Lo decimos con cariño

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research

ISSN: 1326-0219 (Print) 2151-9668 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjil20

¿Lo decimos con cariño? Articulating Blackness in Colombia: Affection, difference or inequality? Gregory J. Lobo & Nick Morgan To cite this article: Gregory J. Lobo & Nick Morgan (2004) ¿Lo decimos con cariño? Articulating Blackness in Colombia: Affection, difference or inequality?, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 10:1, 83-97, DOI: 10.1080/13260219.2004.10429982 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13260219.2004.10429982

Published online: 21 Feb 2012.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 30

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjil20 Download by: [Newcastle University]

Date: 09 September 2015, At: 07:38

RESEARCH REPORT

;;Lo decimos con carino? Articulating Blackness in Colombia: Mfection, Difference or Inequality? Gregory J. Lobo and Nick Morgan·

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

Universidad de los Andes

For all its well-publicised problems, Colombia, like several other countries

in Latin America, is often presented as a 'racial democracy', a nation in

which the very issue of race is largely irrelevant given the predominantly mixed nature of its population. The interesting question of whether Colombia can really be considered a democracy escapes the scope of this article, but the claims of those who would argue that the 'problem of race' has largely been resolved here would appear to be supported by recent legislation, most specifically the 1991 Constitution, that not only codifies the principle of multicultural nationhood, but also goes some way towards recognising the interests of certain Mro-Colombian and indigenous ethnic groups.1 As Jaime Arocha puts it, '[tlhe new Colombian constitution attempts to build the nation neither by integration nor by segregation but by pursuing unity through the preservation of ethnic diversity'.2 Against such claims stands the country's obvious racial stratification. As the Inter-American Development Bank recognised in 1998, Colombia's predominantly black Pacific coast is one of the most impoverished regions in the Americas, comparable in its deprivation to Haiti,3 And in spite of official recognition of their right to a significant degree of autonomy, Colombia's indigenous groups continue to be the victims of extreme levels of social exclusion and violence on isolated resguardos. In fact, it is scarcely an exaggeration to suggest that Colombia is dominated by a form of semiapartheid that relegates the Mro-Colombian and indigenous sectors of the population to the periphery of national life, both geographically and politically, despite its 'progressive' constitution. Meanwhile the political class, the urban elite that continues to monopolise social and economic power, is undoubtedly whiter than average, however one might measure such a claim. One of the problems of foundational documents that enshrine cultural pluralism is that in their utopian desire to establish a tolerant society in the present they tend to consign current inequities to the past. Thus the 1991 constitution's attempt to outlaw discrimination allows some Colombians to claim that the economically marginalised and politically disenfranchised JILAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10:2, JUly 2004

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

JILAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10:1, July 2004 condition of the so-called ethnic communities in Colombia is the result of historic disadvantage, not contemporary prejudice. As discourse analysts working in cultural studies in Colombia we wanted to question the naIve assumption that the discourses, practices and institutions developed throughout a history of conquest, slavery and exploitation have either left no trace in today's Colombia or have somehow been 'reformed' at the stroke of a pen. In particular, we wanted to examine the frequent insistence that race is a non-issue in the light of the fact that the everyday discourse of so many Colombians is peppered with racialised terms such as 'negro', Imorocho', 'indio' and many others. In keeping with Norman Fairclough's claim that 'existing language practices and orders of discourse [reflect] the victories and defeats of past struggle and [are] stakes which are struggled over',4 our hypothesis was that these usages bore some relation to a discourse of race that, despite protests to the contrary, enabled the perpetuation of a racially stratified social order. Our overall intention is to carry out a broad study ofrace talk and discourse in Colombia. Before going any further, however, it is worth making some general comments on what we understand by discourse, a notion that Teun Van Dijk rightly regards as 'highly complex and ambiguous'.s At its most basic a discourse is a specific example of language in use and like most discourse analysts our initial activity centres on the interpretation of precisely this sort of material. Each of our examples, therefore, can be defined in the general terms used by Van Dijk when he refers to a discourse as 'a specific communicative event'.6 Each includes a series of communicative acts that involve specific social actors in a specific setting, and combine verbal and non-verbal factors. However, as Van Dijk goes on to say, '[i]dealIy, an integrated study integrates [sic] the analysis of discourse structures per se with the account of their cognitive, social, political, historical and cultural functions and contexts'.7 In other words, a valuable study would seek to link specific communicative acts with what Norman Fairclough, borrowing from Foucault, calls 'orders of discourse', the conventions which embody the ideologies that structure the communicative act itself.8 Taking seriously, then, the idea that 'el modo de re/lexionar de la gente, el modo de escribir, de juzgar, de hablar, (incluso en las conversaciones de la calle y en los escritos mas cotidianos) [ ...J esta regida por una estructura te6rica, un sistema',9 it is our concern here to establish a relationship between our examples and this wider dimension, between specific discourse structures and what we argue is a racialised discursive order. We were interested in seeing whether we could identify and analyse a discourse of race in Colombia, a systematic representation of racial andlor ethnic characteristics that establishes a hierarchy between them. Our hypothesis was that this discourse does in fact exist, both enabling and cnacting the racist practice that orders Colombian society along racial lines.

84

Lobo and Morgan: Articulating Blackness in Colombia

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

We contend that racial discourse in Colombia provides for a series of racialised identities (or 'subject positions'), articulating the relationship between them and fixing their respective places in the social imaginary. As such it is, also in Norman Fairclough's words, the 'favoured vehicle of ideology',lO the mode by which the asymmetries of social relations are either obscured or normalised and thereby reproduced. Historically, one of the main problems of studying racism in Latin America has been getting people to admit that it exists. Almost thirty years ago Martin Sagrera, in his book on Latin American racisms, describes 'la negativa apasionada, el esfuerzo realizado par todos los medios para que no salga a la luz ese "esqueleto de la familia", ese crimen originario del prejuicio racial ... que s610 los "extranjeros mal intencionados" intentar{an descubrir'.l1 Quite recently, Marisol de la Cadena could write that '[olne of the most puzzling, disconcerting phenomena that the non-native visitor confronts while travelling in Latin America is the relative ease with which pervasive and very visible discriminatory practices coexist with the denial of racism'.l2 Such claims, separated by almost three decades, suggest that while in most Latin American republics it is the more 'European-looking' who dominate the fields of both material and symbolic power, it is rare at almost all levels of society to encounter anyone who will admit that this stratification has anything to do with racism. 13 As we started our research our impression was that neither the problem of racism nor that of its denial was less acute in Colombia. Nonetheless, a number of social scientists and political activists have commented on the existence of a broad discourse of race in Colombia. The terms mestizo, blanco, indio and negro seem to cover the basic concepts of racial difference that historically have underpinned the discourse on race in Colombia. Peter Wade has described Colombia's 'racial triangle', a cognitive model that has been influential in the construction of an ethnic imaginary that explicitly recognises the mixed nature of Colombians, but hierarchises it, with the black and indigenous strands at the base of the triangle and the white at the top, a constant figure of desire for the mestizo majority.14 What complicates the matter is that the interplay between the ideal of blanqueamiento and the processes that typify racial fetichisation reveal blackness, whiteness and the various levels of mestizaje to be wholly relational concepts. In other words, what someone describes themselves as, or gets described as, depends on who is addressing or talking about whom and on the institutional context within which such naming takes place. Mestizo, for example, is generally used in Latin America to refer to those who regard themselves as being of mixed European and indigenous descent, a category that includes the majority of Colombians, yet we would also find that it was used to denote the mixing of Mro-Colombians and Europeans, rather than mulato. Trigueno (literally 'wheat coloured'), on the other hand, a descriptive category that until the constitution of 1991 was used on the

85

JILAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10:1, July 2004

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

national identity card, in principle has no racial connotations, and could be applied to someone regardless of whether they claimed this or that measure of a particular ancestry. Yet we were to find that it was frequently assimilated into the category of mestizo and thus implicitly racialised. And beyond this relatively trivial example we were to discover that the use of the word negro, one of the key terms in the racial imaginary, undergoes a variety of slippages depending on the context in which it is used and the participants in the act of communication. The very words negro and indio are, we should remember, problematic in origin. As Friedemann points out, when the first Europeans began to populate the Americas, '[c]rearon la imagen del conquistador civilizado y la del indio y el negro como incivilizados y salvajes',15 Victorien Lavou supports this claim in even stronger terms when he notes that '10 que se llam6 "negro", como el "indio", s610 existi6 en determinadas circunstancias hist6ricas para ratificar una 16gica de deshumanizaci6n junto con una explotaci6n esclavista y colonialista'.16 The word negro, then, was part of a discursive practice that produced a figure: a savage, a slave, an other. As Lavou argues, 'el interes de explotaci6n de los colonizadores exigfa su existencia y de este modo fueron creadas las especies fantasmas de «indios" y "negros'" .17 When considering the discourse of race in Colombia today, we are not just speaking about the interrelationship of specific terms but about a general discursive context which includes 'negro ten(a que ser, 'me negre6', 'si un negro no 10 caga de entrada 10 caga de salida', 'negro, ni el telefono'; '[[ego la negramenta'; 'como bautizando negros'; 'trabajar como un negro"; 'los negros son perezosos'; 'no sea indio', 'haga patria, mate un negro'; 'indio patirrajado, animal de monte'; 'en esta ciudad hay mucha indiamenta'; 'malicia indfgena' and a host of other racialised, and racist, expressions. These sayings in turn are part of a broader 'common sense' about race that tells us, contradictorily, that afros are oversexed and childlike, that indigenous people are at once devious and naIve, and so on, while Colombia itself is a non-racist society. The current project seeks to analyse the relationships established between these terms because their precise impact, the precise nature of the social relationship they bring into being, only begins to emerge in the context of this broader network of meanings.l 8 We did, however, have a specific starting point, the use of the word negro and its variants negrito and negrita. These terms attracted our attention not only because they are used so frequently to refer to both Afro-Colombians and dark-skinned mestizos hut because their meaning appeared to be more ambiguous than that of the term indio, which amongst the mestizo population has acquired consistently negative connotations. Thus whenever we questioned the use of the word negro and its variants, suggesting that they might have racist connotations,

86

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

Lobo and Morgan: Articulating Blackness in Colombia we were met not so much with denial as with displacement: '10 decimos con carino'. What intrigued us was not only that this reply was so common but that it was repeated by representatives of all sectors of the mestizo population, regardless of age, sex, education, regional origin or social status. Our conclusion was that either we were being particularly obtuse in continuing to preoccupy ourselves with something that was so obvious there was no point in discussing it any further, or that we were dealing with a typical effect of a process of naturalisation, a collective blind spot that merited further investigation. In particular, we thought that this alibi of affection in turn required its own explanation: was it the innocuous recognition of diversity or the key to understanding the effectiveness of processes that continue to legitimate the systematic marginalisation of Mro-Colombians? In pursuing an answer to this question we have found that the precise forms and processes through which racism in Colombia is enunciated have received scant attention, even in studies by widely known authors such as Friedemann, Arocha and Wade, and those who have tended to pursue the relationship have been, as one might expect, Mro-Colombian. In his book Soy afrocolombiano, Antonio Jose Murillo Murgueitio inveighs against the use of the word negro to refer to Colombians of Mrican descent,19 while Roberto Pineda Giraldo (1986) has written of the persistence in Colombian discourse of dichos y refranes de vieja data, denigrantes de la poblaci6n negra, que estan siempre prontos a escapar de los labios (.. •jFrases despectivas que en forma caricaturesca pretenden denigrar comportamientos, actitudes, rasgos de una personalidad modal, 0 de descaracterizar malevolamente el alma de un pueblo, dejando en tender con ella que no se quiere compartir con el, espacio y historia. 20

Pineda Giraldo goes on to formulate an implicit question, namely, why would such racist forms continue to exist if they no longer have 'la justificaci6n de una sociedad oficialmente estratificada por castas', and argues that such usages 'contaminan el ambiente social con prejuicios de alto contenido antidemocratico'.21 And Alberto Angulo in Moros en la costa describes the alibi of affection which mestizos use to defend their USe of the word negro and its variants as 'una mascara para ocultar . .. el rostro monstruoso del odio racial'.22 These critics suggest that beyond the officially promUlgated ideologies that emphasise Colombia's egalitarian constitutional framework, a discourse of racial differentiation and racial inequality continues to exist. Following their lead, we want to begin an investigation of this particular form of discursive racism, with the tentative guiding hypothesis being that in Colombia the use of racialised epithets is one of the more subtle and pernicious means by which a racist social formation is reproduced.

87

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

JILAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10:1, July 2004

In this first phase of our research our primary focus was on the use of terms dealing with the general idea of blackness. We wanted, furthermore, to shift our focus from the terrain of official discourse and examine the sorts of things that Colombians say, or say that they say, in daily speech. Our specific interest was in the way a mestizo majority imagines and articulates the idea of racial difference in daily life through the use of the word negro and its variants, although we were also interested in how Afro-Colombians respond to this use. We therefore handed out questionnaires and carried out a preliminary series of interviews in three Colombian cities, Cali, Bogota and Armenia, where we expected to find significant differences in attitudes.23 In Armenia some of the interviews were carried out at a secondary school in a working class suburb, some were with university students at the Universidad del Quindio, while others were with mechanics in the commercial centre of the town. In Cali we carried out random 'vox pop' style interviews in Salomia, a middle class neighbourhood of the city, while in Bogota our informants included relatively privileged students from the Universidad de los Andes. With a small sample group (100) we were not seeking to make definitive generalisations about the perception of race in Colombia as a whole but were interested in finding clues for further research. We wanted to develop an initial insight into the processes that constitute racial difference, attentive to the fact that while race may be a discursive category that Colombians reinvent on a daily basis, this reinvention takes place in a context shaped both by historic representations of racial difference and an official discourse of multiculturalism. However, one of our first observations was that although we had tried consciously to speak with a wide range of informants in terms of age and socio-economic background the regularities of Colombian racial discourse were far more striking than the differences. The questionnaires provided us with instances of the use of specific terms, while the interviews gave us the opportunity to analyse extended examples of discourse. In both cases self-identification was an important issue because it was relevant to the issue of address forms, one of our central concerns. How we identify ourselves and how others identify us are closely linked and we therefore asked people whether they could tell us what their 'racial identity was. With two exceptions, our informants had no hesitation in identifying themselves within this framework, and the way in which they are identified in the text is based on this self-identification. This seems to go some way at least towards ratifying the claim made by a student at the Universidad de los Andes that 'Colombia no tiene una raza definida, pero todos tenemos el mismo concepto de lo que es el negro, el blanco y el moreno dentro de Colombia'. Such regularities reveal the existence of a repertoire of racialised identities available to Colombians even as the possibility of racism is constantly refused, although it is important to note in passing that some people, particularly paisas, chose to define themselves in

88

Lobo and Morgan: Articulating Blackness in Colombia primarily regional terms, which are in effect racialised by appearing in this context. It is also evident that choices do exist within this repertoire and hesitations and confusions, in part the traces of recent struggles, are evident. A striking example of this was the respondent who used the 'politically correct' term afrocolombiano alongside the pejorative indio.

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

As far as the interviews are concerned two points need to be made. First, it

is important to bear in mind that our analysis is not based on direct observation of the use of these terms but on our informants' reflection on their usage, a second order account of a first order discursive situation. Some of these situations were provided by us from the media, others were examples that we had come across in a range of social situations, both formal and informal. That none of our informants had any difficulty in recognising them, however, confirmed their typical nature. Second, the kind of discursive context from which many of our examples come was hardly a standard one. In most cases we introduced ourselves to complete strangers, explaining where we worked and the kind of project we were involved in. People rarely participate in this sort of survey and our informants' attempts to come to terms with the discursive situation they found themselves in were significant in themselves, a point we intend to elaborate further as we continue to develop and review our research. We recognise that this in itself makes the discussions we had fraught with overdeterminations that may well have had some distorting effect on the conversations-but that is a perennial problem in participant-observer work in the social sciences. Amongst the anecdotes provided by friends and acquaintances in order to illustrate the way these terms function in everyday discourse was the example of the Mro-Colombian university student who asked her lecturer a question. He responded, tacking on 'iYa entendi6, negra?' to his explanation. Taken aback, she reminded him of her name, to which he replied 'Ay, pero 10 digo can carino'. This situation was presented for discussion in the questionnaires, eliciting a wide range of responses. Some people asked for more information about the context, such as whether the lecturer was an Mro-Colombian or what tone of voice he employed. However, over 50 per cent of the respondents felt that this form of address was quite inoffensive, an affectionate and certainly not racist utterance of the sort they would have no hesitation in using themselves. Yet when we asked about these terms in the interviews, many participants decided that such usages were at best condescending and at worst insulting. Context was a determining factor, as a mestiza informant in Armenia suggests in the following exchange: Interviewer: Y todos esos terminos como 'oye, negrita', j,eso te parece

diferente?

89

JILAS - Journa l of Iberian and Latin Americ an Studies , 10:1, July 2004

Woman:

Es diferente. Me explica . .. si uno a veces, yo soy, pues, mestiza, y a mi tambien me dicen 'negrita', pero ya, una persona negra, a veces no les gusta y se sienten incomodos...

Interviewer: Ya, ipor que sera, por que es diferente para una persona

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

negra que para una persona, digamos, que sea triguena, mestiza... 1

0

Woman: Pues, porque a veces le dicen a uno 'negra' por carino. What is strikin g here is what is not directly expressed but merely hinted at because it is all too clear. The unspoken reason why an Mro-C olomb ian might feel 'uncomfortable' 'sometimes' could only be because of the negati ve associations of the word negro, associations of which everyone is aware but which, all things being equal, go unrem arked. In other words , the interpe llation can only take place because the social context is one in which negros , we would insist, are structu rally and imagin atively margin alised . For her part, our inform ant is in no doubt that the term is affecti onate when addressed to a mestiz o or mestiz a; in the case of the latter it is almos t a piropo in its own right, eroticising its recipient. This is one possib le kind of affection referre d to here; anothe r would be the intima cy implied by most nicknames. Yet while all our partici pants regard ed the impac t of the word as affectionate when used by one mestiz o to anothe r, they also tended to agree that when used by a mestiz o to an Mro-Colombian it genera lly implied a softening of what they recognised as the stigma tising impac t of the word negro: Interviewer: Estos terminos como 'negrito', 'negrita', ien que contexto, en que circunstancias utilizan ese tipo de termino, utilizan?

0

no los

Waiter:

Eh, sl, sl, se utiliza mucha, digamos, la palabra 'negrito', 'negrita', eh, digamos, es como par no decir alga asi 'negro', ino? que suena como mas. ..

Waitress.

Mas vulgar

Waiter:

Como mas punzante, ino?, como par no decir, 'ay, ese negro no', y entonces, 'aquel negrito', 0 'aquella negrita', se utiliza mucho ese diminu tivo par eso . ..

Interviewer: Ya Es como algo de carino Waiter: (Waiter, mestizo, and waitress, blanca, Cali.) In this context both our inform ants agree that there is somet hing negati ve about the use of the word negro. It is 'vulgar' and 'hurtfu l'. But the kind of affection appeal ed to here in the use of the diminu tive is very differe nt, an affection that seeks to cover up the symbolic violence inscribed in the openly

90

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

Lobo and Morgan: ArticuLating Blackness in Colombia racist use of the word. At the same time, however, this is a patronising affection, the literal belittling of the negro who now becomes merely a negrito, childlike, unthreatening, certainly not an equal. However it is used, for a mestizo to call an Mro-Colombian negro hierarchises the relationship between them. Negros are people who can be identified in terms of their race rather than their name-defined thus in stereotypical terms as a type rather than an individual. But it is also an affirmation that this supposed racial difference exists-that negros really are out there waiting to be identified. The question would then be, what does it mean, this word? We would refer to Angulo: 'En la idiosincrasia criolla el adjetivo "negro" es sin6nimo de torpe, salvaje, perezoso, tragedia, suciedad, ilegalidad, referencia "cariiiosa" y, simultaneamente, insulto despreciativo'.24 Yet the real conjuncture of power and meaning that the alibi of affection is supposed to obscure is frequently all too obvious to the person being interpellated, as our interviews with Mro-Colombians show: que no, que 'usted es una negra', pues st, soy negra, aY que? (to the interviewer) iahora 10 entendes? 0 cuando, no se que, se refieren a una, no, es que 'negrita, como para no ofenderla, no Ie digo -negro· sino "negnta'" ist me entendes? (Female student, negra, Universidad del Quindi'o, Armenia)

In this asymmetrical relationship one might ask what options are open to the recipient of the term negro. One option is to accept the term as 'affectionate', with all that that implies. Another is flatly to reject the usage and demand to be identified in another, less depersonalising way. As far as possible retorts are concerned it is intriguing that in Colombia there exists a very commonly used term for someone who is light-skinned, namely mono and its variants monito and monita. Yet as far as we can see they are terms used exclusively amongst mestizos to refer to anyone with a fair complexion, and particularly to foreigners. What we found, in fact, was that when searching for a retort that would foreground the issue of racialised forms of address Mro-Colombians are beginning to resort to the use of the word indio to refer to mestizos. This complicates matters still further as, although it tends to achieve the objective of stopping mestizo interlocutors in their tracks, causing them to feel insulted by the word and thereby forcing them to reflect on the use of racialised expressions in general, its force depends on the existing racist hierarchy which has converted the word indio into an insult. Intonation plays an important role in all of this, particularly for those who identify themselves as negros, those, in other words, who accept the dominant description of themselves. This was exemplified during an interview with a motor mechanic in Armenia in the course of which a man passing by in the street interpellated the informant with the words ciOl~, negro!,.25 A few moments later the following conversation took place: 91

JILAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10:1, July 2004 Interviewer: Hablemos un poco de los terminos. A usted Ie dicen a veces 'negro'. ;,Le molesta a no? 1,0 depende de las circunstancias?

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

Mechanic:

Pues, a m( no me molesta, segun la forma como 10 digan. Si usted me dice 'negro', pues, de pronto son los amigos, las amistades. Si dice 'mire ese negro' ya de pronto esta tratando de insinuar otras cosas. Pero de todas maneras las personas comunes y corrientes que me rodean a m(, me dicen as(, 'negro', 0 me Uaman por el nombre, a 'Negro, venga'. (Mechanic, negro, Armenia.)

One of this man's workmates commented in the following way on the same issue during a conversation on football, one of the areas in which MroColombians are prominent but still subject to racialised criticism when things go wrong on the pitch: 26 Interviewer: Volviendo al {utbol, me acuerdo que una vez Asprillaz7 estaba jugando y alguien dijo 'Uuuy, ese negro siempre se tira al piso' (man laughs) iAM te parece grosero el term ina o que? Mechanic:

No, no, vuelvo e insisto, segun el tono, segun el tono que utilices, ;,si me entiende? Entonces st, uno oye 'Uuuy ese negro. .. tin', pero entonces depende del tono. (Mechanic, mestizo, Armenia.)

In other words, interpretation of this term balances precariously on intonation. When used to a mestizo this paralinguistic feature is less important as the expression is more likely to connote affection. But when used to an Afro-Colombian its potential as verbal aggression is always present, creating an uncertainty that the interlocutor can only discard by making a choice about something as subtle as the speaker's tone. We would argue, however, that the choice of interpretation is coerced because barring obvious offensive intent on the part of the speaker the person addressed is almost compelled to interpret the use of the term' as 'affectionate', Yet the simultaneous recognition that there is indeed a tone that would unambiguously transform the term into an example of discursive violence is both a reminder of the violence that constituted the institution of slavery and an indicator of the persistence of the racist social formation that is its legacy. In this particular case it is intriguing that the negative intonation is already in the example given (note that the informant laughs at this point) but is then ignored. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that amongst afrocolombianos the use of the term negro was regarded as contaminated by a whole series of racist connotations, regardless of intonation or context, Intra-group identifications therefore take very different forms:

92

Lobo and Morgan: Articulating Blackness in Colombia No, pues, la palabra, pues, ideal serla 'afro', serla ideal para referirse a una persona de color, pero, 0 sea, uno de la misma raza, y en el mismo ambiente, siempre utiliza otras casas, par ejemplo, 'mi pana', 'mi sangre', 'mi hermano', St, que hay diferentes, pues, 0 sea, no tratar a una persona 'negrito', sino terminos que se utilizan dentro del drculo de uno

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

(Gym instructor, afrocolombiano, Armenia.)

We see here a rejection of words associated with a discourse that marginalises Mro-Colombians and their replacement by expressions that allow members of the same discursive community to recognise each other and emphasise their sense of belonging. However, a teacher in Cali, discussing his own preferred term, afrodescendiente, commented: Pero sigue marcando la diferencia [the reference here is to the word 'afrocolombiano'J, is{? Sigue marcando, 'a ver, iquien lleg6?', 'no, es que, ic6mo es el tra?' 'no, es un negro', 'ah, no, no, no, no sirve', AQui en Cali, aqu£ en Cali.

(Teacher, afrodescendiente, Cali.) The point being made here is that social relationships in Colombia are anything but colour-blind. Mro-Colombians always have to find ways of identifying themselves through difference, rather than being automatically accepted as full members of the culturally diverse nation celebrated in the constitution. Here our informant moves back quickly to negro, suggesting that to all intents and purposes the terms are interchangeable. The point is that changing the terminology is irrelevant if each term is assimilated into a framework that systematically discriminates against Mro-Colombians. In other words, if the use of the term afrocolombiano is generally regarded as just a politically correct form of negro then no real change in perception is being effected. Indeed, the fact that Mro-Colombians need to identify themselves through a claim of both their Colombian-ness and their difference suggests that they are not accepted as full citizens. Within the dominant discourse the very idea of referring to mestizo-colombianos or euro-colombianos seems absurd, as these people are 'obviously' colombianos. To be Mro-Colombian remains an overtly marked condition, while being mestizo or blanco generally goes unremarked. Similarly indigenous people are just ind(genas (when they are not indios) with no reference to Colombia used, a telling quirk that suggests the ambiguous way their relationship with the nation is imagined; the irony is that though they are 'indigenous' they are not really national. Peter Wade has argued that Colombia's 'racial order' is founded on the racist 'truths' of positivist scientific racism which structured elite thinking about Colombia's human capital and potential for development since-and indeed before-its independence.28 Such science looks around and sees negros as impoverished and oppressed and concludes, on that basis, that they are naturally so, fit only to be uneducated labourers, whether slave or

93

JILAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies. 10:1. July 2004

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

free. Since Wade's book was researched mostly before the new Colombian constitution and its new official positions on racial difference were ratified~ we would like to report that the views associated with such science-that, for example, negros are altogether more base and aggressive, less refined, than whites-were no longer current in this new century. Unfortunately, we cannot: our interviews in general, but most lamentably those with 11th graders in a public secondary school in Armenia, will not allow us to make such a claim. 29 What became evident in the course of our investigation is that 10 negro still functions as an ideational space of degradation, as part of a discursive imaginary which fuses backwardness with the differential status of AfroColombian-ness. Today, the discursive relationship established between mestizos and afrocolombianos is still one in which blackness remains undesirable and inferior. Despite the claim that the use of negro and a cluster of related terms is supposedly inoffensive or even affectionate we had clear evidence that many of the informants were fully aware that it represents an act ofliteral denigration. Insofar as this situation obtains in a country that claims to be a 'racial democracy', there is a clear failure on the part of the educational system and the media to playa role in challenging such dismissive attitudes. Overtly racist expressions are still used without any qualms and any comparisons made with different cultural contexts are discarded as inapplicable because all of this is simply part of the 'idiosincrasia nacional', or fails to take into account 'la especificidad colombiana'. As a concluding note we would argue that until this hierarchy is challenged on a daily basis it seems reasonable to suppose that the situation of·Mro-Colombians is unlikely to change substantially. In other words, while the legal moves made since the constitution of 1991 are in many ways laudable, they fail to address this problem of discursive marginalisation. In fact, by apparently solving the 'problem of race' they have closed it down as a subject for debate, stifling the possibility of the sort of critical reflection that we have seen here. And it is precisely the failure to challenge the dominant ways of speaking about race that makes possible the reproduction of a racialised, and racist, social hierarchy. At this point, however, we would remind the reader that this is only the first phase of a larger investigation. Despite the primary moment of denial we have found Colombians not only willing to talk to us but also eager to hear us talk about the issues raised by our research in a variety of encounters, both within and beyond the academy. Such interest in these issues would seem to confirm the relevance of our ongoing research, in which we seek to examine the materiality of discourses of race, and link them to those of nation and democracy in a country where the ubiquity and immediacy of real violence has tended to obscure the symbolic violences which are nothing less than its conditions of possibility.

94

Lobo and Morgan: Articulating Blackness in Colombia

Noles * This

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

article refers to the ongoing research of the Grupo de Estudios Socioculturales at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. As well as the authors the group includes Dr. Chloe Rutter-Jensen of the Instituto Pensar and Andes students Paola Liliana Arbelaez and Daniel Duque. We would like to express our special thanks to Dr. Rutter-Jensen and her students in 'Racial Dialogues' for their help in elaborating the questionnaires, and to Roland Anrup, Jeff Browitt and David Morgan for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this text.

1

The constitution specifically mentions the 'comunidades negras' of the Pacific coast, who have been granted land concessions by subsequent legislation. It also concedes limited autonomy to indigenous communities, but in such a vague way that making decisions about conflicting jurisdictions has been something of a legal headache ever since.

2

Jaime Arocha, 'Inclusion of Afro-Colombians: Unreachable National Goal?', Latin Amencan Perspectives, 25:3,1998, p. 71.

3

See Alfredo Garcia, 'Dramatico informe del BID: el Pacifico, como Haitf, El Pats, Cali, March 13, 1998. p. AI.

4

Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, New York, Longman, 2001, p.73.

5

Teun Van Dijk, Ideology, London, SAGE, 1998, p.195.

6

Van Dijk, Ideology, pp. 193-94.

7

Van Dijk, Ideology, p. 199.

B

Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 23.

9

Michel Foucault, 'A prop6sito de Las palabras y las cosas', saber y verdad, (Eds and Trads) Julia Varela and Fernando Alvarez-Uria, Madrid, Las Ediciones de la Piqueta, 1991, p. 34.

10

Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 28.

11

Martin Sagrera, Los racismos en America 'Latina', Buenos Aires, Ediciones La Bastil1a, 1974, p. 8.

12

Marisol de la Cadena, 'Reconstructing Race: Racism, Culture and Mestizaje in Latin America', NACLA, 34:6, 2001, p. 16.

13

As Bourdieu has put it, symbolic power 'is that invisible power which can be

14

Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

15

Nina S. Friedemann, 'Negros en Colombia: identidad e invisibilidad', America Negra, 2, June 1992, p. 25.

exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it'. Pierre Bourdieu, 'On Symbolic Power', Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 164.

95

JlLAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 10:1, July 2004

16

Victorien Lavou, 'Negrola no hay tal cosa: una lectura ideo16gica de la canci6n "Me gritaron negra" de Victoria Santa Cruz', Afrodescendientes en las A.m€ricas: trayectorias sociales e identidarias, Bogota, Universidad Nacional,

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

IC~,2002,p.339.

17

Victorien Lavou, 'Negrola no hay tal cos a', p. 339.

18

As Fairclough suggests: 'the situational context for each and every discourse includes the system of social and power relationships at the highest, societal, level. Just as even a single sentence has traditionally been seen to imply a whole language, so a single discourse implies a whole society. This is so because the basic classificatory and typifying schemes for social practice and discourse upon which all else depends-what I have been calling social orders and orders of discourse-are shaped by the societal and institutional matrices of that single discourse'. Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 126-27.

19

Antonio Jose Murillo Murgueitio, Soy afrocolombiano, Bogota, Editorial Linotipia Bolivar, 1997.

20

Roberto Pineda Giraldo, 'Prefacio', La participaci6n del negro en la formaci6n de las sociedades latinoamericanas, Alexander Cifuentes, ed., Bogota, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura and Instituto Colombiano de Antropologfa, 1986, p. 7.

21

Giraldo, 'Pre facio', p. 7.

22

Alberto Angulo, Moros en la costa: vivencia afrocolombiana en 10. cultura coleetiva, Bogota, Docentes Editores, 1999, p. 171.

23

Armenia is part of the eje cafetero, regarded by many of its inhabitants as part of the Greater Antioquia, a region in which the importance of blanqueamiento has historically been important. Paisas, as people from Antioquia are called, often stress the importance of European heritage (especially Basque) in accounting for their supposed work ethic and entrepreneurial guile. Bogota, as the capital, has traditionally been a bastion of white Colombia, the home of the political elite. Over the last forty years however, and more particularly in the last decade, large numbers of immigrants from all over the country have arrived in the city, putting capitalinos in closer contact than ever before with representatives of other Colombias. Cali is a city with a large Afro-Colombian population where blaneos, mestizos and afrocolombianos have lived in close proximity for many years, and where a clearly racially stratified social order has developed.

24

Angulo, Moros en la costa, p. 135.

25

While we are well aware of the problems associated with Althusser's concept of interpellation we use the term to refer to forms of address that in one way or another seek to fix the recipient's place in a social hierarchy.

26

Angulo has a long discussion and analysis of the double standards according to which Afro-Colombian footballers are treated by Colombian sports commentators and the domestic media outlets.

27

Faustino 'Tino' Asprilla, a famous Colombian footballer.

96

Lobo and Morgan: Articulating Blackness in Colombia Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, pp. 11-19.

29

Furthermore, while according to the recent Informe- de Desarrollo Humano para Colombia 2000, 'son fuertes, en el imaginario colectivo de amplios sectores sociales de Cali, los roles subordinados de empleada domestica para la mujer negra y de trabajador de la construcci6n sin educaci6n para el hombre negro, que ademas hablan un mal castellano' we can assert that such an imaginary is not restricted to Cali. Informe de Desarrollo Humano para Colombia 2000, Bogota, Departamento Nacional de Planeaci6n and the United Nations Programme for Development, 2000, p. 173.

Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 07:38 09 September 2015

28

97