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Nancy
Appelbaum is Assistant Professor of History
and Latin American Studies at the State University
of New York at Binghamton. Her research interests
include Latin America, Colombia, race, and gender.
Of her many publications, her most recent book, Muddied
Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia,
will be released from Duke University Press in
spring 2003.
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Politics,
Race and Historical Memory in Colombia’s Coffee
Region
Stephanie
Ballenger, Department of History
In
1991, a revised Colombian constitution set forth a new
racial and cultural agenda by defining the Colombian nation
as multicultural. The place of “difference” in
defining the boundaries and character of Colombia as a
nation had previously been articulated in a language that
subsumed racial, cultural and regional difference in the
unifying language of nationalism and national identity,
a language that was often employed to justify exclusion
and oppression. This disavowal of racial difference in
the name of a unified national identity produced a society
that upholds racial hierarchies while denying their existence.
Professor Nancy Appelbaum traced this configuration of
race, region and nation as it took shape in Colombia’s
coffee producing region throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
On
March 19, 2003, Professor Appelbaum, a historian at SUNY/Binghampton
and a visiting professor at CLAS, spoke about the place
of racial ideology and regional identity in shaping modern
Colombian political culture. Her presentation drew from
her research experiences in the town of Riosucio in western
Colombia, which was founded during Latin America’s
wars of independence in the early decades of the nineteenth-century.
By exploring the ways that the town’s inhabitants
voiced their political claims in racial terms, Appelbaum
showed how different versions of the town’s founding
moment have been used to assert “contending political
projects.” Each version employed a particular racial
logic that reflected the historical moment in which it
was articulated.
Professor
Appelbaum has taken up one of Latin American history’s
most persistent and confusing problems: the variety of
ways in which race and racial ideologies have been an integral
element in Latin American political culture. Though focused
specifically on Colombia, her research has implications
for the region as a whole and provides a new model for
thinking about how changing racial ideologies have been
expressed in Latin American societies and how ideas about
race have resonated in economic and political life.
Most
earlier histories of Colombia have focused on the highly
partisan nature of the contest for state power in the nineteenth-century.
As conservatives and liberals battled for control of the
newly emerging state during the period following formal
independence from Spain, their inability to resolve their
differences resulted in decades of civil wars whose legacy
of violence still resonates in the present. Colombia was
left with a relatively weak centralized state which has
been unable to resolve tensions generated by a powerful
leftist guerrilla movement, right-wing paramilitaries,
narcotraficantes and a tradition of local and regional
autonomy. Previous analyses of Colombia’s political
trajectory have not been able to fully grapple with the
role that racial and regional identities have played in
shaping its national political culture and its development
of a unified national identity. Professor Appelbaum confronts
this volatile subject, focusing on the ways in which racial
and spatial identities were worked out over time in Riosucio
and revealing the centrality of race and regional identity
in the project of constructing the Colombian nation-state.
Appelbaum
identified three key moments when larger structural changes
affected the way in which inhabitants of Riosucio defined
their town as indigenous, white or mestizo. Indigenous
communities under pressure to privatize their landholdings
in the mid-nineteenth century articulated their claims
by asserting that the founding of the town reflected its
indigenous nature. Half a century later, as the coffee
economy expanded, tensions between Riosucio and the neighboring
town of Manizares were expressed in ways that reflected
the town’s “whiteness,” emphasizing the
Spanish origins of Riosucio’s founding families and
equating whiteness with thrift and industry. In the mid-twentieth
century, local intellectuals insisted on a mixed-race,
or mestizo heritage, in which stories about the town’s
founding reflected a racial ideology that subsumed all
racial differences in the category of mestizo as a way
of creating national as well as racial unity.
Appelbaum
analyzed the complex racial and spatial dynamics of each
successive historical moment in order to reveal how racial
identity was mobilized to make political claims. Her analysis
also reflected how local power struggles were being articulated
within a broader national and global ideological context
in which ideas about race, progress and modernity were
shifting.
In
response to questions from the audience about the current
situation of indigenous people within Colombia’s
national territory, she was careful to point out that notions
of ethnic authenticity or racial unity are no less complex
now than they were during the forced relocations and the
resultant reconfigurations of identity that occurred in
the colonial era. To be indigenous was not a biological
designation, but one that denoted one’s membership
in “a local landholding community ... ethnic indigenous
identity was rooted in specific local spaces.” Indigenous
politics today involves incorporating local families and
landowners into a community as a way of expanding its land
and power base, regardless of phenotype. The complex calculus
of culture and biology that formerly determined one’s
racial status is being eroded. A new way of being indigenous
is being formulated: one which stresses communal rights
and obligations in an attempt to conserve political autonomy
and ensure community survival through successful integration
into the world market.
Professor
Appelbaum has made a courageous foray into a highly complex
and politically volatile subject. Latin American scholars
have been known to suggest that their colleagues in the
U.S. project their own ideas and anxieties about race into
a Latin American setting in which race lacks the psycho-social
dimensions it has in the United States. However, through
her deft and thoughtful analysis of how racial and regional
identities were expressed to articulate a variety of competing
political claims, Appelbaum exposes how an understanding
of Colombia’s post-independence political trajectory
will remain elusive without a more careful consideration
of how struggles for power at the local, regional and national
level were articulated in terms that integrated racial
and regional identities.
