Muddied Waters

Appelbaum Nancy P. Appelbaum

Description

Colombia's western Coffee Region is renowned for the whiteness of its inhabitants, who are often described as respectable pioneer families who domesticated a wild frontier and planted coffee on the forested slopes of the Andes. Some local inhabitants, however, tell a different tale-of white migrants rapaciously usurping the lands of indigenous and black communities. Muddied Waters examines both of these legends, showing how local communities, settlers, speculators, and politicians struggled over jurisdictional boundaries and the privatization of communal lands in the creation of the Coffee Region. Viewing the emergence of this region from the perspective of Riosucio, a multiracial town within it, Nancy P. Appelbaum reveals the contingent and contested nature of Colombia's racialized regional identities.Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian elite intellectuals, Appelbaum contends, mapped race onto their mountainous topography by defining regions in racial terms. They privileged certain places and inhabitants as white and modern and denigrated others as racially inferior and backward. Inhabitants of Riosucio, however, elaborated local narratives about their mestizo and indigenous identities that contested the white mystique of the Coffee Region. Ongoing violent conflicts over land and politics, Appelbaum finds, continue to shape local debates over history and identity. Drawing on archival and published sources complemented by oral history, Muddied Waters vividly illustrates the relationship of mythmaking and racial inequality to regionalism and frontier colonization in postcolonial Latin America.

Sujets

• Histoire
• América del Sur
• Ethnic studies
• Cultural studies
• South America
• History of the Americas
• Colombia

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 07 avril 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384335
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

M U D D I E D W A T E R S

A book in the series

Latin America Otherwise

Languages, Empires, Nations

Series editors:

Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University

Irene Silverblatt, Duke University

Sonia Salvidar-Hull, University of California

at Los Angeles

M U D D I E D W A T E R S

Race,

Region, and

Local History in

Colombia,

∞∫∂∏–∞Ω∂∫

F

Nancy P. Appelbaum

F

Duke University Press

Durham & London

2003

∫All rights reserved2003 Duke University Press Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

A B O U T T H E S E R I E S

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a critical se- ries. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad interplay of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a contin- uous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing process of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience.Latin America Other- wise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, that rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, that assesses convictions of the academy and of public pol- icy, and that, correspondingly, demands that the practices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny. Nancy P. Appelbaum’sMuddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local His- tory in Colombia, 1846–1948explores the intricacies of the words in the subtitle by examining meanings of race alongside Colombia’s long pro- cesses of colonization. Her research, although based upon an examina- tion of local history, has a more general import: It exposes the link be- tween race and geography in the modern/colonial world, a link that has been theorized and developed toward complementary ends by the Peru- vian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and by U.S. sociologist Immanuel Wal- lerstein. Appelbaum’s account is a compelling one of the particularity of regionalism in Colombia. She sheds new light on one of the most trou- bled countries in the world today, while at the same time contributing to our understandings of how race has been spatially configured and con- stituted in Latin America.

For Amy and Hank and in memory of Ruth

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

C O N T E N T S

Introduction Riosucio: Race, Colonization, Region, and Community

o n e

P A R T ∞

C O U N T R Y O F R E G I O N S , ∞ ∫ ∂ ∏ – ∞ ∫ ∫ ∏

Beauty and the Beast: Antioquia and Cauca

t w o‘‘Accompanied by Progress’’: Cauca Intermediaries and Antioqueño Migration

t h r e e‘‘By Consent of the Indígenas’’: Riosucio’s Indigenous Communities

P A R T ≤

T H E W H I T E R E P U B L I C , ∞ ∫ ∫ ∏ – ∞ Ω ≥ ≠

f o u rRegenerating Riosucio: Regeneration and the Transition to Conservative Rule

f i v eRegenerating Conflict: Riosucio’s Indígenas in the White Republic

s i x

Riosucio on the Margins of the ‘‘Model Department’’

xi xiii

1

31

52

80

107

124

142