Middle Sectors and Classes in Colombia: Confluences and Contrasts between Bogota and Tumaco

Abstract

This chapter addresses the confluences and contrasts between the middle sectors and classes in two Colombian cities: Tumaco, a small town in the southern Colombian Pacific region with a majority Afro-descendant population, and Bogotá, the large capital city that has historically concentrated a great part of the resources and power that emerge from an assumed whiteness. The configuration of the middle sectors and classes in Tumaco stands in contrast to that framed in Bogotá based on the “enclassed” experiences of the social strata. Shared confluences, such as the racial dimension of the examined “enclassifications”, are differentially constituted in both cities. In Bogotá, bodies identified as black are often imagined as misfits among what are defined as middle and upper strata. In Tumaco, the vast majority of the inhabitants, including a significant part of the middle sectors and classes, are of African descent. By addressing the confluences and contrasts between these two cities in relation to the middle sectors and classes, this chapter seeks to problematize the Bogota-centrism (Andean-centrism) that has formed the common sense of the academic establishment and the political imagination of the nation.