Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order 9781666919196, 9781666919189

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Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE AMERICAS Series Editor: A. Ricardo López This series reaches beyond conventional approaches and disciplinary boundaries to publish widely ranging studies in social movements—defined for this series, as the practice through which a multiplicity of actors transform, contest, challenge, consolidate, and reproduce society in variety of historical moments—from diverse perspectives. The fundamental premise of this series is that, if social movements have historically been constituted across nations, the study of them must be transnational as well. The main objective is threefold. First, the series de-emphasizes the nation-state as the primary framework for understanding social movements in the Americas. Second, the series constitutes a transnational and interdisciplinary intellectual community to explore the political, social, economic, cultural conditions through which social movements have played a fundamental role in shaping the experiences, categories, practices, and meanings of democracy. Third, the series reconsiders the origins of social change and democracy away from the U.S. and Europe. Social Movements in the Americas is dedicated to publishing translations of important scholarly work produced in Latin America. Recent Titles in This Series Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order: Black Middle Classes through an Intersectional Lens by Mara Viveros Vigoya Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis by Anderson Bean A Fervent Crusade for the National Soul: Cultural Politics in Colombia, 1930– 1946 by Catalina Muñoz Social Protests in Colombia: A History, 1958–1990 by Mauricio Archila-Neira

Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order Black Middle Classes through an Intersectional Lens Mara Viveros Vigoya Foreword by A. Ricardo López-Pedreros

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Viveros, M. (Mara), author.   Title: Breaking the boundaries of the Colombian socio-racial order : Black middle classes through an intersectional lens / Mara Viveros-Vigoya ; foreword by A. Ricardo López-Pedreros.   Other titles: Oxímoron de las clases medias negras. English   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: Social movements in the Americas | Includes bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023046255 (print) | LCCN 2023046256 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666919189 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666919196 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Middle class--Colombia. | Black people--Colombia--Social conditions. | Social mobility--Colombia--History. | Intersectionality (Sociology)--Colombia. | Colombia--Social conditions.  Classification: LCC HT690.C6 V5813 2024  (print) | LCC HT690.C6  (ebook) | DDC 305.5/509861--dc23/eng/20231030  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046255 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046256 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Figures vii Foreword ix A. Ricardo López-Pedreros Acknowledgments xxvii Introduction: Always “Out of Place”



1

PART 1: THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL DILEMMAS IN RESEARCHING THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASSES Chapter 1: Colombia’s Elusive Socio-Racial Order

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Chapter 2: The Heterogeneity of the Category “Middle Class”

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Chapter 3: An Intersectional Approach to the Latin American Middle Classes

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PART 2: A HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNT OF THE CONFIGURATION OF THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASSES IN COLOMBIA

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Chapter 4: The Middle Layers of the Afro-Colombian Population



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Chapter 5: Upward Mobility, Whiteness, and Social Whitening in Colombia 91 PART 3: UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY AND BLACK IDENTITY: AN INTERSECTIONAL EXPERIENCE Chapter 6: Three Accounts of Social Mobility from an Intersectional and Regional Perspective v



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Contents

Chapter 7: Women Teachers, Ethno-Educators, and Microentrepreneurs in the Formation‌‌‌‌, Reformation, and Transformation of the Black Middle Classes

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Chapter 8: Black Middle Classes in the Crises of Racial Democracy 153 Epilogue

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References Index

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About the Author



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Figures

Figure 1. Miguel Ángel and Alfonso Flórez Góngora walking along Cúcuta’s Fifth Avenue in 1970. Flórez Góngora family photo album. 16 Figure 2. Danit Torres Fuentes with her father Jose Miguel Torres Rodrigues (RIP), at her master’s graduation ceremony. Bogotá, 1998. Torres Fuentes family photo album.

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Figure 3. The Mosquera Asprilla family celebrate the new millennium and the birthday of Amín Mosquera (back row, third from right). Bogotá, 2000. Mosquera Asprilla family photo album, taken by Ada Mosquera Asprilla.

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Foreword A. Ricardo López-Pedreros

Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order: Black Middle Classes through an Intersectional Lens is a revised and expanded version of a book published in Spanish in 2021 by the Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CALAS). By proposing an intersectional perspective and a transdisciplinary approach, Mara Viveros Vigoya, professor at the Escuela de Estudios de Género at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, locates the formation of the Black middle classes in Colombia, as structural and subjective reality, at the core of the process of modernization, development, and neoliberalism during the long twentieth century. It is the product of an extensive ethnographic work with three generations of families from the Pacific and Caribbean regions as well as the islands of San Andrés and Providencia. Viveros Vigoya excavates how, as Black middle-class women and men became professionals in urbanized centers of Colombia, they fought over the meanings, practices, boundaries, and distinctions of being Black middle class in different historical moments since the late 1930s. In so doing, this book is a major contribution to the study of the historical making of the middle classes in Latin America. The implications of the arguments presented here are profound. This study invites the reader to think critically about hegemonic discourses on our globalized present. In a context of what is often evoked as a “crisis of democracy,” the middle classes have yet again become common currency in normative constructions of how globalized societies should be properly organized. Policymakers, scholars, politicians, and commentators all identify the middle classes as foundation to a more democratic society. For some, the consolidation of a middle class could offset the negative effects of globalization by preventing the concentration of national wealth and implementing a discipline of global democratic development. For others, an entrepreneurial ix

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middle class, composed of investors, professionals, and eager consumers, would create the social conditions to distance societies away from political extremism. It is indeed the recuperation of the middle class, the argument goes, that could restore “civilization” and democracy according to the historical experiences of “the West.”1 For many others, a middle class could renovate the deteriorating imperial—and imperialist—leadership of the United States by offering a “middle-class society,” the product of a supposed historical uniqueness, as a model for those countries considered less democratic across the world. It is hailed as the result of distributive policies and the strengthening of left-leaning governments in several Latin American countries. In the Colombian case, the middle class is assigned the task of materializing a peaceful society. And as if all this were not enough, the middle class is also defined as the social class that should be the protagonist of any democratization process and the retaining wall against populism, considered by many as the main threat to a democratic order.2 It is through these discourses that a consensus—a common sense—has become naturalized. The expansion of a middle class means democratization which implies the very possibility to achieve a globalized society that is simultaneously professed as post-class, post-ideological, and post-racial. In contrast, a society defined between elites and popular classes denotes a process of de-democratization which then is imagined as racist, classist, hierarchical, and exclusionary. In academic circles, this narrative has been translated into a hegemonic explanation in which a two-class society is taken as the expression of the supreme form of antidemocratic domination in neoliberal societies where the struggle between two well-demarcated social groups—an ever-smaller oligarchy and a growing mass of popular classes— produce social instability, political radicalization, economic inequality, and the lack of upward social mobility. In this context, many social scientists tend to situate this two-class society as the original struggle of our capitalist societies and, therefore, as the main object of critical work. The middle class is perceived, almost by definition, as less relevant precisely because, we assume, a study of this class would only take us away from what is considered the authentic manifestation of class domination and material inequality in society. According to this argument, the risk is all about falling into the myth—or lie—of the middle classes because such a myth simply veils the real class struggle inherent to any capitalist society. These discourses have translated into what I have elsewhere defined as an elision hypothesis—perpetuated in modernization conceptualizations, naturalized by dependency theories, disregarded by subalternist perspectives, and reproduced in decolonial approaches—through which the middle classes in Latin America are understood as a chimera, as a failure, as a lack, as a bastard variation to a “universal” middle class imagined for the United States and

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Europe. Much ink has been spilled to demonstrate either the nonexistence or the recent creation of the middle classes in the region. Thus, the consolidation of a middle class in Latin America is often explained as a foundational rupture with a past, one characterized by two-class struggle with a weak and gray middle class at best.3 In comparison to Europe and the United States whose historical experiences, the argument goes, have developed middle-class pasts, the future of Latin America belongs to an always becoming middle class that will bring, at long last, a teleological opposite of what Latin America has historically been in the past: a post-hierarchical society, a post-class society without class conflict, a post-racial reality, a cohesive society in which political stability could be achieved, and economic equalities could materialize.4 At the core of these prevailing assumptions, an elision hypothesis have been consolidated—the belief that the middle classes can be easily disregarded— precisely because Latin America as a region has neither middle-class histories to question nor middle-class pasts to study but only futures to enthrone. Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order exposes the racialized—and racist—discourses at the core of such an elision hypothesis. Viveros Vigoya’s book persuasively suggests we work within a framework in which the relationships between being middle class and being Black are understood as a foundational oxymoron. Each side stands opposed to the other in a closed—and racialized—economy of knowledge where the historical reality of being Black middle class is read as fundamental contradiction to, a deviation from, or a reality that does not “fit” in what is considered a proper Latin American subalternity. The Black middle classes in Latin America, as Viveros Vigoya contends, often find themselves “out of place” either as a structural reality or a subjective identity. Take, for instance, some strands of decolonial theories. As they offer a powerful critique of modernity, the middle classes in Latin America continue to appear as nonexistent either because the middle classes are defined as too Europeanized or US-influenced—and here Europe and the United States are imagined as White—and thus presumably not exotic enough to be worthy topic to understand the perceived radical alterity of Latin America, which is uniformly associated with “subaltern” groups.5 Along the way, some decolonial theories, while critically unpacking the colonial matrix of power at the core of Western modernity, reproduce one of its central tenets: the middle class is a particular reality only for what is perceived as Westernized societies in the “Global North.” Resuscitating modernization approaches and dependency theories, these analyses pose the elites in Latin America as pawns of global superpowers and their colonial matrix of power. Decolonial studies simultaneously assumes the middle classes to be pawns of the Latin American elites which, by definition, implies that these middle classes are also reproducing the colonial matrix of power, a creation and imposition of

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global places like the United States and Europe. Simultaneously, in what are considered local spaces (such as Latin America) the Black middle classes are historicized as “unreal” because being Black is associated with a homogenous colonized space—the Global South—and being middle class is defined as part of an equally homogenous colonizer rule—the Global North, particular yet universal.6 Thus, the local—or what is seen as outside a proper Europe and the United States—is often subsumed into a transhistorical unpolluted, glorified, and authentic subalternity positioned against a prevailing Western colonial matrix of power. In this framework, being Black and middle class is understood as an oxymoron. And with these interpretations increasingly becoming hegemonic in some academic circles, it is this foundational oxymoron, with a thick genealogy in the social sciences that, as Viveros Vigoya argues, makes difficult to historicize the multilayered and mottled experiences of the Black middle classes in Colombia. As “Black people are imagined to be universally poor, that is, ‘lower class,’” scholars assume they are part of a subalternity that enters into contradiction with what is perceived as a middle-class position. Certainly, Viveros Vigoya does not seek to acclaim the mere existence of a Black middle class and thus celebrate democratization, as neoliberal discourses would have it. Nor does she want to dismiss decolonial theories wholesale. Rather, finding inspiration in some versions of decolonial theories, this book questions the perception of Afro-descendant “communities” as uniformly impoverished in order to highlight the interconnectedness of class with multiple axes of social inequality.7 In so doing, Viveros Vigoya proposes to study domination through the multilayered intersections of gender, class, race, and age at the core of the Latin American societies: How, she asks, has racism worked through class exclusions and how has classism functioned through racialization and how has gender made these mutually inclusive relationships at all possible? Along the way, this book invites readers to think about how Black middle classes in Colombia have challenged multiple yet conflicting forms of social hierarchization while partially reproducing capitalist forms of domination in different historical moments since the 1930s. Despite the increasing number of interdisciplinary studies committed to the historical analysis of the middle classes, such analysis is often marginal to understand the heterogenous histories of Latin America.8 Thus, the examination tends to be confined to a historiographical field about the middle classes while isolating such study away from histories of power and domination that have historically shaped the region. This is because, again, we assume, the pasts of the middle class in Latin America do not really exist and are just recent creation, prerogatives of globalization and democracy, which are yet again seen as a process emanating from the “Global North.”9

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In stark contrast, Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order invites the reader to reexamine central problematizations in the histories of Colombia as part of Latin America: modernization, development, and neoliberalism. Across Latin America, the worldwide economic crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s accelerated a transition from a primary-export economy to an expansion of industrial capitalism, major process of rapid urbanization materialized, and the growth of the state became a reality. A concurrent historical process accompanied these changes: the dramatic and rapid development of the service sector, particularly commerce, government bureaucracy, and transportation, which, on the one hand, increased job prospects in offices as a place of labor and, on the other, expanded educational opportunities. Such changes also produced profound transformations in social relations, as they reconfigured a new gendered division of labor, shaped a novel classed organization of work with its significant implications for the expansion of women’s and men’s participation in what feminist theories have defined as affective labor. Taken together, these multiple realities propelled an intensification of social movements and a politicization of everyday life in which different historical actors struggled over the racialized, classed, and gendered meanings of modernization. Crucially, this book uncovers the classed foundations of mestizaje as a racialized discourse. In the Colombian case, as new notions of citizenship and national belonging emerged, mestizaje was associated with a conception of middle classness precisely because in a context of political mobilization and social unrest, a middling positionality was imagined as the proper definition of modernity manifested in a racial harmony and a peaceful coexistence of classes. Simultaneously, such a definition of modernity consolidated itself through class discourses that sharply—and hierarchically—distinguished the service sector (i.e., office) characterized as place of labor harmony from the industrial sector (i.e., the factory) as a space of political chaos and social struggle. Along the way, the office was mobilized as a superior experience of a middle-class worker concurrently imagined as the embodiment of a white mestizo identity and, as such, a manifestation of proper citizenship. In contrast, the factory was defined as the other of this middle-class mestizo worker, the manifestation of a manual and working class belonging often associated with backwardness and class struggle which were taken to be synonymous with Blackness and indigenousness, “obstacles” to be overcome for a modern citizenship to materialize. In this context, Viveros Vigoya shows how, as Black people increased their participation and visibility in the service sector labor force during the interwar years, these racialized and classed constructions obscured— even erased—Black people’s participation as middle-class office workers/

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employees. Furthermore, Viveros Vigoya demonstrates how Black women and men from the Caribbean and the Pacific critically participated in the expansion of the service sector and, materially, became eligible to join a middle class and its political and intellectual life in Bogotá, the capital city. And yet, as the service sector was imagined as the manifestation of a Whitemestizo identity predicated on intellectual labor, a racial and class regime that consolidated itself as the essence of Colombia citizenship, Black women and men were excluded from the imaginary of being middle class and the practices of middle-class belonging. Black people were associated with manual and physical work, as belonging to popular classes and in opposition—that is to say, in contradiction—to intellectual labor, presumably the archetypal distinction of middle classness. As a multiplicity of social actors were fighting over the material fruits of modernity during the first half of the twentieth century, the unequal and hierarchical allocation of resources was enabled and “legitimized” through a racialized and classed oxymoronic situation. One the one hand, because of presumably unique and exceptional white/mestizo middle class identity—one predicated on transnational ideas about merit, professionalism, and peaceful service work—mental laborers could be seen as modern citizens and as such deserving more material rewards. On the other, manual labor, associated with being Black, supposedly posed an obstacle to become a proper middle class and thus they were not entitled to enjoy the material rewards of modernity reserved only for those who were defined as middle-class mental laborers. Along the way, the office, a place of labor harmony and middle classness, became a manifestation of a racialized modernity in which being Black was seen as a “out of place” and thus entitled to get fewer economic resources. Yet again, Black middle-class women and men endeavored to break this boundary and its concomitant exploitative hierarchization of modernity in order to, on the one hand, secure better distribution of resources and, on the other, achieve cultural as well as political recognition. They questioned the association between Black women with domestic service/physical labor and being Black with manual labor. In so doing, these Black people materialized a class distinction—they claimed to be different from manual laborers—while they also expanded ties of solidarity to promote an inclusionary notion of modernity. Other members of this Black middle class embraced a mestizo identity not as a strategy of whitening and/or assimilation but rather as acknowledgment of Black identity and inclusion of intellectual contributions of Black people to the nation and notions of political citizenship.10 As a response to multiple social mobilizations, during the 1950s and 1960s the idea of middle classes yet again gained a renewed traction as a central theme of political discussion across the Americas. In a transnational context in which the horror of Nazi racism was very much alive and the decolonization

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struggles intensified across the African continent, the experiences of populism and the subsequent emergence of La Violencia in Colombia—along with the perceptions about reformist governments in Guatemala and Argentina as well as revolutions in Bolivia and Cuba—further consolidated real and imagined concerns for the spread of communism. A “proper” language reemerged here to regionalize—and classify—the world according to notions of racial/ cultural heterogeneity and homogeneity. Global policymakers, politicians, and elite intellectuals linked a middle class to a hierarchical definition of democracy associated with the “first world,” imagined as homogenously European and white. Simultaneously, they demarcated a “racial heterogeneity” as the cause for the consolidation of a society characterized by two popular groups and oligarchies in perpetual struggle which made the Third World the foundational place for antidemocratic populism and feudalism. One only has to read what is often considered the pioneer study of the middle classes in Latin America to see such racialized hierarchization of democracy through the meanings of middle class. John J. Johnson, who like so many other intellectuals moved with relative ease between university halls and the policymaking arena, proposed a narrative whose racialized language sought to hierarchize what kinds of societies—as political and geographic entities—deserved to be recognized as middle-class societies and thus part of the charmed circle of modernity.11 Arguments such as this played a fundamental role in legitimizing the idea that societies defined by certain social structures resulting from particular cultural characteristics—what was described as racial homogeneity, the role of European blood, the role of foreigners coming from Europe to Latin America, civilized lineages—could develop a middle class and, by extension, consolidate an adequate democracy. Johnson’s case studies—Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Brazil—were hierarchically presented to demonstrate how those democratic societies with more “homogeneous” racial composition allowed the settlement of a middle class and should be placed in a superior place in relation to those societies whose “ambiguous” or “heterogeneous” racial arrangement tended to create obstacles to the development of a middle class and the consolidation of a democracy. The Stanford historian enthroned Uruguay as a “political utopia,” with its European tendencies, for the entrenchment of democracy and the development of a middle class while criticizing Brazil for its belated bid for power, conceived as the possibility of achieving a democracy that the middle classes should represent, and for that reason he placed it at the bottom of the Latin American political hierarchy. Uruguay, the historian argued, did not have much of Indigenous or Black influence whereas Brazil precisely developed those influences. In the middle of these two extremes Johnson placed Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.12

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It is this racialized framework that is still very much with us, even if unconsciously, particularly in the study of the Cold War and the role of developmental programs of the 1950s and 1960s. By studying the historical formation of the Black middle classes in Colombia, Viveros Vigoya dismantles such frameworks and helps us offer an alternative explanation of the Cold War in Latin America. For a while, scholars have historicized developmental programs as a typical policy of containment, with US policymakers pushing a ready-made middle class as the political answer to radicalization across the Americas.13 Such development programs sought to push other societies in the Americas toward liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity by promoting “the American way of life” and the “American dream” in which the middle classes are seen as a manifestation of whiteness to be exported across the world.14 And yet study after study argues that development programs were, from their very inception, either colossal failures or lost causes. Despite their noble intentions “to improve” the lives of the people of the “third world” by making them middle class, US officials “misled themselves trying to apply dubious social science theories” unfit for Latin American political, social, and cultural realities.15 Those policymakers ignored, the established argument goes, that the social sciences they used to create middle-class society came from experiences alien to Latin America itself because, again, Latin America were racially heterogenous.16 Very much mimicking the discussion among policymakers and intellectuals during the early 1960s, some historians conclude that “Latin America was not Europe,” and thus the former, unlike the latter, could not emulate a US-style middle-class democracy.17 As a result, Latin American societies remained trapped in a two-class social struggle, thanks to its racial heterogeneity, and thus rejected US development programs, which, of course, further perpetuated political radicalization and social polarization.18 For other scholars, the creation of a middle class in the Americas failed because policymakers did not put into practice the social polices they promoted. Had they implemented their noble intentions to forge a middle class, tacitly imagined as white, a truly democratic society could have been created. What Latin America needed, but could not materialize, was an all-democratic middle class. Viveros Vigoya questions these arguments by historicizing a racialized notion of middle classness at the core of developmental programs. Her arguments tell us that, far from failures or smoke screens to the imperial politics, as many continue to argue, developmental programs further consolidated a classed and racialized notion of democracy. It was such notion of democracy that policymakers, politicians, intellectuals mobilized as the future of a modernization and the antidote to the spread of communism in the region and put it into practice in multiple developmental programs. The “genuine” representative of a democratic state government sought to establish an urbanized

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middle-class mestizo (in its whitening sense) as the only one capable of overcoming the burdens—or obstacles—of a perceived heterogeneous racial composition and its presumably tendencies to perpetuate social conflict for the construction of a proper democracy. Yet Viveros Vigoya also shows how during the late 1950s and 1960s these programs opened professional prospects for Black people to work for a developmental state, educational opportunities to go to universities, and materialized conditions for upward mobility. Again, the process was contradictory. On the one hand, it was thanks to these developmental programs, as part of the National Front, a pact between the majority of the Liberal and Conservative Party factions, that some members of the Afro-Colombian population achieved a middle-class status. On the other, this upward social mobility was often understood as a form of “whitening” that distanced Black people from their backgrounds, precisely because at the core of developmental programs the very possibility of being middle class was associated with a process of whitening or racial homogenization. The racialized and classed oxymoron yet again proved to be powerful, as blackness, professionalization, and its concomitant hierarchical association with a middle-class could not coexist, thereby delegitimizing the very political possibility of Black middle-class peoples to make a claim to represent democracy. In this context, Viveros Vigoya shows how Black middle classes played crucial roles in what has been referred to as the transnational “politicization of everyday life” during the Cold War. This period saw the creation of social networks of Afro-Colombians—women and men—who were converging at that time in the capital. They searched for access to full economic citizenship, fought for material resources, environmental justice, labor conditions, gender equality, political inclusion, land distribution, cultural recognition, social citizenship, and visions of economic justice in their effort to remake a democratic society. They also debated ethnic and racial questions connected to the social and economic inequalities experienced by Black populations in Colombia’s regions. Across the country in the 1960s, Black women teachers came into contact with the organized labor movement, learning together multiple methods for organizing and making demands to the Colombian state in an attempt to improve their paradoxical situation of performing a “respected social function” that nevertheless was not well-paid. How do we read these multiple forms of political mobilization as Black middle class in the 1960s and 1970s?19 To be sure, several scholars have identified the important role played by the middle classes in the process of political radicalization during those decades in Latin America. There are plenty of historical studies that offer detailed descriptions of the participation of certain historical actors who are usually labeled as coming from a “middle-class background.” Eric Zolov, for instance, argues that in order to understand the

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cultural politics of the Cold War, it is imperative to recognize that the New Left was “more socially diverse . . . and ideologically complex” and thus one must include in the historical analysis “the vast sectors of largely middle class youth that took no direct part in armed revolutionary activities, yet who were deeply impacted by the cultural and political trends of their time.”20 Other authors concur that, in the context of revolutionary politics, “most New Left activists were indeed middle class.”21 In so doing, scholars have constantly assigned the middle classes a crucial political role in the consolidation of several revolutionary movements, countercultural practices, and social mobilizations that accompanied armed rebellions. In this context, scholars contend that, given the political polarization of society, the middle classes were preordained to choose political sides either by forming class alliances with popular groups to support a revolutionary project or by joining forces with the oligarchies to advocate for a counterrevolutionary one.22 Political radicalization is thus understood as a progression through which members of the middle class experienced a process of proletarization whereby their (middle) class interests were vanished from a radical and revolutionary position. In these historical narratives, revolutionary politics and middle-class formation is fundamentally historicized as unimportant precisely because members of middle class participated in revolutionary politics by joining forces with peasants, working classes, and the urban poor consolidating what is usually historicized as a classless (or cross-class), raceless (or across “races”), genderless, coherent, unified, left radical project. Via such a template, scholars often assign, as Wendy Wolford has argued, “an ontological coherence to the category of movement—a solid ‘thingness’ that is rarely tenable on the ground,”23 which is only possible when the so-called middle-class political interests overcome its heterogeneity and ambiguity and join forces with a working-class movement.24 Drawing on the Colombian case, Viveros Vigoya, in contrast, puts gendered, class, and racialized subjectivities at the center of experiences of political radicalization during the late 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere I have demonstrated how becoming politically radical and participating in revolutionary movements did not mean the vanishing of middle-class interests but rather an effort to claim for the remaking of a classed and gendered rule within left revolutionary movements.25 Here, Viveros Vigoya further argues how such rule was predicated on a racialized notion of a white-mestizo middle class. As these middle-class revolutionaries questioned oligarchical elites, they simultaneously sought to erect a hierarchal vision of society in which a middle class—an educated, masculine, and white-mestizo subject—should properly represent “the people” and thus hold the right to rule in a revolutionary change. She shows how Black people occupied a subordinated place on this ethno-racial hierarchy, underpinned by the gender and class domination

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that white-mestizo men exercised over Black men, and by an effort to silence their political projects. Furthermore, Viveros Vigoya’s arguments provoke at least three interrelated questions. Was this racialized, gendered, and classed claim to the right to rule a particular experience happening within the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s? Similarly, could one argue that, despite the fundamentally political differences, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements shared the idea of middle-class white-mestizo as the representation of a “true” democracy and thus entitled to hold the right to rule? How did the struggles for revolutionary change shape classed and gendered distinctions among multiple Black identities? Certainly, we need more research to fully answer these questions, but Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order invites us to question recent yet hegemonic interpretations of the Cold War as dialectical struggle between two politically unified, cross-class, raceless, genderless, and coherent revolutionary and counterrevolutionary projects, as recent studies of the period continue to argue, but rather as a struggle between and among heterogeneous classed, racialized, and gendered mobilizations, happening within revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, through which competing conceptions of class rule as well as opposing forms of domination were molded, contested, and legitimized.26 In a context in which multiculturalism has become hegemonic since at least the 1990s, the study of the making of the Black middle classes is an effort to critically think the social foundation of neoliberalism beyond the role of elites. Viveros Vigoya’s arguments suggest that Black middle-class women and men experienced this process through a more subtle, contradictory processes of partial accommodations and fragmented resistance, support articulated with rejections, subversive actions with validating ones in a fragile yet durable methodology of legitimation. In so doing, they invite readers to think that, far from being only an imposition by an elite and thus merely a process benefiting such group, a neoliberal rule occurred through an ample, racialized, and gendered, common sense across multiple and different social groups. Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order underlines several constitutive discourses and practices at the core of the workings of neoliberalism. Viveros Vigoya elaborates upon the contradictions between discourses on multiculturalism and the promises of upward mobility. As a response to multiple social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, a neoliberal state expanded greater recognition of ethnic difference while creating the conditions for a political economy of de-industrialization. Thus, as racialized discourses of inclusion expanded, a highly precarious job market materialized, which meant salaried manufacturing jobs increasingly disappeared. Simultaneously, the condition of the political economy created the further

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growth and legitimation of the service economies—banks, multinational corporations, tourism, universities, state-driven care industries, and insurance companies—that amplified wider job opportunities for some middleclass Black women and men who mobilized their cultural capital to labor as engineers, economists, business administrators, accounts, and scientists in the public and private sectors. Thus, a classed gap has widened between this relatively privileged group and the rest of the Afro-Colombian population who have been pushed out of their homelands by political and economic violence into urbanized centers where, thanks to de-industrialization, they have found fewer job opportunities. At the core of these hierarchies, discourses on the holiness of economic individualism and singular entreprenurship as the measures of cultural recognition and social upward mobility have been consolidated. Furthermore, the very possibility of upward social mobility, Viveros Vigoya contends, is often presented as a whitening experience, as a classed reality leaving behind—or a process of purification of—Blackness as racial and cultural identification. And, similarly, although multiculturalism has offered spaces for cultural recognition, it has also excluded Blackness as upward mobility is intimately associated with whiteness, a “condition” to improve one’s place in society. In so doing, multiculturalism constitutes a racial regime that, like mestizaje in the first half of the twentieth century, links progress, civilization, and beauty with whiteness. In this sense, partially following Franz Fanon, Viveros Vigoya concludes, “neither universalist republicanism with its ideology of mestizaje, nor neoliberal multiculturalism with its rhetorical championing of diversity, have managed to erase the marks left by the carimbas on Colombia’s Black population, serving as a persistent reminder of the status of ‘nonbeing.’” Thus, neoliberal multiculturalism is, in essence, a racial project that renders the importance of racial configurations in society, and their role in the production of poverty, either invisible or explained away as stemming from the lack of competitive individualism. And yet, Viveros Vigoya also demonstrates how these definitions of individualized upward mobility have constantly entered into struggle with other definitions—and methodologies—of economic success. By presenting a detailed ethnographic work, she shows how Black middle classes, particularly women, have proposed economic definitions of upward mobility away from individual entrepreneurship and capitalist individuality and more toward collective endeavors. Women schoolteachers, ethno-educators, and beauty microentrepreneurs at different junctures have contributed to the formation of this Black middle classes by strengthening the fabric of a larger community. They have challenged the dominant imaginary of the middle classes as broadly male, white, and mestizo. In particular, the work of Black women teachers has contributed to the democratization of access to education. Black

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women ethno-educators, although embracing the shift toward multiculturalism, have more recently engaged with broader discussion about anti-racist call and integration on cognitive justice which have legitimized the knowledges, histories, and identities of Afro-Colombians to be incorporated into school curricula. Micro-entrepreneurs have propelled new economic endeavors and, in so doing, have sought to strategically use the neoliberal capitalist project to subvert it and promote anti-racist struggles within it. Their approach has been to link the aesthetic revaluation of Blackness with the (re)distribution of economic, social, and symbolic “value” through solidary networks and exchanges. As part of this process, other Black middle classes have resisted the notion of multiculturalism as “white cultural domination.” They have demanded that the state eradicate the structural racism, as they have identified racism and racial discrimination as central factors shaping the materiality of the armed conflict on Black people, their identities, lands, autonomy, and self-government. Viveros Vigoya concludes: “while Blackness and upward social mobility have become more compatible, it remains to be seen whether we are advancing toward a global agenda of social justice or if we are simply opening some spaces for social and political mobility that serve largely to reproduce the status quo in the name of racial equality.” Taken together, all these arguments about modernization, development, and neoliberalism critically speak to a current present in Colombia. In a context in which the middle class, a reality that often appear as classless and racially unmarked, is seen as the destiny of democracy and democracy is linked to the destiny of the middle class, Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian SocioRacial Order is an important work to unearth what Wendy Brown defines as the antidemocratic elements of democracy.27 Indeed, it is this framework that allows us to see the historical foundations of the racist, classist, and sexist ways Francia Márquez, the current vice president of Colombia, has been delegitimized as the representation of democratic rule. In a context of a neoliberal democracy, Márquez’s story is understood as an “improper” political career because, rather than celebrating upward social mobility as a product an individualized effort, Márquez often reclaims an idea of economic success and political representation as a collective endeavor. Here, again, being Black, a woman, and a potential manifestation of middle classness is seen as a contradiction to what is perceived as the proper representation of democracy. Márquez is a lawyer, a professional status that presumably would include her as part of a middle class but, as so many Colombians often comment on social media, she did not graduate from an elite university institution which prevents her from achieving such class status. Indeed, she is not a professional, the argument goes, because, in contrast to a supposedly nonideological expert and white-mestizo middle class, Márquez gained prominence through community organizing and environmental activism. She is “aggressive” and

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“lacks experience” in matters of government. It is “impossible” for her to represent all Colombians in her role as vice president because the particular— and ideological—interests of Afro-Colombians do not permit her to symbolize a middle class as the embodiment of a proper—universal—democracy. Yet again the oxymoron of being Black and being middle class is further naturalized. For many members of the white-mestizo middle classes, those who define themselves as properly democratic, the very possibility of having an Afro-Colombian vice president meant the sacrifice of the universality of democracy, again associated with an unmarked middle classness, since now the very participation of Márquez is defined as a process of ideologization rather than professionalization or individual merit. Along the way, the vice president often appears as the contradiction to a (neoliberal) democracy because the latter defined politics as administration/management, rather than an ideological activity, a professional activity rather than an activist endeavor, as expertise rather than social struggle. Thus, a notion of middle class-mestizo, the embodiment of democracy and thus with the right to govern—and dominate—those who are perceived as having particular interests, those who lack professionalism, and have no professional preparation or experience in “public affairs” and without expertise for the representation and leadership of the state. In this way, in the name of an apolitical, professional, moral, ethical, and meritocratic democracy—an unmarked middle class—a hierarchical division is legitimized between those who are defined as “legitimate” dominators—understood as universal subjects, representatives of all Colombia—and those who are observed as dominated, since they represent allegedly particular interests and consequently without the right to rule in “genuine” democracies. At stake here is the struggle over who has the rule in democracy, the practices of what it means to live in a democracy, the possibility to question a classist and racist definition of society that often gets sacralized as democracy. Above all, this book is an invitation to think critically about the political distinction between difference as hierarchy and difference as equality. NOTES 1. As an example, see: C. Vidal-Folch Guilluy, No Society: El fin de la clase Media occidental (Barcelona: Taurus; 2019). 2. For a historiographical discussion of these discourses, see A. Ricardo López-Pedreros, Makers of Democracy. A Transnational History of the Middle Class in Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 3. ECLAC, Panorama Social de América Latina (New York: ECLAC, 2019).

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4. Christopher Guilluy, No Society: El Fin de la clase media occidental (Barcelona: Taurus, 2019). 5. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 6. There are multiple understandings of decolonial theories. Here I have in mind the work by Walter Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). For critique of these theories see: O. Taiwo, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (London: Hurst & Company, 2022); Kevin Ochieng Okoth, “Decolonisation and its Discontents: Rethinking the Cycle of National Liberation,” in Salvage (Sept 22, 2021) available at https:​ //​salvage​.zone​/decolonisation​-and​-its​-discontents​-rethinking​-the​-cycle​-of​-national​ -liberation/ Luciana Cadahia y Valeria Coronel, “La teoría decolonial, ¿una astucia de la razón occidental?”in Jacobin, (16.04.23); Gaya Makaran, Pierre Gaussens, coordinadores, Piel blanca. Máscaras Negras: Crítica de la razón decolonial (México: Universidad Autónoma de México, 2020). 7. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (London: Sternberg Press; 2022). 8. Ezequiel Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media Argentina: Apogeo y decadencia de una ilusión, 1919–2003 (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2009); Mario Barbosa Cruz, “Los empleados públicos, 1903–1931,” in Carlos Illades y Mario Barbosa Cruz, (cords), Los trabajadores de la ciudad de México, 1860–1950. Textos en homenaje a Clara E. Lida, (El Colegio de México-Universidad Authonoma-Metropolitiana Cuajimalpa, 2013) 117–54; David Parker, The Idea of the Middle Class; Patrick Barr-Melej, Reforming Chile; Maureen O’Dougherty, Consumption Intensified; Dennis Gilbert, Mexico’s Middle Class; Brian Owensby, Intimate Ironies; Louise Walker, Waking from the Dream; A. Ricardo López-Pedreros and Barbara Weinstein, ed., The Making of the Middle Class; A.Ricardo López-Pedreros, Makers of Democracy; David Parker and Louise E. Walker, Latin America’s Middle Class; Sebastián Carassai, The Argentine Silent Majority; Isabella Cosse, ed., “Clases medias, sociedad y política”; Sergio Visacovsky and Enrique Garguin, eds., Moralidades, economías e identidades de clase media; Isabella Cosse, Mafalda. Claudia Stern Entre el cielo y el suelo: las identidades elásticas de las clases medias (Santiago de Chile, 1932–1962) Santiago de Chile: RiL editors, 2021; Graciela Queirolo, Mijeres en las oficinas: Trabajo, género y clase en el sector admiistrativo, Buenos Aires, 1910–1950. Mario Barbosa Cruz, A. Ricardo López-Pederos, and Claudia Stern,  The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices, and Genealogies (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2022). 9. For a different perspective, see Rachel Heiman, Lark Liechty, and Carla Freeman, The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2012), See Barbosa Cruz, López-Pedreros, Stern, The Middle Classes in Latin America. In particular, Barbara Weinstein shows how in the Brazilian case the notion of the middle class has been historically regionalized through notions of whiteness. See Weinstein, “‘São Paulo is Modernity’: Middle-Class Identity and Narratives of Exceptionalism in Brazil,” in Barbosa Cruz, López-Pedreros, and Stern, The Middle Classes in Latin America.

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10. Francisco Javier Flórez, La vanguardia intelectual y política de la nación. Historia de una intelectualidad negra y mulata en Colombia, 1877–1947 (Bogotá: Crítica, 2023). 11. John J. Jonson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958). 12. For an expansion of this argument, see A.Ricardo López-Pedreros, La clase invisible. Género, class y democracia en Bogotá (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario/ Crítica, 2022). 13. See, for example, David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 14. Stephen C. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in the Cold War America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003); Stephen G, Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Stephen G. Rabe, John F. Kennedy: World Leader (Washington, D.C: Potomac Books, 2010); Jeffery Taffet Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007); Michael Lathan Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; 2000). 15. Stephen Rabe, John F. Kennedy, 82. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Marc Eric Williams, Understanding U.S-Latin American Relations: Theory and History (New York: Routledge, 2012), 190–211. 19. For a history of mobilization among Indigenous and Black peoples in Colombia, see Laura Correa Ochoa, “Black and Indigenous Entanglements: Race, Mobilization and Citizenship in Colombia, 1930–1991” (PhD dissertation in history, Harvard University, 2021). 20. Eric Zolov, “Expanding our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America,” A Contracorriente 5, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 51. 21. Jeffrey Gould “Solidarity under Siege: The Latin American Left, 1968,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 349. 22. Greg Grandin, “Living in Revolutionary Time: Coming to Terms with the Violence of Latin America’s Long Cold War,” in Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph, A Century of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 10, 12–13, 23. Despite his argument to go beyond this tautological argumentation, Grandin still equates radicalization with polarization and proletarization. 23. Wendy Wolford, The Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. 24. Ezequiel Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media en Argentina.

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25. See López-Pedreros, Makers of Democracy. Claudia Stern has also showed the materialization of gendered and classed conditions of power within revolutionary projects. See Stern, “‘Young People Committed to the Mother Land’: Middle Class Masculinity, Radicalization, and the Fragmentation of the ‘Integral Chileans’ in the 1970s” in Barbosa Cruz, A. Ricardo López-Pederos, and Claudia Stern, The Middle Classes in Latin America, 285–308. 26. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Rabe, The Killing Zone. Josep Fontana, Por el bien del imperio: Una historia del mundo desde 1945 (Barcelona Ediciones de pasado y presente, 2011). For a description of the historiography, see Vanni Pettina, A Compact History of Latin America’s Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 5–37. 27. Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2001).

Acknowledgments

In Bogotá, Cartagena, Quibdó, and San Andrés, I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing the people featured in this book, as well as exploring the places and histories associated with them.1 Their warm, generous, and trusting involvement in sharing their life stories for the purpose of this research is deeply appreciated. While my eldest interlocutor is no longer with us, his voice lives on in the video Gente Negra, as well as in his life story, which covers a significant period in the formation of these middle classes. I learned immensely from the stories they shared, the biographical materials they provided, and most importantly, from their insightful analysis of their own experiences. Thank you! This book represents the last stage of a research project that I have worked on sporadically since 2009, as part of different research teams. It has benefited from the conversations, debates, and experiences of the colleagues and students who were part of these teams. I hope I have not overlooked any of them here. In chronological order of participation, I would like to thank: Fernando Urrea Giraldo, Carlos Viáfara, Mercedes Angola, Franklin Gil Hernández, Pietro Pisano, Klara Hellebrandová, Jannia Gómez, and Sergio Lesmes. I would particularly like to thank Franklin for his invaluable contribution at almost every stage of the project, first, as a student and research assistant, and then as coresearcher. From its beginning, these people have accompanied and enriched the research with their incisive questions and wide range of skills, playing important roles in the early stages of my contemplation on the subject and first hypotheses. It was through our conversations, characterized by camaraderie and mutual understanding, that I realized the importance of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the experience of being Black and middle-class in Colombia. I have worked with some on a research report titled “Great Expectations: Memories of Race, Gender, and Class in Afro-descendant Families in the 20th Century,” with the goal of turning it into a manuscript. Let’s make it happen! xxvii

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My perspective on the Colombian Black middle classes has undergone significant transformations over time, evolving as a result of conversations and interactions with colleagues, coworkers, and friends I have encountered in various research settings.2 I would like to express my gratitude and give special recognition to Eric Fassin, who invited me to present the first results of the project at EHESS in Paris in 2010. Likewise, to my colleagues at the PERLA Project (Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America: 2008– 2011): Edward Telles, Juan Carlos Callirgos, Regina Martínez Casas, Graziella Moraes Silva, Marcelo Paixão, Emiko Saldívar, Christina Sue, and David Sulmont. Their invaluable insights and knowledge regarding color, ethnicity, and race in Latin America have greatly improved my understanding in this field. From the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, I would like to thank Danielle Allen for selecting me to be a part of the IAS School of Social Science. Additionally, I am immensely grateful to Joan Scott and my friend of many years Didier Fassin for their guidance and the enlightening conversations they facilitated during the 2014–2015 academic year at the School of Social Science. I would also like to thank my fellow participants in this iteration of the school, particularly Gurminder Bhambra, Sarah Edenheim, Michael Hanchard, John Holmwood, Jennifer L. Morgan, Zita Nunez, and Charles Payne, to whom I owe much of what I learned in this enjoyable and stimulating period. I would like to extend my gratitude to my colleagues on the Lapora Project (Latin American Anti-Racism in “PostRacial” Times): Monica Moreno-Figueroa, Peter Wade, Fernando Garcia, Antonio Sergio Alfredo Guimaraes, Juan Carlos Martinez, Gisela Carlos Fregoso, Maria Moreno Parra, Krisna Ruette-Orihuela, Luciane O. Rocha, Flavia Rios, Judith Bautista, Renata Braga, Luis Alfredo Briceño, and Danny Ramírez Torres. I am thankful for the valuable lessons I have gained from our work together on the different approaches to anti-racism in Latin America. Collaborating with such a diverse research team allowed us to explore how the complex intersections of class, race, gender, and cultural heritage leave their mark on our academic pursuits and interactions. It is important to acknowledge the support provided by the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (CALAS) to the final phase of this project, funding my research stay in Guadalajara and enabling me to begin the process of writing and organizing my ideas. The semester from August 2019 to February 2020 was an enriching period in which I engaged in intellectual and personal explorations and growth. From this time, I particularly remember and thank Bruno López Petzoldt, Natalia Quiceno, Carmen Chinas, and Beatriz Bustos, for the conversations we had in the shade of the orange tree, the collaborative projects that we undertook together, and the care and support they provided me. I would also like to acknowledge and thank those who run the CALAS

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project for their great commitment to fostering interdisciplinary and interregional dialogues centered on Latin America. The management team: Sarah Corona, Olaf Kaltmeier, Gerardo Gutiérrez, and Hans Jürgen Burchardt; Jochen Kenmer, cornerstone of the Guadalajara headquarters; and Olivia Maisterra and Martin Breuer from the administrative team. All greatly contributed to making my stay in Guadalajara pleasant and enjoyable, not only supporting my work but also making my stay there truly memorable. Upon returning to Colombia, I managed to complete the book despite demanding academic and family obligations, as well as the difficult circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was only made possible due to the support and insightful conversations I had with various individuals during this final phase of the project. I would like to thank them here: Grace Acosta, who found and reviewed academic and journalistic articles related to the topic and helping with the writing of a couple of articles I published in English during this period. Thank you, Grace, for your continued interest in my work and for your collaboration during these nine months of the book’s gestation. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Ricardo López Pedreros, who I met through our shared interest in understanding the middle classes and power dynamics in Colombia. Ricardo, thank you for sharing your knowledge, attentively reading my work, and enthusiastically encouraging me to persist during moments of writer’s block. I look forward to future conversations and exchanges the enjoyment they bring. I am grateful to María Camila Mora and Didier Alirol for their wisdom and support during the process of writing this book. They provided me guidance through talk and body therapy sessions. With them I learned to trust the process and embrace its pauses and fluctuations. Thank you both. I am immensely grateful to my father, papá Marino, and my mother, mamá Berthy. Although they are no longer with us, their presence resonated deeply in all my reflections on the research topic. I am grateful for their unwavering support and their example. I took great satisfaction and joy in writing about the profound impact they have had on my journey. Thanks to my sisters, Leida and Galia, and my brothers, Fernando, Diego, and Mauricio, for the lively and uplifting times we have shared. Despite us living far apart, we have managed to keep those memories alive. I would like to thank my daughter, Anaïs, for celebrating and amplifying every moment of joy that this book has brought me. I am also grateful for her sharing her youthful wisdom, helping me to resolve my doubts and questions throughout the writing process in her sunny way. To Thierry, my steadfast and caring partner through thick and thin, I extend my deepest love, appreciation, and gratitude for consistently offering me timely, attentive, and conscientious support.

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Lastly, I want to pay tribute to the memory of my dear friend Luz Gabriela Arango, “la entrañable comadrita,” a kindred spirit and my colleague of many years. I would also like to fondly remember Marco Alejandro Melo, an exceptional former student of mine. I am certain that if they were here today, they would share my joy upon the publication of this book. NOTES 1. Some of you preferred for me to keep your names anonymous. I decided to do the same for everyone featured in this publication in order to respect our initial agreement, acknowledging that this solution is not entirely satisfactory. 2. Some individuals have been involved in multiple projects, but I will mention them only once, listed in chronological order of their participation.

Introduction Always “Out of Place”

DECIPHERING THE INTERSECTIONS OF MY OWN LIFE My academic interest in the Black middle classes in Colombia is closely entwined with my own life story, and studying them has shed light on some of my childhood and teenage memories. It took me a long time to realize that some of the reasons for the uneasiness I felt at certain points as a child and teenager in my home city of Cali had to do with having been born and raised in a “middle-class” home while also being an “Afromestiza” woman.1 I remember feeling like an outsider in places where I should have felt at home, in my neighborhood for example, or in the classroom, or even at the house of my cousins on my mother’s side. In these spaces, there was never any other girl who I resembled physically, who had my skin tone and hair texture, or who had a father whose skin was as dark as her mother’s was light. None of my neighbors, schoolmates, or cousins on my mother’s side stuck so clearly in people’s minds from the very first meeting. One of the worst instances of this that I can remember was as a teenager, when a good friend introduced me to her parents, not by my name, but by explaining that my father was a doctor, as if I were not good enough on my own terms. I felt and understood that in order to be wholly accepted, my presence needed to be explained: as someone who was “Black, but clever, polite, and well behaved.” It was inevitable that I should start to feel that anguish of any child or teenager made to feel they do not belong to their surroundings, and it became especially acute when I started to become more aware of myself. I could not stand the fact that people wanted to touch my hair; or thought that I would be a naturally good dancer or excel at sports; or would be surprised that I spoke French with a good accent, or played a classical piece on the violin well, 1

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or got good grades in philosophy and chemistry. More and more I began to understand why my parents had instilled in me the importance of my studies. They had seen academic success as the best way to avoid what they feared could be the fate of an Afromestiza girl or young woman, in a society like that of Colombia. Incidentally, both my parents were involved in politics, albeit in different ways. My father—one of the first Black students from northern Cauca to graduate from Universidad Nacional de Colombia’s medical school—was twice elected to Congress and was an advocate for the rights and struggles of the “negritudes,” as the Afro-Colombian population was termed at the time. My mother, a white-mestiza woman from the cundiboyancense region,2 recommenced her studies after raising her six children, and on graduating became a social worker and a dedicated participant in women’s rights activism. It was in this political family atmosphere that I started to see my unusual childhood and teenage years as those of a “Black middle-class woman,” and realize that this experience would be impossible to understand unless all dimensions that make up this identity are examined. These memories took on new meaning when I started work on the research project which provided the material for this book and began to analyze and unravel the story of the Black middle classes. Writing with my own voice, and from my own standpoint, steeped in anti-racist thinking and the questions posed by North American, Brazilian, and Caribbean Black feminisms—today grouped under the umbrella of intersectional feminism—also helped me to reframe my childhood. Based on a research journal entry. Guadalajara. Friday 6 September 2019.

THE IMPROBABLE BLACK MIDDLE CLASSES: CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL NOTES The Black middle classes as a concept was practically unknown until acknowledgment of their existence first started to circulate in the United States at the beginning of the 1960s, in the context of the changes for African Americans brought about by the civil rights and racial equality movements. The term has also been employed to describe one of the more visible aspects of postapartheid society in South Africa. However, in the Global North, sociological studies from the 1980s onward pointed to the fact that, middle classness was, by omission, still thought of as white and male (Crompton 1994, Phillips and Sarre 1995, Moore 2008, and Browser 2007, cited in Adamovsky

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2014). These studies found that in developed countries, while non-white people appear in the statistics in social positions traditionally associated with the middle classes, women and racialized minorities were less likely to achieve advancement in a white-collar career. If they had secured a higherlevel posting in a company, it tended to be nonmanagerial and generally more vulnerable to changes and cuts. It is also true that the social significance of holding a job considered to be middle class, and the opportunities for social mobility that stem from it are not the same for everyone (Adamovsky 2014). In the 2010s, research into the middle classes in different parts of the world started to diversify and study middle classes that were not white and male (c.f. Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 2012; Daniel Barnes 2015). I include the research project on the Black middle classes in Colombia that provided material for this book in this new wave of research. In Latin America, this demographic grouping has begun to be discussed as the numbers of Black university graduates have started to increase (World Bank 2018; Pattillo, Bermúdez Rico, and Mosquera Guevara 2021). Before discussing how the upward social mobility of Black people has been studied in Colombia, it is important to contextualize the way in which racial relations in Colombia have molded the language we use to refer to groups and individuals. The terms “Black,”3 “Afro-Colombian,” “Black communities,” and “Afrodescendant” have been the subject of intense debate not only in academia but also in the political arena. Changes in the use of these terms reflect historical processes. The term Afro-Colombian emerged for the first time in the late 1940s, with the development of new discourses of identity that revindicated the contribution of the descendants of Africans to the country’s history and culture. Its use and reach increased in the 1970s with the emergence of an organized social movement. More recently, the advent of multiculturalism has led to the spread of a new identity category: Afrodescendant. This term was initially proposed by Sueli Carneiro in 1996, in the context of debates taking place within Brazilian Black feminism, and it was later adopted at the Third World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. It is a word with a social, cultural, and political connotation that promotes cohesion and a common political identity. At the same time, terms such as Raizal and Palenquero have emerged to describe the cultural specificity of the populations of the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia, and of the four officially recognized palenques.4 These different terms speak to the heterogeneity and diversity present within a sector of the population which is often considered homogeneous. In Colombia, studies that explicitly examined the upward social mobility of the country’s urban Black population were practically nonexistent until the end of the nineties. The topic had been touched upon indirectly in research

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on the urban Black populations of Medellín and Quibdó (Wade 1993a), the Pacific region and Cali (Agier and Hoffmann 1999; Hoffmann 1999; Urrea Giraldo, Arboleda Quiñónez, and Arias 1999; Barbary et al. 2004; Urrea Giraldo, Ramírez, and Viáfara López 2001; Agudelo 2005), Bogotá (Mosquera Rosero-Labbé 1998) and Cartagena (Cunin 2003). The Black middle class also appear in the 2016 study by Urrea Giraldo and Viáfara López about the visibility of ethnic/racial groups in Bogotá’s statistics and also in an analysis of Bogotá’s social and racial segregation, authored by Villamizar Santamaría (2015). The gap in the literature on the Colombian Black middle classes proper started to be filled in 2008 when I embarked on a research project with a group of students and colleagues from Universidad Nacional de Colombia whose objective was to describe and understand the processes of upward social mobility of Afro-Colombian individuals and families. The program got underway with an initial exploration of case studies in the cities of Bogotá and Cali (Viveros Vigoya, Urrea Giraldo, and Viáfara López 2010), followed by a countrywide study of the historical context in which this social mobility took place (Viveros Vigoya, Gil Hernández, and Angola 2013), and the particular stories of Cartagena and Quibdó, two cities home to large numbers of Colombia’s Afrodescendant population (Viveros Vigoya, Gil Hernández, and Angola 2013).5 A 2021 article by Pattillo, Bermúdez Rico and Mosquera Guevara (2021) builds on results from the Black middle classes research project set out in a paper authored by myself and my colleague Franklin Gil (Viveros Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010), exploring how the intersecting identities of Black and middle class affect the cohesion of the group identity and questioning if this identity can be transformed into a Black political consciousness. Meanwhile, a chapter by Eduardo Restrepo from 2022 compares the middle classes of two different Colombian cities: Tumaco, a majority Afro-Colombian city on the Pacific coast and Bogotá, the country’s Andean capital in which resources and power have historically been concentrated. Those who wield these power and resources are presumed to be white. While it is difficult to speak of the existence of Black middle classes in Colombia, it is also an apparent contradiction or oxymoron, because in Colombia, Black people are imagined to be universally poor, that is, “lower class.” This is not merely a stereotype, as most Black people are in fact poor and clearly overrepresented in the bottom two quintiles,6 totaling 55 percent. But there are also Black people who are not poor: according to the 2015 Encuesta Nacional de Demografía y Salud—ENDS (National Demographic and Healthcare Survey), 17 percent identify as an ethnicity that could be included under the umbrella of Black, whilst also occupying the third quintile for income. If the third and fourth quintiles are added to the top quintile, it totals 33 percent of the Black population (Minsalud and

Introduction

5

Profamilia 2015). In other words, based on their income, around a third of Afro-Colombians could be seen as belonging to the middle and upper classes. What do these statistics tell us about what has happened to Colombia’s Black population over recent years? Is the wealth gap between the Black “middle class” and the poor Black population increasing? Statistical data can be useful for improving the effects of public policy, or showing that the economy has improved and well-being has increased, and that decisions that are taken as a result of those statistics can have very clear political repercussions. However, I would like to go beyond the statistics and explore in more detail what is hidden behind this numerical definition of the Colombian Black middle classes. ADDRESSING THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASSES The main sources for the research presented in this book are, firstly, eighteen family histories covering three generations, constructed from fifty-four biographical interviews of men and women recruited from the research team’s own networks, and then through snowball sampling. My interlocutors belong to families with roots in regions in Colombia “traditionally” populated by Black people, namely, the Atlantic coast, along the two main rivers (the Magdalena and the Cauca), the Pacific coastal strip, and the islands of San Andrés and Providencia. Most of the first generation of my interlocutors were born in these regions and migrated to bigger cities, some for education and others for better work opportunities. All of my interlocutors in the second and third generations have a university degree and a steady graduate-level job, either in a state or private organization, an NGO, or an international cooperation program. Throughout the book, depending on the context, I have approached the category of Black middle classes from two different perspectives: the first privileges objective factors such as insertion into the economic system or class position, and the second encompasses the subjective dimensions of class like awareness of class identity or social standing, in an attempt to harness the advantages and avoid the pitfalls of each approach. Concerning the subjective aspects, each of my interlocutors identified themselves and did not object to being identified by others as “middle-class Black people,” without further clarification of their feelings on that specific label, and in ways that varied according to their gender, age, regional culture, and the historical moment in which they lived. In hindsight, following the conclusions drawn from the research, I think that identifying themselves in this way could be the result of the need to communicate that their experiences were not reflected in the country’s prevailing image of Black people as poor and lacking education;

6

Introduction

the desire to affirm and claim for themselves a “respectable” status, in a context that has denied this respectability to Black people; the appropriation of the social norms of the capital’s middle classes, perceived as modern and progressive and therefore tied to the ideal of a post-racial, color-blind society. These different positions show that these Black middle classes are political and cultural projects that acquire meaning in their specific historical contexts and discursive conditions (López Pedreros 2011). One of the objective dimensions that defined this group was the fact that all my interlocutors in the second and third generations, as part of their educational or professional trajectory, had resided in Bogotá at some point. The experience of living in the capital is molded by the fact that it is the Colombian city with the lowest percentage of households living in poverty, but also a place in which Black people are perceived as “out of place” in the city’s middle strata, which presents daily challenges to existing as middle class and Black. Choosing Bogotá as the setting for the research has several implications: first, that the Black middle classes studied here are not only urban but urbanized, and that, in many respects, the majority have adopted a cultural consumption similar to that of the capital’s white-mestizo middle layers (Viveros Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010). Some of the third generation of my interlocutors were even born in Bogotá, and feel themselves to be Bogotanos, even though their darker complexions contradict the stereotypes about the physical appearance of people from the capital.7 The family histories collected refer to people who have incomes that allow them certain material comfort and lifestyles that embrace symbolic universes related in some way to modernity. Work and career are their principal preoccupations in some cases ranking even above romantic relationships and starting a family (Viveros Vigoya and Gil 2010, 103). However, it is important to emphasize that the subjects of this research do not constitute a homogeneous or coherent social group; they are men and women with diverse, sometimes opposing and even contradictory ways of feeling and thinking. It is also necessary to consider that in Colombia there have been different, albeit limited, avenues of social mobility for Afrodescendant populations. It is also worth remembering that, in the 1980s, having a job, even as a manual laborer in Colpuertos, the public company that managed the port terminals, or in Ecopetrol, Colombia’s main oil company, allowed for individual and family movement within the socioeconomic system. Likewise, the presence of drug trafficking money in the Colombian economy and the perks associated with political clientelism have played an important role in enriching and elevating social status. It is also worth noting that, regardless of income level, it is not the same to belong to the middle strata in a large city such as Bogotá, Cali, or Medellín, as it is in intermediate, small, or peripheral cities. Nor does it mean the same in a predominantly Afro-Colombian city such as Quibdó or Tumaco

Introduction

7

(Restrepo 2022). In other words, far from being uniform, the middle sectors are very diverse, and give rise to subgroups that are distinguished more by sociocultural criteria (use of language, behaviors, aesthetics and values) than economic ones, and cannot be imagined using solely the homogenizing and “Andinocentric” standard of the capital’s middle classes (Restrepo ibid.). In addition to family histories, the research team reviewed print media to collect data on the habits, customs and participation of middle-class Afro-Colombians in public events, particularly those of a political and cultural nature. With this information, we analyzed their presence and visibility in the media, as well as the changes that occurred throughout the twentieth century (Pisano 2014b). At the same time, we connected individual trajectories of upward social mobility, the meaning that our interlocutors ascribed to their own trajectories and the historical-social processes tied up with their insertion in the “middle classes” of Bogotá. The triangulation of these different (primary and secondary) sources allowed a deeper understanding of how representations of the “Black middle classes” and their processes of social mobility had evolved as the country moved from the ideology of mestizaje to state multiculturalism (a process covered in detail in chapter 1). In this way, we were able to explore the scope and limitations of these two racial regimes as social projects intended to overcome the inequalities affecting Afro-Colombians. Concerning my positionality as a researcher, I have wrestled with the multiple tensions linked to my position as an outsider within Colombian academia and have made many discoveries as a result. As an Afromestiza woman and researcher on gender and race issues at a state university in a Latin American country, I occupy a relatively marginal position in national and international academic circles. However, inspired by the work of numerous Black feminist intellectuals who have preceded me, I have sought to make “creative use of [this] marginality” to produce critical responses to social domination (Collins 1986, S14). In fact, my status as an outsider within has been productive insofar as it has enabled me, for example, to situate my reflections on the Black middle classes as an expression of the imbricated nature of social domination, or to understand that studying the Black middle class is important for redefining the way in which we study the middle classes and the reasons that we do so. In other words, I have tried to turn the obstacles imposed by the power structures (described in chapter 3) into an opportunity to put forward a point of view that differs from the dominant discourses on the middle classes or that punctures the silences on the subject in the social sciences and in gender studies. I have also learned to trust the creative potential of my own biography, both for myself personally and for my work with and for others. I have engaged in this type of self-analysis and questioning of myself throughout the process of writing this book, as part of a longer-term

8

Introduction

realization that in my life, I have not only been handed disadvantages. While I have often needed to argue the legitimacy of the issues on which I have worked, and defend my place in academia—an additional burden that the vast majority of my colleagues, whose race and gender markers exempt them from this obligation, do not bear—after a good number of years working at my university as a teacher and researcher, I have also gained access to certain privileges which are added to those of my middle-class upbringing. I have realized, with help from the intersectional perspective, that a Black woman will not always experience the greatest disadvantages, and it is important to dissociate epistemic privilege—linked to the outsider within’s understanding of social inequality—from an essentialist understanding of gender and race, which ignores the effects that class, age, or disability (among other axes of inequality) can have on the social position of Black women (Viveros Vigoya 2020, 29). When studying the Colombian Black middle classes, however, I am no longer in the position of outsider within. In this book, I am writing from the inside, similar to Irma Velásquez in her research on her own community of the Mayan “petty bourgeoisie” in Guatemala (Velásquez 2011). As I wrote this book, I carefully recorded my impressions, emotions, and interpretations in my field diary. It is important to acknowledge that we never see the social world in a neutral manner; rather, our interpretation is continually molded by our subjective, political, and ideological positions. To understand the influences that have shaped my analysis, I commence each section of this book with a vignette of sorts with ideas taken from my field diary. While in this book I refer to those who participated in interviews as my “interlocutors” to recognize their role in the research as coproducers of knowledge (González Villamizar and Bueno-Hansen 2021), it is also important to acknowledge that my relationships with them were mostly horizontal in nature, as we had much in common through our shared experiences of race and class. Interviewing Black middle-class people and asking about their lives for my research, I was reacquainted with a familiar unease. They described the stirring up of a “double consciousness” (Du Bois 2015 [1903]), a term that denotes the feeling of living between two worlds: the world of Black people and that of Bogotá’s middle classes. They wanted to forget and make others forget their difference, even though this is impossible in an environment that constantly reminds everyone of that difference. From an early age they honed a “racial literacy” (Twine 2011 cited in Carlos-Fregoso 2022, 125) with which they could read the world. My interlocuters and I had all been, at some point, either anomalies, or the first or one of very few Black people to move in certain social or professional circles. They knew very well the dilemmas that arise when holding social positions that continually provoke interrogation of their ethnic or racial identities, and they had found

Introduction

9

different ways of resolving them. Throughout this experience, it has occurred to me that so many exceptions to the rule, if we had banded together, could have formed a collective with great potential in terms of emotional support, intellectual insight, and political power! In conversation with my interlocutors, many of them told me similar anecdotes. Some related how unpleasant it was to notice, as soon as they crossed the threshold, the alarm on the face of a security guard in a designer boutique or the concierge of an apartment building; how tedious it was to be regularly asked: “After you finish your studies in Bogotá, will you go back to your hometown?,” the questioner assuming that you were not born and raised in the capital. Another remarked with indignance: “How can you not feel annoyed when you are the business owner, or the owner of your apartment, and you are mistaken for the service staff?” All agreed that as Black middle-class people in Colombia, you are continually having to explain or apologize for your skin color, but above all, you are obliged to work harder to achieve the same as everybody else. In Bogotá, being Black and middle class is a daily challenge. I seek to understand this challenge and its effects by analyzing the characteristics and contradictions of the Black middle class and the history of its emergence. While Black middle classness is uncomfortable for those who live it, it is also an uneasy topic for academia. Those who have researched the middle classes have vouched for the difficulty of studying a social category whose objective definition is elusive, and whose outline generally tends to be blurry, as the middle ground between the upper and lower classes (Adamovsky 2014). It is imperative to recognize the heterogeneity of this social grouping, and in fact, the vast majority of studies on the subject start by indicating the complex nature of the middle classes and putting forward an ad hoc definition and terminology for them (Sick 2014). I talked to historian Ricardo López-Pedreros, author of Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia, on this topic,8 as we had observed that those of us who study the middle classes have trouble getting our work to be taken seriously in academic circles. López-Pedreros pointed out that some social scientists feel embarrassed—on account of their own class, gender, and race—when studying the middle classes, to the point that it seems that it is preferable and prudent not to focus on them when conducting research on the histories of Latin America. I believe that this embarrassment—or self-consciousness as I would call it—that can arise when studying the middle classes has a lot to do with the outlook of academics producing knowledge in the social sciences in university settings. These are people who generally enjoy certain privileges, whether in terms of their class, gender, or race, and who belong precisely to the middle classes in question: those uncomfortable, ambiguous middle

10

Introduction

classes who are made uneasy by the questioning of their social position. The lack of self-awareness and reflection on these privileges means that even in leftist and feminist circles, class hierarchies are reproduced, both in the analysis and in real life. People are unable to perceive these hierarchies because of their privileged position, and also because it is not enough to have a leftist or feminist viewpoint to erase all remnants of this bias. Recently, these academic sectors have been debating issues that have to do precisely with the privileges of their own class, gender, or race, and this is something that members of these groups have found difficult, but that must be addressed if we want to produce situated knowledge from a position of permanent self-reflection. Meanwhile, it is important to consider that the study of the middle classes is not an analysis of a neutral class position, rather, it is a class configuration linked to power and privilege, although this is less obvious than when one studies the subaltern or elite classes. THE CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK From an intersectional perspective encompassing gender, generation, and regional origin, this book examines the evolution of what it means to be Black and middle class over a period covering almost a century of national history. Over the course of the book, the descriptions and analyses in each chapter are woven in alongside academic social theory; my interlocutors’ own examination of their experiences, decisions, and opinions in relation to their daily, family, and work lives, and their social environment; and, finally, my own interpretations of these experiences and positionings. The first part of this book, “Theoretical and Political Dilemmas in Researching the Black Middle Classes,” reviews the existing literature on the main conceptual debates that guide the analysis of the research results. My aim in considering these different theoretical debates has been to approach the development of the Black middle classes in Colombia as a social phenomenon that is deeply marked by the historical contexts from which they have emerged. The first chapter looks at the specificities of the Colombian socio-racial order and the place that Afrodescendant populations have occupied in it from the colonial period to present day, covering the colonial caste system, the racial regime of mestizaje, and the turn toward multiculturalism in the 1990s. The second chapter discusses the complexity of the category of the middle classes and considers its usefulness for this project, and contemplates where a study of this nature would fit into the subfield of analysis of the middle class, particularly in Latin America. The third chapter is concerned with the arguments that have led to the use of an intersectional theoreticalmethodological approach to study the middle classes, examining how this

Introduction

11

perspective has been applied to study the middle classes in Latin America and to what extent it has been useful. The purpose of these opening chapters is to bring together theoretical fields that have not seen much prior engagement, but that are vital for the understanding of the specificity of this social group and its experiences. In the second part of the book, “A Historical and Contemporary Account of the Configuration of the Black Middle Classes in Colombia,” I look to history to try to provide possible answers to the questions raised by the category “Black middle classes,” a term made up of two signifiers of opposite meaning. In chapter 4, paying special attention to the categories of gender and generation, I explore the specific mechanisms that limit the social inclusion of the minority of Afro-Colombians who have escaped the extreme poverty that affects the vast majority, covering a period of almost a century of the country’s history. I also examine the different ways that Colombia has addressed ethno-racial differences over the twentieth century and the possibilities for upward social mobility for the Afrodescendant population contained in each model, finding that the principal mechanism for social mobility has been access to higher education. In chapter 5 I analyze the way that these middle classes have engaged with whitening, both as individuals and collectively. I see this phenomenon as an ideological, social, and personal process which is part and parcel of the Colombian socio-racial order. While some Black middle-class people have adapted to the dynamics of whitening, others have resisted or opposed it. As one of the consequences of their migration across the country for economic and education reasons, they have experienced these processes of whitening9 involuntarily, because upward social mobility often entails “living in a white world.”10 In the light of this relationship with whitening, I go on to explore the role that the Black middle classes have played in the political and social crises in Colombia (and in the Latin American region) that have stemmed from ongoing racial and ethnic inequalities, as well as disparities between classes and genders. Subsequently, I analyze the struggles in which the Black middle classes have engaged for better and more dignified living conditions and respectful intercultural and interethnic coexistence in Colombian society. In part 3, “Upward Social Mobility and Black Identity: An Intersectional Experience,” I approach the social mobility of Black people as a process that sees the involvement and interaction of different axes of inequality such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, and regional origin. In chapter 6 I explore what it means to be middle class for women and men from three generations of Black families with roots in the Pacific and Caribbean regions, based on their self-reported biographies. In Colombia’s social context, it is important to show all the different ways that Afro-Colombian people have achieved

12

Introduction

social mobility, as these social processes are little studied and generally excluded from the official versions of national history, as well as the fact that these accounts contain representations of Afro-Colombians that contradict the stereotype. It is equally important to include the manifold life stories of Black “middle-class” people in the history of the Colombian middle classes. This includes acknowledging the various and often conflicting roles they have played in shaping the envisioned but unsuccessful project of social and racial democracy, which is currently in crisis. The stories of these families raise some interesting questions: does the social and self-validation brought about by upward social mobility allow individuals to escape racialization? In a social and political context dominated by white and mestizo people, what values can Black people claim as their own for the basis of their middle-class identity? How do Black men and women of different generations and regional identities understand class and race? The seventh chapter tells the stories of Afrodescendant women schoolteachers, ethno-educators, and micro-entrepreneurs at different historical junctures. I examine the way in which these women—from their particular intersection of gender, class, and race—have produced discourses and practices that have caused different narratives to circulate and contributed to the formation of a Black middle class and its redefinition in practice. I argue that different generations of Black women in the education sector have had a key role in the emergence of these “Black middle classes and the establishment of their values,” which at times run counter to the individualist and capitalist paradigms in which the idea of social mobility is deeply embedded. I seek to question the received wisdom and canonical account of the middle classes and break with the idea that white or mestizo men are always the protagonists of upward social mobility, while highlighting the interconnectedness of the class, gender, and race hierarchies that shape social mobility. In chapter 8 I draw out the main findings of my research on the Black middle classes and discuss them in terms of the new panorama of the global anti-racist turn and greater awareness of structural racism. I also examine how these struggles and ideas were adopted in Colombia during and after the pandemic. This new panorama preceded and propitiated the change of government in the context of implementing the 2016 peace agreement. In the epilogue, I outline the key events that paved the way for this new political and social landscape, starting with the extended strikes of 2021. In these huge marches and protests, Black populations including Black middle classes, young people and professionals, including Black political candidates, gained visibility as new political subjects, as spokepersons for the demands of Black communities, both rural and urban, particularly in large cities such as Cali. The Colombian middle class took center stage, seen as the group most affected by the proposed tax reforms that ignited the unrest. The threat posed

Introduction

13

to these middle classes was understood as endangering the country’s progress and connection to modernity. This book, and the research that it is based on, aspires to contribute to an alternative national narrative by showing the many ways in which Black Colombians have reacted to crises brought on by the persistence of the region’s historic social inequalities and racism. The Colombian Black middle classes have sought to escape the social destiny imposed on them by the “genealogical misfortune” of being born on the bottom rung of a pigmentocratic socio-racial order.11 To paraphrase De Certeau: whether we like it or not, this misfortune places us (and here I include myself) within a history that we can neither choose, nor really legitimize, but we also cannot separate ourselves from it. NOTES 1. Afromestizo is a term more widely used in Mexico than Colombia, as it was coined by Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1976 [1942]). On coming across it in the Mexican literature, I adopted it to describe myself, as someone who is not mestiza, but neither wholly Afro. As a person with this double ancestry, who occupies an intermediate space outside of established ethnic categorizations (Hoffman 2006, 108) I find the term “Afromestizo” useful to name my own particular experience. 2. A high plateau in the Eastern Cordillera of the Colombian Andes, which encompasses Bogotá and parts of the surrounding departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá. 3. In this book I use the term Black as an adjective and not as a noun, as Black does not exist by itself, as its own entity. Rather, it is a relational quality. I follow the decisions taken by many news outlets in the United States to capitalize the descriptor Black, as a way of recognizing the shared experience and identity of this group in the Americas. When I wish to draw attention to the word, indicate its unusual use, or to suggest that I want to be distanced from it, I use quotation marks. Although to use the term Black in this way is to immediately make commentary on it, I should point out that in my research, the aim is not to express preference for one term or another, but to analyze the positive and negative connotations of the term Black itself, as well as to understand what “Black” means for my interlocutors in the research from which the book draws. 4. Raizal is the name given to the original population of the islands of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina, descended from the unions between Europeans (mainly English, Spanish, and Dutch) and enslaved Africans. Their culture, language (Creole), religious beliefs (Baptist church), and historical past differ from those of Afro-Colombians on the mainland. Palenqueros are descendants of enslaved people who, since the fifteenth century, resisted enslavement and sought freedom by taking refuge in remote settlements, known as palenques, throughout the northern coast

14

Introduction

of Colombia. The four officially recognized palenques are San Basilio de Palenque (Mahates-Bolívar), San José de Uré (Córdoba), Jacobo Pérez Escobar (Magdalena), and La Libertad (Sucre). 5. The research program has provided the basis for two doctoral theses (Gil Hernández 2010; Hellebrandová 2017), and a number of publications have been authored by team members of projects derived from the program (Hellebrandová 2014; Pisano 2014a and 2014b; Urrea Giraldo 2011; Viveros Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010; Viveros Vigoya 2012 and 2015). 6. Household income quintiles are calculated by organizing the population (of a region, country, etc.) from the poorest individual to the wealthiest, and then dividing them into five sections with an equal number of individuals per section. In this way, five quintiles in order of income are obtained, where the first quintile (Q1 or quintile i) represents the poorest layer of the population, the second quintile (Q2 or quintile ii) the next poorest, and so on, until we reach the fifth quintile (Q5 or quintile v) which represents the wealthiest layer. See https:​//​ec​.europa​.eu​/eurostat​/statistics​-explained​/ index​.php​?title​=Glossary:​Income​_quintile​_group 7. In the Colombian imaginary, the typical inhabitant of the capital is the “cachaco.” This slang term is a corruption of the word “casaca,” or justacorps, a knee-length coat worn by the landed and urban elites in and around Bogotá in the nineteenth century. The label “cacacho” distinguished them from the lower-class “ruanas,” named for their woollen ponchos, probably derived from the Andean indigenous style of dress. As well as denoting class, these terms have an implied racial meaning, with the cacacho embodying the whiter end of the mixed-race scale, and the ruanas the more indigenous extreme. At the end of the nineteenth and during the twentieth century, its use extended to identify any person from the city and the stereotypes associated with their behavior (Ardila 1986 cited in Tabares 2015). 8. This conversation was held publicly on September 6, 2021, as one of the sessions of the Gender Studies Research Group (Grupo de Investigación en Estudios de Género—GIEG) at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Here I only refer to a few of the topics covered in this conversation. 9. Whitening must be understood as a process forged by both overarching structures and individual motivations. It is deeply imbued with racism, as whitening implies the abandonment Blackness, as it is held in contempt by the Colombian socio-racial order. 10. Expression taken from the title of Franklin Gil Hernández’s master’s thesis in Anthropology, “Vivir en un mundo de ‘blancos.’ Experiencias, reflexiones y representaciones de ‘raza’ y clase de personas negras de sectores medios en Bogotá D.C.,” (Living in a ‘white’ world. The experiences, reflections and representations of ‘race’ and class of Black people from the middle classes in Bogotá D.C.), written within the framework of this same research program. 11. I came across the expression “genealogical misfortune” in a lecture by Victorien Lavou at the “Past, Present and Future of Afrodescendants” International Symposium, held in Cartagena in 2001. The concept malheur généalogique was coined by Michel de Certeau (1975).

Figure 1. Miguel Ángel and Alfonso Flórez Góngora walking along Cúcuta’s fifth avenue in 1970. Source: Flórez Góngora family photo album.

PART 1

Theoretical and Political Dilemmas in Researching the Black Middle Classes

17

Chapter 1

Colombia’s Elusive Socio-Racial Order

SOCIO-RACIAL SYSTEMS OF THE AMERICAS AND THEIR FICTIONS IN NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING A few years ago, I read Nella Larsen’s novel Passing which was first published in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. This early African American cultural movement sought to forge a Black cultural identity, free from white supremacy. The rich body of literature produced at that time, of which Larsen’s novels are part, was framed by an important demand for social progress. Her novel explores racial identity, and how this is tied up with feelings of longing and anxiety, through the story of a friendship between two women of color in 1920s New York City. One of them, Clare, although she has Black ancestry, is light skinned enough to pass for white. She is married to a wealthy, well-to-do white man who often expresses his dislike of so-called colored people. Meanwhile, Irene, also relatively light skinned, has always lived in the Black community and is married to a Black doctor, and is part of African American bourgeois society. The two had lost contact long ago, but then a chance meeting between them renews their friendship, despite their initial awkwardness. Reuniting with Irene allows Clare to fulfill her desire to socialize with “her own kind” again. The title of the novel, Passing, refers to the way in which some African Americans presented themselves as white in order to escape the institutional segregation of the Jim Crow period. By silencing and concealing their Blackness in favor of their white identity, African Americans aspired to go 19

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unnoticed, as whiteness implied the right to invisibility. In this period, passing was a way of transgressing the racial order, and it aroused both fascination and anxiety. Crossing a border that the racist society deemed impassable was both a seductive and threatening image. Escaping being racialized as Black allowed people to “disappear” from the Black world, often forcing them to sever ties with anything that might jeopardize their passage from one status to another. This usually meant their relationships with darker-skinned family members who could never pass for white and could threaten the secrecy and silence on which passing is founded, as it depends on dissimulation and even disguise. From this perspective, the new white identity—with whiteness an attribute that can only be inherited and not acquired—would only mask the racial identity from which one wants to escape. Passing has another dimension that is interesting to me in terms of this book: the novel’s recurring theme of Brazil as a contrasting and threatening reality to that of the United States. Ideas of Brazil in the United States which circulated in the national press at that time portrayed the country as having no color line and no racial prejudice. Irene’s husband, Brian, the doctor of good social standing, harbors a desire to relocate to Brazil to escape the pervasive racial discrimination prevalent in the United States. Irene, however, is set against this plan, as her primary goal in life is “security,” that is, her status as a light-complexioned, middle-class Black woman, and embodying a model of Black racial progress. I agree with Grant Anderson (2014) in his observation that the rigid constraints of the US socio-racial system uphold Irene’s social status; while she is behind the color line, she is also removed from lower-class Black society. The imaginary of Brazil, as well as her friend Clare’s success in passing, uncovers the fallacy inherent within the racial structure of the United States, thereby posing a direct threat to Irene’s established position. The irony of this, which I will show in this book, is of course that while the socio-racial regime in Brazil (and the rest of Latin America) is different from that of the United States, it falls far short of the “racial democracy” narrative propagated within discourse in the United States during the 1920s. The reality is that in Latin American societies like those of Brazil and Colombia, the racial boundaries are much trickier and more flexible compared to the color divide in the United States. However, the preference for whiteness and anti-blackness remains. In Colombia, people have certainly been able to “pass” into “whiter” categories, through achieving more prestigious social or economic status, although they must also possess other signifiers of whiteness, including their appearance, body language, and the way they speak. As Rita Segato (2007) has said, race in Latin America is determined based on people’s looks rather than their ancestry, unlike in the United

Colombia’s Elusive Socio-Racial Order

21

States. Moreover, these boundaries vary depending on the region within the country. Elisabeth Cunin’s work (2003) has explored how, in the Colombian Caribbean, where racial mixing has been more prevalent, Afrodescendants are less likely to identify themselves as Black or associate with Blackness. Instead, they consider those from maroon communities, known as palenqueros, as the true representatives of Black culture. It is these complexities that I have sought to explore in this book, starting, in this first part, with a historical explanation for Colombia’s specific socio-racial order, supposedly free of the racism which has characterized that of the United States. Based on a research journal entry. Guadalajara. Thursday 24 October 2019. THE HISTORY OF COLOMBIA’S SOCIO-RACIAL ORDER Colombia’s socio-racial order is a relational system, made up of different tiers which have maintained a similar correlation to each other since the colonial period. The way that these tiers are understood and valued derives in large part from relations of difference, conceived and established hierarchically from the colonial era onward. Compared to other Latin American societies, a larger proportion of Colombia’s population is conformed of two subaltern groups: indigenous groups on the one hand, and “blacks”—as Africans and their descendants used to be called—on the other. While both are subaltern, excluded and displaced to the socioeconomic margins and from the national narrative, each group differs in size and has its own distinct historical, social, and cultural dynamics (Urrea Giraldo, Viáfara López, and Viveros Vigoya 2014). Peruvian sociologist Quijano (2000) argues that race is the most important invention of the Conquest and colonization, as the concept made it possible to “other” the conquered in the wars of the Conquest (Segato 2010). This imposed otherness also allowed the colonizers to confiscate these people’s products and knowledge, whose value was never recognized nor remunerated (Quijano 1993). This model of power, which Quijano called coloniality, is based on the imposition of a racial/ethnic classification of the population. Its endurance is evidenced by the fact that the racial capital of whiteness still retains its value today. In the context of the Latin American colonies, certifying the “purity of one’s blood”—which was enforced on the Iberian Peninsula and required documentation of a religious ancestry free from Jewish or Muslim forebears—was gradually transformed into the need to prove that one did not have any ancestors who were black, mulatto, zambo, cuarterón, etc.,

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which could be identifiable by skin tone and certain physiognomic features (Hering Torres 2007 and 2010). Used in the Spanish colonial caste system, by the eighteenth-century “mulatto” had come to mean a person of mixed African and European heritage (Leal 2010). It was borrowed and used similarly in English. While it has been argued that its etymology derives from an Arabic root (Forbes 1995), it is more widely theorized that it comes from the word mule, evoking the interbreeding of animals and therefore making it a pejorative term (Callejas Toro 2020). Whichever its root, the word is certainly antiquated and offensive in English, whereas in Spanish (and Portuguese) it is less so. In present-day Colombia, it has fallen out of everyday usage, whereas it was a fairly common term in the mid-twentieth century by which people of mixed African and European heritage identified themselves.1 Zambo was the term ascribed in the colonial caste system to persons of mixed indigenous and African parentage. As this racial mix did not result in racial or cultural whitening, zambos were thought to have inherited the savagery, submission, and vices of both ancestral lines (Montaña Mestizo 2021). The zambo was spurned and dehumanized in the nineteenth-century intellectual production of the Neo-Grenadine elites and reporting of foreign travelers and merchants, described as “the country’s worst race” (Samper cited in Martínez Pinzón 2011, 19). In Colombia, the category zambo has been often associated with the figure of the boga, free men who punted passengers and freight up and down the Magdalena River in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Lamus Canavete 2014). These men were widely mythologized in the reports and literature of that time, for example, in the work of the poet Candelario Obeso (Ortiz Cassiani 2009). In the eighteenth-century colonial caste system of New Granada, a cuarterón was the son or daughter of a white person with a tercerón (a person of one-quarter African ancestry), that is, someone who is one-eighth Black (or has one Black great-grandparent). This category was hard to distinguish visually from white European, and so cuarterones had more opportunity for upward social mobility, through marriage or other means (Solano 2013). It should not be forgotten, however, that whiteness was also a matter of reputation, since a person could be white if that was how he or she was publicly regarded (Wade 2009, 70). From information in various official documents, we can attest that color very easily became an instrument of power, applied in colonial law to achieve certain ends. Color, like memory, was a category that could be shaped in everyday life and defined according to the situation (Hering Torres 2010, 144). From the example of the cuarterones it is important to note the way in which Black ancestry was considered more “staining” than indigenous heritage. The castes paintings from the late 1700s which represented the processes

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of miscegenation among the Spanish, “Indians,” and Africans show that when indigenous and Spanish people intermixed, indigenous origins could be erased in three generations, passing from mestizo (mixed European and indigenous ancestry) to castizo and from castizo to full Spaniard (Lomnitz 1993). By contrast, as the existence of the categories of the cuarterón and even the quinterón shows, African heritage was more difficult to erase down the generations (Leal 2010). In the colonial order, indigenous people, dispossessed of their lands, were to be both protected and exploited as taxpayers, while Africans were to be profited from through slave labor. Although the Spanish, as the ruling class, tried to keep all categories separate, in practice, the same colonial dynamics that created the castes allowed processes of social mobility through whitening, enabling “indians” and “blacks” to overcome the limits imposed by their condition through a gradual process of racial mixing over several generations (Bernard and Gruzinski 1988; Wade 1993a; Leal 2010). Later, the ruling classes engaged in what Castro Gómez (2005) terms the “habitus of whiteness,” associated with principles of ethnic distinction and the concentration of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital during the new republic, despite the egalitarian and integrationist rhetoric that underpinned this project. The era after Independence showed both continuity and change when compared with the preceding period. The low status of indigenous people and “blacks” persisted, as did whitening as a means of inclusion into the community of citizens. Inclusion through whitening was manifested through non-white men being gradually allowed to vote or able to marry a “whiter” woman. Whitening could also be achieved through participation in different political and public spaces, or emulation of the respectability and honor valued by groups considered to be white. Although the situations of indigenous people and “blacks” were comparable in terms of hierarchies of wealth, education, civilization, and social status, their positions in the political arena and in the collective imagination of the new nation were different (Wade 1993a and 2000b). In mainstream Colombian society of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous people were seen as a specific cultural and legal category. Indigenous identity was constructed on the basis of the possession of a distinctive culture and language, which reinforced their image as both different and other. They aroused special interest among intellectuals and the state, but this did not translate into better living conditions for these populations. In the nationalist discourse, the figure of the mestizo, a person of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage, was more highly valued than that of the mulatto, a person of mixed Spanish and African descent, as discussed above. In contrast, Black individuals were excluded from the national identity while being included as ordinary citizens. They were thus deprived of social

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status and caught between two currents: on one side, the ideologies of whitening, which privileged the white or that which came close to it, and on the other, national cohesion, which included them rhetorically, but denied the existence of the racial discriminations to which they were subjected. The state, intellectual elites, and the mestizo population did not become interested in the category of Blackness, the African or Black heritage of the nation’s culture, nor Black communities of the past or present, until the 1970s. As a result, no institutes were created to study Black people, and the little research that was undertaken on this population focused on slavery as an institution, and neglected to study the social dynamics of Black people themselves (Friedmann and Arocha Rodríguez 1985; Arocha Rodríguez 1993; Wade 1993a). An additional layer of the socio-racial order that emerged in the context of the new Republic was that of regional identity. Regionalism strongly marks Colombian (racial) identities within the country even today, and regional identity will emerge as a key theme of the book going forward. Nancy Appelbaum (2016) argues that the materials produced by the Chorographic Commission of New Granada in the 1850s solidified Colombia’s image of itself as a country of distinct regions. The Commission comprised a series of small-scale but ambitious government-sponsored cartographic expeditions carried out in the 1850s, led by military engineer Agustín Codazzi, which produced maps, illustrations, descriptions and detailed typologies. The material produced was widely disseminated and elaborated on in the scholarly and popular discourse throughout the rest of the 1800s and into the twentieth century. Despite its mission to unify the young nation by mapping it, the Commission’s output depicted a fragmented country made up of distinct and often opposing spaces and created a typology of races and cultures according to the groups inhabiting these spaces, which were ordered according to their perceived civility. This geographic hierarchy has persisted into the twenty-first century, with the white or mestizo inhabitants of the Andean interior perceiving themselves as the racial norm, othering the peoples and landscapes comprising the rest of the country (Appelbaum 2016). THE DISCOURSE OF MESTIZAJE Postindependence, the creole elites, now in power, faced the dilemma of creating and consolidating a nation that could compete in a modern and progressive arena, in accordance with the principles of European liberal thought that had spread throughout Latin America (Wade 1993a). As white Americans, the way in which these creole liberal elites across the region went about laying down the aesthetic and ideological foundations of these newly independent

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nations was profoundly “Europeanizing” (Pratt 1992, 175) and starkly paradoxical. As they promoted independence, decolonization, and escape from the tyranny of Europe, they upheld European values, white supremacy and avoided reference to the oppressive social and racial hierarchies present in the territory. The wars of independence and their outcomes generally reconfirmed white male dominance, catalyzed Euro-capitalist penetration and often intensified exploitation (Pratt 1992). They grappled with the conundrum of what to do in regard to a majority non-white population, given their awareness of “the clearly white connotations of progress and modernity” (Wade 1993a, 10). This same conflict was faced by most Latin American nations, and was resolved differently in different countries, albeit with a common objective: to defend the mixed population’s place at the center of Latin American identity, without abandoning the ideals of modernity and progress (c.f. Graham 1990, Skidmore 1974, Whitten 1981, Wright 1990, cited in Wade 2003). Despite the fact that mestizaje had begun to be considered the main feature of the Latin American national identity, race did not disappear as a social category. In fact, the emerging classes of the new republics continued to be racially stratified, while the ruling classes strove to maintain their position. Western scientific thought of the time increasingly placed race as a central organizing category for humanity and society, and linked modernity with whiteness (Wade 2009, 114). Against this background, mestizaje was interpreted as a method for whitening the population and of progress toward civilization (ibid., 116). The tension between the theoretical equality offered by mestizaje and the reality of the hierarchy that resulted in racial discrimination against darker people was managed by the codes of honor, which continued to focus on women’s sexuality (ibid., 117). The respectable heterosexual family, founded by a couple of similar racial status, then became the necessary foundation of the nation’s pride and good standing (ibid., 130). For the greater part of the twentieth century in Colombia, whitening the population was one of the projects pursued by various governments to racially and culturally “improve” the nation (Helg 1989; Pisano 2012). At the same time, mestizaje, as a nationalist “ideology of whitening,” was understood and promoted in two ways: as a democratic and democratizing doctrine, but also as a discriminatory concept that aided development in the “right” direction. In different countries, different versions of the same argument emerged. In Mexico and Peru, countries with large indigenous populations, one offshoot of mestizaje was indigenismo, which while it sought to challenge European superiority and emphasize the specificity of the national identity, at the same time consigned indigeneity to the underdeveloped past, mainly due to the fact that these groups spoke different languages. Both countries sought to engender notions of a shared and reconciled nationality that expressed the dialectical overcoming of the contradictions between the races and cultures

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from which these societies had been created (Martínez Casas et al. 2019; Sulmont and Callirgos 2019). In contrast, Argentina and Uruguay actively sought to whiten the small indigenous and Black fractions of their population through public policies that favored European immigration. The idea that Argentina’s population had “descended from the ships” was accepted as a given (Garguin 2009). Indeed, the dominant narrative of Argentinian national identity refuted that there had been any cultural, phenotypical, or historical influence of indigenous or Afrodescendant peoples, placing them at a temporal and geographical distance, and ignoring any processes of cultural fusion and/or genetic mixing (Frigerio 2008). The representations of mestizaje in Colombia pushed by the county’s elites between 1930 and 1950 fluctuated between the Mexican model—which conceived mestizaje as the nation’s founding narrative and emblem of its present democracy—and the Argentinian model which aimed to change the country’s racial composition through a gradual reduction of the Black and indigenous influence, considered to be backward and regressive. In fact, mestizaje “a la colombiana” entailed the gradual elimination of the Black and indigenous minorities by means of increasing their incorporation into the “superior” white element (Wade 1993b). At a time when Latin American nations were struggling to be recognized as modern, they adopted an “assimilationist” model, seeking to incorporate certain values of indigenous and African groups into the mainstream culture, those seen to be of general interest or of artistic importance, but at the same time, there was a clear agenda of biological and cultural “whitening,” understood to mean progress and modernization. Although mestizaje was often idealized as the superior path to assimilation, the work of Zapata Olivella (1989) attempts to overcome the portrayal of mestizaje as a process of “mixing” that is mechanical, homogeneous, and devoid of conflict, as it has been represented by many writers. For this author, the primary phase of mestizaje in the Americas occurred between Black and indigenous people, as a creative response to the oppressions of enslavement, with the white-European element participating in its second stage (Viveros Vigoya 2013). The white element enters into the process in an attempt to redefine the category “mestizo” and neutralize the subversiveness of the mixture between the Black and the indigenous. Zapata Olivella proposes that Colombia’s national stories should be based on the acknowledgment that Latin Americans are a hybrid people within societies marked by social inequalities by virtue of our colonial heritage (Zapata Olivella 1974, 12). From this standpoint stems his interest in unveiling the ambiguity that underlies the myth of mestizaje, as well as its problematic character, which results from the way it imposes norms and values, and dominates the bodies of indigenous and enslaved people. And in fact, as occurred in other countries in the region, the idea of national unification led Colombians to forget

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their founding lineages, detach a part of their ancestry, and abdicate their past (Segato 2010, 40). One of the possible explanations for the difficulty of referring to race in Colombia has to do with the nation’s construction within the framework of a monolingual, monoethnic, and monocultural model of nationhood. This approach—which declared the country as “mestizo and proud”—demanded the disappearance and concealment of its ethnic and cultural diversity. At the same time, it unquestioningly legitimized a hierarchical socio-racial order that created social and economic inequalities. Gaitanism was the only Colombian political movement that challenged the prevailing model of mestizaje and its project of whitening “from below.” In the 1940s, Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán brought together Colombians of a “dark” complexion, poor whites, and mestizos, and people from the urban middle classes who identified with the movement (Green 2000, 98–101 and 113–24). Gaitanism tried to overcome the country’s partisan divisions by unifying the lower classes with phrases such as “hunger is neither Liberal nor Conservative.” This attempt at unification of the lower classes was certainly thought about in racial terms. His followers were represented by the conservative press, in particular the newspaper El Siglo, in openly racist terms, voicing their fear that if Gaitán were to come to power, it would mean a return to nation’s indigenous and African roots, an imagined eventuality painted as a destructive, barbarian attack on the rationality of the institutions representing civilization and whiteness (Braun, cited by Andrade 2010). Manuel Zapata Olivella’s 1960 novel La Calle 10 has the murder of Afro-Colombian boxer-turned-journalist Mamatoco stand in for Gaitán’s assassination. Zapata Olivella’s deliberate conflation of the two figures in the novel can be interpreted as a representation of the polarization of society that would be in accordance with the Gaitanist movement’s own analysis. In other words, for both Zapata Olivella and Gaitán, the fundamental division in Colombian society is between the predominantly white upper classes and the people, comprising the mestizo, indigenous, and Black populations (Andrade 2010). Gaitán’s project of inclusive mestizaje was clearly influenced by Mexican popular mestizaje, the antithesis of the Argentinian model that only saw mestizaje as successful through European immigration. But with his assassination in 1948, the project failed. All the same, Colombia was never able to emulate Argentina, and despite efforts by the Colombian elites, the attempts made in this regard resulted in nothing more than wishful thinking (Pisano 2014a).

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A TURNING POINT: THE 1991 CONSTITUTION The institutionalization of mestizaje in Colombia remained a reality until 1991, when the constitution was redrafted, and the idea of Colombia as a mestizo nation was replaced, at least in political discourse, by the recognition that the nation was “pluriethnic and multicultural.” Until this point in time, Black people had been imagined as members of a social group of little value, but also as people that could engage in social mobility on a strictly individual basis, and were discouraged from claiming an ethno-racial identity that could be used to unite them politically (Wade 1993a; Viveros Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010). As such, the classification of a person as Black in Colombia was completely subject to circumstances, and the resulting incentive to assign or deny that identity. In short, the Black population was perceived as a social group that lacked development and could not be part of the nation’s future unless it integrated into the mestizo population. In this sense, Blackness as a personal and collective identity, as well as the contemporary Black culture, had no importance nor legitimacy. The new constitution created legal conditions for the emergence of a stronger Black ethnic identity than previously existed, and of an “imagined community” of Black people, resulting from collaboration between different State agencies, the Church, and a social movement that claimed to represent the interests of this community (Wade 1993a). However, it is important to note that, within the framework of the National Constituent Assembly called to put the new political constitution into practice, Black people did not enjoy the same recognition as indigenous groups. Their status as an ethnic group was questioned on the basis of the new constitution dedicating only one transitory article to Black communities. Article 55, which focused primarily on rural communities of the Pacific region’s rivers and coast and regional collective land rights, paid little attention to the social dismissal of Black people. Moreover, despite the 1991 redefinition of the constitution, the “assimilationist” attitude of mestizaje as an ideology has persisted in the national consciousness and there is still discord between the “inclusive” legislative advances represented by this new constitution, and the inclusion and acceptance of these transformations in the daily practices of both government officials and citizens. Another drawback to the way the Constitution of 1991 was drafted was its unintended effects on Black and indigenous LGBTI+ people in Colombia, especially gay and bisexual women. Although the new constitution benefited the LGBTI+ community with the introduction of important legal mechanisms for the protection of rights, Ochy Curiel (2013) has argued that

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the strengthening of collective identities through culture requires cultural authenticity of communities and individuals. This requirement falls most heavily on women as the social and cultural reproducers of their communities and, in this role, are expected to marry or form other types of heterosexual unions. Cultural relativist thinking encouraged by multiculturalism also tends to “tolerate” patriarchal and heterosexual social organizations in traditional communities, seeing sexual dissidence as a white, Western invention. This has resulted in queer women and men having to leave their communities and even being perceived as “race traitors.” In parallel, despite the changes brought about by multiculturalism,2 racial categories did not disappear, rather, they were gradually replaced by language referring to ethnicity and culture in order to legitimize and normalize modern practices of racism, as was the case in the rest of Latin America (de la Cadena 2004). At the same time, in the particular way that the type of multiculturalism prevalent in Latin America since the 1990s governs difference, race and racial categories continued to have strong sexual connotations. Consequently, the importance of imagery and practices connected with interracial sex remained, as this new ideology continues to see racial mixing as the rule: the norm is to be mixed, while being Black and indigenous remains minoritized (Wade 2009, 217). Similarly, the country’s problems concerning racism and social inequalities are still seen as fundamentally problems of class, without considering the connections that may exist between race and class, seeing race as relevant to the explanation for these inequalities, nor recognizing that the overcoming of racial inequality implies the simultaneous combating of class and gender inequalities and heterosexism. These different axes of social inequality are mutually reinforcing and cannot be dismantled independently of each other. The dual process which has sustained the Colombian socio-racial order, of inclusion through mestizaje and multiculturalism, and exclusion through racism, reveals both the deep connections between race, class, and gender in the order’s makeup as well as the relative autonomy of the social relations of race. Moreover, as Wade (2009) has argued, in Latin America, “racial democracy”3 and racism occur at the same time and in the same space. Even within the same family there may be individuals who adopt different racial identities or who receive unequal racialized labels and treatment, depending on where they fall on the spectrum of black to white, and on their gender and class. While this heterogeneity can be understood as proof of racial democracy—since racial heterogeneity crosses class, community, and family boundaries—at the same time it allows racism, classism, and sexism to be reproduced, even within the most intimate family setting.

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A SHARP RISE IN VIOLENCE AND THE EARLY YEARS OF MULTICULTURALISM Up to this point, the two regions of Colombia with the biggest Afrodescendant populations, the Caribbean and the Pacific, had been relatively unaffected by the armed conflict, due to their geographical isolation in terms of their overland connections to the Andean interior (Zambrano 2004; Agudelo 2005; Jiménez Ortega 2018). However, as the changes put in place by the new Constitution began to take hold, the situation in both regions started to change drastically, as they had become strategical zones of interest to armed groups wishing to control the natural resources and create new smuggling routes out of the country. All three actors in the conflict (left-wing insurgencies, paramilitaries, and government forces) engaged in operations against each other to control these territories which saw the civilian population either targeted directly or caught in the crossfire (Zambrano 2004; Agudelo 2005, López, Martín, and Badillo 2020). In this period, the Afro-Colombian populations of these regions were subject to high levels of threats, targeted killings and expulsion from their land that led to displacement in disproportionate numbers compared to the rest of Colombia’s population (Ibáñez and Velásquez 2008), with 1.44 percent of all Afro-Colombians (nearly 63,000 people) being victims of forced displacement at the time of the 2005 census (Rodríguez, Alfonso, and Cavelier 2009, 8). This situation was especially dire for the lands titled collectively through Article 55, with a total of 252,541 people forcibly displaced across the 50 municipalities in which these lands are located (AFRODES 2009). Once displaced, the Afrodescendant population faced worse living conditions than other displaced groups, and around 80 percent of displaced Afro-Colombians relocated to urban areas, to both the smaller regional capitals and the country’s biggest urban centers (Rodríguez, Alfonso, and Cavelier 2009, 219). Agudelo (2005) argues that, while the armed conflict of this period affected populations of all races across the country, when war touches sectors of the population who have already been debilitated by discrimination and segregation, as is the case of Black populations in the Pacific, it has a greater impact and a more traumatic effect. The sharp rise in violence that coincided with the early years of multiculturalism in Colombia severely undermined the success of its policies, as it disrupted the application processes for collective land titling and set back the diverse community organizing that had started to flourish post 1991 (Agudelo 2005; Dest 2020). Nevertheless, Agudelo (2005) simultaneously posits that the construction of an ethnic identity and the institutionalization of territorial rights that had begun in the Pacific in this period, despite the problems these

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processes faced, became a legitimate tool for resistance against the conflict, with community organizing resulting in initiatives such as the “communities for peace” and aid for victims through humanitarian assistance zones. Displaced Afro-Colombians swelled the ranks of an already majority urban Black population (around 70 percent at the turn of the millennium) (Final Report CIDSE-IRD Project 2000 and Urrea, Ramírez, and Viafara 2001 cited in Agudelo 2005). However, this new wave of immigration, the Constitution’s focus on rural communities, and the ignorance of historically urban populations of Black people (Camargo 2004; Romero Jaramillo 2015), have contributed to representation of Black people in Colombia’s cities as immigrant, displaced, and not originally from the city. This representation obscures the multiple facets that make up the myriad Black identities in Colombia (Agudelo 2005; Montoya Arango and García Sánchez 2010). The mass displacement around the turn of the millennium and its consequences of impoverishment, as well as the media reporting of this situation (Romaña Córdoba 2016), have reinforced an uncritical imaginary of Colombia’s Black population as marginalized, poor, and as helpless victims. In the next section, I will examine the association between Blackness and the lower classes in the collective imagination in more depth. CLASS IN THE COLOMBIAN SOCIO-RACIAL ORDER The overlap between the orders of race and of class has shaped Colombian society in a specific way over its history. The echelons of class have been superimposed in a complex manner onto the nation’s racial hierarchy, but in a way that still associates Black and indigenous people with poverty and subordination. Although there are working-class people who are classified as white and some Black people in the middle classes, their presence in the social sphere has not been strong enough to refute this undisputed and naturalized connection. Furthermore, there can be no denying that Black and indigenous people continue to exist within the lowest strata of Colombian society, and are kept there by racial discrimination, persistent negative imaginaries about them, and the lack of concerted political questioning of the situation. There is growing recognition of the strong interactions between race and class positions in Colombia (Urrea Giraldo, Viáfara López and Viveros Vigoya 2014), and this realization has shown the relevance of questioning the commonsense assumptions that connect economic criteria with racial markers, by studying experiences of racial discrimination in non-working-class groups, such as those described in this book. The aforementioned coexistence of inclusion and exclusion that Black people experience explains why scholars have often thought it apt to study

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the position of Black people in Colombia, and in other Latin American countries, in terms of class rather than race (Wade 2013; Telles and PERLA 2014). Many studies started from the presupposition that, historically, the Black population had been deprived of economic wealth, but today they find themselves in the same position as any other poor person and could improve their social status, regardless of the color of their skin. However, although research such as that undertaken by the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)4 does not ignore the importance of the relationship between class and race in the region, it has questioned the portrayal of Blackness in terms of class rather than race, and has stressed the importance of addressing race and class as two distinct forms of social interaction and of exploring the existence of specifically racial oppression and prejudice (Wade 1993a; Telles and PERLA 2014). In fact, as the PERLA survey has shown, in Latin America, class is connected to color and the class structure continues to be pigmentocratic. This means that as skin color darkens, there is a reduction in cultural, social, patrimonial, symbolic, and other capital (Urrea Giraldo, Viáfara López, and Viveros Vigoya 2014). Meanwhile, in the first half of the twentieth century, Black intellectuals such as Manuel Zapata Olivella and Natanael Díaz were aware of not only the class problems that Marxist ideology had revealed to them, but also their condition as the culturally oppressed (Zapata Olivella 2005 [1990], 184), that is, they were confronted by the confluence of class and race. The fact that they had migrated to Bogotá, obtained access to higher education and through it achieved social advancement did not separate them from the community of Black people in which they had grown up. Rather, these experiences intensified their “racial education”—through the accumulation of a series of encounters with prejudice, contact with Black people from other regions, and access to studies on “Africa in America”—and strengthened this racial identity, always associated with a strong social consciousness (ibid., 186; Pisano 2014a, 186). Until the early 1980s, ethno-racial identity continued to be closely linked to class in urban Black social movements, and to identify as part of one of these Black communities—mainly made up of men with a few token women—was to take the side of the socially oppressed, regardless of social position, be it as teachers, lawyers, doctors, or scientists. In this context, there was no middle ground: either one belonged to the ruling classes, to the bourgeoisie, which were tied to whiteness, or to the “people,” that is, to the marginalized and exploited, comprised of “non-whites” (Pisano 2014a, 194). In rural areas, Black people were labeled campesinos,5 miners, and fishermen, and their struggles were for access to land, to “improve” their living conditions, without reference to ethnicity, culture, or traditional modes of production (Restrepo 2012, 27). Their class position was tied to their race, and their

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struggle, rather than being the defense of an ancestral territory, concerned the right to land, and required the challenging of the structures of landownership which saw all land in “white hands” (ibid., 29). This situation has undergone changes since the 1980s, not only locally, but also regionally. Latin American societies began to undergo important social and economic transformations with the aim of pursuing processes of supposed modernization and democratization based on diverse approaches to development, both at the local and international levels. The so-called Washington Consensus6 laid the foundations for “development,” which drove Latin America further down the path of neoliberalism. Its purpose was to increase the market’s influence on the allocation of resources, with the aim of promoting efficiency, competitiveness, labor market flexibilization, and increased decentralization (Misas Arango 2002). At the same time, during this period, a significant number of countries in the region (Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela) revised their constitutions with the primary objective of reflecting the multicultural nature of these societies. In Colombia and many other Latin American countries, these constitutional transformations and the recognition of the cultural rights of indigenous and Black communities were accompanied by neoliberal policies and programs aimed at consolidating the “modernization of the state.” The overlap between multiculturalism and neoliberalism was so prevalent that it was thought that they were indistinguishable, and that there was a perverse interplay between the two (Dagnino 2004; Restrepo 2012). The recognition of multiculturalism and the search for economic modernization, two visions which could be seen as conflicting, converged in the attempt to rebuild the relationship between the state and society through inclusions designed to reduce ethnic conflicts and enhance the economic efficiency of state action (Walsh 2009, 7). In this context, the opportunities for inclusion and social mobility that multiculturalism could have opened up for Afrodescendant populations, based on public policies with an ethnically differential approach, soon found that they were limited by the policies imposed by neoliberalism. The “valuing of diversity” opened the door to a certain “politicization” of culture, while at the same time depoliticizing the economy and politics itself (Díaz Polanco 2006; Restrepo 2012). Acknowledging multiculturalism’s limits does not mean that we must ignore its achievements. There is no denying that multiculturalism brought important benefits for the so-called “Black communities,” such as the collective titles to around five million hectares of land and the emergence of numerous local and national organizations, which became legal interlocutors with the state, NGOs, and private corporations (Restrepo 2012, 32). However, the presence of armed actors and extractivist development projects greatly reduced the scope of these achievements. Although multiculturalism made it

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possible to counteract some forms of intersubjective subordination through the value placed on cultural specificities, it did not succeed in redistributing economic means and resources to guarantee racial and social equity. At the same time, the rhetoric of multiculturalism became so widespread that organizing around ethnic and cultural difference became more palatable and fruitful than organizing around class-based demands or against systemic racism. With some exceptions, few Black women or men saw a significant improvement in their chances for better income or political participation, despite the new legal avenues opened up by the constitutional reform to obtain social and political rights. The political disconnect fostered by the multiculturalist discourse not only simplified the social problems faced by Afrodescendant populations—reducing them to issues of “cultural difference” unrelated to social inequalities—but also ignored the way in which different forms of social subordination are intertwined in the real world. While we know that the matrix of social inequality in Latin America is largely conditioned by class inequalities, it is also shaped by other axes of difference, such as gender, race, and geographical location. We must consider the interweaving of these different axes of inequality if we are to explain and confront the perpetuation of the gaps that exist between Afrodescendants and the rest of the Colombian population in the major spheres of our society and in the enjoyment of their rights. We cannot ignore the fact that over these thirty years of neoliberal multiculturalism, the wealth gap has widened and the percentage of indigenous and, particularly, Afrodescendant populations expelled from their territories through violence has increased, while gender inequalities remain largely unchallenged. The hot spots for disparity occur at points where the axes of race and ethnicity intersect with those of gender, class, and place of residence, with these different conditions configuring social groups that are particularly deprived of material and symbolic resources, opportunities, and power (CEPAL 2016). In this sense, it is clear that the multiculturalist model has not only failed to reduce the effects of neoliberal policies that have a greater impact on these social groups and populations, but has also contributed to reinforcing their marginalization. That said, there has been a renewed public interest in racism in Latin America over the last ten years or so (Brazil has had a head start, seeing this new wave emerge around the year 2000). This has given rise to antiracist policies and programs led by states, NGOs, and social organizations (LAPORA 2018). This shift in thinking has combined reflections on both the political inadequacies of the multicultural state project (Hale 2002; Rahier 2012) and the impact on the population of neoliberal policy and both its extractivist economic development model and its security and defense measures (Escobar 2008; Martinez 2018). The shortcomings of a multiculturalism founded on the recognition of difference and the rights of “ethnic minorities”

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have restarted conversations on the need to consolidate the multiculturalist project, with an emphasis on the importance of incorporating struggles against racism, as has already been set in motion in Brazil. In Colombia, the state has supported various campaigns against racism, and in 2011 passed a law against racism and discrimination. In 2008–2009, Ecuador passed laws prohibiting racist practices and launched affirmative action policies for the employment of indigenous and Afrodescendant people in state institutions. In his first speech, Mexican President López Obrador explicitly referred to the fight against racism as the first of his new government’s one hundred commitments in 2018. In many countries of the region, there has been an increase in the number of specialized institutions dealing with issues of racial discrimination and implementing measures to fulfill the mandate of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (2015–2024). In this new context, the intersectional perspective has gained wide acceptance, demonstrating how the activism of the region’s Black women has been taking a leading role since the late 1990s. For example, it was Brazilian Black feminists who were the first to discuss the category Afrodescendant, which was adopted at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, and at subsequent women’s conferences, where Black women, as members of international coalitions, demanded that their place in feminist struggles be recognized. Reflecting the state of affairs in the twenty-first century, Black women’s gender justice claims weave together struggles against poverty, racism, sexism, deterritorialization, and violence. Black women’s understanding and practice of feminism connects social justice to gender democracy, urban and rural sustainability to opposing extractivist development models, femicide to the accumulation of capital, respect for nonnormative gender and sexual identities to defending social leaders against violence, and the protection of territory to the search for “buen vivir.”7 The Colombian socio-racial order and its inherent social inequalities can no longer be read by analyzing class, race, ethnicity, or gender separately, because these forms of hierarchy mutually sustain each other. Nor can we assume the homogeneity of any social class, ethno-racial group, or gender category, since each is replete with differences and inequalities. The challenge in 2022 is to continue to highlight the social inequalities shaping the lives of Afro-Colombian populations, without losing sight of the fact that there are a multiplicity of differences and hierarchies that interact, intertwine, and reinforce each other to produce these disparities, and that it is impossible to hide them behind a generalizing discourse of ethno-racial identity.

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NOTES 1. See, for example, two well-known works, Mulata cartagenera, a painting by Ernesto Grau from 1940 and ¡Levántate Mulato!, Manuel Zapata Olivella’s 1987 autobiography. In Brazil, the mulata is a national icon, an object of desire and the embodiment of the spirit of carnival. The hypersexualization of this figure has been dissected by Lélia Gonzalez (1980). 2. It is important to clarify that, in the words of Restrepo and Bocarejo (2011, 7), based on the work of Stuart Hall, multiculturalism refers to the practices that are adopted at a given time with respect to the social historical fact of cultural heterogeneity. It can be inferred, then, that there is not only one type of multiculturalism, but in fact there can be and have been different multiculturalisms: conservative, neoliberal, radical, communitarian, among others (Hall 2010). Colombia’s regime from the 1990s into the 2000s and beyond has been neoliberal multiculturalism. 3. “Racial democracy” is a term attributed to Gilberto Freyre which throughout the twentieth century became the slogan for Brazilian society, as it was perceived that there were no legal barriers in the country to social mobility, or access to official positions or to positions of wealth and prestige for people of color (Guimarâes 2002). 4. See https:​//​perla​.princeton​.edu/ 5. Campesino is a general term that refers to people living in rural areas who belong to the lower economic strata, mainly making their living from the land, whether farming their own land, as a tenant farmer, or as a farmworker working for a landowner or agricultural business. While this economic or class-based definition is the most widespread, there have also been movements to enrich this definition by including cultural and identity-based elements to the concept (Duarte Torres and Montenegro Lancheros 2020). 6. The Washington Consensus refers to a series of economic policies that constituted the best course of action for stimulating economic growth in Latin American countries in the eyes of international financial organizations and economic centers based in Washington. 7. “The term ‘Buen Vivir’ (living well) originates in South America and signifies critiques of and alternatives to conventional ideas about development” (Gudynas 2015, 201).

Chapter 2

The Heterogeneity of the Category “Middle Class”

HISTORY OF THE CATEGORY “MIDDLE CLASS” IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES The term “middle class” is one of the means available for naming and classifying a specific sector of modern societies. The category is typically defined based on a multitude of criteria, including the level of income in a Marxist perspective or the categories of occupations and living conditions in a Weberian approach. But whether a sector is middle class or not has also been determined by looking at lifestyle, values, beliefs, and social behavior, as well as whether a middle-class identity is publicly expressed or if it is claimed to be represented by certain political movements (Bosc 2008; Parker 2022). First used in sociology, the category middle class has developed into a complex and multidimensional concept, that at the same time has an imprecise and fluid meaning, depending on the context. The term “class” connotes modernity, where status is chiefly derived from the place occupied in the productive system (Bauman 1982; Bosc 2008). Generally speaking, it could be argued that sociological studies on class have focused on objective conceptualizations—the class in itself—to the detriment of subjective perceptions of class—the class for itself—to use Marxist terminology. Indeed, few empirical studies have attempted to link these two aspects. The vagueness of the qualifier “middle” and its derivatives, when applied to the middle classes, evoke varied, although broadly positive representations, and a social position that is largely dependent on the historical context. The perception of the middle as an ideal position has a long history that goes back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle, in a passage from The Politics, heralds the “middle class” as an antidote to extremes, providing a balance 37

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between excess and deficiency. The argument for the superiority of the middle classes, as defenders of good government and protectors of democracy from excess, has been circulating since the thirteenth century (Sick 1993; Bosc 2008, 6). In a similar way to sociology, classic studies in historiography have often used objective conceptualizations of the middle classes to claim that they played a key role as product and producer of the social, political, and cultural modernization of Europe and its expansion from the seventeenth century onward (Bosc 2008). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Aristotelian issue of the “middle ground” was taken up again in an overtly political moral defense of the middle classes (Sick 1993). A prescriptive stance that began to recur at the beginning of the twentieth century and has persisted into the twenty-first century is the association made between the middle classes and favorable political moderation, based on the supposed relative stability of the social groups designated as the middle classes and their link with social and economic progress and democracy (Oliven 2014; López Pedreros 2019; Parker 2022). Meanwhile, until World War I, the label had been used mainly by those who advocated their cause before the public authorities “from below.” Afterward, the title of middle class has since been assigned to groups to whom economic or social policies are targeted “from above.” (Sick 1993; Bosc 2008). As Sick (1993) explains, the modern idea of the middle class spread rapidly in the period following the formation of the Popular Front government1 for two reasons: the first, the unique political circumstances that saw a series of strikes lead to significant achievements for the working class, and the second, efforts undertaken at the time to transform the very structure of politics through the creation of professional and social organizations claiming to be “middle class.” From this moment on, the expression spread through political discourse of all colors and into academia, where it took hold mainly in sociology, economics, and history. Sick goes on to state that the concept of the middle class should be studied in a historical, rather than sociological light, with the aim of identifying the social, legal, and political factors that determined their makeup in each historical period. A dominant idea of the middle classes developed at every stage, triggering conceptual as well as political disputes. In this regard, it would be of utmost relevance to understand the conditions under which (and the procedures by which) certain groups of people congregate around the same point of reference, conceptualizing their grouping as a “middle class.” After World War II, the term middle classes referred to the expansion of the mid-level wage-earning classes and, at the same time, the social and cultural shifts that accompanied their growth. From the 1950s onward, a reference to the middle classes evoked the inner workings and transformations of the

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social structure of the wage-earning categories, marked by numerous divisions and oppositions. These interpretations, alongside the varying economic, social, and political attitudes of this heterogeneous social group, made the task of marking the borders of the middle classes exceedingly difficult. The mid-1980s were a time of great economic and social change for European societies, and since then, discourse on a crisis of the middle classes started to become more commonplace, with some voices even heralding their end (Chauvel 2006; Bosc 2008). An essay by Fukuyama (2012, cit. in López Pedreros 2019, 1–2), argued that the 2008 global financial crisis and its societal effects highlighted the need to create a new political ideology, to be championed by the middle class, around the concepts of capitalism, democracy, and freedom. In this context, a rebuilding of “middle class societies” was necessary to avoid the emergence of either “oligarchic domination” or “populist revolution.” Meanwhile, Guilluy (2018) has pointed to the impasse in which Western countries are caught with the decline of a model that is failing to build societies. The fundamental symptom of this decline is the disappearance of the Western middle class, a category charged with embodying the values of the American and European way of life. As a consequence, these societies have been undergoing a tumultuous period in which all that comprised the common good, from the welfare state to shared values, has been gradually dismantled, causing a historic split between the world above and the world below, to use Guilluy’s terminology. HOW HAVE THESE DEBATES EVOLVED IN LATIN AMERICA? In 2014, Ruben Oliven remarked that, unlike in developed countries, the Latin American intelligentsia, who were mainly “middle class” people themselves, viewed the middle class with mistrust, as it was neither part of the heroic proletariat and its historic mission, nor was it included in the business class that owned the means of production and promoted capitalist development. However, this perception has gradually changed, and today, by contrast, the middle class is seen in a positive light. How did this change take place? To answer this question, we must step back several decades in order to understand how perceptions of the class structure in Latin America have developed over time, and where the middle class fits into this structure. Since the late 1940s, various groups of scholars—such as those involved in the multinational research project sponsored by the Pan American Union (Parker 2022)—have endeavored to provide a definition of the Latin American middle class and to gauge its importance. Although they explored

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the possibility of creating a single definition to achieve better comparability across national studies, this was soon abandoned as unworkable. Instead, they opted to explain the different ways in which the middle classes had been conceptualized, either by occupation, level of education, or income, or by a sense of belonging to the middle class. These studies contained a widely held view that posited that economic development and the political democratization of societies could be achieved by supporting the middle classes. However, in the 1960s, other scholars started to question, from a more critical stance, whether the middle class actually possessed the positive qualities that had been ascribed to it. For example, they argued that the middle class’s supposed adaptability in the face of the political developments that concerned them resulted in a breakdown of the definition and durability of their ideological positions (CEPAL 1962; Solari, Franco and Jutkowitz 1976). While social class was an important lens through which to analyze the different processes that the world was undergoing in the 1960s and 1970s, more recently, the number of articles focusing on the functioning of the social structure and the production system, and on perceptions of the different social groups, has reduced considerably. After the fall of communism, there was very little research that continued to use the category of class as a central tenet of its analysis, and the concept of identity, originating in psychology and little used before the 1970s, largely replaced that of social class in the sociological landscape of the time. As Oliven (2014) explains, the notion of identity—which emphasizes the formation of new social actors, culture, and the recognition of differences—is a more fluid concept than social class. It also always refers to two dimensions: one that is more objective, related to an insertion in the production model or class position, and another that is more subjective, alluding to class consciousness or social status. Although social class remains a more exact concept than identity, difficulties arise in the social sciences when confronted with the term middle class, long perceived as an imprecise, shapeless, indeterminate, and problematic category due to the wealth of meanings with which it is associated. In theoretical debates, it has been pointed out that the process in which social classes are formed can only be understood in relational terms (Adamovsky and Arza 2012). On the other hand, due to the emphasis placed on economy or culture as the foundations of social differentiation, social class has referred either to a series “objective” shared features—such as the occupational categories that belong to it, the type of relationships held with the social layers above or below it, its specific role in the development of a society over time, the level and nature of its consumption—or subjective traits concerned with the way people understand the world and their place in it, the constitution of the middle classes through discourse, etc. (Adamovsky 2013).

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Despite the obvious polysemy of the category middle class, it has been the focus of much theoretical and empirical debate in the region since the 1990s. In recent times, the middle class has become the subject of widespread positive discourse, and several Latin American nations now define themselves as middle class. Although historically Argentina has been associated with being middle class, it was less common for countries marked by income inequality, such as Brazil, Bolivia, or Colombia. In this context, academics are starting to question the many precepts about how this social category should be researched empirically (Adamovsky, Visacovsky and Vargas 2015). Discussions have debated the very existence of a middle class and its makeup, and have concluded that empirical evidence, rather than abstract ideas are needed to draw conclusions (Adamovsky and Arza 2012). Questions about the Latin American middle classes include: Which people are allocated to the middle class, and with what motives? Under what circumstances is this category transformed into a widely embraced social identity, and who identifies as middle class? Is there any overlap between objective and subjective data on middle class identity? An awareness of the scope and limits of the different disciplinary approaches and methods for proving the existence of a middle class has been growing since the 1990s (Parker 2022). Many of the old assumptions on the subject have started to be questioned, such as the supposed link between the middle classes and a “modern” worldview, their presumed majority support for the national socialist project, or their role in the upholding of democracy. These uncertainties have underscored the need for a multidisciplinary approach that would include disciplines such as communication science and anthropology alongside the established historical or sociological perspectives. Ethnographic research has provided a “situated understanding” of the processes by which identities and social belonging are constituted, of the way in which people define their own identities, and of the effects that social imaginaries have on them (Castoriadis 1983; Garguin 2009; Vargas 2014). This research has also sought to understand the personal dimension of these identities and the leeway that individuals may or may not have to choose their class, as can occur with different members of the same family. It is now understood that like other identities, class identities are neither static nor completely fluid. Automatic associations or inevitable correlations—between, for example, income and social identity, or symbolic universes and class identities—have been strongly criticized (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Meanwhile, these more traditional approaches still persisted in fields like economics, demography, and development studies, where the middle classes were measured by their income as a group that covered everyone above the extreme poverty line and below the wealthy. That the middle class exists and can be measured is a given for these fields of study. In the “common-sense”

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language of politics and PR used by state agencies and marketing, the badge of “middle class” is attached to a specific and distinctive social group, who are also labeled with their own inherent merits and defects. Meanwhile, since the 1990s, postcolonial criticism has revealed that Eurocentrism has influenced certain characteristics that have been ascribed to the middle class, such as a rational and secular worldview, a progressive outlook, and “civilized” behavior (Adamovsky, Visacovsky and Vargas 2015). The narratives of civilization/modernization crystallized around this “new” social group, and they started to embody the promises of civilization and progress as the legacies of a Western tradition. The overlap between the history of the rise of the “middle class” and the history of the “West” made the presence and expansion of a middle class the yardstick by which the degree of palatability and progress of a society was measured. This conflation contributed to the legitimization and symbolic organization of capitalist domination, which has since then claimed the civilizing task of establishing and expanding the middle classes. Historical studies shaped by these ideas have emphasized that the invention of the middle classes was greatly influenced by the need to create a group that would represent the achievements and the project of a Europe conceived, from the time of Guizot, as the land of civilization, freedom, progress, cultural splendor, and economic development (Adamovsky 2014). These studies highlighted the regulatory and performative nature of the category—which carries with it ideas of a strong Eurocentric and classist bias on what social life should be—reserving for it a place in the civilized world. On this matter, Adamovsky outlines the insights of Joshi’s (2012) study on colonial India which manages to go beyond a Eurocentric explanation of the peculiarities of the middle classes in this context, and describes them as part of a “fractured,” incomplete, or singular project of modernity. Adamovsky also discusses the way in which this research interrogates from the periphery the myths associated with Western modernity and its supposed driving force, the middle class. In his study of the middle classes in Colombia, López Pedreros (2019) points to the way in which decolonial theories tend to transhistorically position the “local” as the “authentically subaltern.” Thus, from this perspective, the Latin American middle classes would be an inauthentic, “Americanized” creation, a deviation from true Latin American subalternity and as such, political actors unimportant to the histories of these societies. By promoting this position, the decolonial perspective would be repeating the assumptions made by research from the 1950s that described the Latin American middle classes as a failure compared to their North American or European counterparts. López Pedreros argues that this analysis can reproduce a binary way of thinking that dehistoricizes social relations and pits the local—thought of as outside a “proper” Europe and as the embodiment of an authentic

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and transhistorical subalternity—against the global design of an everlasting matrix of Western and colonial power. Despite its intended critique, such blunt oppositions contribute to Western democracy’s self-congratulatory narrative. Another element to consider about the study of the middle classes in Colombia is how social sciences in the country have prioritized the study of the oppressed, excluded subject, who embodies otherness and on whom the systems of domination and inequality fall most heavily. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin American social sciences prioritized the category “class” as the key to analyzing not only the social structure and the production system, but also all the social processes ongoing in the world at the time. The influence of Marxism was evidently important to the choice of this emphasis, but it should also be pointed out that the Marxist model, in its focus on production and on the capital-labor conflict as essential components of the political struggle, saw the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes as secondary social sectors. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that the concept of social class is often accompanied by moral connotations. In the Marxist narrative, the only subject morally qualified to carry out the revolution is the proletariat, because it is the only group capable of transforming itself into a “class for itself.” This condition is indispensable for the realizing of its revolutionary potential. After the fall of communism, the concept of social class lost its centrality and several of the old certainties began to unravel. In the 1990s, postcolonial critiques began to gain momentum, later giving rise to the emergence of the modernity-coloniality group. From this perspective, it was the colonial power structure that produced the social discriminations that were later codified as “racial” or ethnic, and which provided the framework in which other social relations, such as those of class, operate (Quijano 1992). In this new context, the social actor par excellence for the project of emancipation is no longer the proletariat or the working class, but those who embody colonial difference: the wretched of the Earth, deprived of a human condition, in clear allusion to the concept of the zone of nonbeing, as discussed by Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks. These theorizations sought to go beyond the theory of social classes, which tends toward being ahistorical and reductionist due to its Eurocentrism, and to do away with everything that appeared to be European or associated with modernity (Restrepo and Rojas Martínez 2010). In light of critiques of this nature, research on the middle classes becomes an exercise that spotlights a suspicious subject, as allegedly the middle class are an indicator of the relative modernization of a society and the engine of the “European miracle” (Adamovsky, Visacovsky, and Vargas 2015). In short, for Marxist or decolonial approaches that engage with the search for social transformation, the study of the middle classes could lack interest

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because it refers to social actors devoid of both proletarian heroism and revolutionary potential, as well as the epistemic and political emancipatory character that indigenous and Afrodescendant populations may represent, in the marked difference of their cultural and intellectual perspective. It is also important to mention that, although the study of the wealthier classes is unusual in Marxist or decolonial research, with some notable exceptions (Curiel 2021, Mendoza 2023), doing so can be symbolically beneficial for the researcher, as it is an exercise that contributes to the unraveling of the mechanisms by which domination operates. For all these reasons, the present study, and others like that of López Pedreros, argue that in order to critically study the histories of democracy in Colombia and understand the functioning of power, more attention should be paid to the historical formation of the middle classes. For this author, “the study of the middle classes and the use of the middle classes as a category help us to think about power and domination in a different way from that in which we have traditionally understood them, and in the same way, questions of gender are very important to be able to understand more comprehensively the forms of domination operating in Colombia.”2 Indeed, adding the category of gender and other axes of inequality such as race to create a multidimensional analysis of class has been a key part of my study of the Black middle classes. NOTES 1. The Popular Front was a coalition of left-wing parties formed in 1935 which governed France between 1936 and 1938. 2. Translation of the verbatim transcription from the recording of the conversation referred to above.

Chapter 3

An Intersectional Approach to the Latin American Middle Classes

During much of the twentieth century, the social inequalities that characterized Latin American societies were explained by national doctrines of racial democracy, developmentalist and modernization theories, and Marxist philosophy, mainly using arguments based on social class. It was only in the late 1970s, with the rise of the so-called new social movements, that the academic world began to pay attention to other social categories such as gender and race as factors that structure social inequality (Reid Andrews 2018, 54). However, of particular note is the debate between the different currents of leftist thought and the construction of the Black social movement, which was an ongoing concern throughout the 1970s across the region. Although Black men and women played a varied and relevant political role within the leftist organizations that opposed the military regimes, their contribution was downplayed due to the lack of discussion on race and, to a certain extent, to the reproduction of the discourse of racial democracy within the left itself, which prioritized class as the key factor in social inequality. This situation began to change, in Brazil at least, thanks to Afro-Brazilian women activists and intellectuals, such as Thereza Santos, who in the 1960s brought up Black women’s concerns as topics of political debate within the Brazilian Communist Party (Barroso and Oliveira Costa 1983). Moreover, the work of philosopher Lélia Gonzalez, historian Maria Beatriz do Nascimento, educator and philosopher Sueli Carneiro, sociologist Luiza Bairros, and physician Jurema Werneck have become key texts for understanding the specificities that characterize the relationships between race, gender, and class in Brazil. Their various contributions pioneered the theory of the “race-class-gender” triad of oppressions, to frame the differences existing among Brazilian women that the dominant feminist discourse had tried to ignore. Similarly, since the Second Meeting of Latin American and Caribbean Feminists held in 1983 in the city of Lima (Curiel 2007), various feminist 45

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groups have highlighted the absence of the issue of racism in the political debates of the feminist movement. These episodes show that the problem of certain groups being excluded by theoretical frameworks ignoring the overlapping of power relations has been circulating in the region for almost fifty years. However, it is the more recent term intersectionality that has been chosen as the name for the theoretical and methodological approaches that seek to account for the overlapping and interlocking of power relations and to produce “complex” analyses of the reality experienced by both women and men. The concept itself was coined in 1989 by African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, with the goal of exposing the legal invisibility of the multiple dimensions of oppression experienced by Black women workers at the General Motors Company in the United States. Although Crenshaw’s intention was not to create a general theory of oppression, but rather a concept for practical use in analyzing specific legal omissions and inequalities, intersectionality gradually became the most widespread feminist terminology used in (mostly English-language) academic contexts for discussing either identities or multiple and interdependent inequalities (Brah and Phoenix 2004; Bilge 2010). Simply put, “intersectionality” is a theoretical and transdisciplinary perspective developed within feminist and gender studies to account for the complexity of both identities and social inequalities. Its uniqueness lies in the way it challenges the isolation and hierarchization of the three major axes of social differentiation in Western and Westernized societies, namely sex/ gender, class, and race/ethnicity. It not only recognizes the multiplicity of the systems of oppression that operate by means of these categories, but also postulates that they interact with each other in the production and reproduction of social inequalities. It is this last aspect that especially interests me for its potential in describing and analyzing the Black middle classes in Colombia, in a context of growing interest in the interactions between class, gender, and race in multiethnic and multicultural societies such as ours. In this chapter I will touch on some of the Latin American research that has explored these connections in processes of upward social mobility in Latin America, and the way ethno-racial relations and the formation of the middle classes have interacted, based on studies carried out in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. In this way, I hope to contribute to the conceptual dialogue taking place between analyses of race and gender, and the analysis of class, stemming from the criticisms that have been made of classic studies of social mobility in Latin America, which have left the former two categories out of their research design. My argument is that we must regard race, gender, and class not as axes of inequality that operate autonomously, but rather as historically and systematically interwoven forms of domination, which pose different theoretical and methodological

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challenges to the study of social inequality. In the second section of the chapter, I discuss research that has shown the impact that transformations in gender relations have had on class structure and on the formation and identities of the middle class, referencing a number of studies that examine the formation of indigenous middle classes. These different case studies will allow me to conclude the chapter by reflecting on the aptitude of an intersectional perspective for the analysis of complex social mobility processes and the renovation of studies in this field. CONNECTIONS BETWEEN CLASS AND RACE IN THE ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MOBILITY IN LATIN AMERICA Argentina has traditionally been described as the country with the largest middle class in Latin America, a fact which was attributed to the hard work and determination to prosper of the people descended from European immigrants. These middle classes felt they were the heirs of this European immigration (Visacovsky 2012), and for this reason, studies on social class, ethnicity, nationality, and race were kept separate from one another, with a few noteworthy exceptions, such as Tevik’s 2007 ethnography of Porteño professionals, and historian Garguin’s 2009 study of references to race in the origin stories of the middle class from the 1920s to the 1960s. In the case of Buenos Aires and other large cities in Argentina, there is a naturalized racial perception of the middle class as “white and European” that excludes “blacks” or the “cabecitas negras” (Guano 2003).1 More recently, Adamovsky (2014) identified a blind spot in the research on the middle class in Argentina which ignores the role of ethnic differences in the formation of social classes in the country. Referring to Argentinian “middle-class identity,” understood as a series of representations that come into play when people in Argentina identify themselves as belonging to the “middle class,” Adamovsky points to two elements that link class with race. The first is based on a hierarchical ordering of people according to their being “white” or not, coupled with a whole series of moral and intellectual traits attributed to each category; and the second is the drawing up of a “mental map” that superimposes this order onto the geography, differentiating modern, white, safe, middle-class areas from others that appear to be just the opposite. Adamovsky argues that these types of representations produce profound effects on the social practices of those identifying themselves as middle class in Argentina. In Mexico’s case, it has been very common to think that discrimination in the country is based on class rather than race. An example of this assumption would be the following statement by González Casanova (1965, 103),

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affirming that “an indigenous man of national culture does not suffer any discrimination on account of his race: he may suffer it on account of his economic status, his job, or his politics. Nothing more.”2 In the popular imagination, the figure of Benito Juárez corroborated the argument.3 Later, scholars such as Stavenhagen (1975, 206) argued that although class relations had begun to displace colonial relations, this did not necessarily mean that indigenous cultural identity had been eliminated and that, on the contrary, this identity could persist, unaffected by the upward social mobility that indigenous people might experience. More recent research has documented a strong statistical relationship between skin tone and social class (Villarreal 2010; Martínez Casas et al. 2019; Solís, Avitia, and Güémez 2020). Similarly, anthropological studies (Cerón Anaya 2019; Iturriaga 2016; Krozer 2019) have pointed to ideas within the Mexican elite about what it means to be “good looking,” i.e., to have a European appearance, and Cerón Anaya in particular has studied the dynamics of class, race, and gender currently upholding the privilege of the elites. Many studies from Peru assumed that urbanization would lead to cultural homogenization and the suppression of “traditional” ethnic identities by urban identities of class. However, research by Roberts (1974), Doughty (1972), and Isbell (1978), cited in Wade (2000b, 78), shows the persistence of strong links between the city and the village, expressed by the adapting of village rituals and festivals to urban contexts. Meanwhile, the continuous waves of migration to Lima throughout the twentieth century resulted in the formation of a social group which could be equated to the middle class. It is made up of three subgroups (Arrambide Cruz 2020): the traditional middle class, which sees money spent on the maintenance or appearance of a certain lifestyle as an important investment; the consolidated middle class, consisting of the intellectual and technocratic elite; and the emerging middle class, whose identity has strong ethnic ties and which does not share the cultural capital nor the relationships that once characterized the traditional middle class (Fuller 1998). Compared to the Argentinian middle class studied by Adamovsky, where people’s self-identification as such tells us much about the values that people assign to themselves in order to feel middle class (Portocarrero 1998), the beliefs and values associated with Peru’s “middle class” have changed significantly. Before, having a white complexion and a “good” surname and education could automatically label a person as middle class, even if their situation was austere. Ongoing processes of social mobility have partially shifted ethno-racial boundaries, and racial labels become more fluid as a person’s socioeconomic status increases. But this does not mean that socioeconomic inequalities between ethno-racial groups have disappeared and, in

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fact, academic and political efforts to address and raise awareness of these inequalities have recently multiplied (Sulmont and Callirgos 2019). I will now discuss in depth two studies by Angela Figueiredo (2002, 2004, and 2012) on Black middle classes in Bahía, as their results are highly applicable to my own research. To contextualize Figueiredo’s findings, I will first outline how thinking on race and social inequality in Brazil has evolved since the mid-twentieth century. A large proportion of Brazil’s total population is Black, and many studies have found a strong correlation between class and race, explained as the result of past racial discriminations but which are now considered “class-based.” The contrast between the “cordial” race relations in Brazil and the rigidity of US racial policing led scholars in the 1940s and 1950s, such as Donald Pierson, Gilberto Freyre, and Marvin Harris, to consider that racism did not play an important role in upholding inequality in Brazil (Wade 2000). However, later studies attested to the existence of racism in Brazilian society (de Azevedo 1953, Nogueira 1955, and Fernandes 1969 cited in Moraes Silva and Paixao 2019). Nevertheless, these social scientists considered racism to be an anachronism and a remnant of earlier times which was destined to disappear, either as a result of the modernization of Brazilian society or the transformation of class relations through social policies or a socialist revolution. In this context, the expression “racial democracy,” first coined by Freyre, was used by Black activists, politicians and intellectuals to convey an idea of coexistence between races and political commitment to the inclusion of Black people into Brazilian modernity. The military coup of 1964 and the political regime that followed did not fulfill these expectations, and silenced almost all social debate, including conversations on racial inequality. This stagnation led to criticism of racial democracy as a myth that concealed the contradictions between the norms and practices of race relations in Brazil (Guimarães 2002). However, after the return to democracy in the 1980s, the multicultural turn in Brazil was the only one in Latin America which directly addressed racism and racial inequality (Viveros Vigoya 2020). In the new millennium, national debate started to discuss the reinforcement of racial identity required for actions and policies to tackle social inequality (Guimarães 2007). Some argued that drawing attention to race through affirmative action exacerbated racism and that the racial classification of Brazilian society for the purposes of eliminating racism was an unwanted imposition of US racial policy in Brazil, as part of a greater trend of projecting and imposing on all societies concerns and viewpoints from the United States, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) have put it. It has also been documented that, where poorly implemented, newly imposed racial categories inhibited understanding of race and its role and history in Brazilian society (Baran 2007).

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In this context, I will now examine Figueiredo’s research (2002, 2004, and 2012), which is based on interviews with Black people working in the liberal professions and Black businesspeople in Salvador de Bahia. She shows the difficulties faced by this middle class in accessing quality higher education, as well as in converting educational capital obtained into actual jobs in the labor market (Figueiredo 2004). This middle class is “out of place” because even when it manages to overcome economic obstacles, it still encounters barriers in terms of symbolism and values. Figueiredo (2012) posits that despite changes in the dynamics of Brazilian race relations, the experience of racism, discrimination and, consequently, the feeling of being “out of place” continue to mark the daily lives of most middle-class Black Brazilians. Figueiredo (2012) points out that Brazilian research on race relations has often compared the situation to that of the United States, particularly in terms of differences in the use of race and class categories. While in the United States, after the attainment of civil rights, social class has become increasingly important as a category of analysis to examine the internal dynamics of the Black population, in Brazil, race and color have remained factors of differentiation among Black people due to the country’s color spectrum. Additionally, racial dynamics and mobility strategies differ in each country, as mobility for Black people in the United States came about as a result of a segregated society, whereas in Brazil, it is influenced by contact with the white population. Regarding a sense of belonging to the middle class, Figueiredo observed in 2002 that, despite the fact that the incomes of the liberal professionals interviewed were considered high in relation to Bahian and Northeastern salary standards, they lacked a clear sense of middle-class belonging. In fact, when the topic was brought up, most interviewees made a distinction between themselves and people they considered to be middle class. This finding was corroborated in the research conducted with Black businesspeople, since most rejected the idea of being part of the middle class, even though they had the income and material goods that might align them with this sector. Figueiredo explains this behavior by stating that it is likely that these people’s recent entry into this social class means that they consider that their social position may be perceived as unstable. Moreover, given the individualized nature of race relations in Brazil, there persists a belief that middle-class Black people can be seen and treated as white. Figueiredo disproves this, observing that while in spaces such as workplace and housing complexes where Black people are known and recognized, they may be treated with the deference and respect that comes with having certain purchasing power and status comparable to that of a middle-class white person, all it takes is one confusion or misunderstanding for their economic and social position to become irrelevant and their racial status to be spotlighted. This will mean that

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they will be treated with the same suspicion with which all Black people in Brazil are treated on a daily basis. Figueiredo’s data also reveal the great diversity of the meanings attached to racial identification. As such, it is the interviewees themselves—who could be described as “radical or militant”—who prioritize color and race in the description of their personal experiences and who emphasize issues related to racial inequalities, racism, and racial discrimination. Frequently, these are individuals who remember the differential/discriminatory treatment they received from neighbors, peers, and teachers during childhood and seek to overcome the marks that racial discrimination has left on their psyche. Women’s experiences of discrimination in their childhood tend to focus on experiences related to their physical appearance, particularly their hair. Figueiredo demonstrates that the interviewees possess a “double consciousness,” not in terms of nationality (being Black and/or Brazilian) since all the interviewees consider themselves Brazilians, but in terms of perceiving themselves simultaneously as Black and as members of the middle class. For Figueiredo this is explained by the fact that most representations of Black people and Afro-Brazilian culture refer to the “lower-class” Black population, leaving little room for being both Black and middle class. The author perceives that perhaps identifying as both could be easier for younger generations—the children of the interviewees—who occupy a new position in Salvador’s racial context and who have been socialized as members of the middle class, without forgetting that they are also Black. This hypothesis is proven by a 2020 study which suggests that there is more space for younger generations to identify as Black in middle-class contexts such as universities (Guimarães, Rios, and Sotero 2020). The racial quotas for higher education that have been in place for twenty years have rapidly increased the numbers of Black students in Brazilian universities. These young Black and brown Brazilians—the vast majority from public schools, and often the first in their family to obtain a university degree—are embracing their social or racial origins, problematizing the experience of being Black, and highlighting their Blackness physically and discursively in spaces in which they are traditionally seen as outsiders (Guimarães, Rios, and Sotero 2020). As these students graduate and go out into the world, this shift could mark a significant change in the way the Black middle classes in Brazil understand themselves. Research from Bolivia provides more examples of the importance of ethno-racial relations in the formation of the region’s middle classes. In 2012, Esther del Campo García considered whether it was appropriate to apply the concept of middle classes to indigenous groups in Latin America, considering that these are social sectors with precarious circumstances and while they are deeply immersed in the market, they have little interaction with the state.

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She showed that there had been an important process of upward social mobility that allowed indigenous peoples to participate in this new model, albeit in a subordinate position, through the economic and social transformations of the 1940s and 1950s in the Latin American developmentalist states. The subsequent crisis of the development model, the politicization of indigenous demands, the emergence of indigenous intellectual leadership, and economic informality are all elements that, from del Campo García’s point of view, explain the emergence of indigenous sectors that seem to fit the description of “indigenous middle classes.” Although until recently, Bolivia was not a country associated with the middle classes, it has undergone major socioeconomic transformations since 2005 which have reduced the levels of extreme and moderate poverty and the level of income inequality (Villanueva Rance 2018). As a result, in 2018, 62 percent of the country’s population was within the middle-income bracket, which, compared to 2005, is an increase of 25 percent. During the presidency of Evo Morales, there was also a notable change in public opinion about the middle classes, shifting from a discourse of suspicion and contempt to a more conciliatory stance (ibid.). Interestingly, Villanueva Rance observes that, despite the government’s Marxist ideological foundations, in the presidential campaign that led to Morales’s reelection in 2014, the government frequently mentioned, among its various socioeconomic achievements, having raised millions of people into the “middle class.” Likewise, Zegada (2018) indicates the existence of a social sector which has managed to improve its living conditions through insertion in commercial networks not only nationally, but also internationally, initiating processes of “globalization from below” based on informal businesses, bypassing state monitoring. Their “distinctiveness” is based on their symbolic capital, anchored in a hybridity that combines the ancestral and the modern, and is expressed in expressions such as “tecno tronic aymara,” “electro aymaras,” and “aymara fest.” Various different factors, such as the importance of the informal economy—including trade in contraband—in the formation of a chola bourgeoisie and the entangled cultural relationships between the criollo world and the indigenous world demonstrate the complexity of analyzing the developments of these new indigenous middle classes in the region’s pluri-ethnic societies (Grynspan and Paramio 2012). In a text based on several case studies in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, Carlos-Fregoso (2022) explores how the upward social mobility, in a broad sense, of subordinated and racialized subjects can become a strategy to combat racial inequality and racism. What sets these middle classes apart from their non–racially marked counterparts is that they must face various types of racism which challenge the legitimacy of their social position. This experience makes them “racially literate,” teaching them to easily identify

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racist practices and to confront them based on a varied repertoire of discursive and material interventions. A second way in which these middle classes are different is that they are more likely than their white counterparts to be economically vulnerable, a situation that triggers a variety of reactions, either in the form of defensiveness or of solidarity. Carlos-Fregoso observes—following Segato’s (2003) reasoning around defining the position of women in society—that these factors generate tensions and “amphibious” behaviors in subordinated and racialized subjects, both within their own group as well as in their communities of origin. While developing political projects with their communities of origin, they simultaneously seek alliances with powerful groups or individuals, although these alliances are not free of racist practices or contradictions. In this sense, their very existence challenges the conceptual framework by which power and privilege are understood in racialized capitalist societies. In short, due to these “amphibious oscillations between structural positions,” the political potential of the upward social mobility of subordinated and racialized subjects is vague, as their actions can range from the reinforcement of dominant power structures and hierarchies to the use of their new social standing to name and point out racism, or the strengthening of the grassroots structures and collectives from which they have come. CONNECTIONS BETWEEN CLASS AND GENDER A study by Arriagada and Sojo (2012) examines the role that women have played in the changes in Latin America’s class structure over the last two decades of the twentieth century, and the effects that these have had on women themselves in terms of their class position. Specifically, they indicate that the Latin American middle classes have expanded due to family transformations driven by changes in the status of women—higher education, fewer children, greater workforce participation, and higher incomes—and their contribution to the increase in the number of dual-income families. Arriagada and Sojo focus their analysis of the middle classes on the impact of sociodemographic changes on family structures in the region and the insertion of family members, especially women, into the labor market. In their examination of these new family structures, they highlight the importance of understanding the middle classes as heterogeneous social groupings that have been transforming at the same pace as these social mutations. For Arriagada and Sojo, using a gender perspective makes it easier to pinpoint the current needs of families in order to strengthen the formation of a larger middle class in the Latin American region and reduce their social vulnerability. These needs include the provision of care, along with the institutional development

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of the education and social protection sectors. The growth of the middle classes between 1980 and 2000 made this support for families indispensable. Much of the research that has explored the intersection of gender and class in relation to social mobility in Latin America has focused on the identity of the middle classes, rather than on the formation of these classes themselves. Of these, very few focus on men and conceptions of masculinity. The work of Kogan (1996) and Fuller (1996 and 1997) in Peru are some of the few studies that do so. Kogan analyzes the particularities of the constructions of masculinity of men in Lima’s upper class, related to the economic well-being in which they spend their lives, and highlighting the conservative nature of gender relations in this social sector, in which the social system itself hinders the possibilities of transforming the gender roles. However, he identifies some generational differences in relation to perceptions of these gender roles. Fuller argues that middle-class men in Peru, because of their class status, have been influenced by modernizing discourses that question male dominance and promulgate egalitarian ideas of gender, based on the great number of changes experienced by middle-class women. Despite this, their representations of masculinity continue to be based on assumptions that imply male authority over women, an identification with external space and power, and the rejection of femininity. None of the men interviewed expressed a desire to change these values, since dismantling them would imply undermining the foundations of their own gender identity. The author concludes that, although gender representations have changed, there is a significant gap between the rhetorical legitimacy of these changes and the practices of men in this social group. Ricardo López Pedreros’s research on Bogotá’s middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century seems to me particularly enlightening for understanding the middle classes as the product of the combination of living conditions, political reasoning—in terms of class and gender—and subjective groupings, through the practices and discourses of women and men on what it means to be middle class and to live a middle-class life. Gender plays a key role in his analysis for demonstrating that, despite their heterogeneity, Bogotá’s middle classes shared a political project. His work points to the importance of the discursive construction of class and gender in the transnational formation of the middle classes in Bogotá during the 1960s and 1970s, a period marked by the implementation of US-designed development programs in a context of political radicalization and decolonization. For instance, López Pedreros examines the role played by the Alliance for Progress, a development plan that sought to naturalize a definition of democracy based on a very particular class and gender discourse. During the first half of the 1960s, Colombian society’s middle layer appropriated, negotiated, and modeled the discourses and programs of the Alliance for Progress and the

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social policies of the Frente Nacional4 to forge an identity for themselves as middle-class men and women. As a result, middle-class men on both sides of the political spectrum cooperated in the drafting of a hierarchical class and gender project—to which some women also contributed—that allowed them to define themselves as the legitimate subjects of a democracy, in which they had the right to rule “as men.” This purpose was built on a sense of masculinity, which middle-class men contrasted with the sensibilities of the group they perceived as the greatest obstacle to the consolidation of democracy: the “oligarchy.” For them, this oligarchy was made up of supposedly impotent and elitist rulers: a feminine model that theoretically prevented them from developing as a modern and virile elite. For this reason, the political-pedagogical project of these middle-class professionals was oriented, on the one hand, toward the modernization and democratization of labor/social relations, and, on the other, toward the “masculinization” of these feminized oligarchs, who embodied the traditional image of the lazy capitalist and were, therefore, inadequate to implement the project of “twentieth-century democracy” (López Pedreros 2015, 144). THE EMERGENCE OF THE INDIGENOUS MIDDLE CLASSES To close this section, I will look at some of the research that has studied the development of the indigenous middle classes and takes into account the way in which the interactions of gender, ethnicity, and race shape this class experience. One such work is the biographical study of middle-class indigenous women in Ecuador undertaken by Sniadecka (2001). In this study, published at the turn of the millennium, the author analyzed the experiences of women from traditional communities who had attained higher education and integrated into the middle class, which was unthinkable for members of Ecuador’s indigenous population before the 1990s. These women, despite their inclusion in the middle class, not only continued to identify with their groups of origin and their ethnic heritage, but also demanded respect from the rest of society for their cultural difference. Until then, escaping poverty, changing one’s career path or place of residence, and gaining access to higher education held the high price of losing one’s ethnic identity. The condition for acceptance in Ecuadorian white-mestizo society was to move away from the indigenous community, accompanied by the rejection or at least the shameful concealment of one’s ethnic past and cultural difference. This research evidenced, relatively early on, the emergence of an indigenous middle class, a phenomenon that was unfolding not only in Ecuador

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but also in Latin America as a whole. Sniadecka showed that although the identity of these middle-class indigenous women underwent certain transformations, for the first time this change did not mean the loss of the values of their own culture, but, on the contrary, a strengthening of their cultural identity. Their experiences debunked existing imaginaries of indigenous women as conservative and traditional, with a strong aversion to change and to the world outside their communities, and with high levels of monolingualism. This case revealed how conventional and simplistic Ecuadorian white-mestizo society’s representation of indigenous women was, and the effects these prejudices had on public policy, which for a long time did not consider them agents of change or recognize their capacity for political leadership. By contrast, the biographies of the interviewees show these women’s willingness to work to transform the state of submission and social discrimination that indigenous women have experienced both within their own families and on the national stage. One study that has pioneered the use of an intersectional approach to analyze the middle classes is Velásquez’s 2011 research on the Mayan “petty bourgeoisie” in Guatemala, which I mentioned in the introduction. Velásquez’s research on the indigenous commercial petty bourgeoisie in the city of Quetzaltenango was based on the life histories of three K’iche’ib’ families, compiled from interviews with the three most recent generations of these families. Based on the analysis of the interactions between ethnic identity and class identity in this social group, Velásquez identifies three ways in which the Mayan “petty bourgeoisie” approaches its relationships with the rest of its ethnic community. The first approach corresponds to the subset that is concerned with “maintaining its class advancement” and shows no interest in the economic and social struggles of poorer Mayans, and is even willing to make alliances with right-wing parties and integrate into the Ladino5 population (ibid., 183); the second is described as “a conscious and critical sector” that shares cultural elements with the majority of Mayans and shows solidarity with their struggles, despite their class differences (ibid., 184); the third group comprises the majority, and is characterized by a certain individualistic attitude and political neutrality, concentrating on their business activities (ibid., 185). Despite internal heterogeneity, the K’iche’ petty bourgeoisie shares the same historical and daily racism and isolation faced by the majority of the country’s Maya, and is also united by a patriarchal order that governs both its middle- and lower-class communities. This situation reveals the inherently contradictory position of middle-class K’iche’ib’ women, who enjoy certain class privileges, but are subject to strong gender oppression. This is something they end up accommodating, in order to preserve a cultural unity that allows them to confront oppression as a united ethnic group. The author

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concludes by referring to the inherited challenges that the K’iche’ in the city of Quetzaltenango still face (ibid., 188) and which, from her perspective, can be addressed through processes of awareness and engagement. Addressing these challenges would pay part of the moral debt owed by the K’iche’ petty bourgeoisie to their own community of eight million women and men who make up today’s Maya people of Guatemala, to offset the relative privileges they have historically enjoyed. One of the few works that analyzes the indigenous “middle classes” in Mexico is a study by Judith Bautista Pérez (2022) based on interviews with men and women who are indigenous “professionals” and who originally migrated to Mexico City to study at university. Bautista Pérez argues that one manifestation of the negative racialization of indigenous peoples is the absence of a visible indigenous middle class. This invisibility is also indicative of society’s legitimization of “white privilege” and justification of the social and economic inequality suffered by indigenous peoples in Mexico. Her research examined these professionals’ experiences of racism while viewing them not as victims but as social actors who make decisions and employ strategies to resist and lessen the effects of racism in their lives. As in other cases of marginalized middle classes, the upward social mobility of indigenous people has been incremental, individual and, until recently, required integration into mestizo society through education in the mestizo/ Spanish-language school system. The Zapatista uprising of the 1990s resulted in Mexican indigenous peoples gaining visibility on the national political agenda and being able to politically assert and mobilize their ethnic identity. In this new context, indigenous people with a university education and who had experienced upward social mobility no longer felt they had to reject, conceal, or give up their indigenous identity. Rather, they could embrace their indigeneity and politicize their upward social mobility to challenge the racial hierarchy. Nonetheless, this is no easy task, as the testimonies of Bautista Pérez’s interviewees show. They talk about the problems that they encountered, despite their social mobility, caused by a racialized reading of their physical, cultural, and social traits. For many, the first time they felt like “indios” was when they arrived in the capital. They were made to feel “foreign” and alien to the urban environment and its social practices. While some have reaffirmed their connection to their hometowns and communities, strengthening their relationships with those of the same ethnicity, in some cases, upward social mobility and the new demands of city life have weakened their relationships with family and community. These professionals employ different strategies to resist the racism that they receive, and Bautista Pérez has categorized these strategies into four groups: the first is assimilation, which involves disguising one’s physical and cultural traits and learning new codes of conduct; the second involves

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working twice as hard in an effort to be included, of which there is no guarantee; the third is denial or silence, used as a strategy for survival, and which is also an expression of racial domination. And finally, there is confrontation, employed in order to maintain one’s dignity and as a way to protect oneself from the onslaught of a violent and “treacherous” system. An article by Shakow (2022) on the daily experience of the new middle classes in Bolivia, is another work that addresses the ethnic, class, and gender dilemmas faced by the indigenous middle classes. Shakow describes the social changes that have taken place in this country where, as in other Latin American countries, there has been a widespread imperative to achieve individual and family social advancement, and to “get ahead” through higher education or successful entrepreneurship. In Bolivia, a country with a large indigenous population and marked by the continued existence of colonial hierarchies that shame indigeneity and foster social inequality, “getting ahead” meant leaving behind indigenous racial and cultural identification on the road to prosperity. Along with the rise to power of leftist indigenous movements and parties—which since the late 1990s have paved the way for the election of President Evo Morales in 2005—new models of social mobility and gender equality emerged, promoting (at least rhetorically) “interculturality,” solidarity between the middle and working classes, and the expansion of opportunities for women. These new models grew out of the dissatisfaction with the neoliberal and multicultural project that celebrated a diluted indigenous identity with an emphasis on folklore, while denying the link between indigenous cultural reclamation and the anti-racist and redistributive demands of full citizenship for all. In this context of change, Shakow identifies the dilemmas posed by two opposing narratives of upward social mobility for women who have recently experienced it. In the first, which urged young Bolivians to leave behind their indigenous “campesino” roots and become “professionals” or successful mestizo entrepreneurs, the image of the chola—women who wear wide skirts and two braids—was a strongly politicized social and gender category. A chola’s social progress was dependent on her getting rid of the skirt, since it was impossible to dress in this way and aspire to access higher education. In the second model, promoted by Evo Morales’s political agenda between 2005 and 2019, a change in values was emphasized, focusing on solidarity and the dismantling of racism and classism, and even on the affirmation of indigenous cultural pride and the right of women to their professional and entrepreneurial achievements. This search for greater equity included the appointment of ministers of Quechua and campesino origin, in such a way that identifying as middle class and dressing in a chola style ceased to be a contradiction and instead affirmed a political position. The way that the chola has been converted into a gendered symbol of the imperatives pushed

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by these two competing models of social mobility meant that the dilemmas the cholas themselves had to face—torn between different political, community, and family commitments—were particularly challenging and costly on a personal level. THE USEFULNESS OF INTERSECTIONALITY FOR THE STUDY OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES In the light of the different studies presented above, I would argue that intersectionality—as an approach for explaining the way in which inequalities, discriminations, and positionings are configured as the result of the imbrication of different axes of inequality—is a particularly useful approach for analyzing the trajectories of the Latin American middle classes as social and political biographical projects, modeled by the interactions and imbrications among social class, gender, ethnicity and race. In accordance with Anthias (2008), these different social relations can sometimes intersect in a way that mutually reinforces them, each emphasizing the other in a succession of subordinations, while other intersections can also create contradictory effects. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that social class, gender, ethnicity, and race as axes of social inequality are not autonomous, but neither can they be conflated with each other. Likewise, analysis of the effects of the interactions between these axes must always be contextual and situated; we must look at the concrete circumstances to determine which oppressions are most relevant at a given time and place. As we will see in the following chapters, in the trajectories of upward social mobility taken by Black Colombian women and men of different generations and from different regions of the country, it is often difficult to differentiate what elements of that journey can be attributed to class, gender, ethnicity, race, generation, or region. This difficulty is reflected in the observation made in 1977 in the manifesto of the Combahee River Collective concerning African American women: that the (racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class-based) systems of oppression are interrelated in such a way that it is difficult to point them out in the concrete experience of racialized people, because these people do not face exclusion based on the sum of axes of inequality, but rather their own position is constituted by the intersection of these axes. The understanding that the oppressions of class, gender, ethnicity, and race are inextricably entangled, and need to be combated simultaneously, is important common ground for Afro-Feminist and decolonial political proposals (Laó-Montes 2020). The history of capitalism would appear to show that these inequalities are always intertwined, and that racial or gender differences

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cannot be partitioned off into the “private,” “domestic,” or “cultural” spheres, where they would have no effect on economic structures. The findings of the various studies reviewed above affirm that, in contemporary Latin America, the critical points of inequality are those that are established when the different axes of social inequality cross over one another. The influence that ethnicity and race, poverty, place of residence, and inequality have on the distribution of opportunities, income, time, and power configure social groups that are particularly discriminated against. However, as I will demonstrate throughout the book, “each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone’s lives” (Collins 2000 [1990], 287).6 The different axes are present at all times, and so we must look to the specific context to understand which are more relevant than others in explaining specific forms of inequality and discrimination (Rodó-Zárate 2021, 205). It should also be noted that all of us are always positioned somewhere along the various axes of inequality, meaning that “unmarked” positionings do not exist; white people have race and ethnicity, men have gender, and we all occupy a position in the social space according to the capitals we possess today and have been passed down through our social inheritance (Álvarez Sousa 1996, 145). Finally, it is important to consider that inequality and discrimination affect women and men differently, and these effects also depend on whether women and men are young or old, and are also conditioned by the place and time in history in which they occur. In short, when we speak of social inequalities, we must think of them in a multidimensional, rather than an additive (class + gender + race + ethnicity) sense, trying to consider, on the one hand, that gender, ethnicity, race, and class, together with other axes of social inequality, generate social classifications produced in an intersectional manner, and, on the other hand, that even in contexts of exclusion and oppression there is leeway for individuals to resist these oppressions. Intersectionality invites us to understand that social class is ethnicized, always racialized, and constantly affected by gender, and vice versa. In this way, we can analyze, for example, the upward social mobility of Afro-Colombian populations as the result of the objective and subjective effects of the entanglement and overlapping of the inequalities of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Likewise, in keeping with Butler (1990), I believe that, just as gender has a performative dimension, so does race. Neither gender—nor race, I would add—are essences to be externalized, nor are they stable identities in the sense of a permanent generalized self. Rather, they are like “an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again” (ibid., 277).

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There are now a fair number of studies in Latin America on the middle classes that take into account these intersections and the redefinitions that the Latin American middle classes have undergone as a result of changes in gender, ethnic, and race relations, as well as the political and economic changes brought about by the mainstreaming of a neoliberal model, which undermined the foundations of the welfare state and other aspects considered to be constitutive of the middle classes. In Colombia, the team working on the Black middle classes research program, launched in 2008 and directed by myself, has, as a result of their collective efforts, produced a series of very relevant articles that will be mentioned throughout the book. This book engages in dialogue with much of the output of this research to examine upward social mobility as a social process and an intersectional experience, in which class cannot be understood independently of gender, generation, race, and the subjective experiences that shape it. By means of life histories, that all reflect specific regional contexts and different ways of relating to Black identity and awareness of racism, I will identify migratory, educational, and occupational trajectories, strategies for upward social mobility, and the political, social, and cultural milestones that are relevant to this process. NOTES 1. Cabecita negra (little black head) is a derogatory term that was used in Argentina by the upper and middle classes to refer to people with dark skin and indigenous facial features who in the mid-twentieth century had started to migrate to urban centers to work in the newly built factories. 2. Own translation. 3. Benito Pablo Juárez García was a lawyer and politician of indigenous (Zapotec) origin, president of Mexico on several occasions between 1858 and 1872. 4. The Frente Nacional in Colombia was a political coalition formed in 1958 between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, which institutionalized their alternation in government and public office with the goal of ending a period of violence resulting from bipartisan polarization. 5. In Guatemala, the Ladino population is officially recognized as an ethnic group, and includes both the mestizo population and the population of indigenous descent considered to be culturally mestizo. The term has also been used to describe an identity of denial, of non-indigenousness, and has been used to fuel ethnic tensions between “indigenous” people and “ladinos” that worsened during the country’s civil war (Matthew 2006).

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6. Collins’s position is important for overcoming a dichotomized perspective that opposes absolute oppressors and total victims of oppression within each of the social groups of class, gender, race, and ethnicity, ignoring the internal diversity of these groups.

Figure 2. Danit Torres Fuentes with her father Jose Miguel Torres Rodrigues (RIP), at her master’s graduation ceremony. Bogotá, 1998. Source: Torres Fuentes family photo album.

PART 2

A Historical and Contemporary Account of the Configuration of the Black Middle Classes in Colombia

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The Middle Layers of the Afro-Colombian Population

FINDING COMMON GROUND IN UM PRETO DE CLASSE MÉDIA AND THE COLOMBIAN BLACK MIDDLE-CLASS EXPERIENCE While researching this book, I was excited to come across a Brazilian novel titled Um preto de classe média (A Middle-class Black Man), published in 2021. Written by Cardoso de Lima, an Afro-Brazilian author and systems analyst from São Paulo, the novel is set during the first six months of the Bolsonaro government. The characters are at different points in their trajectories of upward mobility, and their stories reflect how class and race intertwine and contradict in modern, urban Brazil. Thiago and his sister Janice were born into a middle-class family and work in multinational companies. Rodrigo has moved away from his family and their business in a poorer neighborhood to live a more middle-class existence. Edmílson and Felipe, both in working-class professions, have sent their sons to private school in order for them to become “cultured and to improve their prospects.” In its treatment of the dilemmas associated with social mobility and race in an environment of neoliberal overdrive, I feel that Um preto de classe média is the book that I would have liked to have written if I dealt in fiction, or perhaps it will serve me as inspiration for future creative writing. The tone of the book oscillates between wry humor and straightforward sincerity to deal with the difficult themes it presents. This dual tone is also reflected in the way De Lima mixes discussions of the work of philosophers 67

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such as Camus and Kierkegaard with pop culture references. A large part of the novel explicitly draws on the US sitcom Everybody Hates Chris, written by comedian Chris Rock about growing up Black, which is hugely popular in Brazil. This mix of “high” and “low” culture illustrates that Black identity is multifaceted, made up of more than just football and rap music. The book’s thesis, put forward in the final chapter, is that Black people represent a wide spectrum of interests and outlooks, and the only thing that they have in common is being affected by racism. That being said, each of the characters has a different way of dealing with and understanding the racism they face personally and its structural dimensions. De Lima deals with the subtleties of how racism works in Brazil, focusing especially on the white spaces of the middle classes and internalized racism of Black characters. He shows how Black people cannot escape racism entirely, no matter how high they manage to climb in society. He also shows the fragility of these class positions for Black Brazilians when Rodrigo is accosted by the police in his own neighborhood because he is wearing a football shirt. De Cardoso’s characters are made to feel out of place in white environments, under pressure to whiten themselves to fit in better. Thiago especially is desperate to prove himself at work and climb the corporate ladder, his strategy has been to emulate one of his white superiors in talking about the free market and cryptocurrency and peppering his speech with business English. He desires a post-racial world in which his Blackness is no longer his primary identity. “The fact that I’m Black is so unimportant to me that I forgot to mention it” Thiago tells us. And as Lucas, a young Black boy at a very white private school, says: “Racism has robbed me of the chance to construct my own identity.” The key question that De Lima seems to be asking through the narrative is how the country and individuals can move toward a more egalitarian future. This, when there is a general dismissal of the existence of racism, and a suspicion of special measures to uplift Black people, even among Black individuals. Moreover, accountability or sanctions for perpetrators of racism are nonexistent. The reactions of the characters in the face of this panorama differs depending on their political position. Those who believe in meritocracy and the free market to improve society and eliminate racism are left confused and disappointed when things don’t work out in their favor. They are reluctant to admit that they have been discriminated against on the basis of their race. Others acknowledge the existence and the seriousness of racism, and they believe in government intervention to correct it through affirmative actions and punishment for racist behavior. Edmílson observes that sometimes these types of people can be too idealistic, in his words, confusing Brazil for Norway in their proposal of solutions to Brazil’s problems.

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These characters, in comprehending the reality that Brazil faces, are infused with a mix of emotions, between an angry righteousness and despair with the futility of it all. Felipe, the police officer, describes them as “half-depressed and half-militant, with the right eye brimming with tears and the left full of rage.” De Lima has these characters face the dilemma of whether to speak up against injustice or even share their views, as speaking truth to power can warrant serious consequences for their advancement and permanence in middle-class white spaces. Where the book falls down a little is in the relative silence of its female characters, especially as I argue in this book that Black women have been enormously important to the formation of the Black middle classes. Only Janice speaks with her own voice, and while hers is an important chapter, it almost feels like the tokenism that the book sets out to criticize. Janice’s chapter examines the salient issue of interracial relationships, especially the judgment she receives for being married to a white man. She realizes that as a middle-class Black woman, her choice of a partner on a similar social and professional level to her own holds certain limitations. I discuss the dilemmas that many high-flying Black women face in their romantic relationships in chapter 6. I was struck by how the themes and character studies in Um preto de classe média echoed the findings of my research, especially those emanating from those of the second and third generations, whose work and study experiences were immersed in neoliberal multiculturalism. While Brazilian and Colombian society obviously differ in many ways, the functioning of their socio-racial orders have much in common, and this is evident in how the themes of this novel resonate with my Colombian interlocutors’ experiences. Based on a research journal entry. Bogotá. Tuesday, March 15, 2022. THE SOCIAL MOBILITY OF AFRODESCENDANTS IN COLOMBIA PRIOR TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY There are a few early cases of the social mobility of Afrodescendants in eighteenth-century Colombia. By studying the wills of slaveowners in the Chocó region, historian Sergio Mosquera found that there had been a tiny, slave-owning “Black elite” in the city of Quibdó, who desired the lifestyle and refinement of the white elite and strove to mimic its customs (Mosquera 2012). Although the majority of the Black population was poor and had little education, this select minority continued to exist into the twentieth century under the racial segregation of Quibdó, supporting themselves through mining, agriculture, and small enterprise. Their social standing made it possible

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for them to send their children to study in Cartagena and Medellín and to organize their own clubs, cultural events, and social gatherings (Caicedo Licona 1980; Mosquera 2012; Pisano 2012; Wade 1993b). In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cartagena, a social group consisting of artisans of mixed African and European ancestry began to emerge, and in several cases their children were able to attend university, enter professions such as medicine and law, and obtain high-level positions in government (Solano 2010). By the nineteenth century in this same city, some Black men with university education were already engaged in processes of upward mobility. They were also self-taught and with a considerable level of education for their time, and most were of mixed African and European descent (Urrea Giraldo 2011). According to Burgos Cantor (2010), during the period of the Liberal hegemony, between 1870 and 1885, a large group of “blacks and mulattos” from humble backgrounds managed to study and become successful doctors and lawyers (ibid., 63). The case of Juan José Nieto—a prolific self-taught writer, military man, politician, and statesman, who served as president of the Granadine Confederation in 1861, becoming the first and so far, only Afrodescendant president of Colombia—is emblematic of the social advancement of this section of Cartagena’s mixed African and European population in the nineteenth century, who were allied with local white elites. These precursors allowed for a generation of Black professionals from regions such as Chocó, northern Cauca, and the Caribbean to emerge in the 1930s, and go into national politics to defend the interests of the Black populations of their own regions. THE PROMISES OF THE LIBERAL REPUBLIC (1930–1950) By the late 1920s, cracks were starting to appear in the so-called Conservative hegemony, in place since the turn of the century, with a series of national scandals rocking confidence in the government. The biggest of these was la masacre de las bananeras (the banana massacre) in 1928, the bloody culmination of an extended labor dispute between the US United Fruit Company and the workers on its plantations in Magdalena, an area with a large Afrodescendant population. Government forces opened fire on crowds of striking employees, killing an estimated fifty to two thousand people. The event has been fictionalized in various works of literature, including García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and has become embedded in the national consciousness as a shameful chapter in the nation’s history (Elías Caro 2011, Díaz Jaramillo 2019). The following year, newly inaugurated Liberal congressman Jorge Eliecer Gaitán found his political voice and a public willing to listen to his passionate parliamentary speeches on the subject, in

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which he accused the government of protecting a foreign company by killing and imprisoning its own people (Rizo Otero 2013). Under the hegemony, a crucial demographic fact had changed: in thirty years the country’s population had almost doubled and become more urban. This, added to a global economic crisis that triggered widespread urban unemployment, led to an electoral turnaround in which the Conservatives lost votes in the countryside and the Liberals gained them in the cities (Caballero 2016). The burgeoning coffee industry, expanding industrialization, and the Liberal party’s coming to power with its social and political projects seemed to promise—despite the global crisis—a new opportunity for modernization (Pécaut 1986). In 1930 the Liberal candidate Enrique Olaya Herrera was elected president, marking the start of the Liberal Republic. The new government worked to initiate a change toward a “modern” society which sought to redirect public policies toward the construction of a “civilized and progressive” nation on a par with the most socially advanced countries (Gómez Molina 2015). The proposals presented by the government included new formulations of property rights, a rethinking of the relationship between the state and the church, and a series of modernizing measures in the social and political fields, among these, expanding access to education and universal suffrage. The country was divided on these issues, with the government maintaining a moderate position, trying to emphasize the liberal and nonsocialist perspective of its project, and the modernizing but not anti-religious character of its proposals (Melo González 1991). It is important to note that despite the modernizing project, at the end of President Alfonso López Pumarejo’s first term in office in 1938, 57 percent of Colombian society was still made up of campesinos and agricultural workers engaged in antiquated relationships of production and forms of landownership, and there were large disparities between the dynamics of each region (Fresneda Bautista 2017). In this context, and given the country’s racial and ethnic makeup, politicians such as Miguel Jiménez López and Luis López de Mesa thought national progress based on the country’s middle classes to be impossible, circumstances that they sought to remedy through various (unsuccessful) legislative proposals on migration with the aim of encouraging European immigration to Colombia (Wade 1993a; López Pedreros 2001; Pisano 2012; Urrea Giraldo, Viáfara López and Viveros Vigoya 2014). The gradual decline of the agricultural sector, growing urbanization, the emergence and expansion of services in trade, transport, and the public sector, and the creation of government departments, ministries, banks, post offices, and schools, all played key roles in strengthening these intermediate social classes, although not enough to create a middle-class identity. However, for this social group to consolidate, it required new class identities, fed by imaginaries of gender about different types of masculinities as well as which

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activities were best suited to men or women, in order to interpret these recent changes in social living conditions. Specifically, certain antagonisms started to become established between the industrial and service sectors on the grounds of gender and class, and these tensions were important to the launching of the social project of these middle classes (López Pedreros 2003). López Pedreros (2003 and 2011) has explained how industrialization and the expansion of the service sector—two concurrent economic processes of this period—saw the rise of divisive ideas about who should work in the industrial sector and who should work for the state and in the service sector. At the same time, this landscape was inhabited by two gendered subjects: the male employee and the office angel, who not only experienced these changes taking place in the structure of labor relations but also helped create new social identities, defined outside the conflicts between capital and labor. The result of new social experiences, these identities were also the corollary of the meanings they took on in the new discursive formation. Meanwhile, contrary to the pessimistic way mestizaje was widely regarded—seen to have had a hand in Colombia’s backwardness—various Black intellectuals and others of mixed African and European ancestry had started to make political use of the new discourse on mestizaje developed by the Liberal governments during this period. As Flórez Bolívar (2019) argues, this discourse offered a perspective that was emancipatory in two respects: on the one hand, it promoted a celebratory representation of racial mixing, which enabled the deep-rooted perception of heterogeneity as a source of social backwardness to be transformed; and, on the other, it recategorized certain grassroots art forms as autochthonous products of Colombia’s national imagination. Black students, professionals, and leaders took advantage of this new way of thinking to reclaim the unfulfilled promise of racial equality and to influence the views on race and national identity that were forged in Colombia between 1930 and 1946 (Flórez Bolívar 2019, 114). It is important to acknowledge the central role in the emergence of this racial consciousness played by the waves of migration that took place around this time, as a consequence of the ongoing processes of modernization and industrialization. Between 1930 and 1950, the first generations of predominantly male, Black university graduates appeared, having benefited from the Liberal government’s interest in promoting education. At this same time, laws started to be passed allowing women to enroll at Colombian universities. Within this context of economic and cultural modernization that meant women could participate more actively in society, Delia Zapata Olivella—a woman from the Caribbean region—was, in the 1940s, the first Black woman to enter university, initially in Cartagena, and then in Bogotá. The few Black families who managed to save up enough money during this period migrated to the regional capitals, or sent their children to study in

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large cities such as Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. They found that the liberal professions and teaching offered the best opportunities for upward social mobility (Viveros Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010). Students unable to leave their region had the chance to study at teacher training colleges (escuelas normales), newly created in the second half of the 1930s, which opened up the possibility for participation as teachers in circles of regional leadership. For women, the existence of teacher training colleges for young ladies represented an opportunity to train in a profession that offered them recognition in their community and allowed them to escape the destiny that awaited many Black women of becoming household servants. Training institutions such as Escuela Normal Superior (ENS)—a pioneering institution for the teaching of social sciences, founded in 1936 by President López Pumarejo—opened doors for more academic study. One notable beneficiary was future pioneer of Colombian anthropology Aquiles Escalante Polo (1923–2002), who came from Baranoa in the department of Atlántico. At ENS, he opted to study the new field of anthropology and embarked on research of the country’s Black communities at Instituto Etnológico Nacional (National Ethnological Institute), one of the three ENS institutes created in 1941, during Eduardo Santos’s Liberal government. In this context a strong trend of Black and mulatto political leadership had begun to emerge in regions such as Chocó, northern Cauca, and Buenaventura from the end of the 1920s. And with the coming to power of the Liberals, a visible Black political elite started to emerge in their party from the 1930s onward. These new elites had been able to study at universities in the interior of the country and, upon returning to their hometowns, displaced the white and mestizo minorities that controlled local political power. From this local leadership, some went on to gain prominence in regional and national politics (Agudelo 2005). The most famous example is that of Diego Luis Córdoba, an important Liberal party leader, elected to the Senate and Congress from the 1930s to 1960s. Córdoba was of mixed African and European descent, born in the marginalized province of Chocó. He declared himself a socialist and follower of Gaitán, going on to work tirelessly for the equal rights of Afro-Colombians (Rausch 2003). Against the backdrop of the various economic, social, and axiological shifts taking place in Colombia, the country’s first ever Black movement was founded in Bogotá in 1943. Club Negro de Colombia was the initiative of a group of university students from the Caribbean and northern Cauca which included my father, Marino Viveros Mancilla, at that time a medical student at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. The Club came about as retaliation to discrimination that my father and his companions had suffered when another friend rescinded an invitation to membership in a private club, due to its exclusionary policy against Black individuals. This unjust treatment inspired

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them to create their own club in which they would not be discriminated against, and where they could invite anyone they liked. This group of friends, which included Natanael Díaz and Manuel Zapata Olivella, began to plan for what would be christened “Club Negro,” organizing meetings on the weekends that mixed dancing with readings of literary texts and essays by authors who explored the theme of racial discrimination and its history. Reflecting upon that period, Manuel Zapata Olivella recollects how he and his sister Delia acquired the tools to combat their sense of alienation. Through these meetings in boarding houses, classrooms, and the streets of the capital, they unraveled the complexities of unconscious racial biases and forged their Black identity (Zapata Olivella 2005). As the culmination of these meetings, and on reading the news of the lynching of two Black workers in Chicago, the group took a stand. They decided to protest racial discrimination in the United States and make known the Black presence in Colombia by commemorating June 20, 1943, as “Día del Negro,” a day to celebrate Black people. This particular episode would have a profound influence on their identities (Zapata Olivella 2005). To mark the day, they staged a takeover of the Music Room in the National Library, demanding that only US singers Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson be included in the day’s program; in downtown bars and cafés they gave readings of poems by Black Colombian authors such as Candelario Obeso and Jorge Artel and translations of excerpts from books by US novelists such as Richard Wright; and they even danced cumbia. Later that evening they gathered in Plaza de Bolívar, and in front of Bolívar’s statue, they staged a symbolic trial of the independence leader, reproaching him in multiple speeches for not having written the abolition of slavery into the Republican Constitution. The police then arrived after complaints were made and the officers forced them to disperse. The unexpected presence of a woman like Delia among the demonstrators deescalated the situation on both sides, although a number of those who stayed to negotiate with the police, including my father, spent the night in the police station. Those who had participated that day formed the organizational nucleus of Black intellectuals who founded the “Club Negro de Colombia,” and those demonstrators who had stayed until the breaking up of the protest made up its board of directors.1 Zapata Olivella has commented that although the protests of Día del Negro are not widely remembered on a national scale, they deeply impacted those who were involved in them (Zapata Olivella 2005). Historian Pietro Pisano (2012) considers Día del Negro and Club Negro de Colombia as the first attempts in the country to recognize that “Blackness” is a racial identity and to give the word a political meaning that had, until then, been denied to it. Connecting these events to the middle classes, it should be pointed out that Club Negro wanted Colombia’s Black population to integrate

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more fully into Colombian society. This stance was justified by emphasizing the influence of “Black values” on wider society, and they aimed to quash the Black population’s “sense of inferiority,” although at no point did they refer to social inequality or discrimination. The discourse of Club Negro did not encompass the dynamics of racism, as the Club’s founders understood racism as a phenomenon which was neither relevant in Colombia as a nation nor a present-day issue, but one that belonged to a past of slavery and countries such as the United States with its segregation laws, and in the country’s rural regions such as northern Cauca, where Black people were excluded from politics, the economy, and education. This group were pioneers in their argument that it was not contradictory for a community to belong to the nation whilst at the same time having its special qualities recognized (Pisano 2014a), and this was a breakaway from the idea that a country’s existence depended on a homogenous society and culture. After the dissolution of Club Negro, several of its members, who had by now graduated, in 1947 created another organization, Centro de Estudios Afrocolombianos (Center for Afro-Colombian Studies) at Instituto Etnológico Nacional (Pisano 2012; Valderrama 2019). This institute, which since its founding in 1941 had been dedicated exclusively to the study of indigenous peoples, opened a section dedicated to the study of Black peoples in Colombia and the world. The creation of this section had been called for by Black intellectuals since the start of the Liberal Republic. It is worth noting that the institute’s own director, a member of the Andean intellectual elite, justified the section’s creation by stating that “the study of Black people is as interesting as the study of indigenous people”2 (Flórez Bolívar 2019, 113). In short, the period of the Liberal Republic saw social and political spheres open up for the country’s Black and mixed African and European populations, as well as for women. The creation of the teacher training colleges allowed these social sectors to continue their studies beyond secondary school and become teachers and enabled the men especially to become qualified to occupy administrative and political positions in their regions of origin. At the same time, Afrodescendant artists and intellectuals successfully established their cultural offerings not only at the local level, but also as part of the national narrative, and took advantage of the new redefinition of Colombian identity based on mestizaje to demand recognition as part of the nation and greater racial equality. Women working either in the teaching profession—this new and legitimate source of employment for them—or in the service sector started to hold jobs that required certain qualities that were naturalized as feminine, and these conveniently became associated with the “modern woman” who worked outside the home. By the end of this period, Black intellectuals and artists and those of mixed African and European ancestry had been able to influence the visions of race and national identity

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forged in Colombia over these two decades (Flórez Bolívar 2019), and Black women teachers and professionals contributed by example to the erosion of the contradictions that had started to emerge around women’s professional lives, the exercise of their civil rights, and the care of the family (Viveros Vigoya 2011; Luna 2004). UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY MOLDED BY URBAN DYNAMICS AND INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES (1950–1975) On April 9, 1948, Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán was assassinated, leading to an escalation in the frequency and intensity of the violence between supporters of the two traditional political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives. The differences and hostilities between these parties have shaped Colombian society and fueled its long conflicts. Animosity between them reached new heights in the mid-twentieth century in a period known as La Violencia. To some extent, identification with one of the two traditional parties emerged in the vacuum created by the lack of an inclusive national identity (Rehm 2014). Affiliation to one party or the other was usually inherited; one was born a Liberal or a Conservative, with this belonging founded on a sentimental rather than intellectual position (Santa 1960, cited by Rehm 2014). The different positions of the two parties during this period can be summarized thusly: the Conservative party defended democracy and political stability against what they saw as the anarchic ideas of the Liberals. The Liberals considered themselves progressives, embracing the principles of the European Enlightenment and advocating state intervention in social and economic matters. They criticized their opponents for neglecting the common people and clinging to outdated Catholic teachings. The Conservatives viewed the Liberals’ actions as morally inferior due to their lack of Catholic orientation. During the Cold War, Conservatives accused Liberals of promoting communism in Colombia. Liberals denied any connection to communism but contributed to political polarization by arguing that the opposing side represented a fascist-totalitarian project. This created a perception of stark opposition between the two groups, marking the initial stage of societal division during La Violencia. As violence escalated, moderate voices were silenced, and both parties portrayed their opponents as barbaric while presenting themselves as defenders of civilization (Rehm 2014). Teachers came under more pressure as they assumed the task of resisting the political violence that was tearing apart the social fabric of the country. Likewise, with the criminalization of student and social protest in the cities over the cost of living, collective and political

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action initiatives that had been developing over the past decade in some sectors of the Afrodescendant population became restricted (Valderrama 2019). It is important to reiterate a point made in chapter 1, that the majority of the violence of this period was centered in the Andean interior, leaving the areas with the highest concentrations of Colombia’s Afrodescendant population, the Caribbean and the Pacific, comparatively untouched. This period saw more men and (to a lesser degree) women migrating from the Pacific and Caribbean regions to the capital, not displaced by violence, but with the aim of starting or concluding university studies in order to qualify for public-sector employment. Although medicine and the law continued to be the career options of choice for these migrants, they also picked disciplines that were not offered in their regions of origin (Angola and Wabgou 2015). This cohort made a concerted effort to integrate into Bogotá’s different social circles and joined the different support networks for Afro-Colombian migrants. They also started to understand the Afro-Colombian experience in new ways, at a time of widespread economic growth (Fresneda Bautista 2016). The opportunities afforded to this generation in terms of stable jobs with employment benefits allowed them to achieve considerable upward social mobility and supported access to higher education for their children (Viveros Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010). The period of the Frente Nacional government brought various consequences for the Afrodescendant population. Firstly, Black political leadership could no longer attract widespread popular support in a context dominated by the ruling party and radical leftist organizations. Another was that many of the struggles in which they actively participated as part of the teachers’ union were being shaped by the political backdrop of the Frente Nacional and its crackdown on student and social protest. At this time, teachers were seeking to be recognized as education professionals and campaigning for transparent national education policies in a context in which education was arbitrarily manipulated for the benefit of regional politicians. One of the teachers’ union’s most emblematic protests was organized in 1966 by teachers in the department of Magdalena, who were facing significant economic hardship due to not having been paid for more than ten months. With the support of Federación Colombiana de Educadores—FECODE (Colombian Federation of Educators), the demonstrators marched on foot to Bogotá, in an effort to be heard by the national government. This protest, known as Marcha del Hambre (Hunger March), is detailed in chapter 7. It is important to highlight the role played by women teachers in this campaign, not only because they outnumbered their male counterparts, but also due to their determination and commitment at every stage of this long and arduous journey. However, despite the fact that many of the demonstrators belonged to Black communities and those of mixed African and European ancestry, they

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did not see themselves as belonging to these racial categories. The main reason for this was the fact that, at that time, ethno-racial belonging was perceived and experienced more in regional rather than racial or ethnic terms. It was Afrodescendants’ experience of migration, mainly to Bogotá, that allowed them to discover their “Black” identity, from their interaction with other migrants, and in contrast to the Bogotanos, who were mostly mestizo or white and culturally Andean. Moreover, it was the presence of a good number of Afrodescendant migrants in the capital that propitiated the circulation of Afro-Colombian cultural “counter-discourses,” spread through national and Afrodiasporic networks of Black intellectuals and artists, who had begun to arrive in Bogotá in the 1940s (Valderrama 2019, 219–20). Such was the case of Néstor Robles, one of my interlocutors and a well-known journalist, who at law school in Bogotá in the 1950s formed relationships with various Afro-Colombian intellectuals, working to make known the contribution Black people had made to the country’s cultural output or to incorporate a racial consciousness into the class struggle. A common experience for many of this generation of Afro-Colombians was involvement with the Liberal party, due to the fact that, when in power, this party implemented political, economic, and educational reforms that enabled Black people to participate more actively in national affairs (Pisano 2012). Others, such as Robles, were connected to left-wing parties, such as the Colombian Communist Party, which endorsed the demands of the different working-class communities. Néstor recollects his experiences of that time: I joined the dance troupe set up by Delia Zapata Olivella, who was the sister of my great friend Manuel Zapata Olivella, and participated in a television program called “Verbo y ritmo de América” alongside Leonor González Mina, “la Negra grande de Colombia,” . . . We talked about the importance of Black culture, spoke about Nicolás Guillén, and Caribbean and Pacific folklore. We also used to read everything published by Black authors and poets: we could easily find works by Colombians, Africans, and Cubans in bookshops. . . . I joined the Communist youth groups that opposed General Rojas Pinilla’s government and . . . worked with La Voz and Nuevo Mundo broadcasters on the production of a Colombian history series that ended up being censored by the same administration.

His experience is fairly typical of the new ways in which Black people had started to inhabit the capital, playing a role in the construction of Bogotá as a multicultural and multiethnic city, a project which began at that time and has continued to the present day (Angola and Wabgou 2015). Likewise, the changes that started to crystallize into new identity discourses about ethnic and racial issues between the late 1970s and the late 1980s account for the

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way in which “the cultural and political projects would later give way to organizations and associations of national importance” (Valderrama 2019, 225).3 TENSIONS BETWEEN CLASS IDENTITY AND ETHNO-RACIAL IDENTITY (1975–1985) After 1975, many Afro-Colombian men and women migrated to the capital in the wake of the breakdown of campesino economies in the Pacific and Caribbean regions; they also arrived from the smaller cities and towns. These internal migrants were in large part women, due to the high numbers of women teachers. While some men and women were seeking to study at university, others were after posts as primary and secondary school teachers, or as national teaching supervisors and inspectors in Bogotá. They became a visible presence in the public education systems of the capital and of other areas of the country and made a considerable impact. This generation of Black men and women, who were mainly from Chocó, were active participants in teachers’ unions and members of the national organization FECODE and regional organizations such as Asociación Distrital de Educadores—ADE (District-level Association of Educators). This membership connected them to left-wing movements in the country’s main cities (Urrea Giraldo 2011). Afro-Colombian involvement on the left took place in a political and cultural context oriented toward class struggle. In Colombia, as in many other countries, the left did not accept race as a political category for mobilization; it perceived it as a distraction from the struggle against its main enemy and its central goal to emancipate the workers. In these circumstances, it was not possible for Afro-Colombians to reconcile race and class within the militancy of the left. Carlos Valderrama’s doctoral thesis discusses the great difficulty and strong reluctance of some Black leftist militants to continue as part of leftist organizing after they had come into contact with the paternalism and vanguardist attitude of many white-mestizo leaders on the left. Valderrama (2018) recounts the events surrounding the strike led by sugarcane cutters in 1975, during the Frente Nacional government. A Colombian leftist political organization, Movimiento Obrero Independiente y Revolucionario— MOIR (Independent and Revolutionary Workers’ Movement), and its Afro-Colombian members were deeply involved in this strike. However, the leadership of MOIR was made up of leftist white men, whose Marxist positions did not represent the interests of the Black communities, and these leaders were incapable of seeing, codifying, and cultivating the racial nonconformity and sentiment that the cane cutters and Black campesinos were expressing through their protest (ibid., 162). The result of this was a widening gap that began to form between the sugarcane cutters and these

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young white-mestizo revolutionaries from the capital. Reconciliation was only achieved through the mediation of the organization’s Black members. However, as a result of these rifts, some of these Black militants broke with the left or renounced their membership to create or participate in Black social and political organizations instead, because in these leftist spaces they found they could not raise ethno-racial demands, and nor was the left willing to incorporate these demands into its own political agenda. And of course, even less attention was paid to the demands of Black women. For the left of that time, the demands for ethno-racial and gender equality were not important, and were considered secondary concerns in relation to the main concern, which was class conflict. Valderrama’s work shows that many of the Black political projects that emerged during the 1970s brought together different liberal, Marxist, and cultural positions around an anti-racist agenda that sought to affirm the existence of a Black identity and to denounce and combat racism in Colombia. However, these projects were not interested in organizing to increase the political agency of the “Black masses,” nor did they incorporate Black women’s demands and the struggle for their rights into their political and cultural agendas. Needs, concerns, and demands were mainly formulated on the basis of the interests of Black men who had accessed higher education. At this point in time, there was still much work to be done to allow women’s demands to be seen and heard. Their entry into the middle classes was late, despite the fact that, as I will show in chapter 7, they were the first to imagine and aspire to a world different from that which they had previously been offered.4 The social mobility of Black people and their search for access to full citizenship were thought of in masculine terms, constituting a sort of male-only pact. López Pedreros (2019) writes about the existence of a consolidated middle-class project, despite the internal differences of the social sector and differing political perspectives. This project was organized around what he calls “the right to rule,” where the different middle-class factions representing the whole political spectrum shared the prerogative of the middle-class “right to rule,” as was their privilege as men. In this regard, and in my opinion, it is worth considering the negotiations that had had to be made between white-mestizo men and men racialized as Black. The latter occupied a subordinate place on the ethno-racial hierarchy, underpinned by the gender and class domination that white-mestizo men exercised over Black men, and by the fact that the interests of white-mestizo men suppressed the political projects of middle-class Black men. Undoubtedly, the hierarchies of men are organized partly through ethnic and racial categorization, and men from the dominant white and mestizo groups who wielded power as members of the Colombian state deployed different state actions and discourses that unified Colombia as mestizo in order to preserve their power (Valderrama 2008, 324).

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The urban experiences of the new arrivals from the regions saw them transfer their connection to the land where they were brought up to their new surroundings, producing relationships with the city which were both strained and dynamic. Mindful of the fact that they came from another part of the country, for which they still held affection, they were at the same time conscious of their right to a full life in the capital (Arboleda Quiñónez 2016, 202). As a result, they began to request that they be accommodated into the intermediate social strata, having obtained the requisite knowledge, work ethic, experience, and training. However, they would retain their ethnic and racial identity that connected them to other marginalized groups. They were conscious of living in a “pigmentocratic” society and realized that whatever their social station, they would always see themselves as members of the popular classes, since the ruling elites were seen as “white” and therefore as their oppressors. For this reason, upward social mobility was often interpreted as a form of “whitening” that distanced Black people from their backgrounds, making them feel that they no longer “needed to show solidarity with those ‘back home,’” as assuming a Black identity meant that they must—at least ideologically—embrace a class status that did not fit in the context of the middle classes. This period saw an intensification of the dynamics that the Colombian Negritude movement had started to develop during the 1970s, namely research, activist networks, and political meetings (Valero 2020, 55). These activities came to fruition in an event organized by Fundación Colombiana de Investigación Folclórica (Colombian Foundation for Research in Folklore) and Centro de Estudios Afrocolombianos (Center for Afro-Colombian Studies), led by Manuel Zapata Olivella, and Asociación Cultural de la Juventud Negra Peruana (Cultural Association of Peruvian Black Youth): the First Congress of Black Culture in the Americas, held from August 24 to 28, 1977. The founders of the 1943 Club Negro, and various intellectuals and artists from the Americas, Europe, and Africa, were some of the Congress’ participants, gathering for the first time in Latin America to discuss issues such as negritude and racism. Those in power opposed the discussion of these topics, as they considered that they had the potential to challenge Colombia’s republicanism. During this first Congress, there were discussions on the connections between class and race, and these continued throughout the second Congress held in Panama in March 1980, making evident the racial discrimination hidden behind the discourse that assumes all dissimilarities are class differences (Valero 2020). Furthermore, in this arena, the debate on ethnic and racial issues was connected to the social and economic inequalities experienced by Black populations in Colombia’s regions.

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A notable international delegate was the recognized Brazilian activist, artist, and intellectual Abdias do Nascimento, who had been one of the first voices to criticize mestizaje and its sidelining of Afro-Latin Americans. As a coordinator of one of the four of the Congress’ commissions, “Black ethnicity and mestizaje,” alongside Nina de Friedemann, do Nascimento had a large role in shaping the recommendations and proposals that emerged from the Congress. Some of these proposals were revived in the 1990s, such as the introduction of African history on school curriculums, and many were lost, such as the creation of international networks for sharing progress made in the different lines of research (Valero 2021a). Letters between Manuel Zapata Olivella and Abdias do Nascimento in the run-up to the First Congress shed light on the way that ideas and positions on “the Afro question” circulated and developed between Afro-Latin American intellectuals and activists (Valero 2021b). There were also delegates from African countries such as Angola, Nigeria, and Senegal. My father having put in a good word, I was able to attend this Congress as one of its youngest participants; I had recently started university in Bogotá and was very interested in Angola’s postindependence process. At that time, Angola was in the throes of a civil war that had broken out after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975. I was one of a group of university students, all women, who were youthfully enthusiastic and curious, although also quite naive. We raised our concerns with the Angolan delegation regarding the lack of awareness in their discourse of the role of women in the anti-colonial political processes and the difficulties they had in achieving effective equality and full recognition of their rights (Valderrama 2021, 118). The Angolan delegate reassured us, answering that, in Angolan culture, women were very important, and that the loss of certain customs was an indicator of the modern infiltration of ethnic groups that had adopted Western customs. This conference represented the first public recognition of the role Black women had played in the various social struggles of their communities, and there was even acknowledgment of the dual oppression that they faced for being both Black and women (Valderrama 2019, 228). Several commissions and internal processes at the Congress saw questions raised about gender inequalities, leading to a statement in the final document that affirmed that it was impossible to “build a new socio-economic reality [without making] changes regarding the position of women and their right to full citizenship in every country” (Valero 2020, 203). Despite these spontaneous discussions that cropped up over the course of the event, the Congress agenda had failed to include specific discussions on the problems faced by Black women (Valderrama 2021, 118), such as the questioning of white beauty standards established over the course of history. At this time there had been partial and

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contradictory attempts to address this issue and to “democratize” ideas of beauty and a widening consciousness of the concept “Black beauty.” Social tensions between class and race continued to manifest themselves and were a topic of debate at the first Congress. It should be stressed that in the 1980s, at least 15 percent of the teachers on the capital’s public education system payroll came from Chocó (Urrea Giraldo 2011, 34). It also shows that, particularly for men, the teaching profession continued to be a platform from which a political career in the capital could be launched. A role in politics could be a medium for the resolution of these class- and race-based conflicts, and motivations such as these explained why many decided to go into politics, although the prestige of a political career also played its part, alongside the higher status and upward social mobility it offered (Wade 1993b, 315 and 324). Although Black men and women from the Caribbean and Pacific regions made room in the capital’s intellectual and political life for themselves, in Bogotá they continued to be excluded from society’s ideas about the middle classes, who were typically imagined to be secretaries, women office workers, or employees in the service sector, and all of them white or mestizo. These middle-class men were thought of as having intellectual and professional skills, personal independence and autonomy, and women the ability to transform the office into a home away from home (López Pedreros 2003, 262 and 265). This was not generally the way in which Black men and women were seen, despite their entering into professional careers. Rather, they continued to be burdened with the stereotypes that painted them as manual laborers possessing physical strength and excluded them from careers requiring mental agility, specialized knowledge, and critical thinking. This period saw the rise of various initiatives that sought to make a nationwide impact: Centro para la Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Negra (Center for Research and Development of Black Culture), Negritud and Presencia Negra magazines, seminars on Black culture imparted between 1978 and 1983 to teachers, and Juan Zapata Olivella’s short-lived presidential candidacy representing Black political party Movimiento de las Negritudes y el Mestizaje de Colombia, built on the back of various ideological approaches and organizations. Some of these grew out of student movements in places such as Buenaventura, Chocó, and across the Colombian Caribbean, while others were devised as political organizations or platforms to promote critical thinking (Pisano 2014a; Arboleda Quiñónez 2016; Valderrama 2019). They had a hand in raising awareness about Black identity, racism, and the pigmentocracy of Colombian society that confined Black people of all social standings to a lower-class identity, since the elites were perceived as being “white” and therefore, oppressors.

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At the end of this period, the policies and programs that gave the state a central role in planning and managing economic growth suffered a crisis. The economic downturn, the adoption of models of economic liberalization in other countries in the region, and external pressure to dismantle the apparatus of commercial protectionism led to the emergence of a consensus on the need to adopt a new development model that would drastically reduce the state’s role in the economy and impose neoliberal free-market reforms. This major shift had disastrous consequences for most Afro-Colombians, as we will now see. THE OPPORTUNITIES AND OBSTACLES OF NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM (1985–2000) Following the implementation of new government policies for the development of the Pacific region, and a rethinking of local and regional issues, ethnic identities, and environmental protection measures, a new, more political, Afro-Colombian identity began to emerge alongside the social movement of the so-called Black communities. The situation of the Black communities was novel, yet paradoxical, as rural Pacific communities began to modernize without having urbanized. This was achieved by embracing the reclaiming and invention (in its anthropological sense) of ethnic particularism and ancestral knowledge (Hoffmann 1999). The Black population were now thought of as an ethnic group, a concept formerly the preserve of indigenous peoples and bestowing special legal safeguards, and the phrase “Black community” was now its own category. However, many urban Afro-Colombians living in cities did not recognize themselves in this new terminology, since they referred to ideas steeped in community, tradition, and rurality that were more (although not entirely) appropriate for the realities found in the Pacific region (Velandia y Restrepo 2017, 174). At the same time, the various agreements, peace processes, and negotiations that took place in the second half of the 1980s, culminating with the implementation of the 1991 Constitution, afforded opportunities for various Afro-Colombian groups to participate in the national discussion. The political career of Zulia Mena shows how these new dynamics worked. Mena was a member of the Committee that helped enact Law 70 of 1993 that regulated Black communities’ collective property ownership and established a special constituency for the Afro-Colombian communities, securing them two seats in the House of Representatives (Circunscripción Especial de Comunidades Negras). In 1994, she was the first female congresswoman elected by the same Circunscripción Especial following a nationwide vote, and during her

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time in office she focused on combating the forced displacement of Black populations. From then on, Afro-Colombian politics began to diversify and become more complex, splitting into various right-wing, left-wing, and centrist agendas. There are now even what could be termed independent agendas, not connected to any preexisting ideology (Reid Andrews 2007; Laó-Montes 2020). At the same time, neoliberal principles started to open up the economy. From the 1990s onward, industrialization was dismantled, salaried manufacturing jobs ceased to be created, and independent employment in the service sector was incentivized (Fresneda Bautista 2017). There were shifts in the class structure as the number of skilled workers and professionals increased, working conditions became more flexible, and the population of self-employed people working in precarious conditions grew (ibid.). In this new context, it was no longer necessary for Black people to adopt the culture of the mestizo and white population in order to be accepted, instead, they could embrace their ethnic differences without these being perceived as inferior. A small percentage of Colombia’s Black population, descendants of the generation that arrived in Bogotá in the 1950s and 1960s, were born and went to school and university in the capital, and in some cases went abroad for postgraduate study. In comparison to preceding generations, there was a shift in their career paths and present jobs as directors, high-skilled employees, and graduates with college and technical degrees. The millennial generation is no longer made up solely of lawyers or teachers, rather, they are working as engineers (mainly in IT), economists, business administrators, accountants, journalists, and scientists. Nor have they been limited to public-sector employment, and some have even been hired by foreign, private-sector firms. Within this cohort, many women have enjoyed successful careers and remained unmarried, embracing independence and autonomy as distinctive features of Black women’s social experience, but sometimes as an unintended outcome of their success (Viveros Vigoya 2015). The professional lives of this cohort have expanded on the process started by office workers in the service sector who shifted the binary vision of Colombian society that pits the oligarchy against the people and prompted a redefinition of gender roles. In this new economic, political, and social context—in which room has been made for these mid-level social sectors— members of this generation easily identify themselves as middle class. Some of them work in state agencies or in national and international NGOs that have implemented multicultural policies, negotiating and giving voice to the demands of Black communities. Many women participate in this section of the job market, particularly in ethno-education,5 and this has increased their household incomes and given them greater stability, leading to an expansion in what is understood by the term middle classes. Nevertheless, despite the

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existence of new spaces of social participation and the successful careers of a few, there has been no reduction in the poverty and marginalization experienced by the vast majority of Afro-Colombians, and the job market remains segmented on grounds of gender, with women finding themselves at a disadvantage (Urrea Giraldo, Viáfara López y Viveros Vigoya 2014). WHAT DOES THE NEW MILLENNIUM HAVE IN STORE FOR THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASSES? One of the most important events of the twenty-first century for the Afro-Colombian population’s political agenda was the third World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, by the United Nations in 2001. The event was a space that saw Afrodescendant peoples recognized, as it legitimized their political project, bolstered the changes that multiculturalism had championed, and provided a learning opportunity for anti-racist action. However, this process has had paradoxical effects on the social mobility of Afro-Colombians. Some of the successful professionals interviewed said that their work lives allowed them “the freedom to express their personality,” and justified their improved social standing as the result of hard work and their own intellectual and professional abilities. Neoliberal multiculturalism appears to have offered them the opportunity to be part of the “global middle class,” this being an entity that would leave behind the age-old split between capital and labor, and be free of racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice (López Pedreros 2011). This was also the political message President Uribe Vélez wished to convey with the appointment of a young Afro-Colombian woman as Minister of Culture in 2007. An industrial engineer who studied abroad for a postgraduate degree in administration, Paula Marcela Moreno’s background tells the “post-racial” story that Álvaro Uribe Vélez wanted his government to reflect, as she was born in Bogotá to parents originally from the department of Cauca who are university graduates and civil servants. It is telling that few of these successful Afro-Colombians, regardless of their gender, take part in ethnicity-oriented organizations or movements, and in some cases even question their legitimacy, perceiving them to exist for the benefit of their leaders rather than the advancement of the Afro-Colombian cause. Generalizing in this way often masks a reluctance to accept the idea that Black populations need specific support in order for them to meet their particular needs. Although some of them feel affinity to, for example, certain expressions of Afro-Colombian culture, they consider their ethnic background a matter for their private life, and when assuming their “public” persona, in the workplace for example, they will defend meritocracy and the

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values associated with individual ability or a competitive spirit, ignoring any reference to their own identity. Conversely, others have sought to expand and take advantage of the arenas opened up by this new recognition of the Afro-Colombian population’s contributions, and some have even started projects guided by anti-racist reflections, discourses, and practices. An example of this would be the women-owned microbusinesses selling alternative products for “natural” Afro hair, thereby providing practical support for the subjective empowerment6 of Black women and combating the racist and sexist stereotypes regarding their physical appearance (Viveros Vigoya and Ruette-Orihuela 2020). However, it is important to consider the effects of such projects, as even though they have been successful in economic, political/pedagogical, and symbolic terms, there are still unanswered questions about how much real impact they have made in the fight against structural racism and how independent they can really be of the current regimes of power and neoliberal capitalism. In terms of the ethnic and racial identity of those who now self-identify as middle class, some do not want their sense of belonging to revolve around ethnic or racial affiliation, or at least prefer these affiliations to be just another aspect circulating in the plural system of differences. Others meanwhile have explored their ancestry and embraced cultural difference, mainly through food and music. Another smaller group has adopted, supported, or defended practices that promote the aesthetic, cultural, or religious customs linked to Afrodescendant ancestry.7 All of these contrasts and apparent contradictions show the ambiguities produced by multiculturalist discourse, which has created both opportunities and obstacles in the context of neoliberalism. In 2022 it is possible to identify as “Afro-Colombian,” be it from a schoolroom knowledge of Black culture, from multiculturalism absorbed from the surroundings, or from one’s own personal convictions. We can steer clear of an ethnic identity altogether, or highlight our regional origins using a label such as “caribeña” to avoid the negative stereotypes and radical otherness that have been assigned to people from the Pacific. In parallel, there is now a greater public focus on structural and everyday racism, and on the fight against racial discrimination, and these issues are being connected to realities such as the protection of lands and the environment, affirmative action in education and in the workplace, and addressing urban and police violence. These various ways of putting negritude into practice (Restrepo 2013) are not incompatible with being middle class, but they do define the regional, generational, and sexual specificities of each intersectional experience of race and class. In any case, as Cardoso (1960, 584, cited in Macedo de Barcellos 1996, 112) affirms, the only Afro-Colombians who manage nowadays to achieve social recognition, respect, financial stability (and all that this entails), and

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prestige, are those who have managed to adapt most successfully to a development model that promotes individual entrepreneurship and discourages the collective possibilities of social advancement. It is also true that the gap has widened between this relatively privileged group and the rest of the Afro-Colombian population, who have been pushed out of their homelands and into the cities by political and economic violence. In this sense, we can state that neither universalist republicanism with its ideology of mestizaje, nor neoliberal multiculturalism with its rhetorical championing of diversity, have managed to erase the marks left by the carimbas8 on Colombia’s Black population, serving as a persistent reminder of the status of “non-being” (Fanon 2008 [1952]) which has been so difficult to overcome. NOTES 1. The board of Club Negro were Marino A. Viveros (president), Natanael Díaz (public relations), Víctor M. Viveros (treasurer), and the poets and novelists Helcías Martán Góngora (vice president) and Manuel Zapata Olivella (general secretary) (Pisano 2012). 2. Own translation. 3. The mid-twentieth century saw the emergence of a significant number of Black public figures, such as Teófilo Potes, Rogerio Velásquez, Delia and Manuel Zapata, Arnoldo Palacios, Teresa Martínez, Jorge Artel, Helcías Martán Góngora, Hugo Salazar Valdés, and Otto Morales Benítez; writers and politicians such as Natanael Díaz, Diego Luis Córdoba; musicians and folklorists such as Esteban Cabezas, Leonor González Mina, Margarita Hurtado, Sabas Casaman, Alicia Camacho, Mercedes Montaño, Madolia de Diego, and Totó la Momposina; and humanists and academics such as Aquiles Escalante, among others (Valderrama 2018, 112). 4. As I have addressed elsewhere (cf. Meertens, Viveros Vigoya and Arango 2008), Black women’s struggles to secure a place at the table has implied their overcoming of the double “symbolic deficit” that their position in the gender and racial order implies (Bourdieu 1979). It has been made more difficult because the equation “woman + Black = poor” seems to persistently operate in the social classifications with which they are labeled. 5. According to Colombia’s General Education Law 1994, ethno-education is the type of education offered to groups or communities that, while part of the nation, have their own culture, language, traditions, and customs. Ethno-education must be linked to the environment, to a productive process, and to social and cultural processes, and must respect the community’s beliefs and traditions. The history of Afro-Colombian ethno-education is explored further in chapter 7. 6. The word “empowerment” was introduced into the development field by feminists from the Global South in the context of the World Conference on Women (Beijing 1995), as a profoundly political project that encouraged the collective political mobilization of women. However, since the 1990s—due to the confluence of the

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growing obsession with measurable results in the development industry, the need to present women as helpless victims in order to obtain funding, and the interventions of a “white, modern” feminism implicitly charged with the rescue of non-Western women from their own societies, cultures, and contexts—we have witnessed a depoliticization of the term where it has been turned into a buzzword and stripped of its most relevant aspect: political mobilization (Cronin, Gowrinathan, and Zakaria 2017). 7. In the 1970s and 1980s, the boom in salsa music as well as the Cartel de Cali brought a wave of Afro-Cubans to Colombia, specifically to Cali, and Santeria came with them. This Afro-Cuban religion has also been popularized by Colombians who have migrated to Florida or to Cuba for work or study, or specifically to learn more about Santeria itself (Arango Hicapié n.d.). In the twenty-first century, it seems that for young Black middle-class people engaging with this religious aspect of the Afrodiaspora, it represents another way of embracing their Afrodescendant identity and heritage. 8. Branding iron used to mark enslaved Africans to identify them as bondmen and women.

Chapter 5

Upward Mobility, Whiteness, and Social Whitening in Colombia

A key way to promote social mobility is by educating people, and I think for that we need affirmative action. . . . I don’t like it as much in the work environment, because I think that you shouldn’t get a job . . . because you’re Black but because you’re capable . . . and that there are positions that you have to earn, because if not, you’ll make Black people look bad. (Interview with Daniela) Really, what Colombia needs is economic development, to somehow open up a space . . . with people who have managed to be successful professionally, . . . middle-class Afro-Colombians, who you can sit down with and say “Okay. You’ve been successful: what would you like to contribute to those who haven’t had that success? Which are 90 percent of Afro-Colombians. . . . . What can we do, how can we engage that success and privilege that these people have earned all by themselves? (Interview with Carlos)

Daniela and Carlos, the two successful Black professionals quoted above, ask themselves what it would take to extend the better living conditions that a minority of Black people have to the majority. Daniela, from Cartagena, at the time of our interview, was thirty-six years old and living in Bogotá. She had had a successful career so far and was a department director in the Ministry of Education. Carlos, around fifty years old at the time of the interview, is a biologist who had developed a fruitful career both in Colombia and abroad as an expert researcher in both public and private institutions. They propose, 91

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on the one hand, affirmative action in education and, on the other, economic development, two ways that would make it possible to confront the structural racism that has generated these inequalities. I do not know, however, to which model of economic development Carlos is referring, although I suppose that it is one that would allow an increase in successful Black professionals. He probably does not refer to an existing model, rather, it seems he is contemplating some new model that has aspects of both solidarity and structure reform. Nor do I know if the affirmative action in education mentioned by Daniela would be the sort that endorses meritocracy, equating talent with merit, “lack of talent” with demerit, and turning poverty into the fault of those who do not manage to get out of it. The implications of answers like those given by Daniela and Carlos speak to the effects that neoliberal multiculturalism has had on Black people’s social mobility in Colombia and the racial relationships in which they are immersed. In this chapter I will combine ethnographic and historical source material to analyze how the era of neoliberal multiculturalism has shaped upward mobility, whiteness, and social whitening in Colombia. MESTIZAJE, NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM, AND COLOMBIA’S BLACK POPULATION In the new millennium, neoliberal multiculturalism took on the function of governing difference that the discourse of mestizaje had previously fulfilled in Colombia from the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. Both of these racial regimes seek a way to govern countries made up of inhabitants of different races and cultures. Mestizaje, which that saw the increasingly mixed populations as the antidote to barbarism and the basis of the modern Latin American republics (Martínez Echazábal 1998), set about governing difference by flattening it out and proclaiming that everyone was mixed, while still upholding enough of an idea of difference through an ideology of whitening to uphold social stratification and exploitation. Beyond its egalitarian rhetoric, in Colombia, mestizaje has historically represented a whitening project whose objective has been the elimination of Black and indigenous minorities through their progressive mixture with the “superior” white element (Rojas Martínez 2004; Wade 1993b). Despite the failure to meet this objective, the ideology of mestizaje wielded great influence until the end of the twentieth century, when, according to the Constitution of 1991, the mestizo nation was replaced, at least in political discourse, by the recognition of the nation as “multiethnic and multicultural.” Multiculturalism took a different approach to “governing the Other” (Boccara 2011) by acknowledging difference on an ethnic and cultural level and in

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doing so, strengthened Black or Afro-Colombian identity. However, this has been accompanied by the rising social exclusion of Afro-Colombians, as the multiculturalist project has gone hand in hand with the neoliberal economic and political model. In the 1970s and 1980s, Afrodescendant social movements were involved in anti-racist praxis (Arboleda Quiñónez 2016; Valderrama 2019). Then, with the implementation of multiculturalism, from 1991 up until around 2010, the struggle was focused in large part on culture and recognition: ethnic identity, ethno-education, and collective land rights and titles. For Laó-Montes (2018, 249), the multiculturalism of the nineties in Latin America is, in reality, a neoliberal multiculturalism that is, in essence, a racial project. This project, firstly, through a focus on ethnicity rather than race, renders the importance of racial configurations in the social fabric invisible, and secondly, portrays racism as discrimination, solvable through the provision of financial resources and technical assistance to communities, political representation, and educational programs. In many cases, the advances were important, but did not go far enough. This is what one of my interlocutors, Daniela, points out when she refers to Law 70, which recognizes the rights of Afro-Colombians to collectively own and occupy their ancestral lands, but since it is not accompanied by a clear policy of agrarian reform, it does not allow communities to prosper. In the same way, Carlos is aware, from his professional experience in the United States, that without “transforming institutional racism,” it is impossible to “expect a real impact on the social fate of Black people.” The tokenism of multicultural discourse also seems to be a problem, as Jane—born in 1977 and from San Andrés—who worked for many years as a university professor, explains. She remembers ironically an incident where, despite being regularly underestimated and excluded, she was picked to represent the university on a visit to the United States, in order to show off the “diversity” of the university to potential funders: “They wanted me to go to Washington with [the directors] to receive the resources from the NGO, to prove there was a Black professor! [laughter].” Another effect of neoliberal multiculturalism has been the widening gap between rich and poor which has been disastrous for the majority of Colombia’s Black population. The combined circumstances of contemporary structural racism alongside a history of exclusion have meant that Afrodescendants are a persistent segment of Latin America’s poor. In Colombia, there are significant gaps in key measurements of poverty and social disadvantage when Afro-Colombians and non-Afro-Colombians are compared, such as income, employment status and type, and education. This is exacerbated by additional factors that arise from the social circumstances of Afro-Colombians, such as living predominantly on the urban periphery

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(Urrea Giraldo, Viáfara López, and Viveros Vigoya 2014). Social mobility among Colombia’s Black population (as well as the population at large) during this period has been minimal or even nonexistent (OECD 2018). A study on the intergenerational educational mobility of Afro-Colombians in urban areas, based on the National Household Survey of December 2000 (Viáfara López, Estacio Moreno, and González Aguiar 2010, 22) had already shown that Afro-Colombians face the highest levels of social immobility and short-distance mobility, compared to non-Afro-Colombians. Furthermore, this study found that the Afro-Colombian middle classes are subject to greater immobility than the bulk of the Afro-Colombian population. Karen, a university professor from Cartagena, born in 1981, notes the marked devaluation of academic degrees over time and the deterioration of the working conditions of the younger generations, attributing this to the international institutional machinery that has emerged as part of the neoliberal project. This has increased the social immobility of Afrodescendant teachers: A few years ago it was enough to graduate high school, then it was enough to get a degree. Now we are at the level of a doctorate, and if you have a master’s it’s not enough. Because of IMF policy . . . , our generation sees more short-term contracts, there is less job stability. (Interview with Karen)

Afro-Colombians have also been disproportionately affected by the country’s armed conflict. Its deterioration in the 1990s caused the forced displacement of around eight million people. With a high percentage of these being of African descent, it was a fiercely violent form of re-diasporization. The result was a sharp increase in Afro-Colombian populations in the country’s major cities, many of whom settled in the marginalized urban periphery. The neoliberal mold for Colombian capitalism has failed to solve the dire situation in which these victims of the conflict find themselves, and their continued poverty and marginalization demonstrate the economy’s persistent structural racism (Laó-Montes 2020, 248). At present, communities continue to be banished from their collective territories by the combined effects of the armed conflict and mega-development projects—such as African palm plantations, large-scale mining, and unfettered tourism—promoted by a political and business establishment pushing a neoliberal agenda. A huge question in all of this is whether the signing of the peace accords between the state and the FARC has had any effect on violence in rural areas inhabited by Black populations, in particular, if it has made any significant difference to the operation of paramilitaries, involved with the promotion and protection through violence of the economic interests of multinationals and the Colombian elite. The picture, however, is not optimistic. Between 2016 and mid-2022, a conservative estimate of 130 Afrodescendant leaders

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of different social movements have been murdered (González Perafán 2020; own estimates using records on indepaz.org.co). Nevertheless, it is important to stress that Black movements have not kept quiet about these injustices. Although over the last decade racism has been spoken about more explicitly by NGOs, the media, and even the state, almost always, the allusion is to direct racism or racial discrimination. Now, the historically accumulated, structural, and racialized inequalities of society as a whole must be challenged through diverse means. A nuanced analysis is needed to transcend a wholesale condemning of the neoliberal multiculturalist project, and oversimplifying its successes or failures as far as its effects on Afro-Latin Americans must be avoided. The issue is complex because, as far as Afrodescendant social movements are concerned, the proliferation of sources of funding has brought resources to communities, promoted organization, facilitated projects with positive cultural and economic results, and raised the level of civic and political activity. However, this funding has had negative effects in that it has encouraged partial and subordinate integration into the prevailing regimes of power and has turned some leaders into agents of neoliberal capitalism. Dependence on external funding can also make organizations more aid-oriented and demobilize and depoliticize Afrodescendant civil society. Daniela, from her experience liaising with these organizations as part of her job, is skeptical, and said that the people running Afro organizations are more worried about how they will benefit personally than the good that they are doing for Afro-Colombians in general. Moreno Figueroa and Wade (2021) point out that challenging racialized stereotypes and creating spaces for Black and indigenous people that they have traditionally been denied—such as in higher education or the middle class—means questioning structures, both symbolic and material, rooted in inequality and difference. For these authors, (cultural) recognition and (economic) redistribution are not only necessary components of progressive social change, but are also intrinsically linked to each other. In this sense, some of the actions implemented as part of multiculturalism, while not completely transformative, are certainly “better than nothing,” in that they allow their meanings and effects to be defended, rather than be fixed from the start. It is also true that making structural changes, no matter how small, is difficult to achieve, because of how unquestionable the idea has become that free and unhindered expansion of the market would be the solution to all economic, social, ecological, and legal problems (Bourdieu 2010). The supporters of neoliberalism have long presented it as an object of consensus and without alternative, since to oppose it would be proof of an archaic mentality. In spite of the critical voices that have spoken out against neoliberalism, and the negative assessments that its effects have attracted, Colombian governments of the

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2000s have continued the work of their predecessors, entrenching the same neoliberal model that was imposed in the 1990s. UPWARD MOBILITY AND SOCIAL WHITENING IN NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM In this section I will examine the relationships that can develop between upward social mobility and the process known as whitening,1 in the context of present-day multiculturalism. To this end, I will examine social whitening through three lenses: the ideological, social, and personal. Whitening’s ideological lens is manifested, over the long term, through the erasure of Blackness and Afrodescendant people from the national identity. This has been the case for multiculturalism as much as mestizaje. Although Latin American societies, on the surface, seem to be tolerant of ethnic diversity, racial grammar still naturalizes certain occupations and spaces as white, and therefore Black people in higher-status roles are seen as interlopers. This creates an “expectation of whiteness” (Moraes Silva, Souza Leão, and Grillo 2020, 644), in which people are surprised and even disconcerted when encountering Black professionals in white spaces. It has happened to Carlos many times: “what is strange and rather curious to me about Bogotá is that people—middle-class Bogotanos—are surprised to meet an educated Black man. It’s appalling!” The expectation of whiteness is also manifested in Black professionals being mistaken for staff working in lower-status jobs, for example, doctors being mistaken for nurses. In the same vein, several of my interlocutors referred to being treated badly by service staff—such as porters, cleaners, or waitstaff—who they felt, in some cases, do not recognize them as customers to be served, and in others, were purposefully disrespectful. In an ironic tone of voice, Daniela told us about how the doorman of the apartment block where she lives in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood once mistook her for a housekeeper and asked her to call her employer to offer her some bedspreads, to which she replied, “Thank you, but I’m not interested, because my employer is me.” A particularly neoliberal layer has been added to the expectation of whiteness, wherein Black professionals must be seen to be competitive, enterprising, and pragmatic, lest they be labeled as backward-looking, ungrateful, or out of touch. The old adage, “work twice as hard to get half as far” still applies: the effort required to be accepted, never mind successful, can be grueling. Daniela points out that not everyone is willing to take on the self-sacrifice that professional recognition requires: “Others don’t want to get here at six in the morning and leave at nine at night, or work on a Saturday.

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. . . You have to earn your place, earn the job, earn the space, earn respect.” Despite this, Daniela says she has used the expectation of whiteness to her advantage, using it to confound expectations by challenging the stereotypes about Black women and make a bigger impression. Whitening’s social dimension alludes to the effect that the upward social mobility of non-white people has on the way they are received by white society (Gholash 2010; Wade 1993b), and the manner in which white and elite spaces may begin to open up for them (Moraes Silva, Souza Leão, and Grillo 2020). This process of whitening is supported by what Bonilla-Silva (2012) terms “racial grammar” to refer to the way in which the naturalization of white supremacy and racial domination renders them invisible, accompanied by the way whiteness is presented as something intrinsically relevant, making it universally desirable. Even today, in Latin America, despite the changes brought about by multiculturalism, and despite the fact that whitening is not explicitly idealized, either at the national or individual level, “the value of the category of White, as superior and more desirable, continues to influence policies and social interactions in the region” (Moraes Silva, Souza Leão, and Grillo 2020, 633). Social whitening is expressed through the need for Black people to adapt and integrate into white culture and spaces in social or community spheres. For older generations of Black middle-class Colombians, living under mestizaje, society demanded that they erase their Blackness as far as they could and integrate themselves into white/mestizo society. Ana, an IT manager, born in 1958 in Chocó but brought up in Bogotá, narrated how her family, on arrival in the capital, were keen to integrate, choosing a middle-class neighborhood to live in, enrolling their children in private schools, and eventually cutting ties with contacts from their community in Chocó, to better accommodate their children’s adoption of the customs of the capital. There has been a change in the generation that follows Ana, who similarly grew up in white/mestizo-majority cities, but were born around the time of the 1991 Constitution and so came of age in a different racial regime. These middle-class Black millennials are keener to return to their ethno-racial roots, and explore their ancestry through time spent with elder relatives and by engaging with the food, music, and culture of their homelands, even without ever having visited these places. Ana’s niece, Soraya, a twenty-year-old marketing student at the time of our interview, cites the presence of the Chocoano extended family as a huge part of what ties her to her roots and her identity as a Chocoana. Moving in white-majority circles has also had an effect on the romantic relationships of members of the Black middle class. Black women seem to be desired by no one and everyone at the same time, being the subject of stereotypical sexual fantasies and desires but excluded from stable sexual

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relationships which fall outside these (Viveros Vigoya 2008; Urrea Giraldo, Posso Quiceno, and Motta González 2010). Ana spoke about the paradox of the middle-class Black female experience in terms of heterosexual romantic relationships. They encounter few Black men in their professional lives and in their social circles, and those that they do meet tend to prefer lighter-skinned women who better correspond to their ambitions for social mobility. Karen, who is younger than Ana, puts a more positive spin on her singledom. This could be because of her age, but also due to differences between the Caribbean and Andean cultures in which the two women are immersed. She describes her life and that of friends in Cartagena as a world of free, single, professional women who have short-term relationships with men who they do not depend on for their material well-being. In opposition to Ana, she is not necessarily looking for someone from a similar professional sphere, but someone with whom she can feel comfortable. Black men are also subject to stereotypes that come into play in the world of sexual and romantic relationships. This phenomenon has been especially studied in the context of interracial relationships between Black men and white women. Moutinho (2008) has shown how this process leaves Black Brazilian men, like Black women, excluded from the idea of a long-term partner and relegated solely to being sexual objects. Hellebrandová (2014) has documented in Bogotá the performative use of spaces such as nightclubs by young Afro-Colombians from the middle classes who show off their dancing abilities in front of their white girlfriends. Hamilton, Ana’s younger brother born in 1964, remembers similar circumstances in his youth, where his dancing skills were his main resource for winning over girls. As has been documented in many Latin American societies, beautifying is equated with whitening (de Casanova 2018). In addition to skin color, hair texture, body shape, facial features, and clothing can be “whitened” to increase aesthetic capital. The gendered nature of skin color stratification in Latin America means that, in general, the aesthetic manifestations of white privilege are more damaging to non-white women (Gomes 2002; Moraes Silva, Souza Leão, and Grillo 2020). Hair continues to be contentious for Black women, as “natural” Black hair and hairstyles are seen as ugly, unfeminine, and unprofessional. In Colombia, how a Black woman wears her hair is not only a marker of race but also of class. In other words, having your hair straightened or blow-dried symbolizes an adhesion to modernity and to the aesthetic values and models associated with upward social mobility and insertion in the labor market (Villarreal Benítez 2017). While Afro-Colombian women must go to some lengths to modify their natural hair, for their male counterparts, the solution is somewhat easier: all of the fifteen men we interviewed had short hair and two of these had shaved heads (Viveros Vigoya 2015). This, because “Black men are expected to

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wear their hair in its natural state—though the expectation is for keeping it short and conservatively groomed” (Rosette and Dumas 2007, 409). This is reflected in the experiences of the women and men we interviewed—when men talked about their hair (if at all), they would relate isolated incidents, whereas the women we interviewed would be able to talk about their relationship with their hair as a journey that started from when they were very young and was intimately related to their happiness. Where men and women face similar choices is in their adjustment to the cultural and aesthetic norms of a predominantly white context, as is the case of Bogota’s middle classes. This adaptation requires Black people to pay constant attention to physical appearance and clothing, speak without any regional accent and with polite manners, all of which results in their being described as “classy” Black people. Women working as civil servants on the whole wear tailored suits in neutral colors, smart footwear, and discreet jewelry. Only those who work as models adopt an alternative aesthetic, which ensures they will stand out. Depending on their job, the men wear business suits, otherwise they wear light-colored shirts and neutral-colored pants; their manners are “gentlemanly,” and their tone of voice is measured. This form of presenting themselves, as one of my interlocutors says, is “in keeping” with the recognition they have acquired. Leandro, for example, a thirty-three-year-old electrical engineer from Buenaventura, who has achieved fairly rapid upward mobility, explains why he, and Black men in general, avoid attire with ethnic connotations: I think it is important to adapt to the environment that you find yourself in. By adapting, you are effectively neutralizing yourself, your ethnicity should go unseen. Because I notice that the treatment you receive is different if one day you show up in an African shirt. And I don’t like being singled out, . . . either consciously or unconsciously, I don’t want to differentiate myself. . . . I wanted to dress like they do on television, the style you see on the television. (Interview with Leandro)

It is interesting that Leandro references the television as his guide or “standard” of how to dress, as Bonilla-Silva (2012) states that the media, especially the news, film, and television, are principal conduits for racial grammar, which, in this case, universalizes a specific style of dress and personal presentation as the “proper” way. The choice faced by Afro-Colombians in white professional and social circles presents them with a serious dilemma (Rosette and Dumas 2007): to conform to mainstream expectations and shed their ethnic identity comes with certain benefits in terms of being taken seriously by the white world, but with accusations by Black voices of being pompous or pretentious (Wade 1993b) and even labels such as “self-hating” or “race

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traitor” (Viveros Vigoya 2015). Embracing an African or “ethnic” identity expressed through personal style risks the opposite: being seen as “authentically” Black, but with more difficulty in accessing the elite, white spaces. Furthermore, Mariano, thirty-eight years old at the time of the interview, a university professor originally from Santa Marta now living in Bogotá, is aware that wearing a more informal or “ethnic” style of clothing invites judgment from fellow Black people. It is not possible, however, to be authentically Black. This is because, as Fanon (2008 [1952]) posits, Blackness only exists in negation to whiteness, which created it, because it defines it. Both are the opposite faces of the same dialectical process of racialization. BLACK AND MIDDLE-CLASS: NO LONGER A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS (FOR SOME)? Multiculturalism has allowed a small proportion of the population to achieve upward mobility, independent of, to a certain extent, their ethnic/racial background, meaning that today, there are a small number of Afro-Colombians with a high standard of living who are part of the country’s elite. What is new, with respect to the mestizaje regime—in which upward social mobility was conditional on adopting the social and cultural codes of the dominant group—is that, in the post-1991 era, a Black middle-class person has more leeway to express their Black identity. In fact, a Brazilian study (Moraes Silva, Souza Leão, and Grillo 2020) has shown that the Black middle classes are more likely to reject whitening, assuming a Black identity as they move in white-majority circles and identifying themselves in contrast to those around them. In Colombia, race awareness has become more widespread in the context of multiculturalism and the creation of new nation-building narratives that promote Black identity popularized by black-consciousness movements (Telles and Pachel, 2004). Although breaking with one’s social group of origin is still a very common feature of the processes of upward social mobility, a contradiction does not necessarily exist between upward social mobility and embracing a Black identity (Moraes Silva, Souza Leão, and Grillo 2020, and Figueiredo 2002 for Brazil; Viveros Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010, Gil Hernández 2010, and Pisano 2012 for Colombia). Multiculturalist discourse which praises diversity and celebrates individual difference as something innate gives license to a myriad of ways of relating to Black identity, which already existed under the ideology of mestizaje, but did not enjoy the political legitimacy that the contemporary discourse has bestowed upon them. Nevertheless, both in Colombia and Brazil (Figueiredo 2004), middle-class Black identity has become somewhat disconnected from any reference to

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Black struggles or social inequalities; rather, it has opted for an identity that rejects discrimination against the middle classes as individuals, not as part of a racial group with the possibility of mobilization (Pattillo, Bermúdez Rico, and Mosquera Guevara 2021). My Colombian interlocutors expressed this through a wish to live in a post-racial world where they would escape the pigmentocracy and be able to “universalize themselves” and want “more than to fight for the Afro community.” Hamilton’s insistence that affirmative action for people of African descent should be a temporary measure (“these are laws that eventually will have to disappear”), and his desire not to be associated with them, to be singled out as disadvantaged and in need of help, expresses the entrenched meritocratic ideas of the middle class, which prefers to be portrayed as the result of individual feats achieved through personal effort and merit. Many express that they would like “to receive the same treatment as the rest of Colombia’s population,” “to be one of the crowd,” to “forget that they are Black.” Nevertheless, the social reality makes sure to remind them what it is to be Black in a pigmentocratic society. This can be interpreted from Leandro’s comment that he feels he has to leave the fact he was born in the Pacific city of Buenaventura off his résumé “in order not to single himself out” during his job search. His behavior shows his awareness of the way whiteness is perceived as the norm. Some of my interlocutors, like Carlos, are quite optimistic about how a small number of “outstanding” Black middle-class Colombians could normalize Black people’s successes and, at the same time, make a difference for the rest of Colombia’s Black population. At the time of the interview in 2008, he was a member of Fundación Color, an association whose objective was to promote the strategic interests of Afro-Colombians, seeking equality, recognition, and integration, primarily through the promotion and circulation in elite circles of what he calls “the talented tenth,” inspired by Du Bois (2018 [1903]),2 to refer to Black Colombians who have excelled in a competitive field. Carlos’s use of ideas of African American origin show how he has been influenced by his experience living in the United States and the way in which he has applied these debates to the Colombian situation in an attempt at better understanding. For Carlos, if you want to “promote social progress,” you must use “economic power, since it opens doors.” Fundación Color’s founding members were thinking along the same lines, wanting to “use [their] privilege . . . to position the cultural values of the Black population.” When Carlos advocates for individual and family success, recognizing the privileges that have made it possible, he seeks not only to use this success as a platform to support other (individual) Black people, but also to highlight this success in society at large and to garner recognition for people who have been largely ignored, or at

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least, have not seen their success recognized. His proposal is to justify these individuals’ integration into society based on their socioeconomic position, as a way of eliminating the surprise that many feel when society’s expectation of whiteness is not met (Viveros Vigoya et al. 2019). Despite some indisputable benefits of this goal for those who have managed to excel and its usefulness as a stimulus for the younger generations, one wonders how much Fundación Color’s mission can help the vast majority of the Afro-Colombian population. It is difficult to ignore that this objective conforms to an individualist neoliberal vision in which the political is reduced to the “pure administration” of cultural issues (Mouffe 2005; Laclau 2003, 305). In this way, and regardless of intent, positions such as those held by Carlos and Fundación Color end up legitimizing the depoliticization of these achievements and the inadvertent upholding of racial inequality. These positions also resemble what Clay (2019, 78) has called Black resilience neoliberalism, an attitude which sees structural racism as “a constant that is taken for granted” and normalizes the individual’s ability to overcome it, in turn undermining organization in the face of state violence and Black oppression. In the last twenty years, compared to previous decades, there have certainly been more visible Black faces high up in Colombian society. For example, of a total of nine Afrodescendant government ministers, five have been appointed since 2000. In the 2022 presidential elections, five of the nine vice presidential candidates were Afro-Colombian, and of course, Francia Márquez—an Afrodescendant leader who has been at the forefront of a struggle for her community’s land rights in the department of Cauca—became the new Vice President. Along with previously unheard talk of the “Afro vote,” there has been a sea change in Colombian politics which I will explore in more detail in the epilogue. The presence of a greater number of Black politicians in the cabinet however has previously not caused greater debate of the problems that afflict Black people. Before Francia Márquez’s arrival, to be accepted by the mainstream, Black political figures had to water down their political orientations. In this new climate, however, well-known “establishment” figures such as journalist and news anchor Mabel Lara and ex-environment minister (and newly appointed ambassador to the United States) Luis Gilberto Murillo publicly allied with Francia Márquez for the second round of the presidential elections, in an unapologetic cross-party stance of Black solidarity. Black public figures who question the status quo, as Ana asserts, have often been treated brutally, with racial under- (and over-) tones, referring to the unjust attacks that political figures such as Piedad Córdoba3 have constantly been subjected to. Ana points out: “Other congresspeople, regardless of the difficulties they find themselves in, are never referred to by the color of their skin.” This has also been true of Francia Márquez’s experience on the campaign trail, which

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has revealed beyond doubt to the general public that Colombia has an ugly racism problem lurking just under the surface. The Black political elite that has gained acceptance thus far has done so by supporting free trade agreements and participating uncritically in neoliberal governments. And they have equated Black empowerment with the growth of a middle and political class. Under this political framework, the fight against racism has solely been associated with projects for the modernization and social mobility of Afrodescendants, rather than initiatives that would see the bulk of the Afrodescendant population mobilized (Laó-Montes 2018, 256). RESISTANCE TO WHITE CULTURAL DOMINATION Over the last five years or so, there has been greater attention paid to and more discussion of structural racism. This has been evident in the discourse of organizations such as La Asociación de Afrocolombianos Desplazados— AFRODES (National Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians), as they have demanded that the state eradicate the structural racism that makes Black communities in the armed conflict more vulnerable to displacement and confinement and, by extension, the loss of their culture (Cárdenas 2012, 126). More recently, there has been evidence of an anti-racist turn in some areas of the peace process, such as the incipient technical working group “Racism and the armed conflict in Colombia: arriving at the truth,” to analyze the relationship between the armed conflict and racial discrimination. This working group presented the major findings of its study at the eighth Encuentro por la Verdad (Meeting for Truth), titled “Acknowledging the truth of Black, Afro-Colombian, Palenquero and Raizal people: facts and impacts of the armed conflict, for the building of peace and the nation,” which was held in December 2020 in person and, due to the pandemic, online. It clearly identified racism and racial discrimination as factors that intensified the impact of the armed conflict on Black people, their identity, land, autonomy, and self-government; on the exclusions they have suffered in the processes of shaping identity and the state; and on the various forms of resistance and contributions to peace by Black people. While these efforts are of great importance, Cárdenas (2017) sees more potential for anti-racism in actions that fall outside state-sponsored platforms. For example, the civic strike in Buenaventura in May 2017 clearly illustrated Colombia’s race problem and the state’s role in it, although the motivation for the strike was not the denouncing of racism but rather its effects. Through widespread street protests, the movement threatened serious economic consequences for the country, as more than half of its exports and imports move through this port city. Its commercial importance and the

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increased investment in nationally important megaprojects in this area are contrasted against the dire poverty, displacement, violence, and state abandonment suffered by its 400,000 Afrodescendant residents, who have no access to, among other basic services, drinking water. Although the strike produced concrete results—such as the construction of a retaining wall for a secondary school, the installation of a water tank for the storage and supply of drinking water to the city, and the inauguration of an intensive care unit for the hospital—these are still insufficient to meet the reported needs. Although structural racism has been more widely discussed in recent times, it is a practice so deeply rooted in Colombian society that it remains difficult to recognize and therefore to resist. Despite this, I have recently been involved with various research projects that have documented different practices that have been successful in indirectly undermining racism by challenging racialized stereotypes, providing alternative images of Black people that are detached from connotations of poverty, unattractiveness, or lack of education, and have questioned the cultural and aesthetic norms of whiteness (LAPORA project). Several examples of such practices have originated with the younger generations of Afro-Colombian women (Viveros Vigoya and Ruette-Orihuela 2020), and I will refer to these at the end of chapter 7. Giving New Meaning to Racialization in the Arts Carlos Valderrama (2019) has documented that social movements in Colombia have not been the only scenario in which Black identities are built and in which their political agendas and collective interests are mobilized. Since the 1940s, cultural expressions have played a very important role in the construction of meaning about what it means to be Afro-Colombian and have made visible the Black presence in Colombian dance, literature, music and folklore that mestizaje had sought to hide. It also helped redefine the existence of an Afrodescendant community beyond its demographic characterization. With the shift to multiculturalism, policies that recognize diversity and different cultural projects shaped and strengthened discourses of the political, historical, and cultural vindication of ethnic and racial groups.4 An example of this has been the presence of Pacific folklore in popular music, introducing new sectors of the population to this Black musical tradition (see, for example, Estupiñán 2019). Thus, since the 2010s, groups such as Chocquibtown and Herencia de Timbiqui have taken up the musical legacy of the Colombian Pacific and have fused it with elements of contemporary urban music to create a sound that is global yet rooted in the unequivocally Black culture of the Pacific Coast. Through lyrics, music, and dance they affirm racial pride, the collective strength of Black people, and the need for progression into a post-racial society. They present a celebration of Black

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identity and Black people standing together as a way of resisting poverty, displacement, corruption, exploitation, and racism. Their songs invoke a human experience not “governed by skin tone or color,” emphasizing human connection and global harmony, and using the communicative power of music to bring together and mobilize “students, natives, and immigrants” indiscriminately, because “everyone can have zest (sabor).” Thus, the double consciousness, which constitutes the founding experience of the Afro-American diaspora, assigns a double value to these songs that have become representative of both Black music and the country that produced it, Colombia (Viveros Vigoya 2018). Due to its character of “escape” or “cimarronería” in the face of Western hegemonic values, Black music represents an opportunity to democratize social relations. Freedom and spontaneity in the combination of rhythms and dance as well as the dialogical and heterogeneous composition present a new type of anti-individualist sociability that challenges the verticalist and meritocratic democracies, and installs new models of citizenship: “these kinds of alternatives can be indirectly representative of anti-colonial and democratizing ruptures in hegemony” (Quintero 2020, 419). In another field, visual artist Liliana Angulo has taken the violence directed at Black hair and, through exaggeration and parody, has doubled down on it in her series Un negro es un negro (serie peluca siamesa y pelucas porteadores) (A Black man is a Black man [siamese wig and porter’s wigs]) in which Black models (both men and women) wear huge wigs made of steel wool scouring pads molded into a single spiraling dreadlock, which connect the models to each other in solidarity and shared history (Giraldo 2019, 299). The reference to porters evokes “colonial subjects who carried the baggage of white colonizers and the wig represents figurative baggage that [Black people] continue to carry today” (Lane 2010, 121). Artworks such as those of Liliana Angulo or Fabio Melecio Palacios, who since 2007 has been addressing Black themes through performance art, sculpture, and installation, show that it is possible to redefine Blackness and subvert the socio-racial order by taking ownership of Blackness through self-representation. Melecio Palacio’s work, in particular a video titled Bamba 45, re-created his own family history to tell the story of the harsh working conditions experienced by Black men who work in the sugar plantations, his father being one such man. He uses the sounds produced by the Bamba 45 machetes of a group of sugarcane cutters, producing rhythmic music. The video was part of an installation that won the Luis Caballero Award, the country’s most important fine arts prize, and so the artist managed to use his newfound position in the prestigious, white arts world to denounce the precarious conditions of these workers, and talk about a way of life, a cultural space, and a Black aesthetic, opposed to the context in which it is exhibited.

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Alternative cultural offerings have also emerged, such as the exhibition Black Life in Bogotá: 1940-1950-1962, organized by visual artist Mercedes Angola and Togolese university professor Maguemati Wabgou. It shows scenes from the daily lives of Black migrants in Bogotá between 1940 and 1970, their reasons for migration—mostly for education and work—the ways in which they identified themselves and socialized, and the strategies they used to adapt to and be accepted in Bogotá’s urban landscape. From the photographs and videos on display, there emerges a story that has rarely been told by the men and women who actually lived it: their struggles to be recognized for their abilities and hard work, as well as their awareness of their own fortitude, their hopes for the future and their resistance to the processes of racialization and to the forces of alienation, subordination, and exploitation. Similarly, after almost twenty years of state multiculturalism, changes began to take place in the film industry, with issues affecting the Afrodescendant population becoming the subject matter of a new generation of filmmakers emerging as part of a boom in the Colombian film industry. This new context has seen an increasing importance of films set in the Afrodescendant population’s own territories, both rural and urban, with Afro-Colombian filmmakers at the helm, such as Chocó (2012) directed by John Hendrix Hinestrosa and Reparaciones (2022) directed by Wilson Borja. There have been five Black cinema screenings at Bogotá’s publicly funded Cultural Center for the Audiovisual Arts, that have shown audiovisual work that explores “the politics and aesthetics of audiovisual productions from Africa and its diaspora in Colombia” (Cinemateca Distrital 2020). Spaces like these demonstrate the energy of these audiovisual productions and the presence of a new generation of Afro-Colombian filmmakers (both men and women) in the Colombian film industry. Artists have used different tactics in their employment of these different cultural and artistic mediums to expound both the epistemic violence concealed behind many everyday representations, as well as the performative effect of race, radicalizing the brand of self-recognition that multiculturalism offers and rejuvenating the arts scene through anti-racist initiatives. The space that has been cleared for reflections on racism gives some hope that it will be possible to generate political mobilizations with demands that do not revolve around a single and rigid definition of Blackness, and that there will be a critical mass of professionals capable of checking the risk of the Black middle classes turning into a new elite. Self-representation for Black people opposes the imposition of an official history that has ignored or stereotyped their cultural practices and output. Black people are using their own identities and aesthetic resources to create, re-create, and re-signify Colombian Black history and culture in all its polyphonic diversity.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter I have endeavored to convey both the scope and limits of the multiculturist project regarding Afro-Colombians, against a backdrop of unfettered neoliberalism, the effects of which have once again been revealed by the shocking statistics surrounding the pandemic. I have argued that it is as important to achieve recognition as it is to establish systems of equitable social redistribution, since recognition contains “an indispensable emancipatory moment” that should focus on establishing an equal standing for people in social interaction, rather than on validating a specific group identity (Fraser, Dahl, Stoltz, and Willig 2004, 376). From this dualistic and interdependent perspective of justice, we can say that the successes in cultural recognition that the Colombian Black middle class have achieved have been important, but that a serious transformation of the social and economic conditions in favor of the majority of the Afrodescendant population is urgently needed. The direction to be taken by Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez’s Pacto Histórico is yet to be seen. The balance of the achievements toward a racial democracy of the age of neoliberal multiculturalism is ambivalent. The stories and the comments made by some of my interlocuters presented above do not only show how, under multiculturalism, Blackness and upward social mobility have become more compatible, but also aid an understanding of how fissures have started to appear in whiteness as a hierarchical and exclusionary socio-racial order, historical construction, or political project. There has been greater attention and discussion around structural racism in some organizations, and some social movements have made demands on the state, linking problems such as violence and deterritorialization with structural racism. Research that sets out to show correlations between ideas of “race” (mainly skin color), social mobility, and social exclusion is more frequent than before. Affirmative actions and inclusion programs have been undertaken for Afrodescendant populations in the field of higher education. There have been legal advances such as the creation and implementation of laws that criminalize racial discrimination, and some use of them to denounce racism. Media campaigns on racism awareness have been broadcast on public and private media, and on social media too. Artistic and aesthetic interventions have been carried out aimed at the visibility and empowerment of Afrodescendants (Moreno Figueroa y Wade 2021). But at the same time, as Laó-Montes (2020a) has pointed out elsewhere, there are key questions that must continue to be asked, such as whether we are advancing toward a global agenda of social justice or if we are simply opening some spaces for social and political mobility that serve largely to reproduce the status quo in the name of racial equality.

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Considering the problems reported in the literature applied this chapter, we cannot affirm that the living conditions of the majority of Afro-Colombians are improving. Nor can we conclude that we are in the same situation as thirty years ago. The awareness of racism is more widespread within the Black middle classes than ever before, although this has not resulted in the emergence of generalized anti-racist activism among them. Middle-class factions closest to power or with higher economic incomes have discouraged disruptive anti-racist positions. There have, however, been important developments in Afro-Colombians’ political autonomy and participation which I will discuss in the epilogue. The upward social mobility of Black people remains as precarious and individualized as it was before multiculturalism, which is why it has not had redistributive effects. NOTES 1. I understand whitening to mean the attempts made to escape “Blackness” in order to improve one’s place in society, in a context that regards whiteness as synonymous with progress, civilization, and beauty. 2. The “talented tenth” is a term used to refer to the ruling class of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century. Initially used by northern white philanthropists, it was taken up by W. E. B. Du Bois in an influential essay of the same name, which was published in September 1903. It is important to note that even at the time, Du Bois’s vision as laid out in The Talented Tenth was seen as elitist (M’bayo 2004). 3. Piedad Córdoba was a senator of the Colombian Republic from 1994 until her dismissal in 2010, after the Attorney General’s Office, headed by the conservative Alejandro Ordóñez, accused her of collaborating with the FARC. Córdoba was publicly asked to distance herself from Gustavo Petro’s presidential campaign, until she resolved the various legal proceedings in which she has become entangled (for example, in May 2022, she was held in Honduras for trying to leave the country with $68,000 USD in cash). 4. The orientation toward cultural projects and paradigms, as Valderrama (2019) has described, is not unique to Colombia: it also occurred in other countries (such as Brazil or Cuba) where it was politically uncomfortable to talk openly about racism. Afro-Cubans, especially their cultural and religious expressions, influenced their Afro-Colombian counterparts over the course of the twentieth century.

Figure 3. The Mosquera Asprilla family celebrate the new millennium and the birthday of Amín Mosquera (back row, third from right). Bogotá, 2000. Source: Mosquera Asprilla family photo album, taken by Ada Mosquera Asprilla.

PART 3

Upward Social Mobility and Black Identity: An Intersectional Experience

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Three Accounts of Social Mobility from an Intersectional and Regional Perspective

INVISIBLE THREADS: EXPLORING THE UNSPOKEN FORCES IN BLACK COLOMBIAN FAMILY HISTORIES My father, Marino Viveros Mancilla, was born in 1922 in Santander de Quilichao (Cauca) into a family of Afro-Colombian campesino origin. In his mother’s family especially, education was highly valued. In fact, a great-uncle, Aquileo Mancilla, had studied law at the University of Cauca in Popayán, founded in 1827 and by then one of Colombia’s most renowned public higher-education institutions that had produced numerous notable alumni. My grandmother, Herminia Mancilla, harbored similar expectations for her son, and I believe that when my father pursued a medical degree and graduated as a doctor, it was as much to please his mother as it was for his own aspirations of social mobility. I remember hearing Dad say on various occasions, “I would have loved to have been a musician, too.” I now understand why he never said, “a musician instead of a doctor.” A career as a musician would not have afforded the same social status as one as a physician, and for this reason my grandmother would never have accepted this for her son. There is no doubt that my father’s mother was instrumental in determining the course his life would take. She was the one who kindled in him the drive to study and the desire to better himself. She was a woman of strong character, shaped by her heavy responsibilities taken on after being orphanedat a very young age. She had had to renounce her own dreams, and so she projected her ambitions onto my father. 113

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Accordingly, my father was sent to study for his high school diploma at a renowned school for boys in Zipaquirá, a small town to the north of Bogotá. There, my father was one of the only five or six darker-skinned boys from the Caribbean or Cauca, all of them on national scholarships. These boys cultivated a friendship that endured as they went on to study at Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, nourished by their common interests in sport, politics and dancing. They saw in each other a spontaneity which contrasted with the formality and stiffness of the “cachaco” culture of the capital in which they were immersed. When my father started at medical school in the early 1940s, it was in the university’s sports clubs that he first socialized with other Black students, who, like him, were mainly from Cauca. Later, he met fellow medical student Manuel Zapata Olivella, from Cartagena. He and Manuel bonded over the fact that at the university, indigenous and Black students were conspicuous by their absence. This environment prompted these young men to start to see themselves as “Black.” Manuel has said that this awareness came about slowly and quietly, through the way he was perceived and defined by his “white” and mestizo classmates (Zapata Olivella 1989). This identification was reinforced by the complaints of racial discrimination made by the students from Cauca. A law student from Puerto Tejada called Natanael Díaz always stood out in this group, as he was a gifted public speaker and had a sharp political awareness. With him and the rest of the group they talked a lot about the racial discrimination suffered by Black students, and their difficulties renting rooms in boardinghouses because of the color of their skin. To get around this, the students would rent a large room and share it with two or three other Black students to reduce costs. On the basis of their talent for music and dance, they managed to convince the owners of the boardinghouses to allow them to throw parties for their friends and classmates. These parties gave them the opportunity to socialize among themselves and with their white and mestizo fellow students. Some of the young women who came to these parties in some cases became their future girlfriends. During this same period, these young Black people were gradually uniting around shared political concerns about the hostile situation faced by Black people in the United States in the late 1940s, marked by discriminatory laws and mistreatment. This was the context from which Club Negro emerged, in which my father took a leading role and whose genesis I recounted in chapter 4. It may be surprising then that I knew nothing of my father’s political activism as a young man until the last years of his life, and what I found out was by accident. Although my father’s political career as a congressman had marked our childhood, Dad spoke little with us of his memories as a student in Bogotá. Moreover, while Zapata Olivella told his version of those events in



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his autobiography ¡Levántate Mulatto!, Club Negro had never been discussed in any academic text. As a result, I was shocked when I received a call in 2006 from my colleague, Piero Pisano, a historian who was researching Black political activity in Colombia during the period 1940–1965 in the archives of Museo Nacional. He told me he had found a newspaper article from 1943 that discussed the Día del Negro demonstration, and asked if the Marino Viveros named in the article was a relation of mine. This was the first time that I had heard of these events and in this way I discovered a political dimension of my father of which I had previously been ignorant. When I called my father to ask him about it, he laughed, and at first he was surprised that anyone would be interested in that chapter of his life and what he and his university friends had done more than sixty years previous. This lapse of silence speaks to the little importance given to Black history in Colombia, and the book that Piero eventually published revealed that Black political action in the country had started decades before the Black student activism of the 1970s which was the widely held perception. Between this revelation and my father’s death in 2009, I interviewed him about his life, and he told me the story of his school days and first years in Bogotá which I have touched on above. After his death, I had another moment of connection with my father as the family was organizing his estate and belongings. My sister found a book in his bedside table which came to represent another previously unrecognized connection between myself and my father. Years before, I had translated into Spanish the political writings of Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature. The book my father had kept so close to hand were the papers from the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, in which Césaire had participated and whose proceedings had influenced his writings. I had translated some of the essays in the book as part of my work. This discovery was serendipitous, but also revealed to me for a moment the invisible threads that link together families and their histories. The thread of my father’s early political activism on Blackness in Colombia and the diaspora, although he had never divulged it to me, had to have had an influence on my own work and discoveries in Black feminisms and anti-racism (although I must recognize my mother’s feminist activism as an equally important influence!). Intergenerational memories and family histories show us that our present selves were not only constructed over our own lifetimes. We are in fact the product of the desires and designs of those who raised us, and those of the generations before them. Having explored here a little of my own family history, in this final section I outline and deconstruct three of the most representative of the eighteen family histories collected in the research. My goal

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has been to link the invisible threads between generations and the historical and social context that resulted in upward social mobility for these Black Colombian families. Based on a research journal entry. Guadalajara. Friday, October 18, 2019. This chapter compares three stories of upward social mobility told through snapshots from their lives at different historical junctures. The different scenes have been taken from the family histories that were compiled using biographical interviews with three family members (both men and women), each representing a different generation of the same family. These stories were reconstructed with three premises in mind. The first is that upward social mobility is almost always a cumulative family process, taking place across the generations. The second, that in Colombia, “Blackness” is strongly and meaningfully connected to the diaspora and to racism, and varies depending on the local, regional, and subjective context. The third is that the use of an intersectional perspective has become an almost inescapable requirement for the analysis of social mobility, given the current understanding of social mobility as a process in which class is not the single founding axis of social inequality and its reproduction. As noted in chapter 3, and demonstrated in chapter 5, class, gender, and race are historically and systematically imbricated and not axes that function independently of one another. With these premises in mind, what follows are three family histories, tied to three different regions of Colombia which have significant Black populations, namely the Pacific region and the Caribbean coast and islands. The specificity of the regional experience plays a central role in these histories, and my emphasis on region reflects its importance in the Colombian national consciousness. “Colombia’s history has been shaped by its spatial fragmentation, which has found expression in economic atomization and cultural differentiation. The country’s historically most populated areas have been divided by its three mountain ranges, in each of which are embedded many small valleys. The historical dispersion of much of the population in isolated mountain pockets . . . fostered the development of particularized local and regional cultures” (Safford and Palacios 2002, ix). The unequal development of Colombia’s regions is still an issue in 2022, despite the large-scale decentralization effort that Colombia has pursued since 1991. This is because the country has never had a regional development policy aimed at reducing the enormous differences in the per capita income levels of its local economies. Instead, implicit regional policies have been put in place to favor



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some regions, such as the industrial regions and Bogotá, over others, like the non-coffee-producing agricultural regions (Barón and Meisel 2003). In each story, individual biographies, family sagas, and regional histories are tied to a broader time line that covers much of Colombian social history throughout the twentieth century to the present day. The three family histories begin in successive decades—the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—and the individuals featured recount moments in history from their different regional perspectives and distinct gender and generational standpoints. While I seek to contribute to our understanding of the Black middle classes today and in the past by integrating biographical details into their wider social contexts and making reference to historical events, my aim is not to reconstruct a positivist history of what I have termed the Black middle classes. My purpose is to provide insight into these processes of upward social mobility using vignettes that recount certain milestones in the lives of my interlocutors that they themselves have pinpointed as important. They correspond to an exercise that is not so much a remembering of the factual truth, but a subjective process of recreating the past in the present (Covarrubias Cuéllar 2004). It is also important to note that when the present is referred to in this chapter, it corresponds to 2008–2010, which is when the interviews were conducted, and this means that people may have since changed their outlook on statements they made at that time. This chapter tells the stories of the Robles, the Palacios, and the Jones families. The Robles family traces its roots back to the Pacific region. Néstor, a well-known journalist, is the oldest member and was born in 1933 in Condoto, Chocó. His son, Carlos, who we heard from in chapter 5, belongs to the second generation and was born in Cúcuta, Norte de Santander, in the early 1960s. Amaya, Néstor’s granddaughter and Carlos’s niece, is the youngest of my interlocutors from this family and was born in Bogotá in the second half of the 1980s. The Palacios family is from the mainland Caribbean region. The oldest interviewee is Jorge, born in the environs of María La Baja, Bolívar, in 1945. Representing the middle generation is his daughter Daniela, also featured in chapter 5, and born in 1972 in Cartagena. The youngest member is Luis, Jorge’s grandson and Daniela’s nephew, born in 1990. The Jones family, hailing from the Caribbean islands, is the third family to be featured. The Jones family story was reconstructed through interview with Miriam, who moved with her family to the island of San Andrés in 1953 as a newborn, and her daughter Jane, born in 1977. Both women spoke in their interviews about Miriam’s mother and Jane’s grandmother, Rosa, born in 1918 on the Corn Islands (Islas del Maíz in Spanish), and some of Rosa’s story is included here.1

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THE ROBLES FAMILY: FROM CONDOTO (CHOCÓ) TO VANCOUVER (CANADA) I would say that we are a patriarchal family, but in a good way . . . , without imposing our authority. . . . I feel that I have inherited that tradition, because I have become the person that people come to in my family . . . , they consult me about things. My grandfather was this way, my father too, and I am the same; they trust us completely. Carlos speaking about his family

Condoto, Chocó (1933) Néstor was born in 1933, the fourth of five children. Ramón, his father, was a police inspector in Condoto. Ramón supported the Liberal party, and because of his political leanings, he was written out of the will left by his father, who owned gold and platinum mines in the province of San Juan, an area of Chocó that in 1916 came under the control of the Chocó Pacífico Mining Company (Compañía Minera Chocó Pacífico, Castillo Ardila and Varela Corredor 2012). Buenaventura (1940): The Port Is Expanded and Developed The family moved to live in Buenaventura, as Ramón had become embroiled in a dangerous situation, having provided economic support to striking workers of the Chocó Pacífico Mining Company by giving them store credit. In the port city, Ramón starts a small dry goods business in the marketplace, allowing him to provide for his family. A short time later, Néstor began his high school education at Pascual de Andagoya school, founded in 1943, one of the many projects that resulted from the efforts of a number of “Black” politicians to remedy the Afro-Colombian population’s lack of access to education. Bogotá (1950s): A Period of Bipartisan Violence and the Military Dictatorship of General Rojas Pinilla Néstor arrived in Bogotá in the 1950s from Manizales, where he had finished high school as a boarder at Instituto Universitario de Caldas. Although his economic situation was precarious, he enrolled in law school at Universidad Libre, a university founded on liberal ideals. His father could not support him financially, but an older sister would send him the money with which



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he was able to pay rent each month for his student accommodation. He also “earned some money by teaching public lectures at the university and publishing poems in newspapers.” His first experience in print media was at El Mercurio, a newspaper at that time directed by future president Alberto Lleras. At the same time as he began work as a journalist and poet, he started his own family with his wife Irene, who came from a conservative Buenaventura family and was also studying law at Universidad Libre, where they met. The period of the military dictatorship of General Rojas Pinilla (1953–1957), that “strongly adhered to the anti-communist struggle” of the time, was marked by much bipartisan violence and abuse by the state against protesting university students. This violence had until then only affected rural regions far from the capital. During this time the government waged open war against the “enemy within.” This enemy included student movements and “suspicious” individuals who held socialist leanings or were engaged in protest activities (Beltrán Villegas 2018, 20 and 31). These events had a great impact on Néstor and Irene’s lives, as they had become involved with groups resisting the government of General Rojas Pinilla and the communist youth. Although both suffered government persecution, it was Irene who was issued with an arrest warrant. This threat, together with the deterioration of her health due to asthma, prompted the couple’s decision to leave Bogotá for warmer climes. Cúcuta (1957): The Start of the Frente Nacional Government Néstor and Irene arrived in the capital of the department of Santander on the recommendation of different people who had made up their social network in the capital, during their time as students in Bogotá. Upon the invitation of their friend the journalist, political leader, and future Minister of Labor María Elena de Crovo, Néstor began writing for the Cúcuta weekly El Mural. He would later join the newspaper La Opinión, backed by the politician and future president Virgilio Barco, who was also part of the same Bogotá political and intellectual circles. While Néstor was pursuing a career in journalism, Irene, following her passion for literature, found her own path in teaching. Cúcuta (Late 1960s and into the 1970s) In the second half of the 1960s, when Carlos—youngest son and representative of the middle generation—was born, Irene and Néstor already had two daughters and three sons. According to Carlos’s detailed account, after a short period in Buenaventura, at the home of his grandfather Ramón, during a time in which his parents had temporarily separated, the family was reunited in

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Cúcuta. Due to the social recognition afforded to Néstor and the relatively small size of the city, they were relatively well off and enjoyed a good quality of life. They lived in a large house in a residential neighborhood “with a swimming pool,” and went to a private school whose principal was a friend of their parents. “Everyone knew the parents of the Robles children,” Carlos remarks, and their social position may have been one of the reasons why racism did not affect them so directly or explicitly, although it did not totally protect them from what Carlos calls “racial prejudice” and certain taunts. From a young age, Carlos stood out as an excellent student, and his continued upward mobility was closely associated with academic and career success in the field of biology and ecology, studying at Universidad del Valle, and later in Bogotá and the United States. California, USA (2000): Neoliberal Multiculturalism Carlos and his wife Mónica went to live for a period in California, where Carlos had been invited through his work. Carlos had met Mónica, who is mestiza, when they were both pursuing postgraduate studies at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He commented that, during the first two years of their relationship, Mónica’s father did not approve of him because of the color of his skin, although his future mother-in-law and Monica’s siblings treated him well. The period that Carlos and Mónica spent in San Diego, California, is fondly remembered by Carlos, not only in terms of his professional life, but also for personal reasons. They were living in a neighborhood that was very homogeneous in terms of social class and professional level, but it was also very multicultural and liberal. He had a lot of contact with African American culture, having already been very familiar with it through his family’s interests, and although Black people only made up about 1 percent of the local population, he says “he never felt like he was treated as a minority” and, on the contrary, “he had never been as well received in any country as he was in the United States.” Carlos reflected more deeply on racism and came to understand it as a relationship of power that exerts “a destructive force”; he learned to distinguish racism from racial discrimination or prejudice, and identified the “barriers and challenges” that racism represents for someone like himself, in his own country, and specifically in Bogotá. Moved by these realizations and encouraged by correspondence with a friend from his youth, the idea of creating an organization for the Afro-Colombian population started to take form. Fundación Color de Colombia was founded a few years later, and Carlos describes it as “a new type of activism of the Colombian Black middle class.”



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Canada (2009 to the Present) Carlos was able to carve out an important career as an expert and scientific researcher in the field of environmental sciences and has been living in Canada since 2009 for his work, and has acquired Canadian citizenship as his second nationality. His career has also taken him around the world, and he has spent reasonably long periods in France and the United States, countries that he has seen as important places for the African diaspora since he was a child. His brothers and sisters have also gone on to successful professional lives, albeit in fields different from his own. Bogotá (2009) Amaya, the youngest of my interlocutors in the Robles family, is the daughter of one of Carlos’s sisters. Her father is from Chocó, and she does not have a close relationship with him, as her parents separated when she was two years old. At the time of the interview, in 2009, she was twenty-three years old. She had spent most of her life so far between Bogotá and Cúcuta, which is where her grandparents Néstor and Irene live; she is very close with them. She had also spent some long vacations in Buenaventura, which were important for the construction of her identity as an Afrodescendant woman. She was a child when the new political constitution came into force in 1991. Her life experience reflects the many facets of a young Afrodescendant girl growing up in multiethnic and multicultural Colombia, in which the specificity of the Afrodescendant population is increasingly defined by its cultural output. Amaya feels a strong connection to her grandparents’ “Chocoano identity,” is conscious of the fact that racism exists in the country and, like many Afrodescendants of her generation, speaks plainly of her experiences of discrimination. She explains that she has experienced discrimination because she lives in Bogotá, a city populated predominantly by white-mestizo people. At the time of the interview, she was working in her first job at the Road Maintenance Unit, a position she got through a friend of her mother’s. She had deferred her degree in visual arts at Universidad Javeriana and was engaged in a process of personal rediscovery, which among other things, involved an examination of her ethnic heritage and the reinterpretation of her family’s history. Her point of reference for her Afro-Colombian identity is her grandfather Néstor, who had recently received a prestigious award in the field of journalism.

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THE PALACIOS FAMILY: BETWEEN THE CARIBBEAN COAST AND THE CAPITAL What happened is, when they were giving out apples, your white neighbor was given two, and you were given one, Dad. You ate it, but he ate one and sold the other and was able to buy more fruit. . . . You didn’t have that possibility, you ate the apple and you were left with nothing, you started from scratch. Daniela’s explanation to her father regarding the social inequality faced by Black people

Retiro Nuevo, Environs of María La Baja, Bolívar (1945) Jorge Palacios, the eldest of my interlocutors in the Palacios family, was born in 1945 in a small village in the municipality of María La Baja, in an area with an economy based on agriculture, livestock, and salt mines. He is one of eleven children born to Dolores, a housewife and dressmaker, and Rafael, a miner at the La Samba salt mine. He grew up in a poor, rural area where access to education was limited, and studied up to the fifth grade, from a very young age working as a day laborer, cleaning up plantain, cassava, and corn. Caracas, Venezuela (1963): Venezuelan Oil Boom At the age of eighteen, Jorge traveled to Caracas, one of many who went as part of a major wave of migration from the department of Bolívar to Venezuela, which took advantage of the favorable exchange rate when earning in Venezuelan bolivars. Despite this, and unlike some experiences of rapid wealth accumulation, Jorge had to work extremely hard in order to amass economic capital,2 as a street trader of fruits and vegetables in Caracas. There, he met his wife Lydia, an Afro-Colombian woman from Riohacha, who was then working as a maid in a family home. Despite never feeling completely at home in a city they perceived as dangerous and hostile, Jorge remained in Caracas for twenty years, while Lydia was based in Colombia, where she had family support for raising their children. Over two decades, Jorge and Lydia were able to save enough to allow them to both return to Colombia to a better quality of life and, above all, secure a better education than their own for their four children. Cartagena (1977): The New Marketplace at Bazurto When Daniela, their third daughter, was five years old, the family moved to Cartagena. There, Jorge set up a wholesale cassava and plantain business in



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Bazurto, Cartagena’s largest marketplace, with which he was able to support the family and achieve his goal of providing, as he says, “education, affection, and a good example” to his four children (one lad and three lasses, as he puts it), instilling in them the importance of being “sensible” so that they can achieve their goals and “get ahead.” Bogotá (1998) Daniela Palacios, my second interlocutor in this family, is the only one of her siblings with a postgraduate degree. Her eldest sister started working at a very young age and, at the time of the interview, managed a beauty salon in a naval club in Cartagena. Her brother, a policeman, was at that time living in Venezuela, and her younger sister was in Cartagena, working as a civil servant. Daniela has always been very determined, and this side of her personality helped her to complete her master’s degree, along with the unwavering support of her older sister. She has always been gifted academically, and after graduating as a social worker from Universidad de Cartagena in the early nineties, she moved to the capital in search of greater educational and professional opportunities. She decided to go back to school to better compete in Bogotá’s job market. In 1998 she obtained her master’s degree in Community Psychology from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. She has had a long and successful career in the public sector. Her first roles were in the Vice-Ministry of Young People and then the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF). While at ICBF, she worked for a (white-mestiza) boss, who when she departed to the Secretary of Education recommended that Daniela come with her. At the time of our interview, Daniela was the Director of Community Inclusion and Integration at the Secretary of Education, managing a team of forty people. While she does identify as Black, she embraces her Caribbean identity first and foremost. Cartagena (2008) The youngest of my interlocutors in this family is Luis, one of the three sons of Daniela’s older brother. At the time of the interview he was studying social work at Universidad de Cartagena. Luis’s father has lived in Venezuela for most of his life, and his mother, who has married again, runs a food business out of her home; the family lives on the income generated by this business. Luis grew up in lower-middle-class neighborhoods in Cartagena, close to his aunts and his paternal grandfather, a person who is very important to him. Luis originally wanted to study political science at a private university, but without the financial means to do so, he decided to stay in Cartagena for university. Despite the fact that it was his second choice, he says he is enjoying

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his college experience, as it is benefiting his intellectual and personal growth. One of his great loves is music and culture out of the Pacific, a region he considers the center of Blackness in Colombia. Similar to other young city dwellers, he identifies first and foremost as an Afrodescendant, with his regional (Caribbean) and national (Afro-Colombian) identities coming second. THE JONES FAMILY: BETWEEN THE ISLANDS AND THE MAINLAND We ants never borrow We ants never lend We ants do our work. Rhyme sung by Rosa to her daughters in English and Spanish3

San Andrés (1953): Declaration of the Duty-free Zone In 1953, General Rojas Pinilla’s government declared San Andrés a duty-free zone, as part of a project with the objective of overcoming the archipelago’s isolation from the rest of the country. The duty-free zone was intended to attract Colombian tourists to the island, as they could now acquire imported products in San Andrés without having to pay tariffs. The expansion of tourism had negative effects on the local population, or “Raizales” as they call themselves, as they found themselves marginalized from the economic sectors that generated the most employment: construction, commerce, hotels, and restaurants (Meisel Roca 2003). In this same year Miriam was born in the Corn Islands, an archipelago which was transferred from Colombian possession to Nicaragua in 1928 as a result of the Esguerra-Bárcenas treaty, an official agreement that sought to solve the territorial disputes between the two countries and establish Colombian sovereignty over the islands of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina (Alvarado Bedoya 2014). Miriam’s mother, Rosa Down, who according to Miriam was white, already had four children by her deceased first husband when she met Miriam’s father, who was originally from Grand Cayman, one of the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory, and who she describes as “Black.” After a short and rocky relationship they separated when Miriam was three months old; Rosa decided to move to San Andrés with her children. There she worked in different jobs, including as a dressmaker, laundrywoman, and cook. For Rosa, work did not necessarily mean social mobility, but rather it conferred dignity and, importantly for a woman,



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independence. A great reader and a hard worker, Rosa passed on these values to her sons and daughters and took an active role in their education, ensuring that they spoke both English and Spanish. San Andrés (1971) After finishing high school at the age of eighteen, Miriam married a (Black) San Andrés native who worked as a taxi driver. In the years that followed, they had four children together, including their second daughter Jane, my second interlocutor from this family, born in 1977. At this time, Miriam was working as a secretary at the Bolivar School, where her mother had worked as a cook. She had a good command of Spanish thanks to her “privilege” of having been able to spend time with Catholic monks and nuns who were spreading the Spanish language across the archipelago, and these language skills helped her to land this job. She had wanted to be an architect, but there was no money at home to pay for higher education; “the women of San Andrés were never encouraged to venture onto the Colombian mainland,” she told us. Bogotá (1995) At the age of forty-two, Miriam divorced her husband, tired of his infidelities, and decided to fulfill her dream of studying. When her children left for university in Bogotá, Miriam went with them and enrolled in law school at Universidad la Gran Colombia. They all shared an apartment that Miriam had bought for that purpose and survived on the proceeds of a stationer’s shop on San Andrés that she owned and had run alongside her secretarial work. Both Miriam and her daughter Jane were able to access government scholarships for their outstanding academic performance. Jane studied economics at Universidad Nacional as a beneficiary of the “Best High School Graduates from the Poorer Municipalities” program, while her mother finished her law degree and started working for the San Andrés Ombudsman’s Office. At the time of the interview, both of Jane’s brothers, one a high school graduate and the other a college graduate, were working on Norwegian cruise ships, and her younger sister was studying Communications at university while living and working in Bogotá. San Andrés (2008–2011) After graduating as an economist in 2000, Jane studied, with a scholarship, for a master’s degree in Environmental Economics at Universidad de los Andes, and decided to pursue a PhD in Sustainable Development at Universidad de Guadalajara, through contacts her boss in Bogotá had made

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with a group of visiting Mexican professors. She returned to San Andrés to work as a university professor, and she initially encountered many difficulties due to the persistent harassment of a (male) superior. Many of the obstacles she encountered at the start of her career, with her professional abilities going unrecognized, had to do with existing prejudices against the professionalism of the Raizal population in favor of mainland white-mestizo employees. In Jane’s case, she understands her harassment as part of the widespread racist and sexist prejudice held against a professional woman of Raizal and African descent. During this same period she was going through problems with her husband, a fellow islander who she met when they were both studying at Universidad Nacional in Bogotá. Although she had recently given birth to their daughter, she decided it would be better to separate because of his infidelity, and turned the breakup into an opportunity to finish her doctorate. She went with her six-month-old daughter to Mexico, financing the trip with savings and some help from her daughter’s father and her own father. She graduated with a PhD in 2011. San Andrés (2012) In November 2012, the International Court of Justice in The Hague fixed new maritime borders in the Caribbean Sea between Colombia and Nicaragua to resolve a long-standing dispute between the two countries. They divided the continental shelf into two equal parts, which meant that Colombia lost about 43 percent of its maritime territory in the Caribbean Sea, dealing a heavy blow to the San Andrés fishing economy. In the midst of the political turmoil created by the court’s ruling, Jane Jones was offered the directorship of the university teaching center where she worked, as a way of guaranteeing her tenure and fostering the participation of more Raizal people in management positions. She was officially appointed as director for the period 2012–2014, becoming the first Raizal person to hold this position. STRATEGIES FOR ACHIEVING UPWARD MOBILITY: SOME SPECIFIC TO ONE FAMILY, OTHERS EMPLOYED BY ALL Having outlined the three family histories in such a way as to allow the events, social relations, and common themes contained within through an intergenerational and intersectional lens, I will identify strategies—some shared by all three families, and others specific to each—that have been employed to achieve that sought-after upward social mobility. In the



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following section, based on the accounts of family members, I will explore the strategies that these families consider to have been necessary for their upward social mobility. The families’ social advancement is related to their geographical movement from the periphery to the center, as it is connected to the search for better opportunities. Moreover, many of these movements are part of generalized waves of migration made by Black people in Colombia in the twentieth century, as in the case of Jorge and his migration to Venezuela. Néstor’s migration is fairly representative of that of many Black men of his generation, who at first moved to the country’s larger cities to study, and then subsequently settled in one city or another, thanks to the job opportunities they were offered (Urrea Giraldo 2011; Pisano 2012). In the three stories told above, time spent in Bogotá was key to finding opportunities and building social networks. Numerous studies have shown the importance of building and maintaining social networks—both within and outside of the family—for upward social mobility. These networks contain knowledge and mutual understanding that can be mobilized to procure different types of support, safeguards, and influence for the acquisition of material and symbolic goods (such as family and community relationships, political party membership, close friendships, etc.) which can generally be converted into greater economic capital (Fernández Espejo 2003). The women in these histories—both mothers and sisters—often rallied their family networks and sacrificed much to provide the necessary support for chosen family members to achieve their university aspirations. Studies have categorized two distinct types of networks: heterogeneous and homogeneous networks, depending on whether there is contact with members of different social classes (Domínguez 2004). Néstor, Daniela, and Jane’s experiences and possibilities for upward mobility show the importance of heterogeneous networks, as they made connections during their time as students or while working in Bogotá with people from the white-mestizo middle and upper classes. Specifically, Néstor’s participation in the capital’s left-wing intellectual circles, the senior colleague who took Daniela with her when she left to work for the Secretary of Education, and the Mexican colleagues of Jane’s boss who influenced her decision to study for a PhD in Mexico are all examples of networking that brought professional opportunities that they would otherwise have missed. Black people’s emancipation through formal education is an essential factor for the interpretation of these life stories. This is true for every generation, despite the very different circumstances that each faced. Without exception, all of my interlocutors reported having been part of a family that instilled in them the importance of study and working hard at school for the achievement of their professional and personal goals.4 In the absence of economic capital, these families’ primary legacy was providing the motivation and conditions

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for their children to do well at school. In some cases, access was also facilitated by institutional networks that performed functions that the family was unable to fulfill, such as state investment in education and its expansion, the establishment of educational institutions in peripheral locations, or the implementation of inclusive policies. Néstor belongs to a generation of Black people originating from the Pacific region who benefited from the improvements in education which were the result of the sociopolitical changes that took place both nationwide and in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century. In the late 1980s, in tandem with the advance of multiculturalism, inclusion and affirmative action policies began to be implemented in Colombian higher education, such as the Special Admissions Program (PAES) created in 1986 by Universidad Nacional with the aim of fostering the admission of populations historically excluded from higher education, in this case, indigenous communities and top high school graduates from poor municipalities (Gómez Campo and Celis Giraldo 2009). Both Miriam and Jane were beneficiaries of these new public policies in the 1990s. Although access to higher education continues to be important for the upward social mobility of more recent generations of Afro-Colombians, it no longer offers the same guarantees as it did in the past. Those who graduated from university before the 1980s were able to access fairly high-level positions with an undergraduate degree. However, subsequent generations were increasingly confronted with the need to obtain a graduate degree in order to compete in the mid-level labor market. The phenomenon of the devaluation of academic qualifications and increased competition has been documented in other cases of Black people’s upward social mobility (Viveros-Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010, 113). For the youngest generations of the Black middle class, access to higher education is a given, particularly for those who have grown up in established middle-class homes; their stories show that, due to having a safety net, they have had some leeway to make personal choices in how they have pursued their education, as is the case of the Robles family. For families with less access to all manner of resources, such as the Palacios, there is no question as to whether the younger generation will go to college or not, but there are considerations to be made as to the kind of university their budget allows. The stories of these three families show the importance that public education continues to have for non-wealthy families in Colombia, allowing them to study, not only to “obtain a degree,” but also to “broaden their horizons,” learn to think critically, and “grow as individuals.” Entrepreneurial activity and astute economic decisions were also key to the upward trajectory of these families. The sacrifice and determination of people like Jorge and Miriam, as well as certain socioeconomic opportunities of the era, led to a generational leap forward, as well as a fragile but important progression in social mobility. Without higher education, these



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individuals depended on their resourcefulness, entrepreneurship, hard work, savings, and knowledge and skills acquired through practical experience. All of these were crucial for laying a stable base from which they could seek better opportunities for themselves or for their children. Jorge’s entrepreneurship and its direct connection to his upward social mobility can be compared to Figueiredo’s findings in her study of Black entrepreneurs in Bahia, Brazil (2012), in which she observed that embarking on an entrepreneurial venture could serve as an alternative means of social mobility that did not depend on having received formal schooling. The “average” profile for a Black entrepreneur that Figueiredo describes, based on national censuses and surveys, is very similar to Jorge’s: a married man, son of agricultural workers, between twenty-five and forty-five years of age, head of the household, with incomplete secondary education, and owner of a small or medium-sized business established outside the home, probably in the food industry. Having explored strategies that all three families employed, to conclude this section, I will now describe strategies of upward social mobility particular to each of the three families studied, as illustrative examples of tactics and practices adopted in pursuit of social mobility. The Robles Family This family’s story illustrates the importance that father figures hold for upward social mobility. The men of the Robles family have occupied a central place as “cumplidores,” i.e., “dutiful” family men (Viveros-Vigoya 2002), responsibly shouldering their duties in all areas, both familial and marital, to guarantee the economic security and emotional well-being of their wives and children. These qualities are expected for men of their social position, and disprove the widely held stereotypes of Black men as irresponsible, absent fathers and husbands, and as spendthrifts (Viveros-Vigoya 2002; Pisano 2014b). In this case, it can be argued that growing up in a household with an involved father favors the intergenerational transmission of material wealth and social status, as the family’s accumulated cultural and economic capital is not fragmented by the parents’ separation. This sort of family setup also implies an adjustment to white-mestizo society’s ideas of respectability and a distancing from negative stereotypes about Black families, which continue to be generalized as unstable, polygynous, and with an absent father (ViverosVigoya 2002, 143–48). The improvement in the quality of life of the Robles family and their installment in the echelons of the upper-middle classes of Cúcuta was aided by their geographic location in a provincial city while maintaining ties to the capital. In a smaller city and in possession of good educational and social capital, Néstor was able to achieve notoriety and recognition in elite circles,

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forge links with groups of social influence, and have these capitals validated within this social context. This in turn made it possible for him to accumulate economic capital, due to the lower cost of living of a medium-sized city, and to offer a better quality of life and well-being to his family. The Jones Family The account of the Jones family of San Andrés evidences another route to upward social mobility, in which the point of reference for each generation are women. In the interviews with the Jones family women, speaking on the topic of fathers, husbands, and partners, they gave the impression that these men were somewhat irrelevant, and in some cases even hindered personal and professional development. Although the sexual division of labor described in their narrative points to the existence of certain roles that largely define the workplaces and job opportunities of both men and women, what is striking is the emphasis the Jones women place on men’s failure to fulfill their conjugal and parental responsibilities, and the effect this had on their lives in terms of it forcing them to break these norms. The experience related by the Jones family fits with characterizations made by a number of studies of families in Caribbean societies, describing them “as extensive, matrifocal, matricentric, . . . where men are relegated to the periphery” (Valencia 2008, 65). A very important part of this family’s strategy of upward mobility was the decision to separate from partners after they had extramarital affairs in order to recover lost dignity, and to take on the sole responsibility of working to achieve their own goals and those of their children. It is worth mentioning that both Miriam and Jane’s success has manifested through their subverting of the everyday mechanisms of masculine power that operate in their daily lives. However, the root of the difficulties they have had to face can be traced to reasons not only of gender, but also of ethnicity and race. Jane’s story clearly demonstrates that she has had to overcome a lack of recognition for her cultural capital by state institutions that replicate stereotypes reinforced by male and ethno-racial domination. Her observations show that in societies that are simultaneously multiracial, multicultural, and racist, as is the case in Colombia, racism shapes gender hierarchies. The Palacios Family The creation of strong emotional attachments within the family unit was key to the upward social mobility of the Palacios family. These ties allowed Jorge and his wife Lydia to live separately for many years, while he was working in Venezuela and she had returned to Colombia with the children. Despite being unhappy in Caracas, Jorge remained there mostly alone for



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almost twenty years, because it represented his best chance of accumulating economic capital and, at the same time, being able to meet Lydia’s needs, as she required the support of her wider family in Colombia to raise their young children. Moreover, these emotional bonds can be felt in the testimonies of both his daughter Daniela and his grandson Luis, when they refer to Jorge’s unconditional support, and describe him as “a great man” who has earned the deep respect and love that they profess to have for him. The emotional closeness that this father has with his daughters and grandchildren undermines the myth of Black men as absent fathers, often deployed strategically to distract from other problems, including structural racism. ETHNO-RACIAL IDENTITIES AS AN EXPERIENCE OF FLUIDITY Although Afro-Colombian upward social mobility has followed a number of general trends, the differing regional configurations of the Black middle classes between the Pacific and Caribbean due to the distinct sociohistorical and family dynamics of each have had an influence on the way in which “Black identity” is experienced and expressed. Regarding family structure, the accounts of the three families show a greater complexity than that of the “classic” family models described for Colombia’s Black population. They also show that upward social mobility does not depend on a specific type of family organization, nor on the obligatory use of any particular strategy or avenue of social mobility. However, it is important to take into account the differences in the experiences of my interlocutors in the first generations of the island and mainland Caribbean families, compared to those of the families from the Pacific region, and also to consider that the experiences of the different generations of families from the same region show both similarities and differences. Ways of expressing Black identity differ across the three regions mentioned above, and these have changed over time and in accordance with the sociohistorical circumstances. To give an example, the ethnic identity of Néstor’s generation was more closely linked to regional origins (in his case a Chocoano identity) than to racial consciousness. This is not to say, however, that he was able to ignore the existence of clear socio-racial boundaries in cities such as Quibdó and Popayán, despite the prevailing discourse of mestizaje. For his son Carlos, who grew up between Cúcuta, Cali, and Bogotá in the second half of the twentieth century, in a white middle-class environment, his identity continued to be linked to his family’s region of origin, the Pacific, but it also incorporated references to Black identity that came from the struggles fought by African Americans in the United States for their civil rights. His

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experiences in the United States and Canada consolidated the shaping of this identity. For his niece Amaya, who belongs to the generation of Colombia’s post-constitutional change, her sense of ethno-racial belonging is clearer, but at the same time it is expressed in a more individualized way. She is proud of her Chocoano roots and can identify with perfect clarity any acts and behaviors of racial discrimination directed at her, but at the same time does not feel the need to join anti-racist collectives or political movements. How the Palacios family answered when asked about their racial or ethnic identity depended on their age and the discourses in which they had been immersed. Jorge at first responded that he was “moreno,”5 and only after he was “corrected” by one of his daughters, changed his answer to Black. Daniela, who works in policies linked to multiculturalism, identifies as Black, but stresses her specifically Caribbean experience of Blackness, differentiated from that of the Pacific. She questions the homogenization of “Blackness” in Colombia. Luis, conversely, proudly identifies as Black without making any reference to his Caribbean identity, and cites the Pacific as one of the heartlands of Blackness in Colombia. He also has strong criticisms of the social and racial order in Cartagena and in Colombia as a whole, and of the effects of whitening and mestizaje. These three positions reflect different facets of two opposing conceptions of mestizaje that are local to Cartagena: one that is anchored in a harmonious view of race relations and is embodied by the figure of Pedro Claver, the “slave to the slaves,” who dedicated his life to improving the living conditions of the enslaved; and another represented by the cimarrones and palenques, which “introduces . . . a historical, cultural, and—nowadays—political separation between the palenqueros and the rest of the Black, mulatto, or mestizo population, who cannot identify with this history of resistance” (Cunin 2002, 283–84). Much of the Jones family’s upward social mobility took place against the backdrop of the political and cultural Colombianization of the island, and the formation of Miriam and Jane’s identities were marked by this new context. Initially, they were required to learn Spanish in order to better integrate into Colombian society, which at the time was imagined to be homogeneous, both linguistically and religiously, with no room for ethno-racial diversity (Guevara 2007). Later, after the rewriting of the constitution, they tried to navigate the obstacles and seize the advantages of being part of the island’s original population. In their interviews they mentioned different ways of dealing with racism. Although Miriam recognizes that racism exists, and that it is problematic, she insists that she has never felt discriminated against because of the color of her skin, and says that, really, “it is you, and not the rest of the world, who is discriminating against yourself.” For her, “feeling” like an equal is the same as “being” equal, and her strategy is to “not take any notice” of those who discriminate against her. In contrast, Jane perceives that



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the difficulties she has encountered in her working life are due to her dark complexion (or, as she calls herself for being the darkest member of her family, being “the black sheep”), but also because of the fact that she is Raizal. This awareness has forced her to develop a different strategy to that of her mother in the face of prejudice: she does not respond directly, but undermines discrimination by producing better work through total professional dedication. In relation to their ethnic identity, although Irene and Jane are both Catholic, Spanish-speaking, and either completely or partially professionally educated in universities on the mainland, they identify as Raizales, claiming a particular Afro-Anglo-Caribbean identity and setting it apart from the Afro-Colombian category.6 FINAL REFLECTIONS The strategies for upward social mobility described in this section start to become more meaningful if we compare them to existing ideas about the social mobility of Black people in Colombia which have been documented by Pisano (2014b) in a piece that reviewed articles about Black public figures published in Colombian magazines, particularly the magazine Cromos, in the second half of the twentieth century. He asserts that the upward mobility of Black people was represented as an anomaly because it contradicted the prevailing notion of the Black population as inevitably poor. In this book, some of my interlocutors’ stories, particularly those told by the older generation, show that while they have been shaped by the ideology of mestizaje—which preached that it was imperative to emulate the behaviors and values of the dominant classes, in other words, to “don a mask of whiteness” (Pisano 2014b) and renounce any claim to particularism—, they nonetheless evidence some partial transformations. These can especially be seen in the redefining of women’s gender roles, in the way women have seized their own paths, and in their explanation that they achieved their goals as the result of personal merit and effort. This is quite different from the stories published in Cromos that narrated the upward mobility of Black women by mainly employing the prevailing gender stereotypes about women’s supposed passivity and explaining their achievements as pure luck and brought about through the intervention of people who belonged to the dominant race or gender. It is important to stress that these changes have come about through the circulation of feminist discourses and their appropriation by Black, Afro-Colombian, and Raizal women. Similarly crucial has been the identification of the specificities of Black women’s experiences of sexism, which are always linked to racism.

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My interlocutors who are younger, in contrast to previous generations, feel authorized to speak about racial discrimination as an obstacle that must be overcome, and as something that they have experienced personally. Older generations often talked about it as something that happened to other people to avoid the symbolic cost of admitting to being the target of discrimination (Viveros-Vigoya 2007). However, the results of the research presented here, as well as more recent studies, have shown that racism currently tends to be perceived as the sum of discriminatory attitudes and behaviors, rather than a structural phenomenon. This has caused it to be treated as a problem that can be solved through educational programs, campaigns in the media, or the provision of funds and technical assistance to communities, while “the prevailing socio-racial and neo-liberal order” remains intact (Laó-Montes 2020; Moreno Figueroa and Wade 2021). The three family histories show that representations of identity are not only connected to regional and national history, but also to global discourses, movements, and politics. They also confirm that identities are neither fixed nor independent of the family circumstances and subjective experiences of those who claim them. They evidence that processes of identification can fluctuate between connections to ancestral legacies, collective ideas, and individual aspirations, which can “contradict” without canceling each other out, “disappearing,” or losing their social relevance (Hoffmann 2007, 286). When thinking about the Black middle classes, it is important to stress the absence of collective cultural references (Pattillo, Bermúdez Rico, and Mosquera Guevara 2021). The data used for this book confirm that the strongest points of reference for identity are connected to regional experiences, often from my interlocutors’ hometowns or extended family. For Pattillo, Bermúdez Rico, and Mosquera Guevara (2021), this explains the difficulty that the Black middle classes have in finding common cultural references strong enough to unify them as a social group and mobilize them politically. Furthermore, the ethnization of identities which multiculturalism has promoted only reinforced the regional cultural identities that existed before, and which continue to bolster a strong sense of cohesion across the social classes. NOTES 1. The families featured here have been assigned fictional names and surnames in order to preserve their anonymity. Although I would have preferred to include their real names because their stories are associated with very precise historical events and public figures, it was not possible to do so because not all of my interlocutors could, for various reasons, give their consent to be named.



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2. This chapter uses the concept of capital—be it economic, cultural or social—, as Bourdieu (1986, 241) defines it: “Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its “incorporated,” embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.” I consider this concept useful for understanding the management of these goods as a means of social differentiation which become capital when they start to be accumulated. 3. Based on an anonymous nineteenth-century poem of Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Cricket.” See Dawe (1876, 113). 4. Classic studies in the United States suggest that Black families see aspirations to attend college and secure a graduate-level job as family goals, and the entire family may make sacrifices and provide support for their achievement (McAdoo 1978, cit. in Higginbotham and Weber 1992, 419). 5. “Moreno,” meaning brown, is one of a range of terms used in Latin America that alludes to skin color, and only indirectly implies a racial belonging (Viveros-Vigoya 2007). 6. According to Leiva Espitia (2013, 148), this differentiation is based on the fact that as well as having African roots, the Raizal identity is a product of the processes that took place on the archipelago.

Chapter 7

Women Teachers, Ethno-Educators, and Microentrepreneurs in the Formation‌‌‌‌, Reformation, and Transformation of the Black Middle Classes

In this chapter I analyze the discourses and practices of Afrodescendant women schoolteachers, ethno-educators, and microentrepreneurs at different historical junctures, to examine the way in which differences of gender, class, and race have contributed to the formation of the Black middle classes and the construction of different narratives about them. I argue that these differences have redefined the Black middle classes in practical ways. As will be seen over the course of the chapter, this process was based on the adoption of a collective Black identity that has distanced itself from a model of individualistic and capitalist upward social mobility. Over the course of their different careers, these women have developed strategies in their day-to-day life to resolve the dilemmas, overlaps, and misalignments found at the intersection of gender, class, and race (Román 2017). These women teachers, ethno-educators, and microentrepreneurs have contributed in different ways to increasing the material and symbolic well-being of their communities of origin, and in this sense have improved their own social position by means of strengthening the fabric of a community which has been continually threatened by years of combined racism, sexism, and classism.

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THE ROLE PLAYED BY BLACK WOMEN TEACHERS IN THE FORMATION OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES As explained in chapter 4, teaching allowed a first generation of Black women who had trained at escuelas normales (teacher training colleges), to rise through the social ranks, find their vocation, and achieve “personal fulfillment” in a pigmentocratic society. Although Black women worked as teachers before access was granted to official training, setting up and running their own schools for the Afrodescendant population in rural areas (Hurtado-Garcés 2020), the founding of teacher training colleges for young women gave them the opportunity to receive training and become respected figures in the community. Teaching was only one of a few jobs open to women, and it offered the possibility of moving up the social ladder. One of my interlocutors, Ezequiela Urrutia, born in Chocó in 1921, said that she wanted to be a teacher because “I wanted to learn! I wanted more knowledge, not just how to do the household chores.” She went to live with one of her brothers in town and told him that she “wasn’t coming to be his servant, [she] was there to study.” She attended school and then studied at the teacher training college. The number of women who studied to become teachers was so high that there was a surplus of teachers. The infrastructure of local schools and colleges could not absorb all the graduates, and so many were forced to migrate to cities in the country’s interior for job openings in the teaching profession. Although teaching was the only career that women could access at that time, it was seen as valid and prestigious work, and teaching positions were numerous. In the 1930s, a number of Black women from the regions of Gran Cauca and Chocó were able to receive training through government scholarships. This was the case for Livia Abadía de Valencia, who studied at Normal de Señoritas de Popayán, one of the rural teacher training colleges created in 1935 by government ministers López de Mesa and Nieto Caballero with “the objective of preparing young ladies from Cauca, Valle, Nariño, and Chocó who wanted to undertake the mission of imparting education in their home regions.” The founding of these colleges was one of main methods by which the Liberal Government implemented their policies of modernization, democratization, and social assistance for the rural population (Sáenz Obregón 1995, 163). These programs were designed to educate women teachers in a role of “leadership for campesino communities, engaged in efforts to raise up humanity through better hygiene, the development of the economy and agriculture, imparting moral values to the population, and by improving their own personal presentation.” López de Mesa also wished to transform how rural



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women teachers presented themselves, encouraging them to copy the style of urban women, since he was of the opinion that “if the teacher was attractive in her presentation, she could achieve greater discipline” (López de Mesa cit. in Sáenz Obregón 1995, 163). Upon her return to Chocó from Popayán, Livia was put in charge of the creation, consolidation, and supervision of almost all primary schools in Chocó, together with five other women teachers from the same department. Livia and her team replaced women teachers who had arrived some time before from Cauca (Pisano 2010, 72). Livia says that “the women teachers had a big influence, they did a huge amount of work with the authorities and the primary and secondary schools to help the children in these villages become good citizens, and improve their quality of life.” She also says that an educational institution created in 1912 by nuns in Quibdó, Colegio de las Hermanas de la Presentación, which until the late 1940s denied entry to Black girls and girls born out of wedlock, “began to leave behind its elitist tendencies, thanks to the work of these women teachers from the colleges. . . . The nuns came to their senses and began to provide education to everyone, overcoming their prejudices against illegitimate children, and black and mulatto children, and that was a blessing” (interview conducted in August 2014). Livia’s work was recognized in 2009 when the government awarded her a first-class Camilo Torres Civic Medal, a prize that rewards Colombian teachers and professors for their “outstanding service, impeccable conduct, apostolic spirit, perseverance, and fellowship.” However, not all women teachers stayed in their regions of origin, with some migrating to the country’s urban centers, including to Bogotá, to work in the capital’s public schools. The perception of Bogotá as an attractive city in contrast to the deprivations of their hometowns and a place of economic and social opportunity is a determining factor in understanding the migrations made by Black women to the capital between 1940 and 1960 from the Pacific and Caribbean regions, and the departments of Valle del Cauca and Cauca (Angola and Wabgou 2015). Black women’s integration into the world of work through teaching, encouraged since the 1930s by Liberal governments, is one of the expressions of the country’s modernization process, underway since that same period, and a phenomenon with great significance for the formation of the Black middle classes in Colombia. The emergence of the teaching profession on both regional and national levels effectively ushered in a new social category for Afrodescendant people, differing from the prevailing images of the time that evoked the worker and campesino, but never the elites, who were always white or mestizo. A teaching career offered the possibility of escape from a social destiny that assigned men to manual labor in the fields or factories, and women to domestic servitude. In other words, Afrodescendant people acquiring the skills and

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moral values associated with intellectual labor created new gender and class distinctions. Carmen Serna Velásquez, a teacher from Chocó who graduated from Bogotá institutions Liceo Femenino de Cundinamarca “Mercedes Nariño” and Escuela Normal Superior (mentioned in chapter 4), gives an account of what it was like for Black women students at that time: “My arrival at Escuela Normal Superior was difficult. People were surprised [because] I was the first Black woman they had encountered studying there; this was the beginning of February in ’47. I enrolled on a social studies course that I wanted to take. . . . That first year I worked myself to the bone studying to get good marks. In the second year I won a scholarship and things started to change.” The accounts of Livia de Abadía and Carmen Serna are typical of the experiences that many of the first graduates of the women’s teacher training colleges shared. These women tell similar stories about themselves and their lives, recounting journeys of personal fulfillment that started from “humble” beginnings, and improved thanks to education, hard work, and perseverance. These women teachers began to self-identify as part of a group that occupied an intermediate place in the social strata. Their horizons widened by their work, they also started to yearn for more out of life than what their “humble” beginnings would have afforded them. For these women, a career in teaching meant a job which, however modest, broke with the racial and gender-based stereotypes that saw Black women associated with household service. They were tasked with the important and valued goal of bringing about social progress, of “building the nation” (as one of my interlocutors put it), providing access to formal education for “their own people,” and creating citizens. They performed these tasks as part of a mestizo and modern nation that paradoxically did not include them in its national story. Unlike Black men working as teachers, who saw a position in teaching as a stepping stone to the world of regional politics, women teachers embraced the job as a social mission to form bonds of solidarity with those on society’s margins, and to mold the ethics of the younger generations. As has been documented elsewhere (Escobar García and Garcés Gómez 2012), for women, teaching was closely linked to a kind of social motherhood, in which they took on both the academic and moral education of their students, imparting the importance of a work ethic, discipline, and perseverance on the road to success and progress. The mothers of two of my interlocutors, Carlos and Ana, were schoolteachers from Chocó. Both were married to Black men from their region of origin who had studied law in Bogotá and were pursuing their own careers. When Ana’s parents first came to Bogotá in the 1960s, when she was a small child, money was scarce. Within a few years however, Ana’s father was earning enough that the family was able to live in a middle-class neighborhood, in a



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house big enough to be able to host extended family members from Chocó while they studied in Bogotá, and, at the behest of her mother, the children were sent to “the best” private school in that part of the city. Both Carlos and Ana’s mothers stayed at home while their children were young, as their husband’s salaries were enough to cover their expenses, and they had large families to look after (six and eight children respectively). But as the children grew up, both women went back to work as teachers, as well as pursuing further study. As mothers, these teachers transmitted to their children a vision of the world which privileged knowledge and learning. The testimonies of my interlocutors attest that behind the successful academic performance and career paths of many children was a mother in the teaching profession who instilled in them the importance of study and the expectation that they would go up in the world through their educational achievement (Viveros-Vigoya and Gil Hernández 2010). Ana acknowledges that although their childhood was comfortable, there was little material wealth, nor a family business to inherit. For this reason, she says, her mother was so strict about Ana and her sibling’s performance at school. Preparing “good citizens” for a nation which defined itself as mestizo and homogeneous meant imparting its civilizing project of assimilation and mestizaje, whilst simultaneously expanding access to the education system for the new generations of Afro-Colombians, for whom education was the only way to achieve social mobility. For Afro-Colombians in general, and those from Chocó in particular, social mobility and the way in which it can neutralize—even partly—the effects of racial discrimination, is strongly linked to education. Diego Luis Córdoba, the politician who campaigned for the creation of the department of Chocó in 1947, captured the idea behind this link in his famous quote: “Through ignorance we descend into servitude, through education we ascend to freedom” (Urrea Giraldo 2011; Pisano 2010).1 In the 1950s, a period that saw the country rocked by political violence, in which families and communities were struggling to survive and evade fragmentation, the ruling classes stressed the importance of education and identified its lack as one of the causes of the violence. In this regard, former president Lleras Camargo’s speech in 1954 is very illustrative, stating that “the cruelty that characterized this most recent epoch of our history would not have taken such a heavy toll on an educated nation, on a civilized country” (cited by Helg 2001, 215). It was in this same period that the discourses of domesticity and the idea of women as synonymous with motherhood started to gain strength, and Black women teachers, as nonmanual workers and minor public officials, could claim to belong to a new social category of women and of Black Colombians, which disproved “the stereotypes that considered them incapable of contributing culturally to national life” and lent support to an

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“overcoming of their political, economic, and cultural relegation with respect to white people” (Pisano 2010, 71). Through public policy, the Frente Nacional government sought to overcome what at the time was considered the greatest obstacle to the creation of a democracy: the legacy of the violence of the 1950s (López Pedreros 2015). López Pedreros (2015) affirms that the Frente Nacional’s politicaladministrative agreements also responded to the transnational mandate of establishing a middle class through the design and implementation of state policies supported by various private American and European organizations. These policies sought to eliminate the alleged causes of violence, such as economic inequalities and class antagonisms, as well as the ongoing existence of feudal modes of production and class relations. Colombia joined the project alongside other Latin American countries and shared the concern of the intellectuals of several North American and European universities and of the development offices of the United States and various international organizations of achieving modernization and democracy through the strengthening of the middle class (López Pedreros 2019; Parker 2022). For these groups, the middle classes were the only faction capable of addressing and mitigating the many threats of political radicalization and social polarization attributed to influence of the Cuban revolution, to which these countries were vulnerable due to the fact that they represented “a great mass of people supposedly ignorant of democracy and its benefits, as such” (López Pedreros 2015, 130). As has been referred to in chapter 4, from the perspective of the Afro-Colombian population, the Frente Nacional restricted the field of political dispute to one of confrontations between socialist-communist and anti-socialist-communist factions. Meanwhile, it paradoxically opened up spaces for culture that allowed Afro-Colombians to overcome these temporary difficulties and develop Black and Afro-Colombian counter-discourses (Valderrama 2019). This period saw the creation of social networks of AfroColombians who were converging at that time in the capital, and women teachers were some of those who participated in these groups. These networks provided opportunities to begin to mobilize ethno-cultural agendas within the prevailing official and class discourses of the time. They also created new areas of Afro-Colombian public life, revolving around what Arboleda Quiñónez (2016, 27) calls “intimate sufficiencies,” defined as “intellectual alignments, epistemic keystones, and social practices” that shape and consolidate a group’s existence.



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“COSTEÑA” WOMEN TEACHERS AND UNION STRUGGLE Across the country in the 1960s, teachers started to come into contact with the organized labor movement, learning their methods for organizing and adopting their political demands in an attempt to improve their paradoxical situation of performing a “respected social function” that nevertheless was not well remunerated. An important milestone in the history of these struggles for women teachers especially, was the 1966 Marcha del Hambre (Hunger March) (González Blanco 2019). It was organized by teachers from Santa Marta who walked the 1,600 kilometers from their city to Bogotá to call attention to the different problems they faced in their profession and to seek answers to them. The Marcha del Hambre has been recognized as the first demonstration to have a national impact on the different sectors of Colombian society. It also introduced innovative forms of protest that were new to the teachers’ organizations, and it had significant influence in the fight for better social and economic conditions for teachers, as well as on legislation for the professionalization of the teaching profession (ibid., 77). The Marcha del Hambre was mostly made up of women; of the six hundred marchers who left Santa Marta, only eighty-eight—fifty-five women and thirty-three men—arrived in the capital (Fecode and Larärförbundet 2010). The active presence of women on the March demonstrated that women too could be strong and combative, and were able to bear the hardships of the weather, fatigue, and separation from their families just as well as men. They also contributed to removing some of the stigma that saw women away from home as indecent (González Blanco 2019, 94). Their dedication to the Marcha showed solidarity with their male counterparts, whose precarious employment positions affected their ability to provide for their families. With the government failing to pay salaries, men working as teachers faced eviction from their homes and starvation conditions for their families and were unable to take out loans to tide them over. González Blanco indicates that women teachers, on the other hand, were usually supported by their families of origin or by their husbands, and so the nonpayment of their salaries, while unacceptable, was in many cases less disastrous (González Blanco 2019, 66 y 103). These women also helped to achieve better dignity and professionalization of the teaching profession for the entire sector, bringing about changes to the clientelistic relationships in the way teachers were appointed and employed at that time. While the Marcha del Hambre was by no means the first protest organized by the teachers’ union since its founding, it was the first held on a national scale and that had far-reaching impacts.

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In terms of the social class of those involved, Adalberto Carvajal—leader of the March and then president of FECODE—posited that the March was not representative of the working class, rather its participants and supporters, mainly teachers, students, and their parents, belonged to a sector of society that he characterized “as members of the rising petty bourgeoisie, not generally members of the proletariat, but of the lower-middle and middle classes” (González Blanco 2019, 78). Carvajal’s account gives the impression that teachers at that time found themselves socially on the margins of the working class, due to the intellectual, rather than manual, labor required for teaching work. One of the marchers interviewed agrees, stating that “the Marcha del Hambre did not really represent the proletariat, a conception had not yet been established of . . . the working class, rather [it involved the] petty bourgeoisie” (ibid., 78). However, the March moved many and kindled solidarity for the first time in different social quarters, making it possible for the teachers’ union to join up with other sectors, such as the student movement, the emerging armed leftist organizations, and the different trade unions (ibid., 79). Although González Blanco, in her thesis (2019, 84), does not mention the ethno-racial backgrounds of the women teachers who participated, the photographs she includes show women with dark complexions and Afrodescendant facial features who are referred to as “costeñas,” a descriptor that denotes a location (the Caribbean coast), and evokes “mulataje”: African and European racial mixing. Testimonies from marchers also spoke about the way these women danced and sang songs in the Caribbean folk tradition to cheer up their fellow marchers and bring attention to the situation that they were protesting. WOMEN ETHNO-EDUCATORS PROMOTING NEW AFRODESCENDANT IDENTITIES During the 1970s and 80s, there were many Black women teachers in the public-school systems active in the teachers’ union movement, through their national organization, FECODE, and regional organizations such as ADE (Bogotá’s District Association of Education Workers). Their affiliations with their unions also linked them to the leftist movements in the country’s main cities (Urrea Giraldo 2011). While this was the panorama of teachers in urban centers, the country’s more rural Black communities started to design and implement “self-education” projects that responded to the different problems they faced. These beginnings would later be taken up as part of a movement toward an ethno-education designed for Afro-Colombian populations. These communities, “even before the constitutional recognition of their ethnic identity, had managed to carry out various education projects guided by



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their concern for passing down their history and culture” (Rojas Martínez and Castillo Bernal 2005, 86). These were the kinds of concerns that were verbalized in 1977 at the First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas, in Cali. This event was conceived by its organizers as a platform for simultaneous education and politicization, representing “a double effort in the battle against neocolonialism” (Valero 2020, 48). The First Congress was innovative in its argument that this education should not only be imparted by those who had accessed higher education, but by those who, through their life experiences, had valuable knowledge to contribute to the process of decolonization. Delegations from different regions communicated the Afro-Colombian community’s desire for educational processes that reflected their own ways of seeing and understanding the world (Segura Castillo 2020), and their concern that the presence of the work of Black intellectuals and writers in mainstream school curriculums was “non-existent “ (Valero 2020, 69). These concerns were reflected in the resolutions on education of the First Congress, reflecting the links between these demands and global political guidelines against racism which had been in force at UNESCO since the end of World War II, and placed education and research at the center of a strategy to combat racism. Another important milestone for ethno-education was the Declaration of San José (UNESCO 1981), which connected it to the focus on ethno-development, an effort aimed at recovering, maintaining, and transmitting ancestral legacies, without losing sight of the commitment to maintain the quality of life of communities and the protection of the environment (García 2009, cit. in Díaz Sánchez 2015, 187). To contextualize this period further, it is important to mention that when the Black populations of the Pacific were officially recognized as an ethnic group, they began to be seen as guardians of biodiversity and the protagonists of the new environmental policies (Agudelo 2005, 14–15). At the same time, women’s projects, networks, and social movements proliferated in the Colombian Pacific, together with a large number of NGOs and state institutions, with the support of national and transnational agencies, who were running at least one program, project, or plan aimed at women (Alvarez 2000). Around the same period, between 1993 and 1998, activism promoting education designed by and for Black communities culminated in legal statutes for these initiatives and the issuance of a series of laws and regulatory decrees supporting this purpose (Meneses Copete 2016). Newly instituted multiculturalism brought about changes in the conception of Colombia’s education system, and, for the first time, the state legally incorporated the education of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, otherwise known as ethno-education (ibid.). The confluence of these different developments brought about the emergence of a “new figure” in Colombia’s education sector: the ethno-educators.

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It also led to Afro-Colombian identity being affirmed within the social and institutional legitimacy of the teaching profession. By 1996, the Ministry of Education had already received reports on a significant number of experiences of ethno-education within “Afro-Colombian communities” in different departments. Included in these were projects implemented by the Raizal communities of San Andrés and Providencia, which included work on language with the development of a research method, an agricultural production and community participation component, and concepts and literacy taught through culture, all linked to processes of community organizing (Rojas Martínez and Castillo Bernal 2005, 88). Ethno-education transformed the responsibilities that Black teachers—of both genders—assumed regarding their own communities, particularly in the case of urban ethno-education, since despite the diversity of student populations in cities, Colombian schools continued to seek to homogenize the national narrative. Although cultural diversity had become a recurring theme in the world of education, in schools there was still resistance to outside intervention that sought to include the ethical and political dimensions of multiculturalism, as up until then they had only taught folklore, and this only in terms of its “entertainment” value (Castillo Bernal 2017). Classrooms have represented a microcosm in which Black women teachers and ethno-educators have addressed national ideologies about race and cultural diversity. Ethno-educators have taken on even more political roles in rural communities, where they have had to assume the task of advising the community on legal and administrative matters, and assume a leading role in the defense of the community’s rights (Castillo Bernal, Hernández Bernal and Rojas Martínez 2005). Ethno-education has expanded the focus of women teachers beyond the classroom into a role of educating the Black population in self-knowledge and self-esteem, since despite the recognition made possible by the implementation of an Afro-Colombian study unit, there were still people who were ashamed of being Black (Domínguez Garrido, Ruiz Cabezas and Medina Rivilla 2017, 125). These women have transformed their own experiences into pedagogical practices for both the countryside and the city, and have developed them into tools for restorative knowledge that captures a non-masculine and non-white ontology expressed through Afro-Colombian music, proverbs, stories, myths, and literature (Cañón Flórez, Monroy González and Salcedo Casallas 2016). Equally important are the personal experiences of discrimination and structural racism which inform women ethno-educators’ teaching practice inside and outside the classroom. An example of this is the experience related by María Isabel Mena, historian, researcher, and teacher, who has worked for more than fifteen years studying ethno-education and racism in schools. In an interview, she said that when she moved to Bogotá, she



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enrolled her three-year-old son in a day care center. One day her son asked her to put perfume on him because “he didn’t want to smell Black.” Shocked by this, she and her husband asked the center’s director to hold workshops with families and teachers “to share with others the importance of our community and our history”2 (Ministerio de Cultura 2017, par. 9). However, despite innovative experiences in ethno-education and certain legal developments, the Ministry of Education is still lacking procedures, clear regulations, and resources to implement Afro-Colombian studies programs (García Araque 2017; Rojas Martínez and Castillo Bernal 2005; Martínez Carazo, Lago De Vergara and Buelvas Martínez 2016). Faced with the precariousness of this situation, ethno-educators struggle with the dilemma of being new figures with new knowledge in old-school institutions, torn between neo-integrationism and the construction of more autonomous education projects (Rojas Martínez and Castillo Bernal 2005, 95). However, their problems integrating do not stem solely from the epistemic mismatch, as they also face challenges related to their material living conditions. Government regulations demand more requirements for ethno-educators to enter teaching, and they receive less money on the official pay scale for obtaining postgraduate studies beyond a specialization. This undermines ethno-educators’ quality of life and risks discouraging prospective candidates for this type of training and work (Díaz Sánchez 2015, 191–92). The Ministry of Education has placed an emphasis on cultural heritage at the expense of addressing the serious problems that the Afrodescendant population faces in terms of insufficient school infrastructure—a lack of adequate facilities, IT classrooms, ongoing training for teachers, and sports facilities—and these all hinder ethno-education’s potential for becoming an engine of social transformation (García Araque 2017, 12). AFRO HAIR BRAIDING AND STYLING: BUSINESS VENTURES UNDERMINING RACISM Now, I want to briefly reflect on a number of organizational efforts led by Black women teachers in Cali, which have given rise to collective processes that are redefining in practice the meaning of social mobility for the Afro-Colombian population (cf. Ruette-Orihuela, Viveros-Vigoya and Ramírez, in press). The case study I will examine here is the experience of the Afro-Colombian Women’s Association (Amafrocol), led by teacher, researcher, and cultural manager Emilia Eneyda Valencia. Amafrocol’s initial mission, on its creation in Cali in 1996, was to provide support to displaced Black women from the Pacific, living in situations of economic precariousness and exclusion from the formal job market. The

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objective was to improve the bodily and economic autonomy of these women by forming networks and collective projects. Over the years, it has run projects with varying degrees of success, including a Network of Hairstylists, workshops for rural Black women in the design and production of leather goods, and an Afro hair salon (Ruette-Orihuela, Viveros-Vigoya and Ramírez Torres, unpublished). Although Amafrocol’s own productive ventures have come and gone over the years, the organization has managed to create and maintain networks of Black women, both anti-racist activists and those involved in Cali’s beauty industry. It has been most successful in running its long-standing annual event Tejiendo Esperanzas (Weaving Hope), since the late 1990s. The event’s main attraction is the “Afro-hairdressing” competition whose aim is to collectively re-signify the historical, political, aesthetic, and cultural value of the art of hair braiding, and to improve conditions for professional Black women hairdressers. With each new installment, the event has built a growing platform for the exhibition and sale of cosmetic products and Afro-aesthetic clothing and accessories produced by different microenterprises. These new microenterprises are founded and run by young Black women who are university students or university-educated professionals, who started with personal capital from their own savings or money donated by family members (generally mothers or fathers). In 2018, in addition to the event’s now-established Afro-hairdressing competition, a discussion forum on ethnic entrepreneurship was held. Some of the young participants shared experiences of their achievements, but also their concerns about how to protect and patent their innovations and creations. Others spoke about the barriers represented by a lack of capital, and on how to lower production costs and ensure access to quality raw materials. Several women leaders agreed on the importance of the question of how to foster supportive, fair, and equitable trade relations, while simultaneously combating racism and sexism. These microenterprises becoming members of Amafrocol seems to have been beneficial for both sides, having created a space for young entrepreneurs to affirm their feminist and anti-racist stance, and for Amafrocol to escape the exhaustion that the continual search for outside funding represents for many first-tier nonprofits. These discussions took place as part of a framework in which the Colombian State (Conpes 2010, 76) and different international organizations and agencies have been pursuing the strengthening of Afro-Colombian microenterprises, while viewing microcredits for women as a “development panacea.” This development agenda has been criticized from various sectors for the way in which it reassigns “domesticity” to women and seeks to “empower” them in an individual/subjective sense. While these criticisms may be valid, Black women entrepreneurs associated with Amafrocol in Cali have explored an alternative path that takes advantage of some of the



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opportunities that have opened up for their entrepreneurial activities by growing them into a collective operation for fostering anti-racist struggles. How have they done it? By making, selling, and marketing “natural” Afro hair products, made with local ingredients that have been produced by Black women or Black communities; by stimulating the flow of capital within the Afro-Colombian community through the buying and selling of these products; by linking these transactions with strategies for raising Black women’s selfesteem and reinforcing their subjective position in relation to white-mestizo beauty standards; by pairing the whole process with an explicitly anti-racist and anti-sexist discourse; and by anchoring this message, which can sometimes be perceived as abstract and distant by many Black women, in the practices of caring for Afro hair and their appearance more generally. Members of the Association affirm that their work in these enterprises has contributed to mitigating the racial exclusion, gender violence, and economic precariousness experienced by many Black women in Cali. From this statement, it can be inferred that these Members see economic empowerment as a protective factor for gender-based violence, however, this question was not put directly to my interlocutors as part of the research. These women entrepreneurs assert that through their enterprises, they have created networks of solidarity based on a collective control over their bodies and labor. Their sense of empowerment does not stem from their ability to accumulate capital through entrepreneurial activities, but from their ongoing collective resistance against the dispossession of their bodies, and the racialization, individualism, and labor expropriation rampant in Cali’s job market for urban professionals. The work of these women microentrepreneurs has expanded the ethno-development paradigm by emphasizing the different approach many Afro-Colombian women’s microenterprises have taken by creating new networks for trade and production operating within their local region. Amafrocol’s experience, while not common, is also not unheard of, and it shows that the practices of women entrepreneurs must not be judged in polarized terms, such as questioning/resistance vs. reproduction/submission. This binary thinking and the rigidity of these categories can lead to an underestimation of the agency of women microentrepreneurs and their critical and strategic actions taken against neoliberalism. This perspective can also render any actions of opposition and resistance invisible, and ignore alternative ways of producing “value.” In the three scenarios described above, women teachers, ethno-educators, and beauty microentrepreneurs have all undermined the canonical discourse and imaginaries we have of the middle class and of upward mobility as an individual process, albeit in different ways. The fact that they are Black women challenges the dominant imaginary of the middle classes as broadly male (Baxter 1992) and white. They represent a heterogeneity that was not

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contemplated in the projects that sought Colombia’s development and democratization through the creation of a middle class composed of consumer citizens. These middle classes were imagined to be men and women who would be members of nuclear families, which would be the main cell on which the nation’s economic development would depend, and they would be deserving of the social respectability which they would receive. The way these Black women conduct themselves socially shows that they understand the social position that they have achieved is not a product of individual effort. Neither do they believe that only the person who “succeeds” in improving their lot and his or her immediate family circle should reap the benefit. They see it as the product of a collective effort. In the first scenario, the work of Black women teachers contributed to the democratization of access to education. They took advantage of the loopholes offered by state policy to aid their communities of origin, providing the tools for members of these communities to better their chances in the job market. They were also key to the upward social mobility projects of their own families and the wider Black population. This first generation of teachers were Colombia’s first wave of Black women who took on roles of leadership in and for their communities on a grand scale. This was true in isolated rural communities (Hurtado-Garcés 2020); on a regional level, as was the case for the teachers who graduated from Normal de Señoritas de Popayán; and in the country’s urban centers. Despite their awareness of the limits imposed by the socio-racial order of the time, their racial consciousness did not express itself as explicit anti-racist activism, as the prevailing ideology of mestizaje and their habitus as teachers restricted the cultivation of confrontational anti-racist positions. The second group, the women ethno-educators, embraced the shift toward multiculturalism. More recently, they have engaged with the turn toward an anti-racist approach that has seen some Colombian state policies develop projects for education, such as “África en la escuela” (Africa in schools), which addressed racism in schools as one of the expressions of structural racism. Their work has shown that epistemology is an important space of political dispute for the restoration of dignity to historically marginalized and forgotten groups (Santos 2018). Likewise, their work on cognitive justice has enabled the knowledge, history, and identity of Afro-Colombians to be incorporated into school curricula. The connection that the ethno-educators maintain with their community and its specific history has given them a leading role to empower themselves and the wider community through a collective ethnic consciousness, which can be employed as a discursive resource to counteract racism, leaving behind the celebration of individual achievements made possible through education.



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The third scenario illustrates a different way in which access to higher education can be employed for upward social mobility. The fact that multicultural ethnic discourse has been unable to respond to everyday and structural racism (Hooker 2009; Saldívar 2018) has sparked new endeavors, such as the microbusinesses set up by Amafrocol’s young women entrepreneurs. Additionally, these women’s university experiences and familiarity with the discourse of Black feminisms has encouraged them to integrate explicit anti-racist and anti-neoliberal positions into their initiative’s manifestos and in building their networks (Viveros-Vigoya and Ruette-Orihuela 2020). These women—from a position of relative privilege as they do not depend entirely on state or international development subsidies—have sought to strategically use the neoliberal capitalist project to subvert it and promote anti-racist struggles within it. Their approach has been to link the aesthetic (re)valuation of Blackness with the (re)distribution of economic, social, and symbolic “value” through solidary networks and exchanges (Ruette-Orihuela, Viveros-Vigoya, and Ramirez, in press). NOTES 1. It is worth noting that Colombia’s Black communities were conscious of the role of education in their liberation and decolonization from much earlier (Hurtado-Garcés 2020). 2. Own translation.

Chapter 8

Black Middle Classes in the Crises of Racial Democracy

Many of the ideas presented in this concluding chapter have been presented earlier in the book in detail and with a high degree of theoretical attention. Therefore, I will not go into them in depth again here, but I do wish to bring them attention as the main findings of my research on the Black middle classes. To close this chapter, I have included some new insights on the effects that the pandemic and the social unrest that accompanied it, and the role of the Black middle classes in the new panorama after these global events and those local to Colombia. At the start of the book, I reflected on the difficulties that arise when discussing the Black middle classes. If the category of “the middle classes” has always represented a challenge for the social sciences, the “Black middle classes” are even harder to address, especially in a context like Colombia’s which has naturalized the poverty and marginality of Black people. Numerous studies cited throughout the book have shown that the Afrodescendant population in Colombia has the lowest income level, the worst quality of life, the highest rates of child labor, the lowest social security coverage, and the highest demographic vulnerability. Other research has pointed to the low number of Black men, and even fewer Black women, working as senior civil servants and in the top jobs in private companies, as well as insufficient positive representation of Black people in the media and public spaces. The data confirm the persistence of structural racism in Colombia. With this context in mind, what logic is there to studying the few Black people who have not been exposed to these experiences or have managed to overcome them? Does having endured these difficulties make these people a social class? What factors would allow me to label them as a Black middle class? Do these people feel they belong to a certain class? Or do they identify themselves in ways that have nothing to do with class, and feel more affinity with their ethnicity, race, regional culture, or gender? Has this feeling of 153

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belonging always manifested in the same way, for both men and women, and for different generations? What are the effects of Colombia’s racialized geography on these perceptions? Have these people played a collective role in the struggles against social inequalities and racism? In this chapter I will attempt to respond to these questions by summarizing the main findings that have been presented over the course of the book. An optimistic stance could argue that twentieth-century Colombian history saw the progressive insertion of the country’s Black population into Colombian society through access to higher education, indicating the relative success of a republicanism rooted in the ideology of mestizaje. This argument maintains that in Colombia, racism was not such a big problem as it was in the United States. This was the discourse of the country’s elites and those in power who were convinced that if, at the end of the day, “we were all mestizos,” our societies could only be democratic in racial terms (Rahier 2012). Black people and those of mixed African and European descent also put this discourse to use to forge an idea of mestizaje that truly reflected the cultural melting pot which had produced this mixture of white, indigenous, and black (Flórez Bolívar 2019, 114). There were few voices that called attention to the fact that, contrary to this egalitarian rhetoric, racism was a phenomenon deeply rooted in Colombian society. The nature of mestizaje as an ideology did not allow this fact to be acknowledged, since it promoted the idea that racism was something that was removed from the Colombian reality and only happened elsewhere, like in the United States; or in times gone by in Europe, for example in Nazi Germany; in South Africa; and if it did exist in Latin America, it was consigned to history, a relic of the colonial period (Pisano 2014a). The ideology of mestizaje held sway up to the end of the twentieth century, when most of the countries in the region rewrote their constitutions to recognize the multicultural and multiethnic character of their societies. Since then, the ideology of mestizaje has been complemented by that of multiculturalism, and in Colombia both have coexisted alongside the country’s marked racial hierarchies and manifestation of racism (Wade 2009). Although the existence of racism is sometimes acknowledged, this coexistence explains why it is so difficult to recognize and accept its presence in our society. Black intellectuals also adapted to the idealization of mestizaje and the perception that racism was not a Colombian problem. From the 1940s to 1960s, these men celebrated the first Día del Negro in Bogotá, launched Club Negro, founded a center for Afro-Colombian studies, and denounced the abandonment, marginalization, and poverty of Black people through regional and national political activism (Wabgou et al. 2012). The issue of racism was not an explicit factor in Black people’s organizing of the time, nor did it feature in the parliamentary activities undertaken by some. At this time, the discourse

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of Black intellectuals and politicians was fundamentally egalitarian, although they did evoke Black people’s historical and cultural particularities, the need to improve social circumstances in their regions of origin, and to increase Black people’s participation in regional and national political life (Pisano 2014a). Their mission was to push for equality not only among social classes, but also between regions, which was the accepted way of referring to race without naming it. Although these issues continued to be raised throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the many poets, intellectuals, folklorists, and musicians who crossed paths in Bogotá reoriented the conversation taking place in Afro-Colombian academic and social circles toward artistic, cultural, and political projects that would later come together as organizations and collectives of national importance in the 1970s (Valderrama 2019). Likewise, politicians of this generation from northern Cauca and Chocó, mostly members of the Liberal party who had been elected to the legislative branch of government, focused their own programs and the collective project for Black people around access to education as way to emancipate Afro-Colombians from their economic and social subordination. From a class perspective, these are a generation of activists who, despite having acquired a certain cultural capital through university studies and having gained access to favorable employment, defined their social position according to their ethno-racial belonging as “Black” and in doing so, they maintained a connection to the subaltern sectors of Colombian society. Afro-Colombian participation in left-wing militancy revealed that the reconciliation of the demands of class and race were fraught with difficulties, often leading Black members to sever ties with leftist organizing to create or join a Black organization. This was an urgent topic that was debated at the First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas in Cali in 1970, and it continued to be an important ongoing conversation that was addressed at later congresses (Valero 2020). The role of women in the struggles of Black communities and their exposing of the racism ingrained in the canons of beauty started to be recognized and valued. These developments and discussions show how these middle-class Afro-Colombian professionals engaged in some of the processes associated with modernity, specifically, an emancipatory, expansive, and democratizing form of modernity (García Canclini 1989). The model of economic and political development promoted by the United States—which sought to consolidate a middle-class society and a vision of democracy that would make it possible to transcend the “dangerous class struggle and the outdated politicization of society”—started to founder. This crisis opened up space for new economic and political ideas, which since the late 1970s have contributed to redefining the collective ideas and practices of certain sections of the middle classes. This group lent a social and political

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legitimacy to the new economic direction taken, and created a new concept, that of the neoliberal middle class, which gradually acquired a hegemonic character despite finding itself the center of the many disputes as to the true meaning of middle class (López Pedreros 2020). Meanwhile, some AfroColombian professionals who were beginning to identify as part of the urban middle classes took on a more radicalized standpoint in terms of their difference and, from the mid-1980s, embarked on the process of ethnicizing their identity (Restrepo 2012). This change was especially visible in the Pacific region, as this was the birthplace of Colombia’s discourse on Black ethnicity revolving around the premise that the possession of a particular culture and identity should imply the granting of land rights. The approval of a new constitution paved the way for the recognition of the pluri-ethnic and multicultural character of the Colombian nation, and the ethnicization of Black communities continued and consolidated throughout the 1990s, to eventually become the dominant framework that established the criteria for the structuring of the Black social movement’s political branch as well as state policies for the Black population (Restrepo 2013, 149). At the same time, the “Black middle class” was becoming increasingly polarized. One section aligned with the new ethnicization of Black identity, which allowed them to claim their cultural differences without the consequences of social minoritization. Another section did not identify with these changes, since they were based on ideas that were more suited to the realities of the Pacific region. They felt they had little to do with the urban Black middle classes who did not wish to claim a cultural singularity, despite their awareness of the racial discrimination to which they could be subjected. One of the important milestones for the political project of the Afro-Colombian population and Afrodescendant peoples more generally were the preparation phase and the celebration of the Third World Conference against Racism, organized by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. This event undoubtedly empowered and enriched the processes that had emanated from constitutional redefinition and publicized anti-racist struggles. However, it had a contradictory effect on the social mobility of Afro-Colombians and the course of their social and political processes. On the one hand, a number of interesting spaces opened up for the collective “empowerment” of this population and their citizen participation, as well as for the emergence of a small Black middle class and political elite. On the other, these processes sought support from transnational institutions and international NGOs and were consequently co-opted by them. With the adoption of a language of social change and justice, these institutions depoliticized the demands of Black social movements and redirected them toward an upholding of the status quo in the name of racial equality.

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Organizations such as Fundación Color emerged in this context, with the aim of bringing together “the many talented and outstanding Black Colombians” to promote a greater integration of the Black or Afro population into Colombia’s national life and development, while preserving ethnic cultural difference. In 2010, more than fifty people associated with the foundation (thirty-nine men and sixteen women, all university graduates and working in managerial positions) signed Fundación Color’s manifesto which was presented to that year’s presidential candidates. These men and women identified themselves as representatives of a professional Black middle class and political interlocutors of the state. Many of them had begun their working lives in the 1990s and 2000s, and some were part of the newest generations of families that had experienced upward social mobility between 1960 and 1980, in the context of the social and political changes described in previous chapters. It is striking that, despite the fact that Fundación Color claims to preserve ethnic difference, none of its members has been professionally involved with state institutions or NGOs working with public policies around legislation that protects the collective rights of Black communities. This fact reflects the stance of a number of Afro-Brazilian businessmen who were quoted in the media at the end of the 1990s as saying: “the best way to be a black militant is to be a success in one’s business or profession” (Reid Andrews 2004, 196). Fundación Color and its emphasis on the individual achievements of those who comprise this talented group, recipients of awards presented by the foundation each year, have proven to be perfectly compatible with the neoliberal slant of current politics. The same viewpoint is shared by many of my interlocutors. Some, particularly the men, said that they did not feel much affected by the changes post-Durban, and that they had achieved their social position thanks to their own efforts and individual intellectual and professional abilities. They identify as middle class based on their education level, job, the neighborhood they live in, and their consumer habits. They also identify as Black, or Afro-Colombian, on the basis of their physical appearance and their family or regional ties, but they do not feel part of a collective that, if they were to work together, could embark on a project to advance their social, political, and cultural achievements. This is because they do not perceive that it would be beneficial to do so, and for this reason, few participate in ethnic organizations or movements, and even question their legitimacy. Neoliberal multiculturalism seems to have integrated these professionals into the “global middle class” and its belief in the idea that the divisions between capital, labor, and racial or sexual differences have been overcome (López Pedreros 2011). An example of this is when President Uribe Vélez appointed a number of Afro-Colombians to his cabinet in 2007,

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seeking to portray the country as belonging to the general movement toward a “post-racial” era.1 Some of the newly successful Afrodescendant professionals, particularly women, say they feel a connection to some Afro-Colombian cultural expressions, but consider that their connection to the Black community in general is not strong enough for them to want to create AfroColombian societies in their place of work or to mobilize politically. Others have benefited from the flow of resources from international cooperation organizations and, to a lesser extent, from the state, and they have engaged with these sources of funding with pragmatism. Smaller numbers of these professionals have sought to further the multiculturalist project and reorient it toward anti-racist discourses and practices, which are as heterogeneous and variable as the different racisms manifested in Colombia today (these include environmental and epistemic racism, and those associated with eviction from land, urban marginalization, and police violence, among others).2 Those who feel they are part of the Black middle class define their ethno-racial identity on the basis of very dissimilar criteria. Some cite their ancestry and cultural or religious practices linked to this ancestry, others their music and gastronomic preferences, or a sense of regional belonging, or their taste in clothes and interior design, etc. These different ways of relating to Blackness reflect its diverse meanings. Family histories covering three generations allowed me to analyze the changes in configurations of Blackness3 over the period from 1940 to the present. These changes were caused by the specific historical context, which racial regime was in effect (be it mestizaje or multiculturalism), the racialized geography in which they were embedded, and the global context. The different iterations of Blackness could be categorized thusly: firstly, “regional configurations of Blackness’’ were prevalent in the context of the ideology of mestizaje; secondly, “ethnic configurations of Blackness” supported the gradual consolidation of the multiculturist discourse from 1991 onward; and, finally, “diasporic and Afrodescendant configurations of Blackness” are expressed today and encompass a supranational identity that connects people of African descent across the world. Neoliberal multiculturalism has had an ambivalent impact on anti-racist struggles. Over the last decade, more attention has been paid to structural racism. Different social movements have put their demands to the state, emphasizing the links between structural racism and problems such as violence and deterritorialization. Research has studied the way that social exclusion is linked to ideas of “race” (mainly skin color), and in higher education and the workplace there has been an implementation of affirmative action and inclusion programs for Afrodescendant populations. Legal advances have been made in relation to racial discrimination and have been used to report racism to the authorities. Campaigns against racism have circulated in the public

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and private media, and a growing number of artistic projects and interventions have aimed at improving Afrodescendants’ visibility and empowerment (Moreno Figueroa and Wade 2021). However, as has already been recounted, many of the policies and programs derived from the redefinition of the constitution have taken place in the context of increasingly neoliberal macro- and microeconomic policy, and this is the reason why the majority of Afro-Colombians have not seen improvements to their living conditions nor an increase in their political autonomy. The expansion of large-scale commercial agriculture in the Pacific region backed by a government alliance with landowning sectors and supported by paramilitary groups and extractive development projects led by multinational companies have caused massive displacements of Black people, and social leaders who defend these lands and their traditional activities have been targeted and killed. The signing of the peace agreements has not put a stop to these murders, rather, social leaders have continued to be killed in greater numbers. While awareness of racism is more widespread among Black populations, this has not led to them taking up anti-racist activism in large numbers. Sectors of the Black middle class who are closer to power or those with higher incomes have discouraged disruptive anti-racist positions. Black people’s access to higher education continues to be limited, and this affects their social mobility and contributes to widening the gap that separates them from the rest of Colombia’s population. Where social mobility has taken place, it has been an individualized process and has not had a redistributive impact. Distances have been increasing between this relatively privileged sector and the majority of the Afro-Colombian population, displaced from their homelands to the cities through political and economic violence. All of these contrasts and contradictions show the multiple ambiguities of the multiculturalist discourse and its opportunities and obstacles in the context of neoliberalism. A whole chapter of this book was dedicated to exploring the upward social mobility of different generations of women, who, through their work as educators and everyday practices have distanced themselves from the idea of social mobility as an individual process. The purpose of this chapter was to explore the particular dilemmas faced by Black women who have experienced upward social mobility. The meanings that these women have assigned to their “middle-class” teaching careers, and to the opportunities for social mobility that have opened up as a result of that career, are not meanings that have traditionally been used in association with the middle class. My intention is not to present these women as “perfect agents of social transformation” or as redeemers of the Afrodescendant population or the Black middle classes, but as protagonists of stories that are influenced in different ways by the intersections and interactions of class, gender, and race.

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Their experiences challenge the dominant ideas about the middle classes, as they occupy a subjective social position that was not envisioned in the design of the projects for developing and democratizing Colombia through the creation of a middle class. Their actions put into practice a different understanding of social mobility that imagines it as a collective project, rather than an individual endeavor which will only see the “successful” person move up in the world and solely their immediate family circle benefit. Teaching enabled upward social mobility for the first generation of Black women graduates from the training colleges. They gained a new professional identity and aspired to a different way of life than that of their social origins. Their work underpinned the social mobility of their whole family and contributed to the democratization of education. Although many of these women were conscious of the racism directed toward them, they did not encourage a confrontational anti-racist stance, rather, they perceived the academic training they undertook and their professional work as teachers as part of their struggles for social justice. Some joined the labor movement and advocated for political demands and unionization. They carried out multiple and specific daily tasks that pushed against the devaluation and subordination to which they were continually subjected, with the objective of improving the living conditions of their students, families, and community. They created the conditions under which a different story of social mobility could be written, outside of the individualistic ethos that typified the social mobility of the urban white-mestizo middle classes. In the 1990s, new generations of teachers embraced community education and fought against racism in schools, emphasizing cultural diversity. Despite these advances, there is still work to do to leave behind an education guided by a multiculturalist logic that continues to be impregnated with the ideology of mestizaje, and the racialized gender stereotypes that are deeply rooted in the culture of schools must be confronted and overcome. Research on the organization Amafrocol has highlighted Afrodescendant women teachers and students running small businesses to combat racism and sexism while seeking personal and collective material well-being. In the younger generations of Black women, their exposure to feminism in general and to the various Black feminisms in particular has had a profound impact on their personal and political projects, broadening the very definition of what is perceived as a political issue. This can be seen in their struggles to combat negative stereotypes, including issues such as Afro hair care, which were previously perceived as trivial, private, and domestic matters. Today, many young Black women are sharing their reflections on beauty and care of self and politicizing them to varying degrees. While the Afro hair trend was adopted by different women for many different reasons—be it artistic, aesthetic, intellectual, or militant—those of us who made this choice in the 1970s did so as individuals.

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And, although some of us tried to connect it to an identity discourse containing anti-racist ideas, the prevalence of the ideology of mestizaje in Colombia up until the 1990s dispersed and depoliticized these types of initiatives. To summarize, Black women who achieved upward social mobility through their professional practice have been enormously important to the formation of what would later be recognized as the Black middle classes. Equally noteworthy is the fact that they did not perceive their search for personal material well-being as separate from the advancement of their community of origin. In light of all this: what does an intersectional perspective on the Black middle classes in Colombia contribute to the study of the middle classes in Colombia? Firstly, my work represents a theoretical shift because it studies class differences within Afrodescendant “communities,” generally seen as the incarnation of otherness and socially homogeneous as poor; and because it does not consider class as something separate from the geographical and historical context in which it is produced and reproduced, nor dissociated from other axes of social inequality, such as gender, race, and age. This means that an exhaustive account of who Afrodescendant people are can never be achieved by studying their Blackness, or their belonging to the middle classes, or their gender, or any single attribute they may have. This conceptual problem also has political implications, as although the women and men who are the subjects of this research are all Afrodescendant people who occupy the intermediate layers of the social strata, how they experience their own situation and the way in which they live their lives are configured, as I have shown throughout the text, on the basis of all their social positions—be it gender, generation, age, or regional origin—and according to their own personal circumstances. Intersectionality gave me the opportunity to show that these differences exist and that they can become factors for social transformation, as is the case of certain women who have built political struggles and put forward demands based on particular forms of oppression, such as racialized gender oppression, or those linked to regional origin, in the case of the Raizal population. Another important aspect, not unrelated to my own experience as an outsider within, is the way in which I have sought in my work to create narratives that do not dichotomously oppose groups of oppressors and oppressed. I have approached my research with the understanding that the people interviewed could occupy positions of subordination and domination on different axes of social inequality and that, in this sense, class was not their only framework for political struggle against injustice. Taking the axis of class away from the theoretical and political center is one of the substantive changes that the intersectional conceptual framework encourages, in its seeking to understand the complexity of social inequality and the multiplicity and diversity of political struggles. Researching the Black middle classes has allowed me to show

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that the middle classes are diverse in terms of race, gender, age, and regional culture. Likewise, experiences of being “Black and middle-class” differ, depending on whether the person is a woman or man, young or old, retired or working, from the Pacific or Caribbean, or from the mainland or islands. And, of course, “Black and middle-class” has meant different things in different historical periods. Analyzing each life history collected in this research only confirmed the strong and dense intertwining of these different axes of inequality found in my interlocutors’ experiences and the emotional difficulties caused by living “in a white world.” This is a world that only permits bodies that conform to the norms of whiteness “to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape” (Ahmed 2007, 158). Interviewees hypothesized, using different arguments, that their feeling of being “out of place” had to do with the naturalization of white people’s privilege, their feeling of being continuously observed or rejected, and being denied access to the well-being that these white spaces can provide. Many recounted experiences of discomfort, caused by being in possession of a body that does not fit into spaces of political decision-making, nor into the higher echelons of public or private entities, areas of academic prestige, nor the “good” neighborhoods. However, when working from a situated perspective of intersectionality, in which context plays a leading role, the first step in analyzing each situation is always to identify which axes need to be considered in order to understand the functioning of the power relations shaping these Black middle-class experiences. In Colombia’s case, during the long period in which the ideology of mestizaje prevailed, the only social differences that were recognized as relevant were class differences. Therefore, the only acceptable way for Black people to be incorporated into the larger society, thought of as racially homogeneous based on the idea that we were all mestizos, was to hide or minimize the importance of racial difference. As Zapata Olivella has said in his memoir ¡Levántate Mulato! (Mulatto, Rise Up!), the presence of certain visible Afrodescendants in high-level positions did not guarantee that they would been seen as representative of this community: I have always been aware of the existence of Black and mulatto figures in prominent positions in the public sector; there have been more than a few parliamentarians, ministers, governors, and mayors in our country’s history. It is an open secret. Members of our race must keep quiet about their roots, that is, if they remember any of their ancestry at all. They proclaim that they enjoy these positions in their condition as Colombians and not as representatives of their lineage. Consequently, they do not identify themselves as members of the class that they came from and as representatives of their race even less so (Zapata Olivella 1990, 177).

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This was the social context in which my father, Marino Viveros Mancilla, and his contemporaries and friends, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Natanael Díaz, and Arnoldo Palacios, lived their lives. From early on in their youth, they all tried, at different moments in time and in different ways, to mobilize their ideas, needs, interests, and Afro-Colombian identity in pursuit of asserting their ethno-racial difference in a nation that did not recognize it, having founded the national identity on a universal conception of mestizaje. Despite having acquired certain cultural capital through their university studies and accessed favorable positions in their chosen professions, and while enjoying some privileges derived from their class position, none of these men used social class as the only or main criterion to define their social position. It is fair to say that this group was part of the middle classes that justify their position through their links with the working classes. Although they all achieved upward social mobility and gained access to a “status of respectability” for themselves and their families, as Black men they were always open to the possibility of those achievements being disregarded. As a child and teenager, I was witness to tense verbal exchanges in the aftermath of discriminatory words, gestures, or acts. My father would never overlook any racist comment that was intended to offend him or undermine his rights, in any situation. Many times I heard him start his rebuttal by saying loudly, with much self-possession, and in a firm but calm tone, “I’m Black, and proud of being so.” THE PANDEMIC, SOCIAL UNREST, AND PROTEST At a time when special interest is being taken in the global middle classes due to the impacts they have felt from the COVID-19 pandemic, this book has told the story of the Colombian Black middle classes in contexts of crisis. The reflections that it lays out are important in light of the economic and health consequences that the pandemic has had on the middle classes, as a social sector that is widely used as a barometer to measure the degree of well-being and democracy of a country. The crisis of the model of democracy propped up by the middle classes raises questions about the position of the Black middle classes and their role in this situation. Can they come together around a project to overcome it, or is the absence of a political project on their part symptomatic of this crisis? The arguments made in this book invite us to rethink the meaning of multiculturalism in 2023, its link with the notion of democracy and with the current crisis facing representative democracies. Furthermore, I share the sentiment of the invitation extended by López Pedreros (2020, par. 10) to understand democracy not as an ideological fantasy of complete emancipation and simultaneous social harmony, nor as the

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final destination of a single model to which all societies must subscribe, but as a space in which ideas, struggles between subjectivities, social conflicts, and power disputes all confront each other. The outlook after the pandemic, after the paro nacional (national strike),4 and after the election of the Pacto Histórico5 party holds important questions about the place of racism in Colombia’s structural inequalities. In this regard, I wonder for what and for whom we are building our present and future, and what shape it will take. After the international outrage and protests in response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and the abuse and violence that the Minga Indígena6 endured as they participated in 2021’s paro nacional, we began to speak openly about structural racism in Colombia (see, for example, in the mainstream media, Caracol radio 2020; Martínez Ante 2020; Palomino 2021), recognizing the role that the state has played in the production and reproduction of racism. Floodgates have been opened by the responses that these attacks and deaths have provoked. These include declarations of solidarity and the nationwide street protests challenging the police that went ahead even amid the pandemic. There has been a refusal to bury news stories of atrocities such as the death of Anderson Arboleda,7 the political assassinations of Afrodescendant leaders, and the precarious conditions in which Black communities faced COVID-19. Political mobilization surged, with 783,160 votes cast for Francia Márquez in the presidential primaries. All these acts are forms of resistance against indifference to death and the naturalization, denial, or minimization of systemic and everyday racism. The discussions taking place in response to these actions are part of a transnational/international effort to widen the fissures that have already started to appear in the structural racism that sustains neoliberal capitalism. Paradoxically, online communities on social networks (a central aspect of the nonlinearization of society) have become promising arenas for contesting structural racism and exposing the workings of its processes. Social media platforms emerged as powerful tools for documenting and challenging police brutality and ending the mainstream media’s silence and misrepresentation of negatively racialized people. At the same time, an important point to consider is the way they have provided strategic spaces not only to question the long-established state violence but also to contest the racialized devaluation of Black bodies (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). The users of social networks have employed these platforms to expand the public sphere and at the same time evidence the social and political relationships that sustain racist practices both nationally and internationally. Black movements and those of other ethno-racial groups and their allies, both globally and locally, are advancing against the appalling injustices produced by racism and its repercussions. Different social movements, such as the feminist, indigenous, student, and trade union movements, have started

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to form alliances with one another and to incorporate anti-racist proposals and demands into their political agendas. Indigenous organizations originally distanced themselves from the issue of racism, but this has recently changed: organizations of the Misak people of Cauca have demonstrated on three occasions—September 16, 2020, April 28, 2021 (the first day of the national strike), and May 7, 2021—by pulling down monuments erected in honor of the Spanish conquistadors named by the official history as the founders of Cali, Popayán, and Bogotá. These demonstrations were enacted to further the demands they had made to the Colombian state for historical reparations in an era of racism, discrimination, feminicide, corruption, and murder of social leaders (Viveros-Vigoya 2020). The events of the past few years have created the conditions for alliances to be forged around the struggle against the processes of racial exclusion. At the same time, the discourses espoused by Black social movements’ younger generations incorporate considerations of gender and sexuality, the contributions of Black feminisms, and the demands of Black LGBTIQ+ people. Black movements have been invigorated by their adoption of demands formulated from an intersectional perspective, and this is beginning to be recognized. In 2023 there are a greater number of Latin American studies on the middle classes that take into account these intersections and the redefinitions that the Latin American middle classes have undergone due to changes in gender, ethnicity, and race relations. These redefinitions have also been molded by the political and economic changes caused by the emergence of a neoliberal model that has undermined the foundations of the welfare state and all that which was previously considered foundational to the middle classes. Over the course of this book, using the biographical accounts of my interlocutors situated in different racialized regional configurations, I have identified different routes of migration; education and career paths; strategies of upward social mobility; and the relevant political, social, and cultural milestones of a decades-long process embedded in the hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Research by Pattillo, Bermúdez Rico, and Mosquera Guevara (2021, 2) on the Black middle classes in Cali describes them as ““amorphous” rather than “divided” or “fragmented” so as not to make a normative claim that the Black middle class should be unified.” I would like to argue that the amorphism identified by these authors reflects the different meanings taken on by the Black middle classes, the fluidity of the category, and the disputes that can take place within it for hegemony over this meaning. In Brazil, for example, research has found that Afro-Brazilians tend to feel that their social destinies are connected, and that this recognition makes them more likely to support and engage in race- and class-related policies, such as affirmative action in college admissions (see Mitchell 2018 for example). This could indicate that the regular admission of Black and indigenous students into higher education

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in Brazil, over several years, has been able to achieve cultural enrichment, a transformation of academic institutions, and the greater proximity of universities to the social problems of the country (Segato 2007). The state of affairs in Brazil under Bolsonaro showed that these gains, once installed, are not permanent fixtures, and policies such as those that his administration put into effect have significantly affected the budget of public universities and pose a serious threat to these achievements. In Colombia’s case, it has become easier to identify experiences of racial discrimination and people are more likely to talk about incidents in which they were the victims, and in doing so are willing to shoulder the symbolic burden that this disclosure represents. This recognition however does not necessarily translate into anti-racist activism. In recent years, those most likely to be involved in anti-racist action have been the groups gravitating around Afro-feminist movements. My use of an intersectional perspective in analyzing the results of this research has given an understanding of how the interactions between race, class, and gender shape political behavior in different ways, and this has been the basis for my argument when examining the experiences of the women teachers, ethno-educators, and microentrepreneurs who have made use of the education or beauty sectors in controversial ways. In my opinion, the same could be said of artists and artistic collectives that have increasingly assumed explicit anti-racist positions: they have not only resisted white cultural domination, but have also radicalized what we have come to understand as multiculturalism, and made proposals for different possible futures. To summarize, although there is always the possibility that the beneficiaries of affirmative action may reproduce the status quo instead of contributing to the introduction of substantive changes to the way in which power is exercised and to public policy, there have been experiences, such as those described above, that offer some hope that the memory of certain community experiences may reorient political action in a different direction. Glimmers of this hope can be seen in the chain of events that led to Francia Márquez’s election as vice president of Colombia on June 19, 2022, which began with the signing of Pacto para la Construcción de una Política Feminista (Pact for the Development of Feminist Politics), organized by the feminist Estamos Listas movement, in which Márquez was put forward as a presidential candidate for 2022. As Márquez has said, “Colombia’s greatest obstacle is the masculinized mandate that has been sustained by white supremacy. Society has embraced it and has suffered . . . the consequences of this patriarchal system. Our biggest challenge today is to recognize these forms of oppression in our country, as there can only be change once this is acknowledged”8 (Saldarriaga Hernández 2021, par. 4).

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Márquez’s words show that the perspective of Black Afro-feminist women is a powerful tool in the creation of more inclusive political proposals for Colombian society as a whole, and not only for Black communities. The reason for this is because Black women have lived through multiple experiences of oppression, the result of the intersection of the different hierarchies identified above by Márquez. These facts encourage the continuation of the study of the Afrodescendant population’s social mobility and political projects and the use of an intersectional perspective to reveal both the obstacles and opportunities involved in these experiences and undertakings. NOTES 1. The idea of a “post-racial era” began to be used to describe a period in which race relations would soon be replaced by other concerns, such as population growth, industrial development, and economic fluctuations. The inauguration of the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama, led many in the United States to believe that the country was showing signs of becoming a post-racial nation (Schorr 2008). 2. See the results of the LAPORA project in Moreno Figueroa and Wade (2021). 3. I use the concept of configurations of Blackness to account for the plasticity and fluidity of the social relations of race and ethnicity, and to push back against the idea of Blackness as a substance, essence, or nature. The term configuration I have borrowed from the way Elias (1970, 158) has used it as a useful conceptual tool to break free of the social constraint that forces us to think and speak of the “individual” and “society” as if they were different or even antagonistic entities. 4. The 2021 paro nacional (national strike) in Colombia was one of the biggest and most important social protests in the country’s history. Triggered in April of that year by government plans to reform tax policy, the manifestations took up the banner of the previous strike from November 2019 that demanded government action on social inequality, police violence, the non-implementation of the peace accord, and the widespread murder of leaders of social movements. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in urban centers across the country, and at the strike’s height, there were marches almost every day for two months, and highways and ports were blocked by workers. 5. Pacto Histórico is a political coalition composed mainly of left and center-left political parties and movements. 6. The word minga (from the Quechua: mink’a) refers here to a collective of indigenous organizations, and more generally to a gathering in which the community works together on a shared project. 7. On May 19, 2020, Arboleda, a nineteen-year-old Black youth from Puerto Tejada, Cauca, died after receiving blows to the head from police after they accused him of violating lockdown rules. 8. Own translation.

Epilogue

On April 28, 2021, an unprecedented national strike began. The trigger for citizens to take to the streets was a controversial tax reform with which the government intended to raise money to implement social policies required to respond to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The protestors’ main motivation was to force the government to retract this reform, but the strike also became a conduit for wider demands of the moment and the discontent of social struggles that remained unresolved. In fact, the list of demands made by the Committee representing the strikers included free and quality public higher education and reforms to the healthcare system, which had certain similarities with demands made in the Chilean protests. Marches were held continually for more than two months, and although the huge numbers of demonstrators and their high intensity gradually dwindled, they marked an important milestone in the country’s history of social struggles, due to their magnitude and the results they achieved. It was mentioned on numerous occasions during the strike that the middle classes were to be the most affected by the planned tax reform, and that the size of the middle classes in Colombia had been shrinking, and were threatened by both unemployment and the pandemic. The public discourse, unlike the academic discourse, is interested in discussing the needs of the middle classes, mainly because they are perceived as the antidote to extremes and as a group that operates social containment in times of crisis such as this national strike. The public discourse made reference to the middle classes to justify both the protests and the government’s response and its understanding of democracy. President Duque’s response, mirroring that of Chile’s President Piñera in 2019, was to label the protesters as vandals and to appeal to the good sense of the middle classes as respectful enemies of radicalism. Taking the opposing view, a university student interviewed on Canal Capital news argued that the strike represented “a necessary outlet for our society,” given “the abandonment by the state that the middle and lower classes, who make up the majority in Colombia, has been experiencing for years.”1 169

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These statements reflect two perspectives on the middle classes. The first, seen in the President’s statement, could be categorized as the “vision from above.” It emphasizes the idea of the golden mean as a point of equilibrium and an ideal, where the middle classes are preferred over the other classes because they are thought to protect democracy from excesses on either side. The second, put forward by the student, is the “vision from below,” which argues that the proposed tax reform mobilized not only the working classes, but also different layers of the middle classes in different cities. The pandemic showed that Colombia’s much-trumpeted middle classes were highly vulnerable to crises, to which the government did not have the capacity to respond with an expansion of its social protection networks. The increase in family income and higher spending capacity experienced by the middle classes has not been accompanied by a decrease in labor informality or by greater access to public goods, such as health, education, quality public transportation, or security, etc. The Colombian middle classes, like those in Brazil, could assert that they were middle class at home, yet working class out in public (Oliven 2020). Colombia’s middle classes have also been hit hard by the pandemic. In April 2021, Colombia’s office for national statistics (DANE) published the results of their monetary poverty and social classes report, revealing that the middle class had decreased by 2.17 million people, dropping from 14.7 million in 2019 to 12.5 million in 2020 (DANE 2021). Moreover, proportional to the number of inhabitants, Cali was one of the cities that suffered the greatest impact of this reduction of the middle class in 2020. Many of the new poor come from the least-privileged layers of the middle strata, and although none of the statistics are disaggregated in ethno-racial terms, it can be assumed that this contraction has a significant effect on those Afrodescendant households that had reached a certain degree of material well-being and had been freed from the pressures of solving their immediate needs. Cali was one of the epicenters of the national strike demonstrations and suffered some of the worst violence inflicted by security forces and armed civilian groups aided by the complicity of the police. According to Amnesty International (2021), in Cali during the strike there were a total of eighty-two Afrodescendant victims of violence that include homicides, forced disappearances, detentions, and gender-based violence. Those who tried to explain why the social outburst acquired greater intensity in cities such as Cali alluded to long-standing conflicts in which racism, the class struggle, and unfulfilled promises are ongoing. Cali has not been able to provide employment at the same rate as its unrelenting population growth, caused, among other reasons, by forced displacement stemming from the activities of guerrillas, paramilitarism, and drug cartels in the surrounding areas. The city has still not been able to socially integrate the populations residing in its east end

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and on its hillsides, and strong residential segregation continues to be one of the city’s characteristic features (Grueso 2021). In Cali it is evident that the social classes have different skin tones, and that not all complexions are thought of in the same way in a city that perpetuates racist stereotypes about its Afrodescendant and indigenous residents. It is important to note that indigenous people, who come from rural areas that have seen much migration to these segregated working-class neighborhoods, played an important role in the strike by participating in the Minga. Afrodescendant women and men from the community councils of northern Cauca also participated in the Minga (Urrea Giraldo 2021). During the strike, local newspapers made multiple references to the discontent caused by the presence of “chivas”—buses built by hand on top of truck chassis for rural public transport—that were “stuffed with indigenous people” in Cali’s residential neighborhoods. Armed gangs of “gente de bien” (“decent people” or “good guys”)2 living in these neighborhoods shot at participants in the Minga with firearms, arguing that their properties had been vandalized. President Duque responded to the complaints of these residents—rather than those put to him by Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca—CRIC (Cauca’s Regional Indigenous Council)—by asking CRIC to order their protesters to return “to their reservations.” Meanwhile, the president of the Colombian Conservative Party asked them to return “to their natural environment.” A report (Proceso de Comunidades Negras et al. 2021) submitted by a group of important Afrodescendant social organizations to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), detailing the effects on Colombia’s Afrodescendant/Black population in the context of the national strike, contained some important data: that Cali saw the brunt of the violence and excessive use of force during the protests. Cali’s population is 26.2 percent Afrodescendant (DANE 2005), and is the city with the second-largest Afrodescendant population in Latin America. Protests and almost half of the city’s recorded deaths during the strike were concentrated in majority-Black areas with high levels of poverty (Forero-Alba, Gutiérrez, and Murillo 2021). The vast majority of homicide victims in Cali during the strike were young Afrodescendants. These distressing facts show that the collection and analysis of data that is disaggregated by ethnicity and race is essential in Colombia. This data can be used to guide, among other solutions, proposals for differentiated attention to victims and measures to combat police violence. Despite the efforts made by civil society organizations to gather information for this report, this task is actually the responsibility of the state. The 2021 national strike revealed how incapable the authorities were in managing the crisis, their profound disconnect with reality, and the need for a new social contract in this classist, racist, and hierarchical society.

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At the same time, these circumstances led to the creation of new alliances and creative responses in what is now known in Cali as Puerto Resistencia. This was the name given to a popular area in the east of the city, initially called Puerto Rellena, for its famous sausages. Puerto Resistencia first arose as part of the mobilizations of the national strike organized in November 2019 to put forward labor, environmental, institutional, and legal demands, which saw the formation of numerous coalitions that were involved in the strike’s most insurrectionary activities. This space brought together young Afrodescendant and mestizo activists, residents of the eastern neighborhoods; Afro student women’s and LGBTQI+ collectives; Black feminist and Black women’s networks; young white-mestizo people from the impoverished middle classes; and artists engaged in mural painting, performing arts, music, poetry, and audiovisual production. Demonstrators gathered there to socialize, but also to mourn and express their indignation for the young people killed during the protests, victims of the repressive police brutality and the urban paramilitarism of Cali’s white middle and upper classes. *** To bring the discussion back to the main focus of the book, the Black middle classes, I would like to explore the role that these middle classes could play in the new political landscape created by this social unrest. Will they join the “nosotros popular plural” (the “us” of the diverse grassroots)—“los nadies” (the nobodies) celebrated by vice president Francia Márquez—that emerged during the run-up to the presidential elections? Will they denounce the state neglect experienced by the middle and working classes that make up the majority of the population of an unequal country like Colombia? Will they join them in their demands? Or will they beat a defensive retreat to protect their assets and individual achievements? Results of research led by Urrea Giraldo (Urrea Giraldo and Botero 2010; Urrea Giraldo et al. 2021) offer some information on the type of racism that the Black middle classes face in Colombia and reactions that they may have in circumstances similar to the outlook in 2022. Urrea Giraldo and Botero (2010) used the 2005 census to compare the different sociodemographic patterns of the Black middle classes in Bogotá and Cali. They concluded that, in Bogotá, where only 1.5 percent of the total population is Afrodescendant, this Afro-Colombian population is socially heterogeneous. They also observed that although there are relatively important numbers of Black people in the lower-middle classes in the city as a whole, there is also a minority of Afro-Colombians who are part of the affluent middle classes, residing in areas with better living conditions. Meanwhile, the results for Cali show a social polarization that sees a minority of Black people in the affluent

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middle classes and a majority in the very poor lower classes. The presence of Afrodescendants in the lower-middle classes in Cali is much lower than in Bogotá. Urrea Giraldo (2021) also observes that unlike the norm in the Anglosphere where racial segmentation is a feature of all social classes, in cities such as Cali, Cartagena, Medellín, Bogotá, and Barranquilla, the different layers of the Black middle classes face the highest degree of residential spatial segregation. This means that in the working-class neighborhoods of Cali’s east end and hillsides, the Black and white-mestizo populations coexist quite harmoniously through links of urban sociability and family connections, as was shown in a pioneering study by Barbary et al. (2004). By contrast, in middle-class residential neighborhoods, Black families are perceived as outsiders and as “undesirable residents,” and find little acceptance from their white-mestizo neighbors. This polarized residential distribution—which concentrates the Black population in segregated working-class neighborhoods and locates more socially mobile Black people in middle-class neighborhoods—has over the years been feeding a growing racial tension (Urrea Giraldo 2021, 172). The situation described above suggests that, despite the higher incomes of these emerging groups, it is difficult for them to develop a clear sense of belonging to the middle class. Their recent entry into this class has meant that their social position is seen as unstable, their economic and social status is overridden by their racial condition, and they are treated with suspicion on the basis of this condition. However, we must not forget that Black communities themselves are complex spaces where dominant ideologies are simultaneously resisted and reproduced (Collins 1990, 86). Nevertheless, in Colombian society there is still little wriggle room in which one can be both a Black person and a member of the middle class, a fact that underscores both the difficulty, and the apparent contradiction—the oxymoron—that characterizes the existence and experience of the Black middle classes. A new political scenario was born out of the events of 2021 and 2022, which included 2021’s national strike, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, campaigning for the 2022 presidential election in an environment of acute polarization, and the eventual triumph of the Pacto Histórico party candidate, Gustavo Petro. This new political climate aspires to more citizen participation in public decision making, and has started to employ feminist discourse, issues regarding the ethno-racial question and the concerns of those sectors left behind by the state to aid the forging of agreements and to criticize existing systems. Three new political subjects have emerged from this scenario. The first is the feminist political subject, made visible by the aforementioned Estamos Listas movement, founded in 2019 and which played a key role in the launching of Francia Márquez as a presidential candidate. In the presidential

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debates and particularly in the second round, the two candidates understood the urgency of addressing women’s agendas and the need to speak to women, something that was unthinkable a few decades ago. Although feminist organizing has been ongoing for the best part of a century, the fruits of this labor can now be seen, most notably in the fact that feminists are now legitimate interlocutors with power. Then, young people started to emerge as a new political subject through their instrumental involvement in the strike of 2021, putting themselves physically in harm’s way to resist the police crackdown and keep the strike going over many months, thereby mounting pressure on the government. It is important to note that this strike was much more spontaneous than previous ones, and those involved were not only attached to student movements or trade unions, but many were unorganized young people struggling to survive on earnings from the gig economy with little hope for their futures. The younger generations who voted in the 2022 presidential elections influenced the results of the second round of voting, demonstrating their desire for a change of approach for the overcoming of the country’s economic and social problems. The third political subject to establish itself was the “Afro vote.” Afrodescendant populations that have historically been underrepresented in the democratic process found a political outlet in the figure of Francia Márquez. Her naming as Petro’s second-in-command secured many more votes for Pacto Histórico in municipalities where the self-identified Black population counts for more than 75 percent of the total.3 One of the results of the strike and the social polarization surrounding it has been that the Black middle classes have understood that they are not only middle class but are also Black. An unprecedented five of the eight vice presidential candidates in the first round of the 2022 presidential election were Afrodescendants, demonstrating how important Colombia’s Black population had become politically. As has been documented elsewhere in the book, there have been many Black middle-class people who have held political office since the 1940s. In that sense, these developments are not new. What is novel is that while the “Afro vote” is not necessarily internally homogenous, it is being treated as a consolidated voting bloc and this has lent it political weight. Similarly, the visuals of so many Black faces on the campaign trail was also a new experience for Colombians, as until now, the ruling classes in Colombia have been ethnically and racially very homogeneous. It has been suggested that the choice made to appoint Black vice-presidential candidates was a move to copy US President Biden’s appointment of Kamala Harris as his vice president, which may hold some truth. However, these appointments also show that traditional political candidates have felt the

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need to show their potential constituents that they do not represent “more of the same.” In every election cycle, voters were offered the choice between white-mestizo male politicians from large cities in the interior. Appointing an Afro-Colombian as second-in-command has also enabled these politicians to espouse a political discourse that shows commitment to the problems of Colombia’s diverse regions. In this context, Blackness has become the signifier of diversity. The importance given to race in this new political environment could be seen as a revisiting of the political and cultural climate of the 1970s, where people serving as high-level politicians in the Senate and elsewhere who identified politically and culturally as Black felt an unwavering allegiance to the oppressed social sectors, or “el pueblo” (the people). At that time, embracing an ethno-racial identity implied the assuming of a class identity that rejected the middle ground: either one belonged to the dominant classes, who were white, or to the “pueblo,” that is, to the “non-white” marginalized and exploited sectors (Pisano 2013:194). However, the post-pandemic context has seen much criticism of neoliberalism’s economic and social effects, and there has been a growing interest in overcoming the structural inequalities in Colombian society. In this new scenario, the Black middle classes, more visible than ever before, have an important political role to play, whether they choose to support the struggle to democratize Colombian society, breaking the link between success and individual economic profit and responding to the problems caused by the socioeconomic, ecological, and cost-of-living crises; or to uphold the status quo by shoring up a model of society that has already amply demonstrated its limitations. With the arrival of the new left-wing government to power, and above all the election of Francia Márquez as vice president, a number of Afrodescendant individuals have been appointed to top-level positions in President Gustavo Petro’s administration, for example, Aurora Vergara Figueroa as Education Minister; Yesenia Olaya as Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation; Maria Isabel Urrutia as Minister for Sport;4 Ana Carolina Quijano Valencia as Vice Minister of Higher Education; and Camilo Iguarán as the Vice Minister for Sport. High-level advisers such as the Presidential Adviser on Women’s Equality, Clemencia Carabalí Rodallega, is Afro-Colombian, as are the ambassadors to the United States (Gilberto Murillo) and South Africa (María del Rosario Mina). There are also many young Black functionaries working in the vice president’s office. Many of these people embody the Black middle classes analyzed in this book in that they are highly educated individuals, many who have postgraduate studies abroad, and with careers spanning work in international agencies, NGOs, and universities. While the Black middle classes have found themselves with more representatives in the highest-level political positions, their visibility has received

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resistance from sectors of the political establishment. Nevertheless, it is Vice President Francia Márquez who has been the main target of attacks. Márquez did not graduate from a prestigious university and as a young woman worked in artisanal mining and as a domestic worker. She gained prominence through community organizing and environmental activism, rather than a traditional political career. She does not speak the language of the elites, nor pander to white-mestizo and Andean cultural codes, and her bluntness and defiant body language in response to clearly provocative questioning has been classed as “aggressive” (Godoy Fierro 2023). This class difference has made her the main target of attacks, in that her presence at the top of the government is seen as illegitimate by those on the right. Márquez is seen as an interloper, a social climber whose hidden goal is to enrich herself on public funds. This image has been seized on by certain senators from the right-wing Centro Democrático party under the guise of policing how taxpayers’ money is spent (González Quintero and Wolf 2022; Osorio 2023). She has been accused of throwing away public funds on her use of the armed forces helicopter (Lafuente 2023), while her official visit to three African countries has been dismissed as an “expensive safari” (Revista Semana 2023; El Colombiano May 10, 2023). These commentators have corrupted her motto of “Vivir Sabroso” through their cynical argument that it means that Márquez herself is intent on “enjoying life” on the resources meant for all Colombians that Márquez claims to represent. “Sabroso,” for these people, has come to mean consumerism and monetary wealth, because upward mobility in Colombia has come to take on these ideas, rather than an accessing of dignity or the chance of a better life, not only for individuals but for everyone. While many would wish that Márquez take on an austere public persona akin to that of Uruguayan ex-president José Mujica, who executed in his daily life the values that he preached. The reality for Márquez as a relatively young Black woman in Colombia is a different one. The threats against her life she continues to receive make overland travel hugely dangerous and the use of a helicopter necessary. Her position in the Colombian socio-racial order has meant that she is not seen as a legitimate figure able and suitable for wielding power. Her elegant tailor-made wardrobe and frank defense of herself all act as a shield against that automatic doubt of her capability and appropriateness for the post. It is also true that, globally, women in politics are the targets of extremely high levels of offline and online abuse and harassment (for examples in the UK, see Harmer and Southern 2021; in Brasil, Rabelo de Pinho 2023). Yet Márquez contends with additional race- and class-based discriminations (Urrea Giraldo 2023). It is important to make the connection between greater visibility of Black people in power and stronger discriminatory reactions from those

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who perceive this greater presence as a threat, as it rocks the status quo of Colombia’s historical and current socio-racial order. It is yet to be seen if these reactions signal the start of a backlash of the proportions seen in the United States as a reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency. NOTES 1. Own translation. From an interview with student Katherine Monroy, quoted in the article “90% of young people in Bogotá feel the National Strike represents them,” published on May 28, 2021. https:​//​conexioncapital​.co​/90​-de​-los​-jovenes​-se​-sienten​ -re- presentados-por-el-paro-nacional/. 2. Following Eduardo Restrepo (Palacio 2021), “gente de bien” describes a group of people who have, for many years, been hegemonized in Colombian society by the triad of the political ideology of ex-president Uribe Vélez, paramilitarism, and the Catholic and Evangelical Christian lobbies. This white-mestizo, middle and upper-middle class section of society deeply believes that they have a monopoly on moral goodness and decency, and classify those who fall outside of their boundaries as criminals, vandals, commoners, and druggies. This worldview has justified their moral and practical support of serious human rights violations of the past decade or so, such as the falsos positivos scandal, “social cleansing” paramilitary killings, and this most recent episode of shooting at protesters alongside the riot police. 3. See https:​//​elpais​.com​/america​-colombia​/elecciones​-presidenciales​/2022​-06​-08​/ el​-voto​-afro​-del​-pacifico​-el​-efecto​-francia​-marquez​-en​-datos​.html. 4. Although in 2023’s cabinet shake-ups Urrutia was removed from the post following certain controversies.

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Index

affirmative action, 49, 51, 68, 91, 92, 100, 107, 128, 158, 165–166 African American influence, 74, 101, 114, 120, 131 Afro hair, 98–99, 148, 149, 160 “Afro vote,” the, 102, 174 Afro-Colombian government ministers, 70, 73, 83, 102–3, 174–175; connected to Liberal Party, 73, 155; and social policy, 118, 154 Afro-Colombians in the arts, 104–6. See also self-representation AFRODES, 103 Alliance for Progress, 54. See also international development Amafrocol. See Black women’s microenterprises Andinocentrism, 7, 24 Angulo, Liliana, 105 Angulo, Mercedes, 106 anti-communism, xv, 118–119, 142 anti-racism, 2, 86–87, 93, 103, 104, 106, 148–151, 156, 158–159, 161, 164–165, 166 Arboleda, Anderson, 164 Argentina, xv, 47, 48 armed conflict, 30, 94, 103

Article 55, 28, 30 assimilation, 26, 28, 57, 97 axes of social inequality: age/generation, xii, 5, 8, 11, 60, 98, 121, 127, 128, 131–132, 133, 155, 161, 162; and configuration of social positions, 34, 59, 161; critical points along, 34, 60; gender and class, xiii, 53–55; as inextricable, 59–60, 161; as multidimensional not additive, 44, 60; as mutually reinforcing, 29, 35, 59; race and class, 29, 31–33, 67. See also compatibility of Black and middle-class identities and race-class-gender triad, 45–46, 159; race and gender, 130, 161, 140, 160 Bahía, 49–50, 129 biographical method, 5,11, 116; integrated into social context, 7, 117 bipartisan violence. See La Violencia Black communities, 3, 28, 30–31, 156; 201

202

Index

and alienation of urban Black population, 84, 156; as environmental guardians, 145; and mega-development projects, 33, 94, 159 Black feminism, 115, 133, 160, 166– 167, 172; in Brazil, 35, 45; and intersectionality, 2, 35, 45–46 Black identity: in different generations, 131, 134; its ethnization, 84, 156, 158; first recognition in Colombia, 74; global, 134, 158; its heterogeneity, 31, 51, 68, 100, 131, 134, 156, 158; individualization of, 132; linked to regional origin, 77–78, 131, 134, 158. See also Caribbean identity; more leeway to express, 85; through culture, 68, 104; post 1991, 28, 31, 84, 156; rural, 32. See also Black communities Black men: as fathers, 113–115, 118, 129, 131; stereotypes of, 83, 98, 129, 131 Black middle classes as social group, 10, 172–173; and absence of collective identity, 134, 165; and activism, 11, 86, 172; and amphibious behaviors, 53; and democracy, xvi, xxii, xxi– xxii, 12, 163; disconnected from Black struggles, 100–101, 157–158; economic vulnerability of, 53, 107, 173; their heterogeneity, 6, 9, 165, 173; identification with popular classes, 32, 81, 155, 163, 175

and identity, 12, 50, 85–87, 100, 158. See also Black middle-class position; integration based on wealth, 102; and liberal professions, 50, 73; and modernity, xiv, 6, 155; in numbers, 4; and respectability, 5, 50, 87, 97, 129, 163; and self-presentation, 98–99; and stereotypes, xiv, 6, 83, 87, 95, 98, 104, 129, 130, 131, 133, 141, 160 Black middle classes as social phenomenon, 10 Black middle-class millennials: and identity, 51, 85, 121, 132; their understanding of racism, 121, 132, 134 Black middle-class position: challenges, 9, 52, 162; fragility of, 9, 50–51, 68, 163, 173 Black political action, 80, 84; as a new political subject, xxi, 12, 174; restriction of, 76, 77, 142 Black population in Colombia: associated with lower classes, 31, 153; compared to rest of population, 93–94, 153; excluded from national identity, xiv, 23–24, 140 Black resilience neoliberalism, 102 Black social movements, 81, 83, 164, 172; focused on culture and recognition, 93, 142, 155; and integrationist mindset, 74–75; making political alliances, 165, 172 Black women:

Index

affected by racism and sexism, 8, 133, 137, 148, 176. See also Francia Márquez; associated with domestic service, xiv, 140; breaking the neoliberal paradigm, xxi, 12, 149; and collective social mobility, xx, 137, 150, 160; overcoming the intersection gender/race/class, 137, 160, 167; recognition of role in struggles, 137, 155; and romantic relationships, 69, 84, 97–98, 125, 126; social mobility of, 12, 133, 137– 151, 159 Black women ethnoeducators, xx, 12, 85, 137, 144–147, 150, 166 Black women schoolteachers, xx, 12, 76, 79, 118, 137–144, 150, 159, 166; and political organizing, xvii, 144, 160. See also Marcha del Hambre Black women’s microenterprises, xx–xxi, 12, 86, 137, 147–149, 151, 160, 166 Bogotá, 83, 121, 125, 172; migration to, 5, 77, 79, 106, 118, 123, 127, 139; as site of Afro-Colombian socialization, xvii, 78, 114, 142, 155; as site of racial awakening, 32, 74, 78, 114; racial dynamics of, 6, 80–81, 83 Bolivia, 51–52, 58 Borja, Wilson, 106 Brazil, 49–51, 52, 67–69, 165 buen vivir, 35 Buenaventura, 103–4, 119, 121 Cali, 147, 170–171, 172–173 Caribbean identity, 87, 123, 132, 144

203

Caribbean region, 21, 30, 77, 79, 83, 98, 117, 122–126. See also Caribbean identity Carneiro, Sueli, 3, 45 Cartagena, 4, 69–70, 72, 91, 94, 98, 114, 117, 122–23, 132, 183 caste paintings, 22 Cauca, department of, 2, 70, 73, 75, 86, 102, 113, 114, 138, 139, 155, 165, 171 Centro de Estudios Afrocolombianos, 75, 81 Césaire, Aimé, 115 Chocó, department of, 69, 70, 73, 79, 83, 97, 117, 118, 121, 138, 139, 140, 141, 155, Chocquibtown, 104 cholas, 52, 58–59 Chorographic Commission of New Granada. See Codazzi, Agustín Club Negro de Colombia, 73–75, 81, 114–115, 154 Codazzi, Agustín, 24 Cold War, xv–xvii, xix, 76 Colombian Communist Party, 78 colorism. See pigmentocracy Combahee River Collective, 59 compatibility of Black and middleclass identities, 50–51, 85, 87, 100, 107, 173. See also oxymoron of Black middle classes configurations of Blackness. See Black identity Conservative party, xvii, 76, 171 Constitution of 1991, 28, 30, 84, 92–93, 97, 100, 116, 121, 156, 158 Córdoba, Diego Luis, 73, 141 Córdoba, Piedad, 102 Corn Islands, 117, 124 COVID-19 pandemic, 12, 163–164, 169–170, 173 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 46 creole elites, 24 Cúcuta, 16, 117, 118–120, 129–130

204

Index

De Certeau, Michel, 12 de Friedemann, Nina, 82 democracy, 163–164. See also middle classes development models. See buen vivir; neoliberalism Día del Negro. See Club Negro de Colombia Díaz, Natanael, 32, 74, 114, 163 do Nascimento, Abdias, 81–82 Du Bois, W.E.B., 8, 101 education: its importance in Black families, 2, 127–128, 141; for social mobility, 67, 127– 128, 141. See also higher education; public investment in education Escalante Polo, Aquiles, 73 escuelas normales. See teacher training colleges ethno-education, 85, 144–145, 160. See also Black women ethnoeducators family histories, 113–117. See also biographical method Fanon, Frantz, xx, 43, 88, 100, FECODE (teaching union), 77, 79, 144 feminism, 160, 166, 174. See also Black feminism First Congress of Black Culture, 81–82, 145, 155 Floyd, George, 164 forced displacement, 30, 84, 94, 170 Frente Nacional, xvii, 55, 77, 79, 142 Fundación Color de Colombia, 81, 101–2, 120, 157 Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 27, 70, 73, 76 Gaitanism. See Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer gender, 53–55, 133.

See also axes of social inequality; Black women; Black men Gonzalez, Lélia, 45 Herencia de Timbiqui, 104 higher education, 50, 77, 95, 128, 154, 159, 165–166; Black, male graduates, 72, 80; devaluation of, 94, 128; and indigenous women, 55–58; as mechanism for social mobility, 11, 32, 53, 55, 58, 151. See also affirmative action Hinestrosa, John Hendrix, 106 identity, study of, 40 indigenous middle classes, 51, 55–58 indigenous political activism, 165. See also Minga Indígena indigenous as “other,” 23, 31 international development, xvi, 54–55, 145, 148, 158 interracial romantic relationships, 2, 69, 98, 120, 124 intersectionality, 35, 45–61; and importance of situated approach, 59, 162; for study of social mobility, 46–61, 116, 161–162, 165. See also axes of social inequality Juárez, Benito, 48 La calle 10 (novel), 27 La Violencia, xv, 76, 141–142 Lara, Mabel, 102 Law 70 of 1993, 84, 93 left-wing movements: Black people’s alienation in, xviii, 79–80, 155; Black people’s participation in, 45, 79, 155; and dismissal of race, 45, 79–80 LGBTIQ+ people, 28, 164, 172

Index

Liberal party, 73, 118; and Black membership, 78, 155 Liberal Republic, 70–76; and education, 72, 138; and mestizaje, 71, 75; modernizing project, 71, 138, 139; and opportunities for Black Colombians and women, 75 López-Pedreros, Ricardo, 9, 54, 163 Marcha del hambre, 77, 143–144 María la Baja, Bolívar, 117, 122 Márquez, Francia, xxi–xxii, 102, 166, 172, 173, 175–176 masacre de las bananeras, 70–71 Medellín, 3, 69, 73, 173 Melecio Palacios, Fabio, 105 men and masculinities, 54–55, 80. See also Black men Mena, Zulia, 84 meritocracy, xxii, 68, 86, 92, 101, 133, 157 mestizaje, 25–27, 92, 132, 161; as assimilationist, xiv, 26, 28, 74–75, 133, 141, 162–163; as celebration of racial mixing, 72, 154; inclusion/exclusion of Black Colombians, 23, 29, 31, 154; and modernity, xiii–xiv, 25; as national identity, 25–27, 72, 163; perceived as contributing to backwardness, xv, 72; and whitening, 23, 25–26, 92, 133. See also whitening Mexico, xv, 25, 47, 52, 57, 126 middle class as category of study, 10, 37–44; analyzed alongside gender, 53–59; analyzed alongside race, 47–53; its conceptualization, 9, 37–39; and Eurocentrism, 38, 42;

205

decolonial/postcolonial approaches to, xi, xii, 42; intersectional approach to, xi, 10, 44; for understanding domination, 44; in Latin America, ix–xi, 39–44, 46–59; objective vs. subjective definitions, 5, 37; and self-consciousness, 9; as unimportant or suspicious, x, 39, 43 middle classes: as defense against communism, xvi, 142, 155; and gender roles, 72, 80, 85; idealization of, 37–38; linked to democracy, ix–x, xxi– xxii, 142, 155, 163, 169–170; linked to power and privilege, 10; and modernity, 37, 42, 142; perceived of as white, xv–xvi, 2, 12, 47, 83, 149; and “right to rule,” xix, xxii, 55, 80; and service sector, xiii–xiv, xix, 72, 75, 83, 85; under threat, 39, 169–170; understood as politically moderate, 37–38, 169–170 migration: rural-urban, 5, 72–73, 138, 139. See also Bogotá Minga Indígena, 164, 171 Morales, Evo, 52, 58 Moreno, Paula Marcela, 86 Mujica, José, 176 multiculturalism. See neoliberal multiculturalism; state multiculturalism murder of social leaders, 95, 159 Murillo, Luis Gilberto, 102, 175 national strike 2021. See paro nacional 2021

206

Index

neoliberal multiculturalism, 33, 69, 92–103; (cultural) recognition vs (economic) redistribution, xix, 33–34, 95, 107; in Bolivia, 58; and depoliticization, 33–34, 156; and gender inequality, 85; and increased funding for Black organizations, 95, 158; limitations of, 33–34, 85, 93; on balance, 95, 106, 158–159; and social inclusion of AfroColombians, xix, 34, 85, 86; and wealth gap, xix, 34, 85, 87–88, 93–94, 159 neoliberalism, xiii, xix, 61, 84–85, 87, 156; in overdrive, 67, 107. See also neoliberal multiculturalism new political scenario, 173, 175. See also Francia Márquez; Pacto Histórico party Nieto, Juan José, 70 Obama, Barack, 176 “out of place,” xi, xiv, 1, 50, 68, 162, 173 oxymoron of Black middle classes, xi, xii, xiv, xvii, xxii, 4, 173. See also compatibility of Black and middle-class identities Pacific region, 3, 4, 5, 28, 30, 77, 79, 84, 128, 145, 156, 159; music tradition, 104–5; as touchstone of Blackness in Colombia, 87, 124, 132. See also Black communities Pacto Histórico party, 107, 164, 173–174 Palacios, Arnoldo, 163 paro nacional 2021, 12, 164–165, 169– 172, 173, 174

passing, 19–20 Passing (novel), 19 Peace Accord of 2016, 94, 103, 159 Peru, 25, 33, 48, 54 Petro, Gustavo, 107, 173, 175 pigmentocracy, 12, 32, 48, 83, 101, 138 Pisano, Piero, 115, 133 positionality, 7–10; and outsider within, 7, 161 postcolonial/decolonial approaches, x, xi, xii, 42–44, 59 post-racial society: desire for, 68, 86, 101; supposed, 86, 157–158 public investment in education, 128, 138, 166; scholarships, 125, 128, 138, 140. See also Liberal Republic; teacher training colleges Quibdó, 3, 4, 6, 69 Quijano, Aníbal, 21 race, 20, 25, 27, 29, 49–50, 60, 93, 146. See also axes of social inequality; Quijano, Anibal racial categories: Afro-Colombian, 3, 84, 146; Afrodescendant, 3, 35, 86; Afromestiza, 1; Black, 3; changing language of, 3; cuarterón, 21–22; mestizo, 23; mulatto, 21–22; palenquero, 3, 132; raizal, 3, 124–126, 132–133, 146, 161; zambo, 21–22. See also Black communities; Caribbean identity racial democracy, 12, 20, 49, 154 racial discrimination, 114, 166, 176;

Index

distinction with structural racism, 93, 95, 120, 134; legislation against, 35, 107, 158 racial grammar, 97, 98 racial quotas. See affirmative action racial regimes: comparison between the US and Brazil, 20, 49, 50. See also mestizaje; neoliberal multiculturalism; socio-racial order; state multiculturalism racism: in Brazil, 49, 50–51, 68; in childhood, 51, 146–147; coexistence with racial democracy, 29; in Colombia, 153–154, 166; as common ground, 68; denial of existence, 24, 75, 154; denial of having been a victim, 68, 134; double consciousness, 8, 51; emotional impact of, 69; against indigenous people, 31, 57, 171; and racial literacy, 8, 52–53; as social exclusion, 11, 31, 158; resistance to, 57–58. See also anti-racism; responses to, 57–58, 69, 132–133, 163, 172; seen as problem of class, 29, 31–32; undermining racialized peoples’ social position, 163, 176; under multiculturalism. See state multiculturalism. See also whitening regional origin to refer to race, 24, 77–78, 134, 155, 162 regionalization of Colombia, 24, 116–117. See also regional origin to refer to race religion, 76, 133, 158

207

representations of Black people: in the media, 31, 133; self-representation, 105–6 repression of political organizing, 77, 118–119, 174 Rojas Pinilla, dictatorship of, 118– 119, 124 San Andrés, 117, 124–126 social class as main explanatory category, 29, 31–32, 40, 43, 45, 161 social inequality, 34, 45, 122. See also neoliberal multiculturalism social media, 164 socio-racial order: of Colombia, 10, 21, 24–35. See also mestizaje; state multiculturalism state multiculturalism, 28–29, 92–93, 154. See also Constitution of 1993 strategies of upward mobility: academic excellence, 120, 123; emotional attachment, 122–123, 130–131; entrepreneurial nous, 122, 125, 128–129; migration periphery to center, 72–73, 77, 127; political career, 83; patriarchal family, 128. See also Black men; settling in a smaller city, 129–130; social networks, 119, 125– 126, 127; women’s role in, 53, 113, 127, 130, 161 structural racism: increased interest in, 34, 87, 107, 164. See also anti-racism; racism struggle/resistance: to armed conflict, 30–31;

208

Index

to injustice, 164; to white cultural domination, xxi, 103–6, 166. See also paro nacional 2021 study of Black Colombians, 24, 75; Black middle classes as category of study, 2–3, 9, 153 teacher training colleges, 73, 75, 138 teaching profession: breaking stereotypes, 139– 140, 141; high number of teachers from Chocó, 83; importance for Black middle classes, 73; precarious conditions of, 77, 143; as a social mission, 140; and upward social mobility, 75, 138, 140, 160; and women’s liberation, 75–76, 138, 160. See also Black women schoolteachers teaching union. See FECODE Third World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenofobia and Related Intolerance, in Durban, 3, 35, 86, 156 Um preto de classe média (novel), 67 Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2, 4, 73, 114, 125, 128 upward social mobility of Black Colombians, 11, 52, 80, 107, 116; and whitening, xvii, xx, 23, 50, 81. See also whitening;

as an individual process, xix, 57, 101–2, 107, 157, 159. See also Black women; pre-twentieth century, 69–70 Uribe Vélez, Álvaro, 86, 157 US racial policy, imposition of, 49 Venezuela, migration to, 122, 123, 130 Viveros Mancilla, Marino, 73, 113– 115, 163 vivir sabroso, 176 Wabgou, Maguemati, 106 whiteness, xv, xx, 21–23, 25, 96, 107, 162 whitening, 11, 23, 92, 96–100; and beauty, xix, 98; and mestizaje. See mestizaje; as a national project, 25, 96; through European immigration, 26, 71 women’s access to higher education, 72, 125. See also teacher training colleges working twice as hard, 57–58, 96–97 young people, 98, 124, 148, 151, 160, 171–172, 174, 175. See also Black middle-class millennials Zapata Olivella, Delia, 72, 74, 78 Zapata Olivella, Juan, 83 Zapata Olivella, Manuel, 26, 32, 74, 78, 82, 114, 162–163

About the Author

Mara Viveros Vigoya holds a PhD in anthropology from EHESS (Paris). She is a professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, teaching in the Department of Anthropology (1998–2017) and the School of Gender Studies. She is cofounder of the school and has been its director three times. She has been guided in her career as a researcher and lecturer by the theoretical, political, and ethical dimensions of critical feminism; her research has focused on the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, and race and ethnicity in the social and cultural dynamics of Latin American societies.

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