Emancipation or Enclosement?

The
Spatialization of Difference and
Urban Ethnic Contestation in
Colombia
Diana Bocarejo
Carrera 6A # 1413 piso 5, Escuela de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad del Rosario, Bogot a,
Colombia;
dbocarejo@gmail.com
Abstract: The focus of this article is a paradox inherent in the political effects of spatial
claims undertaken by multicultural policies in many nation states: though territory is
considered as one of the primary means of achieving autonomy and self-determination,
it is at the same time a mechanism that encloses difference. Through a combination
of archival and ethnographic research I study the political effects of binding indigenous
peoples minority rights with indigenous reservations in Colombia. I focus on analyzing
the legal ways in which an ethnic indigenous type has been attached to an ethnic
indigenous rural topos in the jurisprudence of the Colombian Constitutional Court. I also
examine how ethnic groups in the capital city of Bogot a have questioned the multicultural
ideals of indigeneity and the romantic desires of what an indigenous place should look
like. Ultimately, my intention is to draw attention both analytically and politically, to the
necessity of more thorough analyses of the consequences of strict forms of spatializing
ethnicity.
Keywords: indigenous peoples, multiculturalism, urban ethnicity, spatialization of
difference, Colombia
Figure 1 shows a public bus whose nal destination seems to be an intercultural
city and which reects a celebration of urban diversity that stands in sharp
contrast to the complex histories of marginality of indigenous peoples in many Latin
American cities. The fact that all these different people are riding one of Bogot as
emblematic red buses is especially paradoxical since Colombias multicultural policy
has consistently excluded indigenous people in urban areas. In fact, the recognition
of ethnic minorities, in legal and in popular imagination, actually seems to imply that
indigenous peoples who do not live in their rural territory do not correspond to the
ideal of who and what is worth protecting. In that vein, a general statement by the
National Ofce of Ethnic Groups (2005) states that urban communities should not
be recognized . . . because once indigenous people leave their traditional land, their
social relations, relations of production . . . their relationship to the land and [their]
cultural traits, customs, and traditional knowledge, are slowly lost or modied. This
statement is at odds with the actual practices and legal imaginations of ethnicity
in many other countries, in particular anglophone and francophone ones, that are
based on ideal constructions of multicultural cities. The invisibility of urban ethnicity
in many Latin American contexts has also nourished a different kind of academic
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Figure 1: This drawing commissioned by the Bogot a mayors ofce in 2006 reads Towards
an intercultural city (yer in Transmilenio public bus stations; photograph by author)
approach to muticulturalism, one that has focused mainly on the disputes rising from
land tenure and land use in rural areas and has neglected the complex issues of social
difference and inequality in the consolidation of an urban ethnic citizenship. The
struggle for legal recognition by urban indigenous groups in Colombia who do not
envisage the creation of or the return to a rural reservation does not theoretically
map onto the same territorial claims that have been made in recent decades by
various social movements. Territorial claims have generally taken the formof disputes
seeking to achieve state recognition of indigenous reservations and as such have
constituted one of the most importantif not the single most importantmatter
of multicultural rights and ethnic autonomy in Colombia and many other countries
of Latin America. However, this celebration of territorial ethnic recognition tends
to gloss over the violent history in which states have historically rendered ethnic
populations legible by creating xed associations between an ethnic group and a
territory.
1
The political effects of spatial claims undertaken by multicultural policies in many
nation-states are therefore paradoxical: though territory is mobilized as one of the
primary means of achieving autonomy and self-determination, it is at the same
time a mechanism that spatializes and encloses difference. This contradiction is
especially poignant, though by no means unique, in the case of indigenous groups
in Colombia.
In the remainder of the article, I explore this paradox through the study of
two different problems. The rst concerns the legal mechanisms through which
an ethnic indigenous type has been bound to an ethnic indigenous rural
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topos. I approach this issue through the study of rulings made by the Colombian
Constitutional Court. Through these rulings, the Court has not only come to shape
the conditions under which someone can be a grantee of minority rights, but it has
also come to determine the place that he or she is supposed to inhabit in order to
conform to the multicultural regime. The second problem addresses how the States
recognition of ethnic groups in Bogot a has destabilized the strong spatialization of
difference in Colombia. This type of recognition has brought about a reformulation
of the broad political imagination of ethnic places associated with the idea of
Colombia as a multicultural nation.
This text relies on combined insights of archival and ethnographic research
materials. The focus of my work has been the attempt to counter a common
tendency in multicultural studies to privilege the analysis of legal codes over the
analysis of legal practices. Within the study of codesof rights and of legal norms in
generalI found many valuable contributions to our understanding of the manner
in which minority rights have been negotiated, as well as invaluable material for
comparative studies of multicultural legislations (see, for example, Jackson 2007;
Rappaport 1996; Van Cott 2000). My research, however, goes beyond codes and
delves into the legal practices that result from them.
Setting my sights on practices has allowed me to study the problems and conicts
rising from the exercise of certain multicultural minority rights that have been
inextricably linked to territory (usually to an indigenous reservation called resguardo
in Colombia). As such, my archival analysis of legal texts and regulations regarding
minority rights focuses on the manner in which these rights are contested both
in court sentences
2
and in the endeavor of urban ethnic groups to attain state
recognition. The analysis presented here is a part of a broader investigation that
brought me together with different groups and took me to different areas in
order to bring an ethnographic eye onto disputes over the implementation of
multicultural policies and the different spatial frontiers that were shaped within
those disputes (Bocarejo 2008). This article only takes into account the case
of state-recognized urban indigenous groups in Bogot a as they have openly
contested the strong legal spatial associations of indigenous groups and minority
rights.
Given that multiculturalism, as an object of study, has been explored from very
different angles and lines of questioning, it is important to clarify that the analysis
set forth here understands multiculturalism as a political arrangement and not as a
naive recognition of diversity. This entails that the argument presented here operates
under the premise that multiculturalism is the decision-making process through
which plurality is recognized, rendered visible and accountable (see, for example,
Comaroff and Comaroff 2003, 2009; Povinelli 2002). It is therefore approached in
its normative sense (Goldberg 1994); that is, the specic legal negotiations that
in many nation-states have resulted in the creation of new Constitutions in which
certain minorities are recognized and granted special rights.
Within the wide range of issues that are articulated within the study of
multiculturalism, I am particularly interested in analyzing the manner in which
multicultural policy has used and imposed a specic relationship between being an
indigenous subject and living within a particular territory. Some anthropologists and
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geographers have made important contributions to this topic by studying different
social movements and their struggles over territory within multiculturalism (Escobar
2001; Jackson and Warren 2005; Oslender 2004, 2008). My purpose is to contribute
to this body of literature by exploring the spatial grounding of multiculturalism. The
types of conicts I will address include both explicit contestations of policy such
as legal cases, and implicit discrepancies with general multicultural preconceptions
such as the ways in which indigenous groups imagine new urban ethnic places.
This type of analysis is intended to raise a red ag, both analytically and politically, for
those who deem the effects of territorial claims of minority groups to be eminently
emancipatory. Many activists, especially those working within legal circles, tend
to forget and silence the long and violent history of the strong association of
indigenous peoples to their place in Colombia. A few instances of this history
are the colonial mandate, the marginality of ethnic groups in state-making, and the
intricate processes of internal migration and displacement associated with the state,
guerrilla and paramilitary groups ght over sovereignty, all of which would be hard
to pass off as minor.
These reasons lead me to claim that multicultural studies could gain a lot
from broader debates regarding pluralism and democracy. For instance, there are
two crucial arguments that ought to be taken into account when studying the
emancipatory potential of multicultural policy. The rst is the acknowledgement that
multicultural rights, like any other rights, can be both a vehicle of emancipation, of
political disenfranchisement or institutionalized servitude and a mode of securing
and naturalizing dominant social powers (Brown 1995:99). The second is the idea
that any sort of plurality that is recognized within a multicultural system of rights
cannot be reduced, overcome or rendered commensurate. Thus, my intent is to
follow Chantal Mouffes argument for the irreducibility of plurality as a condition of
democracy. She explains how:
the object of radical and plural democracy is to be able to acknowledge that difference
is the condition of possibility of constituting unity and totality at the same time that it
provides its essential limits. In such a view plurality cannot be eliminated; it becomes
irreducible (2000:33).
Hence, multiculturalism, like any other political arrangement, cannot be addressed
as a means for rendering difference, once and for all, commensurate in a shared
orthodoxy.
This irreducibility of difference is laid bare by the analysis at hand in two different
ways that show the impossibility of determining a single ideal form and meaning
for an indigenous territory. First, in the Constitutional Court sentences we can
follow the different ways in which indigenous peoples dispute a reduced and limited
recognition of cultural difference that includes only those living in indigenous rural
reservations. Second, the case study of indigenous urban groups in Bogot a shows
the different imaginations of ethnic spaces in urban settings and the desires and
hopes for a new indigenous urban citizenship. These imaginations and desires
openly question the States ideal of indigeneity and the spirit of the multicultural
law.
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Bounding Difference and Rights
As has been exemplied by a variety of authors within the social sciences, the
relationship between space and politics has been addressed through the study of
the different mechanisms of governance, control and power embodied in legal
classications, instruments of correction and security, and in the different forms of
human conduct and subjectivity (see Castells 1978; Harvey 1996; Mitchell 1999;
Moore 2005; Nash 2005).
The process of granting special rights to a portion of a nation-states population
requires a special legibility effect dened by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2001:126)
as the production of both a language and a knowledge for governance and of
theoretical and empirical tools that classify and regulate collectivities. Both the
language and the specic tools of governance of national minorities in many
multicultural legal regimes are based upon strict spatializations of difference. In
the case of Colombia, ethnic collectivities have been largely constructed through
two spatial congurations: indigenous reservations (resguardos) and Afro-Colombian
collective territories (territorios colectivos). In the 1991 Constitution ethnic groups
are addressed as the legal subjects of minority rights. The category ethnic group
comes to include, in this case, indigenous peoples (pueblos indgenas), black
communities and raizales
3
of the Colombian Caribbean islands of San Andr es
and Providencia. In 1998, Rom communities (gypsies) were also recognized as an
ethnic group. However, the strong spatial association of ethnic rights implied in the
current Constitution is the result of longue dur ee historical processes that exceed the
multicultural legal conjunctures of the 1990s. Indigenous resguardos, in particular,
are a legacy of the Spanish colonial period.
Thus, the spatial location of current ethnic groups has been the result of
the production and reproduction of what Claudia Briones, using Rita Laura
Segatos concept, calls national formations of alterity. This idea understands
the social, economic and political factors as not only dictating the criteria of
identication/classication and belonging, but as also regulating differential
conditions of existence within a nation-state (Briones 2005:16). I believe these
national formations of alterity are, in many cases, intensively constructed and
regulated through spatial logics. One such scenario of constant production and
(re)production of formations of alterity is the National Constitutional Court, created
after the new 1991 Constitution.
In fact, for many scholars, the Constitutional Court is one of the major players
in the consolidation of multiculturalism in Colombia through its rulings over cases
involving a wide variety of ethnic issues (Cepeda Espinosa 2001; Pineda 2001;
Sousa Santos and Rodrguez Garavito 2006). These include issues of customary law,
disputes over access to indigenous reservations by different agents (missionaries,
oil and mining exploitation, the presence of military), and decisions regarding the
inclusion of indigenous people in multicultural programs (especially when it comes
to benets for healthcare and education and exemption from military service). For
this reason, the study of court sentences provides a picture of how the connection
between rights and territory has been both framed and contested at the national
level and across time. In fact, legal suits regarding the issue date back to 1992
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and have come from a variety of indigenous groups from different geographical
areas.
Most of the rights that had been granted to ethnic minorities have actually
acquired their spatial delimitation within the framework of a decentralized state,
which was another guiding principle of the 1991 Constitution. Decentralization
sought to take power away from the central government in Bogot a and grant more
autonomy to the regions. It implicated a shift in the administration of budgets,
which allowed indigenous resguardos to receive state transfers that are co-managed
with local governments. This implied that the exercise of minority rights, including
customary law, education and language, must be conned within a specic
territory. The following are some examples of the type of legal language through
which certain Constitutional rights have been spatialized: indigenous territories
will be governed by councils and rules that follow the uses and customs of their
communities (art 330); indigenous resguardos are municipios
4
under the law
(art 357) and will receive equal parts when it comes to national transfers per capita,
multiplied by the indigenous population that inhabits that resguardo; languages
and dialects of ethnic groups are ofcial only in their territory; the education of
communities who have their own linguistic traditions will be bilingual (art 10);
members of indigenous peoples that share border areas can become nationals (art
96); ethnic groups inhabiting archaeologically rich areas can have special rights
over these (although the specic rights are not explicit) (art 330); and the extraction
of natural resources within indigenous territories will be carried out without harm
to the cultural, economic and social integrity of indigenous people living in such
places (art 330).
The Constitutional Court, whose mandate is to serve as guarantor of the integrity
and sovereignty of the Constitution, has gone even further in shaping the close
relationship between indigenous typologies and topologies. Such a relationship has
been shaped mainly through a spatial isomorphism that is very well known in the
social sciences, particularly within anthropology, where each group is supposed to
have its corresponding place and each place its corresponding group (Gupta and
Ferguson 1992). It is important to mention that, although I focus on indigenous
peoples in this analysis, the legal multicultural connection between rights and
collective territories becomes even more complex in the case of Afro-Colombians,
an issue that I will not address in this article (see Escobar 2005; Restrepo 2008, Rojas
2004).
Indigenous territory is regarded by the Court as a necessary venue for cultural
survival. Thus, one of the most cited statements of the Court in many of its
sentences reads as follows: in various occasions, this institution has recognized
the fundamental right of ethnic groups to collective property as an integral element
in guaranteeing their survival, given the close relationship that exists between a
community and its territory (Constitutional Court of Colombia (CCC): C 180/05).
The recognition of indigenous territories as a Fundamental Right has been a crucial
legal tool used by indigenous peoples to confront a wide variety of issues such
as military and corporate intervention. Various authors have also recognized the
important role that the National Constitutional Court has played in protecting
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multicultural legislation in a complex context of intense violence and political
instability (see Cepeda Espinosa 2004; Pineda 2001).
However, legal protection of indigenous territories in Colombia, as in many other
countries, requires that indigenous subjects perform an authentic difference in
exchange for the good feeling of the nation and the reparative legislation of the
state (Povinelli 2002: 6). That is why indigenous recognition in Colombia is much
more associated with a romanticized idea of the survival of pure cultures than
it is with attempts to counteract, even if only partially, the historical and social
inequalities faced by ethnic groups. Not surprisingly, the main explanatory factor
that the Court mobilizes to justify the close connection of indigenous peoples to
their territory is that of culture, framed as static, self-contained, nite and natural
(Bocarejo 2008; Vera Lugo 2006).
An even more problematic legal consequence of such an approach is the
Courts cultural principle according to which, in the words of Manuel Jos e
Cepeda, a former magistrate and chairman of the Court: A mayor conservaci on,
mayor autonoma which roughly translates as when there is a greater degree
of conservation, there will be a greater degree of autonomy (Cepeda Espinosa
2001: 235). This statement revives a traditional debate within the social sciences
especially within anthropologyregarding the idea of culture as a group of
traits (language, dress, phenotype, etc) that can be measured by creating scales
or gradations of cultural belonging or of acculturation/assimilation (both terms
can actually be found in court sentences). The question then is, how does the
Constitutional Court make judgments on who has more or less culture within the
current constitutional debates regarding ethnic rights? Part of the answer is found
in the strict association between indigenous groups and their territory: living within
an ethnic territory is the crucial evidence of having more culture and being more
Indian.
This association has generated what I have called spatial exceptionalism of
multicultural rights which points precisely to the fact that minority rights seem
to be limited and attached to a territory. One of the court sentences that show
this strong relationship between minority rights and territory is the case of Alfonso
Palma Capera, an indigenous man, who in 1993 led action suit against article
27 of Law 48 of 1993. This law states that members of indigenous communities
who reside within their territory and preserve their cultural, social, and economic
integrity are exempted from compulsory military service. Mr Palma argued that
this article was discriminatory against indigenous peoples and violated their right
to free circulation within the National territory. Moreover, he afrmed that, this
obligation imposed on indigenous peoples to be exempted from military service is
a connement sentence, reducing us to live in ghettos (CCC: C058/94).
In spite of the accusations of such a strong spatialization of difference and of
multicultural rights, the Court determined that:
with respect to military service, what is being protected is not the individual indigenous
person (indgena) but the indigenous person taken as part of a specic context
determined both by territory and identity. As such, we can conclude that the protection
granted by the law is directed at the ethnic community (CCC: C058/94).
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Nevertheless, the Constitutional Courts ruling on this case goes well beyond
the question of military service, as it afrms that the ultimate message implied
in the rule is a motivation for the indigenous subject to continue to perpetuate
his species and culture . . . its objective is to protect indigenous groups as such,
and thus, protect indigenous people that live with other indigenous people, and as
indigenous people (CCC: C058/94).
In recent years, this overt spatialization of difference has somewhat changed in
the jurisprudence of the Court. More recent amendments actually acknowledge
the possibility of cultural survival outside indigenous territories. Nevertheless, the
terms of this recognition continue to address culture as a question of survival,
using the same static notions of culture mentioned before. For example, in 2009, a
case involving the issue of exemption from military service revived the controversy
that had taken place regarding this rule back in 1994. Amparo Ortega viuda (widow)
de Coral, a member of an indigenous group from Nari no, in southern Colombia,
led A legal suit on behalf of her son when the Colombian army enrolled him
even though he was an indigenous person. In this case the court decided that the
issue of territory is not, thereby, a necessary condition for a persons belonging to
an indigenous group. There is no absolute and indispensable relationship between
territory and the preservation of culture (CCC: T 113/09).
Paradoxically, this apparent moderation in the territorial requirement for the
exemption from military service did not actually entail a drastic change because,
as the Court states, the requirement of stay within a territory must be interpreted
broadly and not narrowly. This rather ambiguous position was further justied
by citing the example of nomad populations in Colombia. The sentence afrms that
the Constitutional Court does not ignore the fact that some indigenous groups are
nomadic or are on the move for survival reasons. In this manner, exemption from
military service would be denied not when the person leaves a particular territory,
but when he leaves the historical space of his community. Even though the Courts
conception of the space that indigenous people are supposed to inhabit may seem
less strict, the allusion to historical space and the appeal to nomadic populations
in order to explain indigenous mobility, continues to emphasize a particular type
of indigeneity that exists in the legal and popular imagination: an idea of a culture
that is pristine and that has not been tainted by western inuences.
The analysis of court sentences shows the intricate ways in which indigenous
peoples have to conform to a romanticized radical indigenous alterity that is
shaped within academic circles, legal institutions, and more generally, in popular
culture. There is no commensuration between the ideal indigenous subject and the
lived practices of indigenous peoples in their indigenous territories and outside of
them. In general, territory continues to be the marker of indigeneity and more
specically a major factor in determining indigenous jurisdiction (fuero indgena) and
customary law.
The Constitutional Court actually states that there are two main factors that
condition indigenous jurisdiction:
one is personal or subjective in character, which means that the individual should be
judged according to the rules and authorities of his/her own community [and] the other
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is geographic in character, which allows each community to judge conducts occurring
in their own territory according to their own norms (CCC: T 496/96).
As stated by the Court itself, the distinction between these two elements is crucial
because, sometimes we address either the personal or the territorial factor in
order to determine jurisdictions . . . Coordinating between both types of jurisdictions
corresponds to the particular circumstances of each case (CCC: T 496/96).
The denition through which the Court recognizes the indigeneity of a subject,
relies not only on the views of magistrates but on the assessments of experts, mainly
anthropologists, and of indigenous authorities called upon by the Court to provide
a judgment. It is possible to trace in the Courts assessments a sense of a gradation
of indigeneity, which is accompanied by a notion of acculturation. Acculturation, a
concept that has been widely criticized within anthropology, has been ambiguously
referenced in many verdicts. For example, in one court sentence in which indigenous
jurisdiction was denied, one of the arguments showing the persons acculturation
was that he [had] left [his community] voluntarily in order to earn money and, as
he himself afrms, learned to speak Spanish and interacted with people outside his
culture (CCC: T 496/96).
Even though the Court constantly resorts to the concept of indigenous
territory, the spatial delimitation of what constitutes such a territory is not any
less ambiguous. It actually includes different spatial conceptualizations such as
reservations (resguardos), indigenous territories, ancestral territory, and territorial
scope ( ambito territorial), all of which refer to different spatial delimitations.

Ambito
territorial is the most prevalent concept in the Courts most recent jurisprudence
on the topic, with important political implications since it can actually include an
area that goes beyond recognized indigenous reservations. This is especially relevant
when it comes to setting in motion Prior Consultation (Consulta previa), a juridical
tool that demands that the state or any other organization (an economic or religious
group, for example) that wants to carry out a project or activity in an indigenous
territory consult with indigenous authorities.
For the purpose of this article, I seek to show the legal power of the correlation
between an ethnic typology and an ethnic topology. Even though the Courts
jurisprudence seems to have broadened its perspective on whether a person can
continue to be considered indigenous when he/she no longer lives within an
ethnic territory, there is still a strong spatial isomorphism in ethnic recognition
of minorities. This has resulted in the consolidation of a complex gradation of
indigeneity, that is, who is considered to be more or less indigenous or more or
less acculturated. Crude spatial isomorphisms also fail to recognize the complex
dynamic through which subjects create what Moore (2005) has called different
spatial sensitivities: the different manners in which people construct and give
meaning to their place within a wide variety of social relationships.
In the following section I seek to present how the contestation over strict legal
spatial isomorphisms comes not only from direct legal confrontations but also from
the new places, both real and gurative, that urban ethnic groups seek to occupy
in the Colombian multicultural state.
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A New Multicultural Imagination for Urban Ethnicity
Landless urban indigenous subjects are a conceptual non sequitur within the
national multicultural framework. Nevertheless, certain indigenous groups living
in the city of Bogot a have worked towards being recognized as urban ethnic
groups. In this section I will focus on the political conditions of possibility that have
allowed urban indigenous groups to gain recognition in Bogot a. I will then go on to
explore the expectations that these recognized groups hold and the places they have
occupied within the political imagination of a pluralistic Bogot a. The underlying
purpose is to understand the manner in which recognized urban groups are starting
to reshape multicultural imaginations about indigeneity and to renegotiate their
inclusion as urban citizens within the Colombian nation.
I will begin by presenting the political coalitions and conjunctures that allowed
some urban indigenous groups to be recognized by the governments Ofce of
Ethnic Groups in 2005. I will next shed light on the particular multicultural policies
that urban ethnic groups are working to bring about, and the manner in which
ethnic groups have been rendered visible within local city politics. Finally, I will
draw attention to the new indigenous places in the city that indigenous leaders of
recognized groups imagine. Such imaginations include, all at the same time, class-
related issues of social equity and economic mobility, as well as claims to cultural
difference that would play a role in the construction of a plural citizenship in
Bogot a. These projects include the construction of indigenous neighborhoods and
the construction of an indigenous shopping mall.
The relevance of these questions comes from the fact that minority rights in
Colombia, as well as in many other Latin American countries, have been directed
at rural as opposed to urban areas. As I stated before, such a legal development
contrasts with many other countries in which cities have been the main scenarios of
dispute and practice of multicultural policy. Moreover, urban ethnicity has inspired
most of the main theories of liberal multiculturalism in the social sciences (see
Habermas 1994; Kymlicka 1995; Taylor and Gutmann 1994).
The different approach to multiculturalism in many Latin American contexts does
not come out of an absence of ethnic groups in these countries cities, but of
the particular manner in which legal minority rights have been negotiated and
consolidated in these contexts. This situation has reied old imaginations regarding
the territorial enclosure of ethnic difference. As such, even if an indigenous
presence in Bogot a is not new, as processes of indigenous migration and violent
displacement are anything but recent, ethnic presence in the city is commonly
addressed as a pathology that interrupts the natural correspondence of an ethnic
group to a territory. It is only recently, that, in an interesting course of events, a few
groups in Bogot a have openly worked towards ofcial state recognition, not only
as displaced groups but also as urban ethnic groups who live and are settled in the
city.
One of the most important and interesting cases is that of Ati Quigua, an
indigenous elected member of the Bogot a city council and a member of the
indigenous Arhuaco group. The relevance of Ati Quigua is two-fold: rst, as will
be recounted in a moment, the manner in which she actually came into the
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public eye was in itself an issue of indigenous jurisdiction outside a recognized
reservation; second, her election to public ofce in the city of Bogot a gave rise to
a particular political conjuncture that was crucial in the process of recognition of
urban indigenous councils (cabildos).
In 2003 Ati Quigua was elected for ofce in Bogot as City Council. She was at
rst forced to resign because she was not 25 years old, the minimum legal age
required to be a member of City Council. Ati Quigua led a legal suit claiming, her
right to the fulllment of her identity as an indigenous woman, in the form of the
execution of her political rights, was being violated. (CCC: T 778/05). This case
openly demanded that the Court make a statement about the viability of being an
indigenous person in an urban context.
In 2005 the episode concluded with a verdict in favor of the councilwoman in
which the Court asked the Bogot a Council to make an exception for Ati Quigua
based on the cultural requirements of her community which allowed her to be
considered an adult and be eligible for political representation. The Constitutional
Court cited the opinion of an anthropologist who explained that for the Arhuaco
culture becoming an adult is not marked by reaching a certain age and that
in accordance with the traditions and customs of the Arhuaco people, a woman
acquires the power of speech, as well as social and political responsibilities, once
she has undergone the rites of passage related to baptism and rst menses (CCC:
T 778/05). Hence the Court recognized indigenous difference in an urban setting
stating that:
to come to the conclusion that cultural identity can only be expressed within one and
only place would amount to establishing policies of segregation and separation. Diverse
cultural identities can be lived out in any corner of the national territory given that they
all deserve the same dignity and are all a fundamental part of our nation.
Even if the Court acknowledged indigenous difference in an urban context, the
political language used in this legal case as well as in efforts to attain ofcial urban
recognition still rested on a demonstration of survival of cultural difference outside
an ethnic territory. In fact, urban recognition was and still is a difcult process
of demonstration immersed in intricate political maneuvers. Part of the intricacy
comes from the reticence of the governments Ofce of Ethnic Groups (Ocina de
etnias) to legally recognize urban indigenous groups. For this Ofce indigenous
urban communities should not be recognized; since the continued existence of an
indigenous community as dened by the law is not possible in an urban setting
(Ofce of Ethnic Affairs Colombia 2005:45).
Despite all this, ve indigenous groups have actually managed to be recognized
groups in Bogot a. Only two of these have territorial claims to areas that belong
to the city: the Muisca
5
cabildos of Suba and Bosa claim to be descendants of the
ancestral Muisca populations. In this article, however, I focus on the three remaining
groups that present a complex set of challenges on national multicultural policy in
that they come from outside Bogot a and its surrounding areas, and do not claim to
have any sort of ancestral rights over this particular land. These groups include
the Ingas from the department of Putumayo, who were recognized as an urban
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cabildo in 1984, and the Ambik a-Pijao from Tolima and the Kichwas from Ecuador
who were recognized in 2005.
The process of recognition of these groups was an important moment in the
contestation of the strong association between being an indigenous person and
living in a state-recognized indigenous territory. Though neither group claims to be
the ancestral inhabitants of what is now Bogot a, they do not deny the existence of
a territory of origin. They do, however, openly call on their right to mobility and
also lay bare their intricate histories of violent displacement (both old and recent).
Leaders constantly argue that remembering and having a constant connection with
their places of origin does not mean that urban ethnic groups cannot feel belonging
to the city.
Not surprisingly, ofcial state recognition for urban ethnic groups was a difcult
process. The Ofce of Ethnic Groups rejected their petitions for years and even, in
the case of the Muisca, recognized them only later to annul their ofcial recognition
and nally reinstate it once again (Chaves and Zambrano 2006; Salcedo 2006). As
Chaves and Zambrano (2006:18) have argued, many of the groups in Colombia
that are seeking ofcial recognition have resorted to essentializing strategies that
emulate those imposed and sustained by the Colombian state in the rst place.
They do this by trying to create ethnological studies that stress their cultural
difference, by using ethnic racial traits as proof and by claiming processes of cultural
recovery.
Ati Quigua was once again relevant in this point of the process. As expressed
by indigenous urban leaders and by ofcials of the Ofce of Ethnic Groups, it is
clear that the 2005 recognition was the result of a conscientious effort by Luz Elena
Izquierdo, Ati Quiguas mother, who held the position of director of the Ofce of
Ethnic groups at the time. Beyond this effort for recognition from the inside at
the level of national institutions, Ati Quigua and Izquierdo were also crucial at the
level of city politics. They were both active participants of the Polo Democr atico
Alternativo, the growing political leftist party. The last elected mayor from this
party, Luis Eduardo Garz on, was so supportive of Ati Quiguas political career that
he expressed his open approval of her in the swearing-in ceremony of the urban
cabildos in 2005. His speech said: if this city wants to change the logic of politics,
it has to send out messages like those of Ati Quigua (Figure 2).
Many representatives of indigenous urban groups, besides Ati Quigua, have also
been interested in forging political alliances at the level of city politics. Though these
alliances brought about success in the recognition process, indigenous leaders are
seeking more substantial results and commitments. Such compromises are even
more pressing due to the fact that the Ofce of Ethnic Groups, which has not
presented itself as an ally, can actually retract urban ethnic recognition. Within
the political framework of the city, urban indigenous leaders have been given the
opportunity to imagine new windows of expectations for a citywide multicultural
policy.
These new possibilities do not conform to the romantic multicultural premises of
safeguarding and isolating ethnic others in the nation-state. They instead stand as
new political negotiations that show how state multicultural legislation cannot limit
the expectations of what indigenous peoples imagine for themselves and for their
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Figure 2: Ati Quiguas political campaign advertisement, October 2007 (city-wide yer;
photograph by author)
groups. I am particularly interested in the political language used by the leaders
of recognized urban indigenous peoples. One of the most interesting aspects of
this debate is the fact that they have contested the preeminence that Colombian
multicultural policies have given to culture by bringing social class back into the
new political landscape. Talk of class is particularly important because it is aligned
with the active revival of such language in the current left-leaning city government.
Conversations with different members of recognized groups brought to light the
fact that the appeal of the recognition process lays mostly in howit presents itself as a
means to access rights to which these people are entitled as Colombian citizens, but
have never really enjoyedhealthcare, education and a promise of protection by the
state. Thus, instead of promoting notions of autonomy and self-determination, they
have openly pursued a greater participation in programs of healthcare and education
nanced by the citys government. The following statement by an Ambik a-pijao is
an example of this: We have certain needs. Just like many other people who live in
this city we have been excluded because we are poor and do not have guaranteed
access to education or healthcare. Thus, the point of this recognition is to make the
government pay closer attention to us.
A new or at least a more assertive type of language has openly appeared
in the political negotiations of indigenous leaders of urban cabildos: there is talk
of exclusion, inequality and poverty. Most of the claims made by members of
recognized groups are phrased under the problem of income inequality and
the impossibility of achieving social mobility due to decient education. More
interestingly, I found in several interviews that indigenous peoples use the notion of
social strata and express their expectations of social mobility in terms of a change
in stratication.
6
Recognized indigenous urban groups were included in one of the Mayors most
popular programs framed under the governments poverty policy: Bogot a sin hambre
(Bogot a without Hunger). This program was designed to provide underprivileged
people with food subsidies, in the form of what was called by the majors ofce
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as a Canasta Nutricional (Nutritional Basket).
7
Many people belonging to urban
ethnic groups were eligible for them. Healthcare projects directed at recognized
indigenous populations included subsidies in health services, programs supporting
traditional medicine (Guti errez y Otavo 2009), and the creation of epidemiological
proles (Tapiero, Otavo y Bocanegra 2009). Other short-term projects have also
involved funding of womens initiatives and cultural subsidies for dance and music
schools.
Another important window of possibility that was opened for urban ethnic
groups was the broad campaign launched by Garzons administration to construct
a pluralistic Bogot a. Such an idea meant conceiving of Bogot a as a place
for diversity: a city where there is no discrimination on the basis of a persons
sexual orientation, gender, regional origin, or ethnic identity (Alcalda de Bogot a
2007). The construction of the political project of a pluralistic Bogot a came
with ideas of the citys cosmopolitanism and the consolidation of tourism. Not
surprisingly, some of the most visible platforms of indigenous participation in the
city have been the events organized by the municipal Institute for Culture and
Tourism. Some of these are Rock al Parque (Rock in the park), the Festival de
Verano (Summer Festival), activities involving Planet Earth Day and the Meeting
of Indigenous Peoples. It is common to see the slogan of Bogot a cada vez m as
diversa (Bogot a ever more diverse), as a form of advertising for such events. A
particular alliance was forged between urban ethnic groups and young Colombian
artists, which has also brought the former to the foreground. In fact, musicians such
as Doctor Kr apula, Aterciopelados and Andr es Cepedaall well known Colombian
musiciansparticipated actively in Ati Quiguas campaign.
These new alliances do not necessarily entail a radical change in the notion of
an indigenous identity understood as a list of characteristics or traits that involve
performing ethnic difference in public events through distinctive or traditional
music, food, language and dresseven if these characteristics are not practiced
on a current basis. I do not want to argue along the simplistic lines of invented
traditions or false consciousnesses but to stress the manner in which the practices
that are addressed as distinctively indigenous become part of new urban public
rituals where indigenous peoples seek to negotiate new places outside of their
imagined territories. As Christian Gros (2000:71) argues identity is there to be seen
and there is nothing innocent or funny in the manner in which indigenous peoples
make public appearances. For this author, an important aspect of indigenous
eloquence in the ritual of meetings and other public gatherings is when an
indigenous orator starts off, when he can, with a phrase in his native tongue and
where ponchos and feather-work ourish for the purpose of such ritual.
What, then, do urban recognized ethnic groups within these emergent political
and social coalitions imagine as new places? What are their desires, even if utopian,
when making claims on their place in the city? By places I refer to sites that
are immersed within particular experiences, meanings, and social and political
relationships (Casey 1998; Massey 1994). These new urban places that I refer to
are imagined places and though they are not materialized, they are important
social constructions that may imagine new meanings and possibilities for spatial
practices (Harvey 1989:218; see also Kosek 2006; Moore 2005). One of these new
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Emancipation or Enclosement? 677
imagined places is the consolidation of what Ati Quigua called a mythopolis. She
said:
we consider Bogot a to be a mythopolis, a modern city under development, that
rediscovers the myths and traditions, the ways in which indigenous peoples organize
territory . . . The myth of Bachu e
8
must be recovered because she is the mother of land,
the mother of water (personal conversation 2005).
This idea of conjoining modernity and tradition is expressed quite distinctively
in the imagination of two spatial projects: the construction of ethnic neighborhoods
open to city tourism and the construction of an indigenous shopping mall.
These imagined places openly expose the tensions involved in the manner in
which ethnicity has been valued under multiculturalism. Such an appraisal openly
resists the idea of an indigenous community that lives in a city outside of a rural
ethnic place thereby leaving out the idea of an indigenous subject that is inserted
into the wider (neo)liberal economy. As many authors have argued, current ethnic
mobilizations around the world have connected their claims to current trends of
economic development (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Hale 2002; Mitchell
1993; Povinelli 2002). Regardless of whether this is an intended or an unintended
consequence, what is evident, as Jean and John Comaroff argue, is that while
ethnicity is increasingly the study of existential passion, of the self-conscious
fashioning of meaningful, morally-anchored selfhood, ethnicity is also becoming
more corporate, more commodied, more implicated than ever before in the
economics of everyday life (2009:2).
Hence, to examine the manner in which economic prosperity becomes a
condition of possibility for the assertion of cultural difference rather than for its
disappearance is more interesting than simply reducing it to the acculturation
of indigenous communities within the neoliberal world. Jessica Cattelino (2010) has
explored the issues around this debate in the context of the Seminoles in the United
States. According to her, indigenous peoples face a double bind of need-based
sovereignty because they require economic resources that are often derived from
their governmental rights in order to exercise sovereignty but once they exercise
economic power, the legitimacy of tribal sovereignty and citizenship is challenged
in law, public culture, and everyday interaction (2010:235236).
Leaders of recognized indigenous groups in Bogot a envisage the relevance of
economic indigenous prosperity as a means for achieving both their expectations
regarding political cultural survival/revival and social equality. As the governor
of the Kichwa cabildo states we must get our living conditions to improve while
staying together and developing projects that bring us even more together through
greater economic stability for all families.
Along these lines, Luisa S anchez (2008) has stressed the importance of
understanding processes of re-signication of practices and objects such as the
indigenous traditional houses of the amazon (malokas) in urban settings, and
the new possibilities these might represent for interethnic alliances and for
new economic incomes. In fact, these new indigenous traditional houses in
the city have been part of broader agendas that S anchez (2008) and Caicedo
(2009) recognize as forms of globalizing spirituality. One of the ways in
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which non-indigenous peoples come into contact with these new ethnic urban
spaces is through the consumption of ritual substances such as mambe, ambil,
and yaj e. These practices have resulted in, as Caicedo argues, new forms of
neo-shamanism that attract middle and upper class [people] in search of
therapeutic, spiritual and enlightening alternatives (2009:16).
There are other ethnic spaces such as the construction of indigenous
neighborhoods and of a shopping mall that in the imagination of indigenous leaders
could be: an important source of subsistence, a project of social cohesion for the
community, and a means for positioning themselves more visibly in the city. These
two places are thought of as open spaces where indigenous and non-indigenous
people alike may interact freely. Regarding the idea of the construction of ethnic
neighborhoods, the Kichwa Governor afrms that the city should not only develop
subsidized housing plans in order to create a Kichwa neighborhood, but should
also think of it as a tourist attraction. In fact, he states, Bogot a should follow the
design of the city of Otavalo in Ecuador, where communities and people can go,
see people working at the looms, there may be food [for sale], people can see
music workshops and the luthiers at work, let them see, the Kichwas are over there,
lets go to the Kichwa neighborhood! (personal conversation 2005). Kichwa and
Ambika Pijao leaders imagine the construction of a beautiful neighborhood in
which Bogotanos and tourists can stroll on weekends just as they imagine people
do in Chinatowns or Italian districts in North America.
However, we must consider how a shopping mall can be conceived of as an
indigenous place. What would such an indigenous mall actually look like? When
asked about the subject, indigenous leaders provide fascinating responses. They
denote absolutely modern aspirations in display of indigenous culture and what
they consider the hybridization of modern and traditional spatial practices. But
could there be a better way to anchor and x a modern indigeneity in the
city than a shopping mall? The Ambika-Pijao cabildo Gobernador said that their
shopping mall would be just like any other mall, like Plaza de las Am ericas, Centro
Andino, or Salitre Plaza, all popular shopping centers in Bogot a. In addition, Kichwa
leaders mentioned that, we even want to bring Sears or some other big store like
Home Center,
9
big things, or Carulla,
10
so that it can compete with other shopping
centers. In fact, Ambika and Kichwa leaders afrm that the shopping mall will have
80% well known stores and 20% indigenous stores.
Still, the shopping mall will have to have some kind of ethnic character, as one
of the Ambika leaders argues, because in other countries with shopping centers
like this, like Ecuador or Bolivia . . . they also have culture there, so that one can feel
that indigenous peoples are also present in the city. Ati Quigua considers that the
architecture itself would have to symbolize indigeneity: we want the architectural
design to honor . . . our sense of space and light. A Kichwa leader also argued that:
this project helps us have a place, a space where we can display our indigenous
cosmology . . . It is a multiethnic intercultural center, because from the moment you
come in, it will narrate the history of the place, there will be small plazas where we will
do, as they say in North America, our pow wow, what we call a minga.
11
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Apart from these plazas, they also plan to have theaters where we can perform
our dances, our rituals . . . where people can be with us. And, they say, movies
about indigenous peoples would also be projected in these theaters, and they could
also be used as meeting places for the urban cabildos and other ethnic groups that
come to Bogot a. In another Kichwa leaders plan, the shopping mall would also
accommodate occasional events:
. . . so that, for example, if the Uwa arrive, we can have everything ready for them so they
can transmit their science, their thought, and if the Arhuaco come around, the same goes
for them . . . and that way people in Bogot a will gain consciousness and receptiveness.
As such, the shopping mall is also envisioned as a place where the performance
of culture works as a strategy for visibility and pedagogy.
This idea of increasing visibility and receptiveness of urban ethnic groups among
the citys population comes hand-in-hand with the conceptualization of ethnic
urban places as important areas for city development and economic prosperity
for indigenous communities. Even if these recognized indigenous groups do not
have any interest in creating indigenous reservations in the city or its vicinity,
urban ethnic groups have other types of imaginary landscapes that imagine new
meanings and possibilities for spatial practices (Harvey 1989; see also Lefebvre
1991). This is not to deny the fact that indigenous peoples do experience
estrangement, as Salcedo (2006) points out, when they have been violently
displaced and forced to live in the city. However, we should be mindful of the
violence implicated in the states legal rationale, according to which indigenous
groups have to live in particular places in order to be recognized and granted a
political space. In contrast, indigenous peoples not only have inhabited many urban
areas for some time, but some of their leaders are mobilizing their communities to
work towards a new model of multiculturalism; a model that blends into a notion
of pluralistic and cosmopolitan citizenship of Bogot a.
Final Remarks
The practice of multiculturalism shapes diverse ethnic spatial congurations that
contest the ideal legal correspondences between an ethnic group and its territory. In
this article I tried to showhowthe strong spatialization of minority rights in Colombia
has been disputed through legal suits ruled on by the National Constitutional Court
and by indigenous groups who seek ofcial recognition as urban ethnic groups.
These disputes have typically not been given much attention and have been silenced
by academia and political ethnic activism.
Such a silence not only brackets the difculties and intricate histories of indigenous
mobility but also forecloses the possibility for an indigenous political mobilization in
cities. In contrast, leaders of recognized indigenous groups in Bogot a have deed
the main grounding of multicultural rights in three ways: they have challenged the
criteria used to dene ethnicity, they have openly disputed the spatial imagination
of ethnic enclosure, and they have brought back issues of social class into a
multicultural framework that has historically worked to silence such talk.
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Most of the projects that recognized urban ethnic groups have tried to develop
are inserted into broad agendas of city development such as the construction of
ethnic neighborhoods open for tourism and of an indigenous shopping mall. These
expectations for a new form of visibility and the economic insertion of ethnic groups
in the city are not new or unique to this context. In fact, not only have ethnic groups
been inserted into neoliberal forms of cultural commodication, but for many leaders
there are also unique possibilities of actually imagining a possible autonomy or
sovereignty through the economic prosperity of indigenous communities in the
city. The new location of recognized ethnic urban groups necessarily calls for an
acknowledgement that ethnic citizens are active builders of the city, and not alien
inhabitants carrying a topographic pathology by not being in their place socially
or politically.
I believe the lack of acknowledgement of these new indigenous forms of
mobilization is part of a typical liberal illusion of a pluralism without antagonism
(Mouffe 2000:20). Multiculturalism, understood as a political arrangement, cannot
be addressed as a policy that succeeds in resolving pluralism spatially, thereby
suppressing the conict rising from its practice. The discursive correspondence
between ethnic emancipation and ethnic territories has, as Harvey argues, tended
to consider places and cultures as embodied things (2001:285). The effect of such
an embodiment is the construction of a fetishistic politics that freeze[s] existing
geographical structures of places and norms forever creating a dysfunctional and
oppressive political effect (2001:285).
The image of the indigenous resguardo has been used by governmental agencies
as a fetish that masks the real practices by which indigenous peoples live and move,
and the causes that have accounted for their violent displacement for years. It has
become an excuse that easily silences a reality in which indigenous peoples do not
exclusively live or want to live in an ofcial indigenous reservation.
This does not deny the relevance that ethnic territories have had for indigenous
peoples and the centrality of spatial claims in their political movements. However,
what I want to stress is the fact that the strong imagination of indigenous peoples
inhabiting rural reservation areas can also been translated into an instrument for
ethnic enclosure. Hence, indigenous reservations cannot be judged a priori as a sign
of emancipation. It is crucial to make a call, both analytically and politically, in favor
of a more thorough manner of addressing ethnic places that may inform new
social possibilities by taking into account the social and political relationships that
build such places and the disputes involved in these relationships. Indeed, what
recognized indigenous groups seek to reach is, in sum, a right to the city, a right
to be acknowledged as urban citizens and not as outcasts. They demand the right
to aspire to the possibility of social mobility, as many non-ethnic people do, and
largely a right to have a new place physically and symbolically in the construction
of a nation-state.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and my colleagues at Universidad del Rosario
for their valuable comments on the article. My special thanks also to Mariana Saavedra for
her suggestions and support.
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Emancipation or Enclosement? 681
Endnotes
1
The violence rising from shaping social difference through xed and static ideas of territorial
belonging has been discussed widely in many contexts of the world (see for example Gupta
and Ferguson 1992; Harvey 1996; Scott 1998).
2
I use the term court sentence to refer to the Constitutional Court decisions or rulings
because it is the most appropriate term given the Colombian legal terminology.
3
Raizales, literally the roots, or those of the root, is the name used for the original
black settlers of San Andr es and Old Providence Islands in the Colombian Caribbean who are
descendants of runaway slaves that originally came from English colonies in the Caribbean.
4
Municipios are the legal nomenclature below the Departamento or state level, that would
roughly correspond to a town or county in the United States.
5
The Muisca polities inhabited the area around Bogot a and to the north in the early sixteenth
century and were forcefully incorporated into the early colonial state between 1539 and 1590.
6
The notion of stratication relates to the spatial delimitation of the city in six types of
strata (estratos) used by the local government to create differential rates in public services
and taxes, estrato 1 being the poorest areas in the city.
7
This is a small basic package with essential foodstuffs like rice, beans, cornmeal, etc.
8
Bachu e is the Muisca mother-goddess associated with water.
9
A local home-improvement store.
10
A national supermarket chain commonly used as an anchor store for shopping malls.
11
A minga is a collective work action it is different from a pow wow but the person
interviewed made a correlation between the two types of events.
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