Abstract

BERMAN AREVALO, Eloisa. The “ruinous failure” of agrarian reform in key of blackness: afro-peasant communities and liberal recognition in Montes de María, Colombia. memorias [online]. 2019, n.37, pp.117-149. ISSN 1794-8886.  https://doi.org/10.14482/memor.37.986.105.

During the 1960s, the implementation of agrarian reform in the town of Marialabaja in Colombia’s Caribbean, marked a conjuncture of complex negotiations surrounding the legitimacy of a liberal state project in a historically afro-campesino territory. Project Bolívar #1, implemented by the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (INCORA), was based on schemes and logics of agrarian modernization and peasant recognition that disavowed the blackness of the local population. The Project not only confronted the particular territorialities and histories of afro-campesinos but was faced with strong opposition from conservative landowning elites. Based on the case of the community of Palo Alto Hicotea, and the relationship between its inhabitants, the State and the conservative opposition, this article analyzes the ways in which blackness emerged and was mobilized as a political resource by different actors during agrarian reform in Marialabaja. An analysis of the conjunctural emergence of blackness allows us to understand the ambiguous and unstable nature of the politics of blackness and to broaden their analysis beyond blackness as a State category. In turn, the experience of the inhabitants of Palo Alto offers a unique perspective to analyze the partial and contested nature of technologies of liberal state recognition and the insertion of afro-descendant populations into schemes and logics of agrarian modernization during agrarian reform.

Keywords : blackness; agrarian reform; liberal recognition; Colombian Caribbean.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )