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theses

For centuries, alluvial gold extraction and plantation labor have been central sources of income for people living in Norte del Cauca. Located in Western Colombia where the Andes open up to the Cauca River Valley, scholars have described this region as a landscape of proletarization, commoditization, and urbanization. Narratives that oscillate between teleological images of agrarian and urban transition on the one hand, and essentialized views of resistance and autonomy on the other, have long characterized social scientific studies of the region. This dissertation critically examines these narratives and shows how they have foreclosed important political and theoretical debates. This ethnography is thus not the tale of how enslaved populations became “free peasants” and later plantation and factory workers, or even how they became urban dwellers as promised in most modernization narratives. Nor is it one where people find their “ancestral” identity and belonging though concerted action against oppressive structures. Drawing on twenty-four months of anthropological fieldwork and archival study conducted between 2011-2016, the dissertation diverges from these views stressing the stories of mutual constitution and often overlapping and ambivalent paths I encountered in this land of gold and sugarcane. There is no doubt that there is little to glorify about the history of colonialism, state formation, and capitalist development in this region. However, I argue that people who are imagined by activists of the black ethnic organizing in Colombia, and the global peasant and environmental movements to be dreaming with alternative forms of political, economic and ecological becoming, are also dreaming with state recognition, infrastructure improvements, entrepreneurial success, and development projects. Moving along the upper Cauca river with its hydroelectric dam and gold mines, and across the Pan-American highway with its sugarcane plantations and industrial areas, this dissertation develops an analytic of entanglement in order to examine how historically racialized production relations, long-standing extractive practices, and an emergent entrepreneur subjectivities exist alongside “ancestral live-visions” of well-being and autonomy, and notions of “traditional” belonging and production mobilized by small farmers, miners, and rural workers. I argue that what is left of the racialized and extractive labor regimes, is not just a history of proletarization and destruction of the environment, but also the important experience of people who have sought to belong to the region and have come to know themselves precisely through inhabiting and working theses same landscape of exploitation and extraction.  

ETD_8753

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Enrique Jaramillo Buenaventura

doi:10.7282/T3BK1GT0

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.