, 52, 75, 81–110, 119, 124, 136, 144, 177–179 Positionality, 2, 3, 21, 46, 48, 60, 62–64, 70, 75, 76 Possessive logics, 66, 110, 175, 177 Post-accord, 138n3, 144, 156, 165 Poverty, 38, 40, 62, 99, 103, 106, 121, 122, 124, 129, 130, 137, 169 poor, 13, 83, 125, 131, 153 Power relations, 61, 118, 166n1 Precarity, 152 precarious work, 107 Private, 6, 10, 36, 39, 44, 92 Privilege, 3, 5, 15, 59, 61–64, 171, 175, 176 Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), 39, 143, 149, 150, 158, 165, 179 Progressive, 3, 8, 14, 52, 90, 91, 138 Property, 18, 34, 38, 149, 150 Proximity, 97, 99 Proyecticos, 133, 158, 173, 174 Public, 4, 6, 11–13, 36, 44, 64, 71, 92, 106, 148, 159, 160, 164, 173, 175

 Index  Q

Quijano, Anibal, 5–7 R

Race racialisation, 64, 66 racial order, 61 Racism, 2, 7, 10, 11, 34, 37, 45, 59, 63, 64, 66, 75, 85, 145, 147, 152, 158, 160, 170, 175 Rain, 48, 50, 51, 71, 99 See also Rain season Rain season, 48 Rationality, 59 Re-existance, 46, 82, 155, 158, 170 Reflexivity, 21, 48, 52, 60–67, 70, 74, 84, 103, 110 Relationality, 21, 34, 36, 41, 42, 47, 92, 109, 177, 178 Research, 14, 15, 17, 24n10, 35, 49, 63, 67, 70, 71, 76, 90, 111n6, 137, 166n1, 175 See also Research practice; Research process Research practice, 48, 60 Research process, 60 Resistance, 3, 4, 7–10, 13, 18, 19, 21, 34, 36–41, 44, 50, 52, 66, 75, 82, 91, 97, 109, 119, 123, 138, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 157, 158, 165, 176, 177 Right-wing, 20 River, 147 Río, 69 Road, 48–51, 115–117, 131, 135 Romantic, 69, 110 See also Romanticising

205

Romanticising, 44, 46, 89, 171 Routine, 73, 126, 127 Rurality, 19, 42, 82, 137 Rural places, 40, 42, 46, 48, 51, 81, 83, 110, 138, 177 Rural Women’s Law, 36, 159 See also Law 731 Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres, 18, 19, 39, 118, 151, 179 S

Safety, 38, 48, 87, 164, 165 Santander, 63, 86, 138n4 School, 51, 88, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 102, 104–106, 115, 126, 128, 130, 138n7, 154 Security, 20, 87, 89, 109 national security, 20, 178 Self-determination, 66, 178 Self-identification, 60 SENA, 105, 106 Sentipensar, 3, 48, 51, 52, 60, 67, 69, 71–73, 75, 145, 172, 173, 176 feeling-thinking, 15, 21, 67–69, 93, 173, 178 Settler, 65, 66 settler colonialism, 65, 66 Sexuality, 7, 60, 171 Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, 21, 22, 46, 47, 62, 69, 83, 111n5, 118, 124, 131, 170 Slavery, 9, 45 Social fabric, 120, 122 Social justice, 2, 22, 70, 166, 173, 175, 180

206 Index

Social leaders, 4, 19, 21, 22, 36, 62, 70, 71, 143–145, 147, 152, 155, 158, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 171–173, 178, 180–192 Social movements, 12, 19, 22, 37, 110, 138, 144, 149, 154, 159, 161–165, 171, 178 Solidarity, 8, 38, 66, 72 Sovereignty, 22, 65, 66, 87, 109, 144, 155–157, 161, 170, 177, 178 Space, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 18–20, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 51, 52, 64, 67, 72, 75, 92, 107, 109, 118, 122, 126, 137, 147, 154, 163, 164, 174–176, 178 State abandonment, 51 Static, 24n7, 41, 81 Storytelling, 21, 50, 51, 59, 75, 92, 129, 172 Stove, 85, 87–89, 109, 130, 134 Struggle, 1–5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 33–37, 40, 44–46, 51, 53, 61, 69, 71, 75, 83, 87, 91, 92, 103, 109, 110, 118, 119, 122, 126, 129, 137, 143–166, 170–173, 178, 179 Subjugated, 37, 129 Subversive, 82, 83, 90, 91, 109, 177 Surface, 41, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 177 Survivors, 39 Sustainability, 19, 40, 157, 159 T

Temporality, 35 time, 1–3, 10, 13, 17, 22, 35, 39, 41, 42, 46–48, 50–52, 53n7,

63, 64, 67–69, 71–73, 75, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 115, 116, 121, 125, 128, 132–135, 137, 143–145, 153, 163, 165, 170, 172, 173, 176, 178 Territoriality, 36, 42, 52, 178 Territorio cuerpo-tierra, see Territory body-land Territory, 10, 14, 18, 20–22, 33–53, 62, 71, 76n3, 117, 118, 120–123, 135, 143–145, 147–152, 154–157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 177, 178 territorial, 8, 9, 14, 17, 18, 20–22, 24n7, 37–39, 50, 53, 61, 118, 119, 123–138, 145, 147–152, 156, 165, 166, 170, 172, 177, 179 Territory body-land, 20–22, 34, 37–40, 52, 71, 143–166, 173, 177, 178 Terror, 117 Testimony, 3, 18, 22, 37, 39, 52, 71, 73, 105, 106, 110, 144, 145, 162, 171, 178 collective testimonies, 72 Threat, 122, 148, 163, 165 Toca, 15, 21, 22, 40, 44, 49, 50, 62, 72, 84, 88, 90–93, 95, 102, 103, 105–107, 118, 123–131, 133, 138n7, 153, 170, 178 Tokenism, 9 tokenised, 9, 170 Top-down, 13, 157, 161, 174, 178 Tourism, 107, 118, 123, 124, 131–137, 170 tourist mobilities, 22, 131, 135

 Index 

207

economic violence, 152, 153 epistemic violence, 5, 8–10, 19, 36, 68, 110, 136, 159, 161, 176 structural violence, 14, 123, 133, 137 violence against women, 21, 46, 89, 152, 164

Tradition, 23n5, 69 Transnational, 43 feminisms, 68, 174 Transport, 48, 117, 124, 126, 135, 138n7 See also Bike; Mototaxi Trauma, 122, 123 Triple shift, 82, 129, 138n8 Trust, 62, 63 W U

United Nations, 11, 12, 18, 144 United States, 15, 17, 83, 137, 176 Universalisation, 11, 13, 14, 43 Unlearning, 3, 21, 52, 53, 59–76, 83, 145 Unpaid work, 90 Urban, 7, 15, 51, 62, 86, 106, 107, 122, 126, 136 urban feminism, 7, 15 V

Values, 1, 50, 61, 64, 69, 91, 128, 129, 131, 134, 135, 154 Vereda, 21, 40, 46, 49, 62, 63, 68, 71, 81–110, 115, 117, 120, 121, 130, 131, 133, 135, 138n7, 144, 162, 173, 177, 178 veredear, 15, 24n8, 49, 50, 75 Victimisation, 144, 155, 177 victims, 39, 40, 53, 90, 91, 125, 129, 137, 150, 155, 162, 180 Vida digna, 36 See also Dignified life Violence

Walking, 24n8, 46, 49, 50, 63, 68, 144 War, 18, 20, 22, 37, 39, 110n1, 118, 120, 121, 137, 144, 148, 150–152, 165 Weather, 48, 50, 51, 98, 99, 101 extreme weather, 51, 99 rough weather, 51, 99 Well-being, 8, 20, 34, 40, 87–89, 95, 96, 99, 128, 136 West, 8, 15, 170 Western feminisms, 44, 83 See also Western Western, 4, 11, 34, 44, 45, 60, 66, 68, 83, 118, 124, 135, 154, 173 White, 1, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 33, 59–64, 66, 74, 76, 125, 158, 173, 175, 176 White-mestiza, 2, 4, 10, 59, 61–64, 145, 171, 174, 176 White privilege, 5 White saviour, 11, 13 White supremacy, 61, 66 Widowhood, 117 Wife, 151 Women of Colour, 5, 7–9, 170

208 Index

Women’s liberation, 8, 10, 83, 154, 173 Women’s rights, 11–14, 43, 150, 154 Working-class, 83 Workload, 72, 73, 82, 91, 128, 133, 153 heavy workload, 49, 50, 71, 153

Y

Young, 49, 62, 63, 82, 93, 103–108, 110, 111n6, 126, 129, 131, 135, 136, 138n7, 162 Z

Zapatista, 8, 34