Claudia Quijano Mejía
https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-0224-5621
Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia
cmquijam@uis.edu.co
Abstract:
Drawing from the case study of a Black community, this study explores how identifying themselves with ethno-racial categories became a resistance strategy amid armed conflict and made easier for rural dwellers to get closer to forms of state regulation. After peace accords with the FARC, that stance has made harder for the ELN rebel army to position itself as a valid mediator in community conflicts. Methodologically, we resort to ethnography and oral history, using techniques like interviews, documentary review, and participating observation. The categories guiding the analysis were identity —understood as strategic and relational— and State, —not as a rational actor operating outside and above society but based on its agents’ practices and the representations that populations have towards it—.
Keywords: Black communities, Peasant, identity.
