Pacas Choquenzá: una experiencia poscapitalista sobre la producción de lo común

Abstract

The Paca Digestora Silva [a composting technique], a system for using organic waste, arrived in 2019 in the Niza Antigua neighborhood in the Córdoba wetland, northwest of Bogotá (Colombia). Since then, the pacas (composting piles) have become a way of transforming pre-existing neighborhood dynamics and fostering the care of the common land, despite certain logics of fragmentation based on the defense of one’s own well-being. The Paca Digestora Silva is proposed here as a post-capitalist alternative that goes beyond the human-nature structural rupture so that the race for capital accumulation, reflected in landfills, can be overcome with the resignification of waste. The paper is constructed from the intersectional perspective of feminist political ecology and relates the process of pacas to the production of communality and the commons. This lens allows the analysis of care through two intertwined routes since the commons propitiate the care of a common good, and, in this care, which is reproduced in the doing in common, a community that watches over its protection and subsistence is strengthened or consolidated. This article documents community experiences with pacas and provides an alternative reading of this system, which transcends the dimension of waste utilization and demonstrates the possibility of building an ethic of care based on collective action.