Abstract
Since 2005, Colombian tourism and economic development sectors have spearheaded an intensive image-building campaign called “Colombia Is Passion.” This campaign brands and markets Bogotá as a cosmopolitan city “as diverse as the country.” However, urban practices of racial exclusion contradict this image. The experience of six black young people who were barred from entering nightclubs in Bogotá’s Zona Rosa serves as an example of the limited access of racialized people to the cosmopolitan city and, by extension, to the state’s multicultural ideals. It also highlights the reinforcement of racial hierarchies by white elites’ locating racism outside their immediate social worlds.
Desde el 2005, el turismo colombiano y sectores de desarrollo económico han encabezado una campaña de construcción de imagen intensiva llamada “Colombia es pasión.” Esta campaña marca y comercializa a la ciudad de Bogotá como una ciudad cosmopolita “tan diversa como el país.” Sin embargo las practicas urbanas de exclusión racial contradicen esta imagen. La experiencia de seis jóvenes negros a quienes se les negó entrada en los clubes nocturnos de la Zona Rosa de Bogotá sirve como ejemplo del acceso limitado que se les otorga a la gente racializada en la ciudad cosmopolita, y, por extensión, a los ideales multiculturales del estado. También sale en relieve el refuerzo de jerarquías raciales localizadas fuera de su mundo social inmediato de parte de las elites blancas.
On a crisp April night in 2008, I stood with friends outside a nightclub in Bogotá’s Zona Rosa. Music and bright lights poured out of nightclub doors all along the strip, and restaurants buzzed with raucous chatter and laughter. On this side of town, bar drink menus list beverages almost exclusively in English, nightclub admission costs more than a meal in a local restaurant, and international DJs and local celebrities regularly provide entertainment. I had been living and researching in Bogotá for a few months when five of my Afro-Colombian friends invited me to experience this side of the nightlife of the capital city. This area of the city and its establishments cater to local young people, foreign tourists, and elites but are not known for attracting black clientele. I had been to the Zona Rosa on previous occasions, a few times alone for lunch after conducting interviews at the Pan-American Foundation or the local United Nations office and once in the evening with a white Colombian-American woman and a black man from Cartagena. The racial dynamics and small numbers of our group as well as the bohemian Caribbean identity of the nightclub we visited were in significant contrast with this context. Dressed in business attire and alone for lunch, I could easily be read as an Afro-Colombian professional or a foreigner, particularly given that many U.S. Foreign Service Officers are assigned to housing in the residential section of this neighborhood. Prior to that night my friends and I had frequented only predominantly black or black-owned establishments for recreation and entertainment. We were all keenly aware that we might have trouble gaining admittance to a nightclub in the Zona Rosa.
The capital city serves as the symbol of Colombia’s modernity, stability, and global status and plays a significant role in countering its image as a violent country run by narco-traffickers, mafiosos, and armed groups. However, the white elite cosmopolitanism promoted in Bogotá and the Zona Rosa depends on simultaneous practices of inclusion and exclusion and on complex convergences of space, time, and race. White Colombians help reinforce existing racial hierarchies and inscribe them in urban space through spatial distancing—locating racism and racial discrimination outside of their immediate social worlds. Racial discrimination and spatial distancing impact the ways in which city residents interact with urban space and each other, maintain racialized cosmopolitanisms, and produce an everyday common sense about race and belonging embedded in urban space. They conflict with the national branding of Bogotá as a cosmopolitan city and Colombia as a diverse, multicultural nation.
“Cosmopolitanism” can refer to a worldview, a political project, a social condition, or a competence or practice (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002) rooted in egalitarianism. Some scholars understand it as merely tolerance of social difference, while others go farther to explain it as engagement with difference (Hollinger, 2002: 231). This view resonates with Hannerz’s explanation of cosmopolitanism as “an intellectual and aesthetic stance toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts, rather than uniformity” (1996: 103), or what Anthony Appiah (2001) calls “universalism plus difference.” In contrast to universalism, which seeks to forge these differences into a common identity, cosmopolitanism implies respect for and appreciation of human diversity—an openness to and willingness to engage with cultural difference. While this approach to cosmopolitanism espouses lofty values of tolerance and acceptance, it has practical implications. A critical approach to cosmopolitanism must include “validation . . . of the equitable (re)distribution of resources and privileges, of the recognition of others’ freedoms, of (comm)unity in diversity, or, very simply, of the unqualified practice of fairness, kindness, and generosity” (Dharwadker, 2001: 7). In this sense, cosmopolitanism is not simply a lofty ideal or global worldview but a commitment that has real implications for everyday life, social interactions, and governance. Realization of cosmopolitan values of fairness, freedom, and equal privilege requires only humanity, not merit, wealth, status, or a particular racial or national identity.
If asked to locate cosmopolitanism in space, scholars would point to cities (Binnie et al., 2006; Featherstone, 2002) and particular sections of cities associated with multicultural diversity (Bodaar, 2006). It is in cities that diverse people, commodities, technologies, and cultures from around the globe meet. The geographer Brenda Yeoh (2004: 2432), borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt (1992), states that cities are a kind of “contact zone” where people previously separated by geography and history encounter and interact with one another. However, to examine difference and equality in cities we must ask how differently positioned people encounter each other in urban space. Ethnographic study can help us investigate how cosmopolitanism is actualized in everyday life and urban space and what role is played by race (not just class) in the production of “the cosmopolitan city.”
Two critiques of cosmopolitanism are applicable here. First, the cosmopolitan city is not simply a place of intercultural encounter but also a site constructed and produced by neoliberal political and economic projects. Cities become cosmopolitan through development facilitated by investors, city planners, and real estate agents who design, brand, market, and sell cosmopolitanism as a modern aesthetic and global lifestyle (Young, Diep, and Drabble, 2006). Second, this neoliberal and development-driven cosmopolitanism is accessible only to professionals, intellectuals, artists, and other elites. Participation in the cosmopolitan city involves “knowledge, cultural capital and education: being worldly, being able to navigate between and within different cultures, requires confidence, skill and money” (Binnie et al., 2006: 8). Ethnic people, nonelites, refugees, and working-class immigrants are generally excluded from the cosmopolitan project because of their inability to participate in elite consumption practices or their orientation toward their communities (Werbner, 2006). This brand of cosmopolitanism depends on the presence of people of color and nonelites in urban space but not their full participation. Often these groups provide the obligatory elements of cultural and ethnic diversity that make for urban cosmopolitanism but live and work on the periphery of these spaces. The racial dimension of cosmopolitanism is made manifest in this process of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion.
When examined closely, this type of cosmopolitanism can be seen to depend upon these simultaneous inclusions and exclusions at various levels from the national to the city to places within cities. For Colombia to lay claim to global status there must be spaces within the nation where cosmopolitanism is performed; one such space is the city. Moreover, for cities to take on a cosmopolitan identity and global status, there must be places within the city like the Zona Rosa where this cosmopolitanism is visible. Cosmopolitanism is produced when certain spaces and experiences are highlighted while others are erased. In the case of Colombia, Bogotá serves as a critical resource in the nation’s mission to improve its image abroad. Therefore urban spaces like the Zona Rosa are high-stakes elements of the national image-making project and the site of tension between elitism and consumption, on one hand, and diversity and the engagement of difference, on the other.
Bogotá: “as diverse as the country”
Historically, travel writers and settlers described Bogotá as a mountainous backwater that was difficult to colonize and develop because of its inhospitable climate, difficult terrain, and flash floods and hailstorms (Safford and Palacios, 2002). Urban-studies research of the late 1990s shows that “Bogotá has become a large city only in the last fifty years; in 1938, it had only 300,000 or so inhabitants” (Gilbert, 1996: 242). Its population grew exponentially to an astounding 7 million by 2005, the time of the latest national census. “In the process, it added to its existing status as the national capital by becoming the country’s major financial center, the largest industrial city, and the center of culture” (Gilbert and Dávila, 2002: 29). By most accounts, Bogotá is on the fast track to becoming a “megacity.” 1
Bogotá symbolizes the nation’s modernity, wealth, and stability. The image of Bogotá as a cosmopolitan city has profound economic and political significance as the national government courts foreign investment, develops the tourism sector, and brands Colombia as a safe, democratic nation. Whereas issues of violence, drugs, and war plague Colombia’s image around the globe, Bogotá has been described as “an island in a land at war” (Washington Post, September 6, 2002). Since 2005, the Colombian government has spearheaded an intensive image-building campaign called “Colombia Is Passion.” The national rebranding of Colombia as a safe, welcoming destination is best summed up in the Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Tourism’s new slogan: “Colombia, the only risk is wanting to stay.” Recently, the editors of the New York Times named Colombia as one of “31 Places to Go in 2010” (January 10, 2010), devoting most of the entry to Bogotá, “a role model of urban reinvention” for its extensive bicycle paths, museums, outdoor cafes, international restaurants, and modern public transportation system. The Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Tourism promotes this sort of global urban image of Bogotá but considers the city’s diversity as a marker of cosmopolitanism. According to the tourism authority, Bogotá is a “city as diverse as the entire country” because people from each of Colombia’s ethnically and culturally distinct regions live alongside each other there. 2 Of all Colombian cities, Bogotá receives the most internal migrants (Gilbert, 1996), contributing to popular notions around the country of Bogotá as the quintessential urban space and site of Colombian diversity.
Signs of the capital’s economic expansion and urban development were visible during my fieldwork in Bogotá in 2007 and 2008. In 2007 Semana magazine hosted a forum entitled “Bogotá 2038: Forum on Building a Global City” to discuss ways of attracting foreign investment, developing infrastructure, and promoting social development. The international scholars, Colombian government officials, and private investors who spoke at this conference debated the steps necessary to confirm Bogotá’s status as a “global city” by its five-hundredth anniversary in 2038. The city held its annual marathon, book fair, gastronomy exposition, and theater and arts festivals, citywide events that drew millions of local and international performers, participants, and tourists. City concerts have also featured high-profile entertainers such as the international salsa sensation Marc Anthony and the rockers Coldplay and Aerosmith. On the political front, Bogotá is the legal and administrative center of Colombia, where state institutions such as Congress and the Supreme Court make their home and multilateral and international organizations like U.S. Agency for International Development, the UN, and the International Organization for Migration maintain offices. Together these tourism and economic development campaigns and the public imaginary of Bogotá as a city of migrants contribute to its production and characterization as cosmopolitan. It is marketed as democratic and multicultural, on one hand, and as a manifestation of global status and urbanism, on the other. However, this notion of cosmopolitanism, which depends on contact between diverse people in urban space, does not require sustained, egalitarian interaction among the city’s residents. There are few spaces in the city like city sidewalks and public buses where black and white, well-to-do and poor come into regular contact. Ethnographic analysis of everyday life in the city shows that the very sites marketed as cosmopolitan operate as sites of inclusion and exclusion in particular space-time configurations.
The urban-studies scholar Annemarie Bodaar (2006: 174) explains that only certain places in the city become associated with cosmopolitanism. In Bogotá, the Zona Rosa is such a place. Its image as a cosmopolitan space arises from the juxtaposition of informality, public space, and remnants of colonial architecture with modern elements and a global aesthetic. International restaurants, specialty grocers, designer boutiques, high-rise shopping centers, nightclubs, and outdoor cafes line the streets of this commercial district, and public spaces such as promenades and plazoletas (small plazas) can be found throughout it. Public spaces in Latin American cities symbolize the democratization of urban space because of their role as sites of grassroots protests and demonstrations (Irazábal, 2008; Kaplan, 2004). However, these public spaces are also sites of consumption, where local artisans and ambulatory vendors sell their wares in planned indoor and outdoor artisan markets, supplying sanctioned symbols of cultural diversity.
Despite the presence of old and new, local and global, bohemian and modern, admittedly put in crude terms that do not reflect the interconnectedness between these concepts (Hawkins, 2010), city residents largely associate the Zona Rosa with wealth, exclusivity, and consumption. These characteristics are almost entirely confined to elite whites (and foreign residents and tourists), who are therefore constructed as the ideal and most common users of the cosmopolitan city. This image is enhanced by the noticeable absence of nonwhites as customers, shopkeepers, restaurant staff, or even pedestrians. In many global cities, working-class and poor people of color disproportionately perform service duties as nannies, domestic workers, landscapers and restaurant workers (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007; Sharman and Sharman, 2008), but black bodies are a rarity in the Zona Rosa.
In the past decade, demographers and social scientists have attempted to count the capital city’s black residents and profile their lives, networks, and the social conditions in which they live. There are significant disparities in estimated numbers of black people residing in Bogotá, partly because of the limited scope of studies undertaken, the research methods employed, and the population’s high mobility. The 1993 national census estimated a mere 1,801 black residents. The National University’s Center for Social Science Research conducted a socio-demographic study between 2000 and 2001 that estimated 129,000 Afro-Colombian residents, about 2 percent of the city’s total population at the time (Arocha, 2002). A 2003 study estimates the black population at 533,739, 8.9 percent of the total (Rodríguez Echeverry and Jiménez, 2006). Afro-Colombian organizations insist that these official counts are too low; the Consultivo Distrital, a body of Afro-Colombian community leaders, conducted a census in 1999 that estimated the city’s black population at 800,000. Despite this broad range of estimates, the consensus is that there has been a significant and highly visible increase in the Afro-Colombian population of the capital city since the early 1990s (Mosquera Rosero, 1998). Many scholars attribute this demographic shift to the armed conflict in and forced displacement from the Colombian Pacific and other resource-rich rural areas (Oslender, 2008; Santos Caicedo, 2004).
Prior to this period, there is little historical evidence of a significant black population residing in Bogotá or the surrounding state of Cundinamarca (but see Díaz Díaz, 2001, on urban slavery in the 1700s). Indigenous people and white mestizo settlers in Latin America have historically inhabited the Andean highland and interior regions and blacks the tropical lowlands and the coast (Appelbaum, 2003: 17; Wade, 1993). The Colombian historian Carmen Ortega Ricaurte (2002: 248) says that some migration of blacks to the capital began as early as 1938 with the new possibilities in transportation, including a new airline and improved bus and train services. Military service and higher education have also been important in black migration to Bogotá. Black migration to the interior from the predominantly black Caribbean and Pacific regions has produced new social encounters and unprecedented negotiations around space and race.
Urban-studies scholars have found extreme economic segregation across Bogotá’s localities, where “most suburbs are socially homogeneous and are clearly recognizable as the territory of a particular income group” (Gilbert, 1996: 251). This stratification of economic resources is so fixed that the National Planning Department categorizes residential neighborhoods in terms of numbers from 1 to 6 to calculate public service subsidies to less wealthy neighborhoods. 3 This segregation has a racial component as well as an economic one. While the black population lives in all 19 of the city’s sectors, it is concentrated in sectors with the two lowest stratum designations, Bosa, Kennedy, and Ciudad Bolivar (Arocha, 2002; see also Ortega Ricaurte, 2002: 260), which are located far from the Zona Rosa.
Private Parties and Urban Common Sense
When my friends and I—three men and three women—reached the head of the line waiting to enter the Gavanna Bar, a bouncer wearing a shiny black security jacket and black workpants lowered the velvet cord to block our advance. My friend Emma, a 23-year-old Afro-Colombian woman born and raised in Bogotá, asked him what the cover charge was, and he responded that the nightclub was hosting a private party that night and we would need to show invitations to get in. “But we didn’t see you ask the people ahead of us for invitations,” someone said. Hector, known in Afro-Colombian activist circles as a budding leader, asked the bouncer to show him a copy of the guest list, perhaps to confirm that the nightclub was hosting an invitation-only party, but he declined and tried to move us out of the line. We stepped away, humiliated and upset, to decide where to go next.
At Scirocco, an upscale club with a chic entryway of black granite tile and a frosted-glass door, there was no line, so we went right up to the door, where a bouncer with a smirk on his face watched us approach. He did not greet us but waited until one of us asked if we could enter. In a matter-of-fact tone, he answered that there was a private party, so we would not be allowed in. “Normally, the cover is 15,000 pesos per person, but tonight a woman paid 2 million pesos [about US$1,150] to rent the entire place.” Hector asked to see the invitation, but the bouncer could not produce one. Instead he showed us a guest list bearing the name of the birthday girl. As we were leaving, my friends expressed relief that we had not been prohibited from entering the nightclub on the basis of race. The bouncer at Gavanna had also claimed that the nightclub was hosting a private party, and when he could not produce a guest list he had said that the venue was full to capacity. While that encounter was legible to my Afro-Colombian friends as blatant racial discrimination, our experience at Scirocco appeared not to be racially motivated. Given proof that Scirocco was hosting a private event, my friends concluded that we had been barred from entering not because we were black but because we had not been invited to the party.
The problem with this interpretation was that when we approached the door the bouncer did not ask to compare our names with the guest list. Instead, he assumed that we had not been invited to the party. His “commonsense” assessment may have been that it was highly unlikely that my Afro-Colombian friends and I were guests at an exclusive party in this neighborhood, let alone the guests of the presumably white party hostess. The racial homogeneity of the Zona Rosa district would support such an assessment. While residents and government officials describe the Zona Rosa as cosmopolitan, “cosmopolitanism” here signifies whiteness. The racial exclusivity of the Zona Rosa district conflicts with the view of cosmopolitanism as engagement with social difference and the pursuit of unity amid diversity.
Later that week, when I recounted the story of these rejections to some of my white university colleagues, I learned that they too had visited Scirocco that night but, in contrast to my Afro-Colombian friends and me, had been allowed in. The bouncer had informed them that there was a private party but they could pay the normal cover charge and enter. It may be that the nightclub was hosting a private party and he let my white colleagues in to make a few extra pesos for himself, but this was not an option in the case of my friends and me; it would have been impossible for black people, let alone a large group of six, to slip into this party unnoticed. It may never be clear whether preventing us from entering Scirocco was an act of racial exclusion, but there can be little doubt that black people could not seamlessly blend into the party as potentially invited guests because of the stark division of black and white social spaces (and social networks) in Bogotá.
At both Gavanna and Scirocco the bouncers invoked privacy as a justification for denying us. Here, privacy is being used to construct racial barriers, situating black people outside of the social and physical space of the Zona Rosa. Nightclubs are nighttime spaces, spaces of intimate contact. Sharing such nighttime spaces requires black and white partygoers and the nightclubs that host them to break cultural barriers and racialized codes of intimacy. Such barriers and expectations of intimacy are less pronounced in daytime cosmopolitan spaces such as the Zona Rosa restaurants I had frequented for lunch. This duality of exclusion and inclusion, private space and public space, reveals the space-time-race complexity of urban cosmopolitanism.
The capital city’s young white elite and foreign tourists are the target patrons of the Zona Rosa and its trendy shopping centers, cafes, and nightclubs. Despite our elite status as university graduates, professionals, and world travelers, black people like us do not fit the image of the ideal user of the Zona Rosa. In Colombia and other Latin American countries with a significant black population, black people have been associated with thievery, laziness, and backwardness (Wade, 1997)—an image that has only recently begun to change with global antidiscrimination politics and the visibility of Afro–Latin Americans in these campaigns. In her research on class distinctions among residents of a black Chicago neighborhood, the sociologist Mary Patillo (2007) explains that because “hard facts” such as a person’s income and education cannot be known at first glance, people rely on “soft facts” such as dress, language, and mannerisms to express and determine class. Given the long history of mestizaje in Latin America, I would add skin color to this list of symbols, as it too is a salient signifier of belonging and status (Lancaster, 1991; Sheriff, 2001). I argue that these meanings are heightened in purportedly cosmopolitan cities like Bogotá where racial groups encounter each other in spaces and places that were previously the domain of (elite) whites. Practices of racial exclusion such as barring black people from Zona Rosa nightclubs lead to the reproduction of long-standing racial hierarchies with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom (Whitten and Torres, 1998). These social differences become inscribed in urban space, dictating (and dictated by) the way people encounter and traverse the cosmopolitan city. This incident in the Zona Rosa illustrates how racial hierarchies play out in urban space, making certain places and spaces virtually off-limits to black people, especially during particular hours of the day.
Locating Racism in the Cosmopolitan City: Spatial Distancing
After leaving Scirocco, my friends and I decided that Genoeva would be our last stop. This nightclub is a little more casual and draws a younger crowd than the others we had visited. As we reached the front door, three bouncers were patting down several few kids and checking their identification cards. Before we could move ahead, one of them swooped in to create a barrier between us and the rest of the line and said, “The cover charge is 30,000 pesos” (about US$19). The absurdity of the price was a clear sign that our presence was not welcome, because nightclubs in the area charge 5,000–15,000 pesos for admission. Emotionally exhausted by the rejections we had experienced, we did not protest but walked away from the nightclub to a nearby street corner to discuss how we would salvage a wasted weekend evening.
As we stood on the corner talking, two young white women who were classmates of one of the Afro-Colombian women among us rushed over to us yelling, “We were right behind you guys in line. They let us in, and they didn’t even charge us! The bouncers only asked to see our ID cards!” Hector joked, “Well, they charged us extra because they know that black people have more money than whites.” Hector’s quip was a comedic attempt to highlight the disparity between Genoeva’s admission policies for blacks and for whites while trading on the glaring truth that on average Afro-Colombians do not earn more than whites. (Colombia has no official wage statistics disaggregated by race or ethnicity, but according to the 2005 census nearly 15 percent of Afro-Colombians had gone without food one or more times during the preceding week for lack of money compared with only 6 percent of whites.) The joke helped all of us to release the bottled-up stress and anger resulting from the night’s events, serving as what the anthropologist Donna Goldstein (2003) calls a “weapon of the weak” in the face of the social inequities that poor Afro-Brazilians are otherwise powerless to resist.
Elizabeth, one of the white women, expressed disbelief and shock that there could be racial discrimination in Bogotá: “Maybe this type of thing occurs in other parts of the country but not in Bogotá.” The discrimination we experienced belies her notion of Bogotá as the quintessential cosmopolitan “contact zone” (Pratt, 1992: 7), where people previously separated by geography and history encounter and interact with one another. By locating racism in distant places and outside of her social world she is relieved of the burden of considering how she might participate or be complicit in racial exclusion. Spatial distancing reinforces exclusionary racial-spatial norms and white privilege and elitism (Twine, 1998). 4
White Colombians who frequent these areas are not exempt from the production and reproduction of racial exclusion in urban space, even if they are not the actors responsible for denying nonwhites admission to area establishments. In my follow-up interview with Elizabeth days later, she denounced the absurdity and backwardness of racism. She described herself as “friendly with all people regardless of color” at the same time that she admitted that she rarely encounters black people in the course of her daily life, not at the university, in her networks of family and friends, or in places of recreation like the Zona Rosa. Well-meaning whites like Elizabeth often deny the importance of race and the existence of racism in Colombia (Dulitzky, 2005), failing to take into account the way their everyday actions are implicated in processes of racial discrimination. For Elizabeth it was only upon witnessing the differential treatment extended to her friends and to mine that she began to reflect on the racial makeup of the places she frequents.
On separate occasions in the following week, I recounted the evening’s events to two working-class Afro-Colombian residents of Bogotá, one a 25-year-old waitress and single mother from Cali and another a 30-year-old office manager-turned-homemaker originally from the Chocó, and their reactions were nearly identical. Both of them said that my friends should have known better than to go to the Zona Rosa and should not have been surprised by the treatment we received. One even laughed, almost mocking us for making an issue of the situation. In their view, we had ignored clear, even if unspoken, rules about the city’s racial/spatial boundaries that we should have been aware of and heeded. For these women the Zona Rosa was so fixed in its racial character that there was no room for challenging social norms. At a time when multicultural politics is aimed at reducing social differences, this incident and the women’s responses to it show that race remains important even in urban cosmopolitan spaces.
Race and class mark place and space, making Scirocco, Genoeva, Gavanna, and similar nightclubs in this wealthy enclave virtually inaccessible to blacks. Such socio-spatial norms are not legally enforced; instead, practices of exclusion based on ideologies of race, class, and belonging establish white spaces and places as inhospitable to black people. These ideologies and intangible boundaries are reinforced, in part, by nightclubs’ practice of turning away potential black customers unless they are recognizable national celebrities or public figures. 5 These boundaries are also reinforced by Afro-Colombians’ tacit knowledge of the city’s socio-spatial landscape and of local racialized ideologies of place, which guides the way they traverse the cityscape and make choices about where they will work, live, and socialize. Research has shown that neoliberal urban development projects marginalize city residents who cannot fully participate in the revitalized city, but Young, Diep, and Drabble (2006: 1690) draw attention to the “feelings of cultural exclusion” that reinforce this social exclusion and marginalization. In Bogotá, black residents learn the space-time norms that govern where they do not belong and when. Together with white patrons’ practice of spatial distancing, these factors facilitate the reproduction of long-standing racist social hierarchies, thereby inscribing social difference in urban space.
Race is so embedded in everyday social life and commonsense notions of belonging that it is difficult to challenge racial/spatial norms. In the weeks that followed that April night, lawyers of DeJusticia and the Observatorio de Discriminación Racial at the University of the Andes collaborated on a tutela (writ of protection) arguing that our fundamental rights had been violated. Rather than seeking damages, the suit named not only the nightclubs but also the mayor of Bogotá, Samuel Moreno, and the former president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, for failing to protect Afro-descendants from racial discrimination. The goal in doing so was to shed light on Colombia’s three-decade-long failure to implement antidiscrimination legislation in accordance with the state’s ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1981. Five months after the original incident and after a round of appeals, the Colombian Supreme Court ruled in our favor, concluding that the named parties had violated our fundamental rights to equality, honor, dignity, and the “free and full development of one’s personhood.” The language of the court draws upon international human rights discourse as it confirms the social reality that many across Colombia choose to ignore—that race and racism define everyday life.
Footnotes
Notes
Fatimah Williams Castro is a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She thanks the reviewers for their insightful comments and appreciates the suggestions offered by attendees of the faculty roundtable of the Rutgers University Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, where this work was presented. She also thanks Simone Delerme, Daniel Goldstein, and Chaunetta Jones for reviewing early drafts of this paper. Funding for the research was provided by the Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Dissertation Fellowship Program.