Light is like water: flooding, blackouts, and the state in Barranquilla

Abstract

ABSTRACTBetween 1996 and 2014, in the midst of the Colombian armed conflict, 117,326 internally displaced people settled in southwest Barranquilla. This article describes the process of rapid urbanization carried out by these communities. It narrates how, due to underinvestment in drainage and electricity infrastructure, flash-flooding and blackouts became frequent in southwestern barrios. Men from the community, known as marañeros (entanglers), built/repaired electricity networks. Subsequently, state regulations classified these settlements as “subnormal,” which meant that although they built their own connections, they had to pay communal bills for the energy extracted from municipal transformers. Communities became indebted and during periods of malfunction, when flashfloods damaged electricity infrastructure, marañeros were victims of accidental electrocution. I suggest that a close look at processes of infrastructural malfunction enables a critical understanding of the state’s active construction of marginality. Interconnected infrastructural malfunction is a form of state engagement, as the presence of precarious infrastructure is a direct action. Instead of narratives featuring state absence/failure, the routines of southwest Barranquilla lay bare the ways in which malfunction is reproduced through institutional channels. Specific regulations created a place of malfunction, and deficiencies in both electricity connections and drainage portray/reinforce racialized and gendered identities based on unequal power relations.