Of the studies that grew out of the 1990s redefinition of Latin American nations as multicultural, most focus on the struggles of indigenous groups and the extension of their rights. Odile Hoffmann’s insightful book centers on black people, bringing together the literature on multiculturalism with that on blackness and race relations. Colombia’s 1991 constitution and the legislation that followed stands out in the Latin American context for conceiving black rural people of the Pacific coast as an ethnic group who should receive communal titles to the land. This legal recognition produced an unprecedented wave of political mobilization around the consolidation of this new identity and the formation of communal territories. Many researchers followed this process. Although in the last 15 years they have produced numerous articles, only recently have they begun to publish monographs based on their experiences. Hoffmann’s is one of several much-awaited books that have appeared in the last two years or are currently in press (Bettina Ng’weno 2007, Arturo Escobar 2008, Ulrich Oslender 2008, and Kiran Asher 2009).The book centers on the region of Tumaco, on the southern Pacific coast of Colombia, and explores the complex relationship between territory and identity. It claims that the legal model that equates them provides a way to self-empowerment for blacks subject to discrimination, but it does so by misinterpreting their society and limiting the ways this kind of relationship can be established. The author builds her argument around two main contributions. First, she examines the history and forms of organization of a community on one of the rivers of the area. Based on ethnographic work, she concludes that it is a mistake to assume, as does the recent Colombian legislation, that black rural people have clear communal institutions as do indigenous groups. Instead, political power has been scattered, people move in and out of the communities, and there is no centralized way of distributing territorial rights. Thus, the establishment of communal councils creates a new form of political organization and of regulating space rather than simply recognizing an ancestral one.Hoffmann’s second main contribution stems from her study of the application process for communal titles in the Mira River, an area with large oil palm plantations. The author analyzes the difficulties and contradictions in the creation of communal property rights and in the process of political organizing where capital has a strong presence. The loss of land to agribusiness, the subsequent dependence on the jobs the firms offer, and the contrasting realities this situation creates in relation to the ideal territorial model expressed in the law all complicate the process needed to guarantee communal property rights. She also mentions that the intensification of the armed conflict, coca plantings, and the drug trade have further hindered these developments. However, many of the latter problems escalated after she finished her fieldwork, so they do not figure prominently in the book.This work ends by relating the new forms of political mobilization with the political history of the region since the 1950s, as well as by exploring how an urban ethnic or racial identity relates to the rural ethnic identity promoted by the law.Hoffmann’s work is perhaps the best single contribution so far on black identity and its relation to the way space has been conceived and managed in this region. Her two case studies bring much-needed detail to discussions on this topic. As a geographer, she captures elements that have escaped the attention of scholars from other disciplines. Besides drawing very useful maps and combining various scales of analysis to build a complex picture, she includes relevant discussions about space, such as the way residents of the city of Tumaco use places differently according to race, and the implications of map making in the process of communal titling.The book moves between diverse places, scales, and topics, creating a mosaic that shows many sides of a multifaceted reality. But this strategy has its costs. While reading the book’s 11 chapters, which are organized in four sections, I sometimes had a hard time fitting all the parts into one big picture. By trying to cover so much terrain, the author shortchanges a number of the interesting topics that she raises. Also, bringing her ethnographic work to life by giving voice to the people whose experiences she shared would have greatly enriched this book. Unfortunately, inadequate copyediting left the publication with numerous typographical and writing mistakes. This is, nonetheless, a major work that will be widely consulted for years to come.
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Aug 17, 2023
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