Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

ISSN: 1744-2222 (Print) 1744-2230 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlac20

Mestizaje, multiculturalism, liberalism, and

violence

Peter Wade

To cite this article: Peter Wade (2016) Mestizaje, multiculturalism, liberalism,

and violence, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 11:3, 323-343, DOI:
10.1080/17442222.2016.1214368

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2016.1214368

Published online: 26 Sep 2016.

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LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES, 2016
VOL. 11, NO. 3, 323–343
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2016.1214368

Mestizaje, multiculturalism, liberalism, and violence

Peter Wade
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Mestizaje has been theorized as a racial–cultural process of nation- Latin America; Colombia;
alist homogenization, as a mode of subaltern contestation or mestizaje; violence;
inconformity, and as a practice that simultaneously combines multiculturalism; liberalism;
inclusion; exclusion
both inclusion and exclusion. This exclusive inclusion is character-
istic of liberalism generally, and may involve violence. The core
meanings of mestizaje are rooted in sex and reproduction, which
allow ideas of inclusion (family, kinship) to gain traction. These
ideas mask the violence of mestizaje (rape, coercion, enforced
assimilation, elimination). In Colombia, the long-standing tension
between democracy and violence has recently articulated in a
particular way with mestizaje as this has become reconfigured as
inclusive multiculturalism, coinciding with the explosive spread of
extreme violence to once peaceful ‘black regions’ of the country.
This violence should not be understood as inherently racial – for
example, as purposely targeting black populations. But in placing
mestizaje in relation to multiculturalism through a common
dynamic of inclusion and exclusion that characterizes liberal social
orders in general, I highlight the racialized connections between
mestizaje and violence in the Colombian context.

Introduction
In this essay, I explore the tensions between processes of inclusion and exclusion that
are characteristic of liberalism and mestizaje, and the role of violence in their operation. I
analyze how the liberal tension between inclusion and exclusion works in relation to
racialized difference in regimes of mestizaje and, more recently, multiculturalism in
Colombia; and how racialized difference has become recently more clearly articulated
to violence in that country, even though most of the violence has little explicit racial
dimension to it. As racialized difference has become enshrined in multiculturalist law,
the violence that is constitutive of liberal social orders ensnares that difference in more
overt ways.
Liberalism and mestizaje are not concepts of exactly equivalent order. The former is a
mode of political organization. The latter describes acts understood to ‘mix’ different
bio-cultural categories to create forms that bear the marks of the originary categories,
while being distinctively new. But mestizaje also describes political arrangements of
citizenship, which have a dual character: certain bio-cultural categories of people are

CONTACT Peter Wade peter.wade@manchester.ac.uk Department of Social Anthropology, University of

Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
324 P. WADE

politically superior, while others are subordinate; and/or everyone is (or will be) a
mestizo and equally a citizen. Mestizaje describes a process of nation-state formation
based on the idea of race – an inherently political concept – which defines who can
properly govern (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt 2003). Mestizaje is about
acts of sex and kinship – the symbolics and passage of blood (Smith 1997) – and this
makes it intensely political, whether we consider the genealogical governance of honor
and property in colonial Latin America, or the regulation of sexual behavior (especially
female) in the name of public morality and social hygiene in the region in the early 20th
century (Caulfield 2000; Martínez 2008; Noguera 2003; Stepan 1991; Twinam 1999; Wade
2009).
I look first at the tensions within liberalism, and how violence figures in them. I then
look at the way violence and racialized difference figured in Latin American regimes of
citizenship. Turning to Colombia, I explore inclusion, exclusion, and violence in mid-
20th-century ideologies of mestizaje, before examining the post-1990 turn to multi-
culturalism. Although this turn is not a radical rupture with mestizaje, I argue that
racialized difference is now more clearly articulated to violence than it was before,
even if the connection remains ambiguous.

Liberalism, inclusion, and exclusion

Liberal rule – including its neoliberal variants – is characterized by fundamental tensions.
It is beset by the constitutive conflict between the democratic inclusion demanded by
ideologies of liberty and equality, and the political and economic exclusions demanded
by the need to govern ‘properly’ and the need of governing elites to preserve the
hierarchies of economic stratification in which they hold a dominant position. The
dictates regarding the proper ways of governance and who can properly be a governor
vary over time. For example, there have been long-term shifts toward a Foucauldian
concept of the bio-political, in which the regulation and maximization of life force
become the key principles of governance. There have been recent shifts toward a
neoliberal variant of liberalism, in which decentralization and the individualization of
citizenly responsibility for self-governance are core values (Rose and Miller 2008;
Wacquant 2012).
Liberalism was originally an ideology ‘born out of the struggles of the [European]
bourgeoisie against the abuses of royal authority,’ which, in order to ‘destroy corporate
privilege…made freedom, equality before the law, and the right to property universal
rights of men’ (Viotti da Costa 2000, 54). When liberals faced the challenge of translating
theory into practice, ‘everywhere in this process liberalism lost its revolutionary mean-
ing’ (55). Liberal ideology invokes the image of universal citizenship, of equal rights and
sameness vis-à-vis the state; it denies the relevance of difference to the question of
rights.
Liberalism must also deal with particularity and difference, and it does so first by
consigning them to the ‘private’ sphere: differences (of race, gender, culture, religion,
etc.) exist, but they are deemed irrelevant to the ‘public’ sphere of rights. However, the
laboriously constructed divide attempting to separate public and private as pure
domains is constantly made porous as the differences of the ‘private’ domain are
integral to the functioning of the liberal project in the public domain: the feminist
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 325

slogan ‘the personal is political’ points at a general truth. Liberalism constitutes differ-
ence as relevant to rights by means of moral judgments made about who is fit to be a
citizen, what a good citizen is, and who is in a position to make such judgments. Such
judgments are necessary to maintain a political and economic division of labor.
Liberalism constitutes difference as hierarchy, even if hierarchy is rhetorically denied in
assertions about being ‘different but equal’ (Baumeister 2000; Mehta 1997, 93).
Sometimes liberalism attempts to eradicate some forms of difference – genocide,
ethnocide, forcible assimilation – but ultimately it needs difference.
As a mode of governance, liberalism moves between sameness and difference or
universalism and particularism in a strategic fashion, emphasizing one or the other, in
order to regulate change and maintain hegemony. Universalist and public claims that
everyone is equal before the state and the law coexist with particularist and public
discriminations on the basis of difference. The differences understood to be relevant in
determining the ability or right to rule or be included in citizenly rights can be diverse:
gender, age, race, class status, national origin, etc. While it is not clear that racial
difference, in particular, is necessary to liberal regimes, there is little question that racial
discrimination has been historically constitutive of them, as liberal modernity’s darker
side (Goldberg 1993; Mignolo 2011). Holt contends that historical evidence from the
19th-century Atlantic world ‘suggests that “racism” was embedded in the very premises
of a presumably nonracist liberalism’ (1992, xx). It seems unlikely that hierarchical
difference can ever be ironed out of liberal rule – despite the progress made in some
areas of the world in terms of antisexist and antiracist public policy – and differences
such as sex and race are likely to continue to provide ways of organizing and justifying
liberal hierarchies, especially when seen on a global scale (Goldberg 2008; Stokes and
Meléndez 2003).
Those who suffer discrimination because of their perceived difference may protest at
the resulting inequality, invoking the principles of liberal equality that are supposed to
govern public life. Such protests provoke reassertions of the universalist principle, which
states that to highlight difference in the domain defined as public – even when done in
protest at the failure of the principle itself – is to challenge the basis of equality and to
introduce division where it does not belong. Examples of this, in relation to racial
difference, can be seen in the violent backlash against black antiracist political organiza-
tion in Cuba in 1908–1912, in recent critiques made of racial quota policies in Brazil, and
in the reluctance in much of postwar Europe to allow the language of racial difference to
enter the public policy domain. These challenges to racial inequality have all been
criticized for reinforcing racial division. Another example is the critiques of multicultur-
alism that object to its universalization of the right to public difference, and restate the
liberal principle that racial and ethnic differences – all glossed as cultural difference –
should be confined to the private sphere (Fry et al. 2007; Helg 1995; Lentin 2004). A
bone of contention here is the difference between equality of outcome and equality of
opportunity: some insist that racial–ethnic inequalities of outcome in the public sphere,
when long term and collective, must indicate failures in equality of opportunity, which
necessitate direct attention to differences of race and ethnicity for reparative purposes;
others contend that paying such attention may itself undermine equality of opportunity
and reinforce hierarchy. Equality is a common value, but it contains different elements
that may be incommensurable (Baumeister 2000, 179).
326 P. WADE

The difference-making, hierarchy, and exclusion that are constitutive of liberal rule,
rather than aberrations of it, may involve violence of various types, from everyday
discriminations and exclusions, to structural segregation, forcible displacement, and
killing. I will expand on this below.

Mestizaje, difference, citizenship, and violence in Latin America

After independence in Latin America, political elites attempted to dismantle the colonial
regimes that had institutionalized racialized difference; they adhered to a liberal empha-
sis on universalism and the creation of equal citizens (Larson 2004; Lasso 2007; Viotti da
Costa 2000). However, as usual in liberal regimes, there were major limits to equality.
Women were excluded from suffrage, as they were in many liberal regimes worldwide.1
In Brazil, when the first constitutional charter, dated 1824, ‘defined freedom and equality
as inalienable rights of men, millions of blacks continued to be enslaved’ (Viotti da Costa
2000, 57). Indigenous and free black people were not usually explicitly excluded,
although indigenous people were more likely to be named in this respect. This was
the case in Brazil, where in addition to being legally defined as wards or orphans of
state, the 1916 Civil Code classified silvícolas (translated as ‘savages’ in the English
version) as ‘relatively incapable,’ and thus not fit to vote, along with married women
and prodigal sons (Ramos 1998, 18, 157). More usually, however, literacy requirements –
which persisted in Colombia until 1932 and in Brazil until 1988 – were used to exclude
them from suffrage, along with many other poor people (Agudelo 2005, 108, note 112;
Engerman and Sokoloff 2005, 913; Sanders 2004, 128, 191; Yashar 2005, 141, 156, 227). In
short, ‘converging race-class correlations … cemented modern forms of social inequality
and marginality under liberalizing “republics without citizens”’ (Alberto Flores Galindo,
cited in Larson 2004, 247).
Racialized difference – and inequality – persisted, but this was not simply a delay in
progressively ironing out the kinks in a universalist policy of citizenship. Two processes
were at work. On the one hand, citizens who felt themselves to be excluded made
efforts at inclusion, which raised issues of racial difference in varying ways. On the other
hand, elites actively produced difference in their discourse and practice. In this sense,
differences were simultaneously produced – indeed coproduced – from below and
above. Everyone agreed on the value of equality and freedom for all, but everyone
also kept producing difference – and, in some cases, hierarchy. In rural Rio de Janeiro,
the appearance of color terms in legal and bureaucratic documents declined from the
1860s, except in relation to slaves: increasingly, negro became a synonym for slave. The
ex-slaves, especially immediately after abolition in 1888, avoided the category negro,
wanting to distance themselves from slavery and be accepted as free; to some extent,
official processes reflected this universalization of citizenship by being silent about color.
Everyone converged on the values of freedom and silence about color. Nevertheless,
everyone also produced difference. In the 1890s, documents often still labeled recently
freed slaves (and indeed their children) as negros, and the categories of blanco, pardo
(brown), and negro persisted in official usage. Meanwhile, among the plebeian classes,
negro was used as an insult, which could provoke free blacks to take legal action (Mattos
de Castro 1995). For these freedmen, participation in freedom meant excluding negros,
as elites also did.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 327

An example of producing difference from below is Colombia during and immediately

after independence, when the pardos (free blacks and mixed-race people) of the
Caribbean coastal region fought for the equality promised by revolution. However,
Simón Bolívar himself denied that South America was suited to full liberal democracy,
as the participation of the (nonwhite) popular classes would, he said, ‘lead to Colombia’s
ruin’ (cited in Lasso 2007, 3). Although by the 1820s, with the active participation of
pardos, Colombia had ‘developed a nationalist ideology that proclaimed the equality
and harmony of its people of European, African, and indigenous descent,’ many among
the new elite, while they adhered to the idea of equality, also shared Bolívar’s views
(153). It is not surprising that, although some pardos were admitted into political office
and they enjoyed formal legal equality, they were aware of the racial exclusion of dark-
skinned people. They occasionally complained about this, effectively highlighting their
own difference, even though they sought only an equal society. Such grievances,
especially when expressed by pardos in positions of authority, provoked accusations
that they were undermining the nation’s hard-won racial harmony with their unpatriotic
‘racial enmity’ and were threatening to provoke a ‘race war’ (107, 155).
Another example is of indigenous communities in the Cauca region of Southwestern
Colombia, whose members in the mid- to late 19th century made claims to be treated as
full citizens, especially in relation to land rights (Sanders 2004). The claims invoked the
argument that they were indios: they were poor, weak, defenseless, and stupid – con-
temporary stereotypes about indigenous people – and thus needed special help. They
claimed to be citizens and also highlighted their status as indios – the same as others
and yet different.
In Brazil and in Cuba, some black people organized in the early decades of the 20th
century – in the short-lived Cuban Partido Independiente de Color or the black São
Paulo press – claiming equality of citizenship, but in the process pointing up racial
difference. This caused critics to accuse them of being ‘racist,’ that is, focusing on race in
a society that aspired to, or claimed it had already achieved, race-blindness in the public
political sphere (Andrews 1991; Helg 1995). In sum, blacks and indigenous people
sought equality and participated in the production of a society of liberal values, which
nevertheless excluded them in practice.
In the second mode of difference production, elites actively produced difference as
part of national ideologies based on foundation narratives of mestizaje, the mixture of
Europeans, native Americans, and Africans – or more accurately white men and indigen-
ous and black women – to form new mestizo people and societies. In keeping with the
tensions that beset the modern liberalism to which they aspired, elites equivocated
between the democratic inclusion and the racist exclusion of black and indigenous
populations, deemed by contemporary science to be inherently inferior. Mestizaje is, at
one level, all about sameness and inclusion: everyone is mestizo, everyone is the product
of a cultural–biological fusion, no one is pure; people may look and act differently, but
they all share in mixture; racial difference is overwhelmed by shared mixedness and
cannot operate as criterion of discrimination. But mestizaje is simultaneously about
exclusion: people classified as black and indigenous belong to the past and to the
margins; they are seen as inferior and backward. Racial difference motivates exclusionary
discrimination. In order to become full citizens, these people must discard such iden-
tities – by leaving behind dress, languages, and habits seen as indigenous and black, by
328 P. WADE

leaving communities that seem ethnically endogamous – and integrate into mestizo
society, where they can become educated and break the ties of kinship to their
communities.
Mestizaje has thus been seen by some as the forcible eradication of difference, often
involving extreme violence that operated apparently outside the boundaries of the law.
Examples include the massacres of Afro-Cubans in the 1912 ‘Guerrita del 12,’ which
demolished the racial mobilization of the Partido Independiente de Color (Helg 1995);
the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ in late 19th-century Argentina, in which mass executions of
indigenous people took place (Andermann 2000); the massacres of Matagalpa people by
the Nicaraguan state repressing an 1881 rebellion (Gould 1998); and the extreme abuses
practiced by rubber companies in the Colombian Amazon in the early 20th century,
which created a ‘space of terror’ (Taussig 1987).
In this view of mestizaje as ethnocide, inclusion would be seen as linked to cultural
‘improvement,’ coming within the compass of the law and achieving proper citizenship;
while exclusion would be linked to noncitizenship (in practice, if not in the letter of the
law) and to violence directed against racialized people seen as belonging to the realm of
nature and animality. But there is more to it than this: the balance between inclusion
and exclusion is more subtle.
As an ideology in practice, mestizaje is not just about the definition of noncitizens
and their assimilation or violent eradication but is also about the active production and
continued management of difference (Wade 2005). In the 1850s, for example, the newly
formed government of New Granada (effectively Colombia) sent out a Chorographic
Commission to map the country’s people and resources and the country’s possibilities
for progress. Driven by a project of national integration and modernization, the
Commission produced difference as it documented the country’s regional and racialized
variety in text and watercolor paintings (Restrepo 1984). A century later, in the 1950s
and after, Colombian school textbooks unfailingly mentioned the mixture of African,
Spanish, and indigenous people that is the foundational story of the nation; they
reproduced thumbnail sketches, in text and pictures, of the three ‘original’ components
of the mix – and ranged them hierarchically, with blacks and indigenous people in
clearly subordinate positions (Wade 2000, 34–36). Such diversity was not only located in
the past: the textbooks also always referred to the variety and diversity of the con-
temporary national population, usually in regional and/or racial terms. In Colombia,
regional diversity is strongly racialized (Wade 1993) and, as I will discuss below, the
difference enshrined in politics by the new multiculturalist constitution of 1991, which
focused on black and indigenous minorities, was not a radical departure from these
representations.
Difference has long been constitutive of the nation in ways more complex than
merely being subject to eradication – multiculturalist legislation is only a recent and
explicit variation on this theme. In this history, difference has always constituted the
hierarchy at the apex of which the elites placed themselves: continual, managed
difference has always been needed in order to reproduce the distinction elites claimed
for themselves, even under multiculturalism.
Hierarchical exclusions often entail violence, but this may take diverse forms.
Mestizaje can involve one or more of a range of processes: the symbolic violence of
denial, invisibilization, and forced assimilation; the structural violence of exclusion and
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 329

impoverishment (leading, for example, to high rates to morbidity and mortality); and the
violence of extirpation, which can take the form of administrative dislocation and/or
physical extermination. Collins (2015), for example, in his account of the conversion of
the traditionally black Pelourinho zone of Salvador (Brazil) into a heritage site, a repre-
sentation of Afro-Brazilian history and culture as part of the national (and international)
patrimony, documents the displacement of the majority of the local black population.
This involved a combination of local state administrative interventions, with social
scientists who collected and archived data, officials who counted and measured, and
then evicted (and sometimes relocated or compensated) the locals, and policemen who
harassed and killed them.
I focus mainly on overt violence – killing, displacement, terror, physical fights – and
explore how they have figured in regimes of mestizaje and, more recently, multicultur-
alism. The management of difference in regimes of mestizaje not only could organize or
even generate violence against racialized categories of subordinated people but also
could ameliorate racialized violence, because these categories were simultaneously
included as well as excluded, following the logic of liberalism. In Colombia, the idea of
mestizaje made it possible to say ‘you are black, therefore you are not mestizo citizens,’
and thus subject to exclusion; and simultaneously, ‘OK, you are black, but you are also
(kind of mestizo) citizens’ – a claim also made by black people themselves. With the
advent of multiculturalism, alongside the intensification of neoliberalized development,
the dynamic of inclusion and exclusion alters. The differences evoked by the narrative of
mestizaje become institutionalized as categories of governance that are targeted for
inclusion, while those defined by those same categories become – and come to be seen
as – particular victims of the violence that affects society as a whole.

Mestizaje and violence in mid-20th-century Colombia

Colombia has been wracked by episodes of violence characterized by extraordinary
levels of atrocity and impunity, in which the state and its proxies have been involved,
such as the Liberal–Conservative conflicts of the Guerra de los Mil Días (War of a
Thousand Days, 1899–1902); La Violencia (The Violence, 1948–1958); and the more
recent decades of guerrilla, paramilitary, state, and drug-fueled violence (Bushnell
1993; Sanford 2003, 2004; Taussig 2005; Uribe 2004). Colombia’s citizens have long
been caught between the apparatus of a liberal democratic state system, in one of
Latin America’s most durable democracies, and very high levels of violence and abuse of
citizens’ rights. The role of race in these conflicts has been ambiguous and equivocal;
although my argument is that it has recently become rather less so.
Historically, black people and the regions where they have concentrated – mainly the
Pacific and Caribbean coastal regions and some areas of the Cauca Valley in the south-
west of the country (such as Northern Cauca province) – have been staunchly Liberal.
The Liberals ushered in abolition in 1851 and have generally been associated with
populist challenges to the Conservative and clerical oligarchy, although of course a
section of the elite was Liberal and Liberalism was a heterogeneous political current,
with more and less radical versions (Green 2000; Pisano 2012, 112–125). In the 19th
century, black- and brown-skinned people formed the bulk of the plebeian classes in
much of the country, and many of those living in urban areas participated in Colombia’s
330 P. WADE

sociedades democráticas de artesanos (democratic societies of artisans), which repre-

sented the liberal aspirations (and Liberal loyalties) of an emerging middle stratum
(Agudelo 2005, 105; Green 2000). But there was no straightforward correlation between
race and political affiliation and the Liberal–Conservative conflicts of the Guerra de los
Mil Días and La Violencia by no means followed clear racialized lines.
A case in point is Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the left-leaning populist Liberal leader, whose
assassination in 1948 sparked La Violencia. On the one hand, ‘There is no question that
Gaitanismo was a “dark” movement. The terms “pueblo,” “plebeyo,” “chusma” (“rabble”)
and even “país nacional” all had strong race as well as class connotations’ (Green 2000,
120). Gaitán himself was nicknamed El Negro Gaitán and El Indio Gaitán – disparagingly
by the white oligarchy and proudly by the urban working classes – and Gaitán used his
mestizo appearance for populist appeal. He also gained the support of many black and
brown intellectuals (Urrea Giraldo, Viáfara López, and Viveros Vigoya 2014, 89). Yet
‘Gaitanista mobilization never mustered overtly along color lines’ (Green 2000, 121)
and the ensuing conflict did not target categories of people identified in racialized
terms: the key divide was between Liberals and Conservatives, at least in theory (Uribe
2004, 87).
The regional distribution of violence in the province of Antioquia during this period
shows that racial connotations were in play, but ambiguously so. Roldán (2002) argues
that racial difference was a factor influencing the pattern in which the Antioquian
municipalities with the highest rates of violence in 1949–1953 were ‘peripheral’ to the
central, highland coffee-growing zones of the province. Her argument is that, compared
to the central zones, these peripheral municipalities were all lower altitude, more
tropical, less stable in terms of landownership, and subject to rapacious colonization
by capitalist interests from the highland zones or overseas, which exploited cattle-
ranching, forest resources (timber), and minerals (gold, oil), rather than coffee. At the
same time, the province’s central zones were populated by people who had developed a
self-image – a mythology – based on the idea of a raza antioqueña, reputed to be
dynamic, entrepreneurial, adventurous, colonizing, hard-working, devoutly Catholic –
and rather white. The people of the peripheral zones were seen by these highlanders as
morally and religiously lax, backward, and lazy – and, in the peripheral areas close to the
Caribbean coastal region, moreno (brown) or negro. In addition, these areas were often
Liberal strongholds. Violence was then a complex product of partisan loyalties operating
through a dynamic of internal colonialism with its attendant economic interests and its
moral judgments about cultural and racial differences.
Roldán is one of the only scholars to explicitly link race to La Violencia, but her
material shows that racial difference was not articulated in a clear or simple way with
patterns of violence. To start with, she focuses only on Antioquia, with its arguably quite
particular regional mythology and racialized configuration; extending the analysis to the
whole country would be difficult. Second, within Antioquia itself, some peripheral zones
(Urrao, Medio Magdalena) were not ‘black,’ even in the highland imaginary, compared to
others (Bajo Cauca, Urabá), which bordered the Caribbean province of Bolívar. Third, the
peripheral areas with the highest incidence of violence were actually the least black:
‘western Antioquia,’ for example, was a buffer zone between the highlands and Urabá
(which was Antioquia’s corridor to the Caribbean coast, and was very dark-skinned and
Liberal); it was a contested zone where the struggle between Liberal guerrilla forces and
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 331

Conservative paramilitaries – and the terrorizing of the civilian population by the latter –
had the most drastic effect. Fourth, complex local scenarios emerged. In Urabá, for
example, the soldiers were brought in not from distant highland Antioquia, but from
nearby Caribbean coastal provinces; they were dark-skinned Liberals, as were the local
policemen and other local residents. Another contingent of police was brought in from
the more indigenous provinces around Bogotá (Boyacá, Cundinamarca): they were
Conservatives and little liked by the locals or by the army; the same went for the
customs officers who came from the highlands of Antioquia. In other words, what
might be seen as agents of colonization of a peripheral area – the army, the police –
were themselves divided by race and partisan loyalty (Roldán 2002, 177, 197).
La Violencia shows that serious conflict might have some racial connotations, but that
these were diffuse and were crosscut by other forms of social identification. An example
of how racial difference was more explicitly articulated comes from a period slightly
before La Violencia and does not deal with such overt violence. Indeed, black intellec-
tuals’ ideas about racial difference at the time, while challenging in some respects the
view of mestizo Colombia as racially harmonious, took a nonconflictive stance and tried
to avoid actual violence – not always with complete success. These intellectuals gen-
erally came from a minority of black families, based in the urban areas of the Pacific and
Caribbean coastal regions and the south-western provinces of Cauca and Valle, which,
from about the 1920s, had been able to give their offspring a university education,
usually in the white-mestizo cities of the Andean interior, such as Bogotá and Medellín.
Being a tiny minority of blacks in nonblack cities, they often experienced everyday
racism in the form of stares, insults, being stereotyped, and feeling excluded from
certain social contexts (e.g. as potential boyfriends – most of the immigrants were
men – of local young women) (see Wade 2000, 125–138, 188–191). At the same time,
some of them knew about the Black Renaissances in Harlem and Chicago; they had
heard of Négritude and other such black diaspora phenomena.
On 20 June 1943 in Bogotá, a small group of resident blacks organized El Día del
Negro, which involved ‘invading’ the Music Room of the National Library, where they
persuaded the staff to play records by black US artists, after which they gave some
public speeches in local cafés and below the statue of Simón Bolívar in the city’s main
Plaza. Here, some passersby objected to what they saw as an insult to the memory of the
great ‘Liberator’: violence threatened to erupt and the police had to intervene, taking
Natanael Díaz, Marino Viveros, Adolfo Mina Balanta, and Delia and Manuel Zapata
Olivella to the police station for the night (Pisano 2012, 67). In the face of an overt
assertion of racial difference, which was at the same time a claim to equality, public
reaction was negative – the local press accused the event of introducing racial division
into Colombia, where, according to the journalists, it did not exist (68) – and there
emerged a threat of physical violence, which was defused by police intervention.
Apparently, the black people were the only ones arrested.
These individuals and others, such as the politician Diego Luis Córdoba – several of
them local and national political figures – soon founded the short-lived Club Negro in
Bogotá. The public statements of this organization show the equivocal and ambiguous
role assigned to race and the desire to avoid conflict, above all by these black intellectuals
aspiring to middle-class status in a mainly white-mestizo city. The Club’s propaganda
secretary, Natanael Díaz, claimed racism did not exist in Colombia – in contrast to the
332 P. WADE

United States – and said the country’s mixed national identity ensured a basic racial
equality. Yet, he claimed that the contribution made by ‘la raza negra’ to the nation –
their martyrdom – had been ignored and that they lived in particularly poor conditions,
which demanded reparation. Díaz and his colleagues were reticent about racial discrimi-
nation when addressing a national audience – for example, in Congress – and emphasized
an encompassing Colombianness. However, when in their regions of origin, addressing
audiences who were generally darker skinned, they challenged the image of racial
equality more openly (Pisano 2012, 227). An explicit assertion of racial difference was
combined with the invocation – hovering between the present and future tenses – of
equality and integration, in which such difference would no longer have significance.
Almost no claim was made for cultural distinctiveness.
In 1947, some members of the Club Negro founded the short-lived Centro de Estudios
Afrocolombianos (Pisano 2012, 103–107). Seeking to emulate the state-funded Instituto
Etnológico Nacional (IEN), which was founded in 1941 by the French anthropologist Paul
Rivet and focused exclusively on indigenous groups, the spokesman of the Center, the
writer and folklorist Manuel Zapata Olivella, defined an anthropological agenda, proposing
studies of black people’s contributions to Colombian history and culture, and of black
culture itself. At a time when the term afrocolombiano was little used, the Center’s name
adduced the idea of African origins. The Center’s stance challenged the homogeneity of
Colombian mestizo culture, yet the basic tension between difference and equality evident
in the Club Negro’s formulations remained. Black people were different and were treated
unequally; they deserved to be treated equally, but this formal equality was associated in
these statements – and arguably in many of the later writings of Zapata Olivella – with an
attachment to the positively valued idea of Colombian mestizaje as a unifying force, albeit
heterogeneous and, in Zapata Olivella’s work, able to represent subaltern as well as
dominant stances.2 Mestizaje would avoid the kind of racial violence and hatred that
was seen as afflicting the United States, to which these activists routinely opposed
Colombia, and which Zapata Olivella knew at first hand through his travels.
The discourse of the black intellectuals actively produced racial difference and racial
mixture as simultaneous processes that existed in an irresolvable tension: in mestizaje,
mixture never produces complete homogeneity, and difference never exists without
mixture blurring its boundaries. In the vision of the black intellectuals in Bogotá,
mestizaje made blackness invisible. This symbolic form of violence, with material entail-
ments in terms of everyday racism, was both highlighted when talking with regional
audiences, and denied when they addressed a national forum and inclusiveness was
being rhetorically emphasized, along with the speaker’s adherence to such ideals.
Mestizaje was also valued because it was seen to prevent racial violence from emerging
or to defuse a particular context if it did so. The critique and valuing of mestizaje are not
opposed tendencies, but rather express the constitutive tension between inclusion and
exclusion. For the black leaders, mestizaje could indeed invisibilize blackness but could
also include black people as ordinary citizens, although the leaders equivocated on
whether their blackness would be accepted as normal or viewed with disdain. Racialized
violence was thus contained by the equivocations of mestizaje; despite the devastating
impact of violence on the country, the racial dimensions of that violence were blurred by
the constant potential of mestizaje to appear inclusive as well as exclusive – and black
leaders themselves participated in the production of that blurring.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 333

This unstable balance has changed in recent decades, especially with the rise of
official multiculturalist policies – although these do not represent a radical break with
ideologies of mestizaje.

Multicultural reform and racialized violence

From the 1960s, indigenous and, slightly later, Afro-descendant social movements began
to organize politically in Latin America. These movements built on long-term indigenous
and black resistance to domination, and formed part of a broader worldwide trend
toward ethnic minority organization and recognition politics. In the 1990s, many Latin
American states enacted political and legal reforms that defined the nation as multi-
cultural and pluriethnic, and recognized indigenous (and to a lesser extent, black)
minorities as culturally specific and often as the holders of particular sets of rights
(e.g. in relation to land holding) (Postero 2007; Rahier 2012; Sieder 2002; Van Cott
2000; Wade 2006). Some critics see these shifts as linked to neoliberal decentralization
and globalization agendas, which seek to open up new areas – often inhabited by
indigenous and black communities – to capitalist exploitation, while giving limited rights
to these communities and meshing their self-organization processes with the techniques
and mechanisms of state governance (Hale 2002; Speed 2005; Wade 2002).
Colombia was a front-runner in these reforms, which began with the 1991
Constitution and continued with numerous laws and decrees relating to indigenous
and Afro-Colombian communities. By 2013, legally constituted indigenous resguardos
(land reserves) numbered 715, with an area of about 32 million hectares, representing
30 per cent of the national territory; although about 80 per cent of this reserve area is
home to a mere 5 per cent of reserve-dwelling indigenous people.3 Indigenous reserves
receive fiscal transfers from the state under a scheme called Participación en los Ingresos
Corrientes de la Nación (participation in the current income of the nation). In 1993, Law
70 created new rights for ‘black communities,’ including the possibility of collective land
titles, which in 2013 numbered 181, encompassing over 5 million hectares or about
4 per cent of the national territory (Salinas Abdala 2014). Over 95 per cent of these lands
are located in the country’s Pacific coastal region, an underdeveloped area, the popula-
tion of which is about 80 per cent black. This law and subsequent decrees have created
arguably the most comprehensive legal framework for the recognition of black people in
Latin America (with the possible exception of Brazil’s affirmative action policies).
These measures represent new forms of legal inclusion and citizenship for black and
indigenous minorities in Colombia. Such official multiculturalism is often understood as
representing a radical break with regimes of mestizaje, seen as simply creating a mestizo
homogeneity. My view is that multiculturalism reconfigures the previous ways in which
difference was actively produced and managed in ideologies and practices of mestizaje.
Difference now becomes a basis on which to claim special rights and establish or
reinforce ethnic communities, which can be portrayed as representing modern political
democracy, rather than being an obstacle to it. But the image of the mestizo nation
remains powerful: it coexists easily alongside multiculturalist representations of differ-
ence, because difference was always already present in the idea of the mestizo nation.
This much is evident from recent genetic studies of the Colombian population – and
their reporting in popular media – which rehearse the familiar script of three original
334 P. WADE

source ‘populations’ (rather than ‘races’) mixing together to form a majority mestizo
population, whose DNA is heterogeneous but nevertheless the norm, compared to the
DNA of indigenous and black populations, treated as distinctive bio-cultural samples.
Strikingly, such studies manage to combine elements of both mestizaje discourse (the
mestizo is the norm) and multicultural discourse (black and indigenous people are
separate and distinctive) (Olarte Sierra and Díaz del Castillo Hernández 2014; Wade
et al. 2014).
The continuities linking mestizaje and multiculturalism are evident in the simulta-
neous existence of racialized inclusion and exclusion. The liberal tension between
inclusion and exclusion that shaped mestizaje remains evident in a multiculturalism
shaped by neoliberal policies that recognize ethnic minority rights, while facilitating
capitalist exploitation of ethnic group territories. However, the exclusion of racialized
minorities now operates more powerfully through violence and displacement. As noted
above, violence has occasionally targeted such minorities in the past in Latin America. In
Colombia, black and indigenous groups were caught up in the cross fire of state,
guerrilla, and paramilitary violence before the 1991 reforms, and some of them made
specific efforts to distance themselves from these conflicts. In the mid-1980s, anthro-
pologist Jaime Arocha Rodríguez (1987) argued that the way violence affected ethnic
minorities was being widely ignored, especially in relation to Afro-Colombians, in keep-
ing with the tendency pre-1991 of public policy to sidestep ethnic difference and
particularly blackness. His analysis traced a continuous pattern of violence from colonial
times, enacted through racial discrimination and segregation, and operating in the mid-
20th century in terms of discrimination, encroachment by colonists, and capitalist
interests on lands held by Afro-Colombian and indigenous groups, and interethnic
frictions (including those between indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups over lands,
which resulted in part from the greater recognition of indigenous land claims by the
state) (Arocha Rodríguez 1987, 1989, 1998; see also Chomsky 2007; Pulido Londoño
2010).
On the other hand, Arocha and others noted that La Violencia of the 1950s had been
mainly confined to the Andean center of the country, although with important impacts
on the plains to the east of the Andes, known as Los Llanos. Afro-Colombian commu-
nities had generally escaped this violence: in the Pacific coastal region, for example,
although violence spilled over from Antioquia into the Northern Chocó province of the
region, when the army pursued Liberal guerrillas who took refuge there (Almario 2004,
82), it is also true that local Conservative leaders had turned away the chulavitas, the
Conservative ‘police’ militias sent from the interior of the country to terrorize and kill
Liberals (Agudelo 2005, 127; Castillo 2007, 323). Arocha characterized areas of the Pacific
coastal region as a ‘haven of peace’ that, at least until the early 1990s, was relatively
immune from the conflicts wracking central areas of the country, and able to resolve
local disagreements without resorting to violence (1999, 116).
During the 1990s and 2000s, however, violence spread into areas of the Caribbean
coastal region, which had largely escaped the violence of the 1950s, and where sig-
nificant black and indigenous populations live. In particular, violence spread into the
Pacific coastal region, with its predominant Afro-Colombian population as well as
significant indigenous populations. The region became a target for guerrilla activity
and soon after for military incursions. Most damaging of all, paramilitary forces, using
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 335

tactics of terror and coercion, displaced large numbers of people, which severely under-
mined many of the newly gained collective land titles (Wouters 2001) and converted the
whole region into a ‘strategic space’ for conflicts between the state, the guerrilla, and
the paramilitaries (Almario 2004, 86), imposing a ‘geography of terror’ replete with
‘landscapes of fear’ (Oslender 2004, 40, 2007). Sanford (2004) sees displacement as a
key strategy of the war, rather than its side effect (cf. Escobar 2003). Challenging these
destructive forces, black communities and organizations such as the Proceso de
Comunidades Negras (PCN) have devised tactics of resistance, showing great resilience
and creating some spaces for autonomous action and alternative life projects (Asher
2009; Escobar 2008; Oslender 2016).4
The violence affecting the Pacific region is part of a war with goals that are not only
political but also economic, facilitated by the state’s neoliberal openness to global
capital. As local people have been displaced, capitalist economic interests that had a
foothold in the region have expanded their range of operations in African palm-oil
plantations, industrial shrimp-farming, mining, and so on (Escobar 2003, 2008). In effect,
the displacement of local people by tactics of terror opened the way for economic
interests to take over the recently ‘cleansed’ landscape – limpieza (cleansing) is a
common term for campaigns of forced displacement and killing. In short, although
violence in Colombia is long established and endemic, indigenous and especially black
regions and people have recently been included into its ambit in unprecedented ways.
Data on displacement reinforce this picture. Desplazados (displaced people) are flood-
ing towns and cities all over Colombia. The Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el
Desplazamiento (CODHES) estimates 4.1 million Colombians were forced from their homes
between 1999 and 2012 (CODHES 2012). Of these people, it was estimated in 2009 that
24 per cent belonged to some ethnic group, with 17 per cent being Afro-Colombians and
6.5 per cent indigenous.5 The 2005 census showed that, of the total population, Afro-
Colombians were 10.5 per cent and indigenous people were 3.4 per cent. These categories
are heavily overrepresented among the displaced. The circulation of these statistics is part
of a public recognition – by the state, the media, and ethnic social movements – that the
violence now has noteworthy racial–ethnic dimensions.
The link between the extension of new rights to Afro-Colombian communities and
the extension of pitiless violence into the areas where key dimensions of those rights
(collective land titles) are being exercised obeys the perverse logic of a Colombian
society in which violence and impunity coexist with a comprehensive system of legal
and constitutional protections. On the one hand, there is inclusion, not just as a fiction,
but in terms of land titles given to black communities, resguardos assigned to indigen-
ous people, and fiscal transfers made to them. There is also the tutela mechanism,6 used
by individual black people to challenge everyday racial discrimination (Meertens 2009)
and, in one case, used by a black NGO to force a local city council to recognize the
existence of a ‘black community’ in the city – effectively reshaping that category as
enshrined in Law 70, which restricted eligibility to rural black communities in the Pacific
region (Wade 2002). The state has recognized the ‘victim’ status of many Afro-
Colombian and indigenous people and the 2011 Victims Law, designed to restore land
and make reparation to the victims of internal conflict and displacement, includes
ethnically ‘differentialist’ policies (Cárdenas 2012; Jaramillo Salazar 2014; Salinas Abdala
2014).
336 P. WADE

On the other hand, there is continued and very violent exclusion, by means of the
displacement and assassination of Afro-Colombian and indigenous people, at a level
disproportionate to their presence in the population. Much of this violence is carried out
by forces that, while they have important connections to the state, are not the state but
rather operate outside the law and with widespread impunity.
Official multiculturalism actively produces and manages blackness and indigenous-
ness, playing a new variation on previous ideas of mestizaje, but with significant
continuities. In line with neoliberal agendas of community self-management, it brings
ethnic communities into direct relationship with the state (e.g. via the land reform
agency and other state departments, such as those for justice, planning, statistics,
culture, etc.), bureaucratizing them and instituting them as collective citizens, charged
with administering themselves under the aegis of the state. As various authors have
commented, there is not a necessary contradiction between neoliberal projects of
governance and the creation of collective subjects of citizenship: on the contrary,
collective citizens can fit well into neoliberal governance and can extend the reach of
the state into peripheral areas where it had little presence (Hale 2002, 2005; Postero
2007; Speed 2005). As well, subaltern minorities use the spaces created – or rather
retooled – for them by official multiculturalism and its legislation as a vehicle for their
claims (with good reason, as struggles to promote these claims were a significant spur
to multiculturalist reform in the first place). In this sense, Afro-Colombian mobilization
around a black identity connects, at some points, with official recognition of ‘black
communities’ as legitimate interlocutors with the state. Inclusion is a common ideal;
the state and the minorities approach it with rather different perspectives.
At the same time, violence and displacement tend to produce the kind of erosive
effects associated with mestizaje-as-ethnocide or simply as imposed assimilation: sig-
nificant numbers of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people are killed and others are
recruited into guerrilla and paramilitary armies (sometimes forcibly). Many more end up
in cities, both as desplazados and as ‘voluntary’ urban migrants.
Although, for Afro-Colombians at least, ethnic nuclei form in the cities, reproducing
difference in urban spaces, and cities are places for ethnic–racial organization and
resistance (Barbary and Urrea 2004; Wade 1993, 1999), there are also powerful forces
of structural violence and urban assimilation in the longer term. Urbanization has long
been seen as a motor of mestizaje, and it involves both inclusion and exclusion, but
violent displacement results a more agonistic version of this dynamic as large numbers
of vulnerable black and indigenous people are thrust into an urban environment. For
black people in Cali, life expectancy and mortality rates are a reflection of the direct
violence of homicide and the structural violence of poverty and environmental stresses
(including racism) that cause illness, early death, and a suicide rate that is double that for
nonblacks. Rates of homicide are twice those for nonblacks; Afro-Colombians’ life
expectancy is 8 years lower in poor areas of the city and 5 years lower even in middle-
class areas; for black males aged 10–24 years, mortality rates are about double those of
nonblack peers (Urrea Giraldo 2012, 154–156). These patterns are of course related to
class position, but this does not alter the fact that violence, both immediate and
structural, powerfully shapes the experience of urbanization for many black people.
At the same time, the areas that are ‘cleansed’ – such as parts of the Pacific coastal
region – are the object of intense interest from the state and capitalists, for whom it is a
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 337

key site of developmentalist and geopolitical importance: a gateway onto the Pacific
basin, seen as the hub of global development for the 21st century; a repository of
resources, ranging from traditional primary products (minerals, etc.) to chemical and
genetic products, perhaps as yet uncharted, stored in the region’s famed biodiversity
and exploitable within new conservationist regimes of the capitalist management of life
itself (Escobar 1997, 2008). Thus, as black and indigenous people are displaced from
these archaic seeming, but actually intensely modern peripheries, they leave spaces
open for colonization of a more industrial kind, which assimilates the region into the
national project of modernization, progress, and neoliberal opening to global capital. Of
course, progress was part of the older regime of mestizaje, which was not just about
assimilating individuals but also integrating and modernizing nations. But now progress
takes on a more racially violent face.

Conclusion: mestizaje, multiculturalism, and violence

I have argued that mestizaje and multiculturalism are connected through a common
dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, which characterizes liberal social orders in general.
Both regimes aspire to be inclusive – one by declaring difference to be irrelevant in the
public sphere, even as everyone actively reproduces it; the other by making difference a
reason for inclusion. Both also effect the exclusions necessary to maintain political
hierarchy and an economic division of labor.
But there is a difference between the way racial exclusions work in each regime.
Before multiculturalism, the possibilities of racial inclusion and exclusion were mediated
through mestizaje, which contained both processes within itself in a relationship of
mutual constitution, and thus blurred the racialization of violence; this was not just
imposed from above but also attracted some support from below. With the declaration
of official multiculturalism, although there are strong continuities with ideologies of
mestizaje insofar as they too produced difference, a distance opens up between the
means of inclusion, which are increasingly channeled through multiculturalist legisla-
tion and mobilization around racial–ethnic identities, and the means of exclusion, which
are effected most glaringly by murder, terrorization, and displacement. This undermines
mestizaje’s ability to equivocate between inclusion and exclusion.
The distance between racial inclusion and exclusion is now more evident than it was,
both because the violence affecting ethnic minorities has become more intense and
pervasive, and because mestizaje is less able to operate as an ambiguous equivocator in
a multiculturalist context. Previously, the inclusions and exclusions of mestizaje did not
align closely with the inclusions and exclusions of state and civil violence: there were
some overlaps, as I showed, but these were partial. With the advent of multiculturalism,
the two dynamics of racial inclusion/exclusion and violence have become more closely
integrated and aligned, laying bare the ethnic and racial dimensions of violent exclusion.
The more explicit recognition of black and indigenous minorities, as special classes of
citizen to be included on the basis of their difference, generates both the more intense
practice and the more public recognition of the violent exclusions they experience.
Processes of inclusion and exclusion in Colombia also – indeed mainly – operate in
nonethnic ways. Violence has ethnic dimensions, but it is not primarily about ethnicity
and race. But the recent intensification of violence affecting black and indigenous
338 P. WADE

communities is not just a difference-blind accident: there is a structural coincidence

between the regional location of these communities – peripheral, vulnerable, coloniz-
able – and the kinds of places targeted both by armed actors and neoliberal capitalist
colonization. The inclusions and exclusions that affect racial and ethnic minorities have
larger repercussions, because mestizaje and multiculturalism act as a definition of the
nation as a whole. They speak to the fate of the nation, and the partial dethroning of
mestizaje as an official sign of the nation – however much it continues to operate as an
everyday ideology of nationhood – makes more evident the racialized exclusions that
characterize Colombian society.
Parallels can be drawn with contexts in Brazil. Above, I referred to Collins’ study of
Pelourinho, in Salvador, to illustrate the diversity of forms of violence deployed by the
city authorities, ranging from interventions for data collection on the local populace,
through physical displacement, to murder. Collins (2015, 281) notes that ‘the attempt
[by the local state] to extinguish violently the residents … is fairly new;’ it is a recent
development linked to the post-1990 program of patrimonialization and reification of
blackness, which is part of Brazil’s multicultural reforms. According to Collins, the
attempt ‘exemplifies and reproduces the blurry boundaries between extirpation and
care that are so essential to the heritage-based management of the life of an Afro-
Bahian populace in the Pelourinho’ (Collins 2015). The state not only intervenes, now
with greater violence, to remove locals but it also retains some locals considered
suitable to represent Afro-Bahian heritage in an officially multicultural Brazil, and, in
collaboration with NGOs, delivers health-care projects to the residents. Thus, the ‘sys-
tematic war’ waged on the area’s residents by the local state was balanced with the
authorities’ assurances that it was caring for them (210).
This ambivalent relation between extirpation and care is linked to ideologies of
mestiçagem insofar as Pelourinho has long served both as a symbol of African roots
(i.e. an original source for mestiçagem) and as a site of an Afro-Bahian version of race
mixture, in which elite and middle-class white men came, until recently, to consort with
black women in the brothels and taverns of the zone’s red-light district. These sexual
exchanges parallel the ones understood to have founded Brazil’s mestizo population
and thus function as ‘a path for passage from interior spaces like brothels … to the
public life of the nation’ (Collins 2015, 162). Pelourinho’s mixture is ‘a space for con-
structing inclusionary and exclusionary impetuses that lie at the core of the production
of national history and community’ (161). Collins does not make a specific argument
about changes and continuities that occur when multiculturalism retools mestizaje, but I
am struck by his identification of ‘extirpation’ and ‘systematic war,’ alongside rhetorics
and practices of care, as post-1990 phenomena linked to the reification of Brazilian
blackness.
Making exclusion more evident is arguably a useful thing. Mestizaje has the power to
equivocate and make ambiguous, but in so doing it masks the oppression that exists
alongside integration and makes it more difficult to contest. Multiculturalist legislation,
which has added to, rather than superseded mestizaje in Colombia and elsewhere, has
provided Afro-Colombian and indigenous people with new legal tools and political
spaces with which to challenge discrimination and claim rights. This is part of the
increasing ‘judicialization’ of ethnic politics, which may occur particularly in the transna-
tional arena of multilateral bodies such as the ILO (International Labor Organization),
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 339

creating opportunities for indigenous people to formalize their claims and take them to
court (Sieder, Angell, and Schjolden 2005). The increasing entry of indigenous and Afro-
descendant actors into the political arena, which has been a corollary of official multi-
culturalism and ethnic mobilization, has provided new means by which ethnic and racial
minorities can claim rights and defend livelihoods. The price they have to pay is,
however, increased violent attacks on precisely those rights and livelihoods.

Notes
1. Women gained the vote between 1929 (Ecuador) and 1961 (Paraguay).
2. The subtitle to Zapata Olivella’s autobiographical novel, ¡Levántate, mulato! (rise up,
mulato!) is the phrase ‘Por mi raza hablará el espíritu’ (the spirit will speak for/through
my race), the motto of the Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México, coined in 1921 by its
rector, José Vasconcelos. The motto referred to Vasconcelos’ vision of the Latin American
mestizo as the positive future for humanity (Vasconcelos [1925] 1997). Zapata Olivella
distanced himself from the homogenizing overtones of Vasconcelos’ romantic idealism,
but he still valued the notion of the hybrid (de Luca 2001).
3. These resguardos do not all date from 1991, as reserves existed as a legal institution from
colonial times.
4. Sanford (2004) describes the ‘Peace Communities,’ formed in the Pacific coastal region by
returnees from violent displacement, which act as spaces that refuse all armed actors. They
draw on state administrative and juridical agencies, as well as the church and international
entities, to sustain themselves (see also Castillo 2007, 334–338).
5. These 2009 figures are given by the Comisión de Seguimiento a la Política Pública
Sobre Desplazamiento Forzado (2009, 145). Figures for 2002 estimated 38 per cent of
displaced people belonged to an ethnic group, of which 33 per cent were Afro-
Colombian; see CODHES bulletin 44, Destierro y repoblamiento, April 2003, http://www.
codhes.org/index.php?option=com_si&type=4. Castillo (2007, 330) cites official statistics
for the early 2000s, indicating 43 per cent of displaced people were Afro-Colombians.
The 2008 figures cited by Rodríguez Garavito, Alfonso Sierra, and Cavelier Adarve (2009)
are lower.
6. The tutela is a writ for the protection of constitutional rights, found in many Latin American
judicial systems, and widely used by individuals in Colombia to protect their everyday
rights.

Notes on contributor
Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and currently
holds a British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship. He recently co-edited Mestizo Genomics:
Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke University Press 2014) and is the author of
Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism, and Race in Latin America (Duke
University Press 2017).

ORCID
Peter Wade http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4070-4187
340 P. WADE

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