Abstract
Abstract This article is the result of ethnographic research carried out with black women from San Basilio de Palenque, a black community located in the Colombian Caribbean. These women work as peddlers of different types of sweets in Colombian territories and neighboring countries. My ethnography followed the movement of Palenquera women who circulate with sweets, in order to examine the dynamics, movements, interactions and meanings of this activity in terms of race, gender and work relations. The women find social dignity in the universe of sweets, despite affirming and experiencing harmful effects on their bodies - that is, despite recognizing that peddling sweets is work that can kill, and that makes them “slaves” - and express positive valuations and emotions about the work. This dual meaning of working with sweets permeates the descriptions presented in this article. The trade offers a marginalized and ambiguous strategy that allows them to survive and promote their social mobility, especially by investing the material gains in the formal education of their children, and the sense that this marginal strategy, although it is difficult, provides them autonomy and dignity.
Highlights
Its 8:40 on a sunny Sunday morning, in the rural black community of San Basílio de Palenque, Colombia
The movement of various Palenquera women is noticed on their way to neighboring municipalities to work and return at the end of the day to their homes
On the corner of the “house of the Palenqueras” we found a small shop and in front there was a main street where we usually took taxis to get around
Summary
Its 8:40 on a sunny Sunday morning, in the rural black community of San Basílio de Palenque, Colombia. My initial network of women developed mainly through my stay in in Flor María’s house in Palenque She had spent years working with the sales of fruits and sweets, and through her I gradually gained access to her network of contacts. While the sale of sweets can be interpreted as a form of labor that the women agency in contexts of poverty and within situations of inequality, socio-racial exclusion and limitations of education and employment, the work with sweets is experienced by its agents as a mark of identity and a legacy that has been passed down for generations This reveals the ambivalences of the senses and meanings of the struggle for independent and informal work.
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