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This paper explores how Black women entrepreneurs in Cali, Colombia confront racism and sexism, as they engage in the expanding neoliberal beauty market. We argue that anti-racist entrepreneurial experiences in Cali are shaped by four interconnected processes: First, changes in gender and development policies, aligned with inclusive neoliberal development projects. Second, the limitations of state neoliberal multicultural policies, which has made activists aware of the need to address racism and sexism. Third, activist's appropriation of the intersectional turn, allowing them to recognize articulations between racism, classism and sexism. Fourth, the adoption of anti-neoliberal discourses supporting distributive and solidarity practices. Our analysis suggests that while entrepreneurial anti-racist actions do not generate radical or permanent changes in the beauty industry, they do have material and symbolic effects in Black women's experiences of racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent multicultural turn in Latin America has made the census a key site of struggle for both recognition and resources. Drawing on document analysis and ethnographic methods, this paper examines the politics around Colombia's 2005 census. I argue that Afro-Colombian organizations were successful in pressuring the state to move beyond the purely cultural notions of blackness institutionalized in the 1991 constitution and toward a broader ethno-racial Afro-Colombian category in the 2005 census. However, their success required them not only to situate their claims in international mandates and domestic law, but also to grapple with competing definitions of blackness within the movement itself. In this way, the Afro-Colombian movement has been an important actor in shaping how ‘official’ ethno-racial categories are made and remade in Colombia. This case not only sheds light on the politics of multiculturalism in Latin America more generally, but raises questions about how we understand ‘race’ versus ‘ethnicity’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyses of multicultural state-dictated social categories are often governed by those same categories, even while they deconstruct them. Nonetheless, these categories are often used in public spheres such as national imaginary or ethno-political activism. Taking a different point of departure, that of representations rather than the categories themselves, the aim of our paper is to understand the modes of classification that are relevant among four populations in Colombia and Mexico who would, a priori, be categorized as ‘black’ or ‘Indian’. The daily reality of these groups indicates other possible internal, sometimes even intersecting, kinds of categorizations, which, far from naturalizing the ‘Indian’ and ‘black’ categories, in fact reveal place-based social identifications. These identifications seem closer to the everyday lives and practices of the people in question, and underscore the local conceptions of their presence and agency in a given spot. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin America, racist violence against Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups persists. Yet the racial facets of violence against non-ethnic campesinos remain unexplored. Integrating scholarship on race as a global structure and Latin American racial formations, I offer an account of racialization in Colombia. This article analyzes the racial dynamics of resistance to extractivism in Colombia's Campesino University, uniting Indigenous and campesino groups like the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. While the dominant race lexicon separates "campesinos" like San José's peasants from "Indigenous" and "Black" groups, I argue that the identifier campesino mestizo hides how San José's farmers were "de-indigenized" yet remain racialized as the less-than-human "Indigenous savage". If racialization works to dominate but also divide the subaltern, then Campesino University participants' cross-ethnic solidarity network against what they affirm is a shared experience of racist violence both unveils and counters racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do internationally informed, technology-driven efforts to democratize the police and citizen security policies in developing countries intersect with pre-existing racial dynamics and discourses? This question is relevant to scholars of both race and security in developing countries, given the current global diffusion of US policing reforms into distinct racial and political contexts. I analyse the intersection between the adoption of crime-mapping technology in urban Colombia and dynamics and discourses regarding the Afro-Colombian population. I find that efforts to democratize the police can paradoxically displace important questions about race from citizen security policy discussions and generate seemingly 'objective' findings that fuse with subjective assumptions regarding the links between criminality, violence and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most existing scholarly work available on Colombian migrants' transnational political practices has emphasized the divisions, mistrust and apathy affecting them. However, research conducted by the author among Colombians in the United Kingdom and Spain departs from previous studies by stressing the broad nature of migrants' transnational political participation, which involves engagement in both formal and informal politics, at the individual and collective levels, and in initiatives coming from 'above' and 'below'. It also shows how transnational political practices oriented towards the home country occur simultaneously with activities in the host society, contrary to what has generally been thought. This was more the case among Colombians in Spain than among those in the UK, which could be partly explained by differences in the historical development and size of each community, as well as the role played by individual factors, such as migrants' previous political experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of Iberian identity includes national identities within Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The case of Spain and Spanish national identity has been particularly neglected in academic literature, although this situation has been changing since the mid-1990s, in comparison with analyses of alternative national identities within the Spanish state. This is related the discrediting of Spanish nationalism during the Francoist dictatorship later democratic devolution which encouraged an analogous diversification in the study of national identities within Spain. Since the asymmetric of Spain, Spanish interpretations of nationhood have reflected the premise of the 1978 Constitution that the nation's unity is complemented and strengthened by its national and regional diversity. Variety within broad category of Iberian identities is augmented by the incidence of labour migration into Spain and Portugal and development of popular culture, this case music, in Latin America and specifically Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the transnational economic, political, and socio-cultural relations of Colombian migrants residing in two different locations in the United States. The vast majority of these migrants are middle class and originally from large urban areas, which differs from the typical rural origin migrants previously studied by transnational scholars. This study aims at testing some of the conclusions put forward by previous studies by looking at a group whose characteristics depart from earlier case-studies, using a methodology that overcomes some of the above limitations. To do so, They compare the transnational relations of Colombian migrants residing in two different locations in the United States. Literally, Colombia is a country on the move. At least 3-million Colombians, or 8 per cent of the national population of 37-million, now reside outside the national territory. An additional one million, or 3 per cent of the total, have been forcibly displaced within the national territory by an acute civil strife that has been ravaging the country for the last decade.