From plantation to proletariat: Raizals in San Andrés,Providencia and Santa Catalina

Introduction

The Department of San Andrés and Providencia is one of Colombia’s most recent administrative districts, created in 1991. An archipelago, it consists of three islands, San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina in the Caribbean Sea. It lies far from the American sub-continent, being closer to the Nicaraguan coast than to the mainland of Colombia itself, and more or less equidistant with Jamaica (see Figure 1). For this reason, during much of the twentieth century the area was ruled as a special territory administered by civilian officials sent from Bogotá by central government. The major constitutional and administrative reforms of the 1990s allowed most Colombian Departments to choose their own political representatives. The islands, however, were located at the centre of a long-standing historic conflict between Nicaragua and Colombia concerning sovereignty over the archipelago and its surrounding waters. In 2012, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague put an end to the conflict by ruling partially in favour of Nicaragua. But despite Nicaragua’s claim to the three islands, the Court only recognised Nicaragua’s marine rights in the area and not the islands, given their historic occupation by the Colombian state. ¹

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Figure 1.

Location of Providencia, San Andrés and Santa Catalina in the Caribbean Sea. Source: authors from Vector Maps. Creative Commons Licence.

It is the Colombian state that calls the local people of San Andrés and Providencia Raizals; it is not their own self-description but, rather, an etic or external term. Raizals, who are descendants of the Africans brought to the islands by the English as slave labour for cotton plantations and cattle raising, are Protestant and Anglophone. ² They were then ‘abandoned’ on the islands by their English landlords, who left the plantations when they became clearly uneconomic. The isolation and poverty of the islands meant that, for centuries, Raizals were, in practice, semi-autonomous, living in a subsistence economy based on fishing and sporadic trade with Afro-descendants on the Nicaraguan east coast.

The term ‘Raizal’ enables the Colombian state (and most mainland Colombians) to distinguish between the inhabitants of the islands and those Afro-descendants populating the Colombian Pacific region. For the latter have traditionally been more visible for two reasons: they have been the target of systematic violence by both paramilitaries and guerrillas and have, at the same time, developed a consistent social movement of resistance. This process has been extensively documented by anthropologists and sociologists, mainly because it has played a key role in the promotion of constitutional reforms advancing the recognition of different communities and their needs for political and cultural autonomy within a multicultural framework. ³

Unlike the Raizals, the Afro-descendants of the Colombian Pacific have made some advances in terms of territorial autonomy. The Colombian state has granted them recognition over things like collective ownership of land and local education systems. On the islands, things have been somewhat different. On the greater island, San Andrés, part of the territory has been occupied by a growing number of entrepreneurs from continental Colombia, who employ the Raizals as cheap labour in tourist resorts, restaurants and supermarkets. Something similar is happening with the middle-sized island, Providencia, and to a lesser extent on Santa Catalina, where a few Raizal families still live and there is resistance to the privatisation of the territory. This may be due to the fact that local families are settled in the habitable strips of the island, the rest being difficult to access. (This was well known to the famous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, who built a house on the most inaccessible side of Santa Catalina.)

For various historical and cultural reasons, the local people have always rejected an identification with Colombia, which is closely associated with the idea of   a white, Spanish-speaking, Andean and Catholic nation. These features are not shared by locals: Caribbean, Afro-descendants, English-speaking and, for the most part, Protestant. ⁴ Unsurprisingly, these Colombian citizens have more in common culturally with Jamaica than with Bogotá. Thus, in this archipelago, perhaps as in no other Colombian context, it has become clear how the so-called Andean model of nation-building, in which attempts were made to create, at a stroke as it were, modern nation states from a basis of autocratic, distant, imperial Spanish rule, has tried (and failed) to nationalise Caribbean culture and traditions. The Andean nation-building processes of countries like Colombia, Bolivia or Ecuador has been haunted for two centuries by the conflict between the cultural and national imaginaries of Hispanised elites and the masses of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants. As Jacobsen and Aljovín De Losada have shown, the negotiation and confrontation between these groups has ‘played a major role in lending Andean nation-state building projects an especially unstable, experimental character and limiting the spatial and social reach of state capacities and legitimacy’. ⁵

The Colombian state’s traditional nation-building efforts involved the imposition of cultural and economic hegemony over the islands, by trying to make Raizals fit the national ethnic and racial ideal and by establishing military bases. In recent decades, however, this strategy has been taken further through a state-sponsored attempt to deepen the economic exploitation of the islands through tourism, and heritage and culture industries. Mainland entrepreneurs have taken the opportunity to settle on the islands, taking advantage of tax policies designed to enhance tourism consumption, banking and investment. As a result, Raizals have been displaced and their traditional way of life has come under attack.

The Colombianisation of San Andrés and Providencia

Historically, the nationalisation of the islands by the Colombian government has involved the social construction of local people as ethnically and racially different; i.e., Raizals, and then attempts to implement different strategies to bridge this difference. This process, known as the ‘Colombianisation’ of the islands, ⁶ entailed the imposition of political and cultural transformations. The first strategy aimed to force linguistic homogeneity by getting rid of English and imposing Spanish. The state invested in the creation of schools, sent teachers to the islands and trained Raizals in the Spanish language and Colombian geography; they were then put in charge of teaching their communities. A second strategy involved the arrival of Catholic churches and priests. Although Protestantism was not confronted directly, the Catholic presence was a form of counterweight to its dominance. Part of this strategy consisted of co-opting local religious sites. For instance, on the emblematic site of Fort Warwick in Santa Catalina, there has been a statue of the Virgin Mary for at least two decades, exercising a form of symbolic violence upon the local landscape and religion. Fort Warwick is key in the imaginary of Raizals, because it allows them to reassert their affiliation with the founder of the settlement, the English Count of Warwick, and implicitly to counter the Hispanic identity imposed by the Colombian state. In other words, what is taking place can be seen as a combination of traditional nation-building state policies with the neoliberal commodification of culture in the archipelago, much of it effected in recent years through the archaeological and anthropological fieldwork carried out on the site of Fort Warwick, or as the state would have it, Fuerte Libertad.

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Figure 2.

Fort Warwick-Fuerte de la Libertad in a representation from 1822 by the Colombian state. Source: National Archive of the Nation, Colombia.

In sum, the Colombianisation process implied the understanding of difference as a racial divide that could be suppressed through the transformation of linguistic and religious systems. Nonetheless, the natives of the archipelago led a relatively quiet life before the 2010s. Their economy was largely based on the collection of marine resources both for self-consumption and for sale to restaurants in nearby resorts. Men spent much of the day, almost sixteen hours, at sea, collecting lobsters or harpooning different species to meet family needs. In fact, some reports point out that in order to keep lobster and fish populations stable, social convention amongst Raizals banned the use of oxygen tanks or large nets. Fishing is limited by the immersion capacity of the fishermen. A recurring expression when the Raizals are questioned about their fishing systems is that ‘you get what you can get’. That is, the longer the fisherman can be submerged, the more resources he can get. Amongst fishermen, breaking this rule brings dishonour, while those who are able to spend more than five minutes underwater are distinguished as heroes. But most of the Raizals’ fishing areas are outside the coral reef that surrounds and protects the islands, so have been largely ceded to Nicaragua.

From plantation economy to monetarism

In this context, it is important to stress that the ICJ ruled in favour of a dispute between states, ignoring the social and cultural rights of the Raizals who were the most affected by the decision. The case of the archipelago is in fact one of the few in which a nation like Colombia, some distance away, implements a process of internal colonialism on a population that is not indigenous and completely separated from the continental territory.

The dispute between the governments of Colombia and Nicaragua is relatively old and relates to nation-state formation over the last centuries. In the colonial period, the Spanish empire determined that the islands had to be administered by the Viceroyalty of New Granada ⁷ since one of its managers considered that it was better that they were controlled from far distant Bogotá than from the Captaincy of Guatemala. ⁸ Obviously, this meant greater autonomy for the officials in charge, since performing inspection visits from Bogotá was, in practice, almost impossible.

However, by the end of the eighteenth century, given the improved relations between the British and Spanish empires, the former desisted from using the islands as a fortress from which to protect pillage from piracy on Spanish ships covering the Cartagena-Santo Domingo route. Related to this fact was the amnesty that the Spanish empire gave to the settlers so that, if they declared themselves vassals, they would be allowed to stay in their territories and maintain their activities, especially cattle breeding. This pact took place despite the fact that the Raizals felt closer to the British empire because they were the descendants of the slaves that the British had taken to serve in the cotton and sugar cane plantations, following the model applied in Jamaica and other islands. The British did not care much for the islands because productivity was low and so abandoned them, but the enslaved remained there generating their own subsistence economies combined with some commerce with their peers from the Nicaraguan coast, especially the Afros from Bluefields.

Ethnographic information indicates that the Raizals of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina enjoyed a more or less autonomous life until the second half of the twentieth century, when the Colombian state started a process of incorporation. Beyond the cultural strategies of Colombianisation already mentioned, the state established military bases and then started opening tourist routes that were expanded under a policy that exempted the islands from taxation on consumer goods. The strategy aimed to attract Colombian consumers to buy goods on the islands and increase tourism. Many people took the opportunity to develop new businesses between the 1970s and the end of the 1990s, creating shopping centres back on the mainland that were called ‘Sanandresitos’. ⁹ Thus, in addition to promoting the use of Spanish and the symbolic imposition of Catholicism, the ways were opened for a mestizo population eager for commercial opportunities. This opening meant that San Andrés attracted traders from Palestine, Syria and the Lebanon, known locally as ‘Turks’. ¹⁰

These economic changes led to the arrival of banks on the islands to manage the growing influx of capital, which, in turn, allowed for a change in local social relations and a shift from barter to monetary economies. To differing extents, and according to their economic possibilities, the islanders entered the educational system and went to university, for there was now an increased need for doctors, lawyers and public accountants. By the 1980s, the tourism sector was fully fledged and began to generate differential demographic and economic patterns in the two parts of the archipelago. In San Andrés, the Raizals were quickly converted into servants working for hotel and restaurant entrepreneurs, who demanded a low-skilled workforce for cleaning and maintenance tasks. Others became workers in small shops and a majority of the population acquired low-rank positions in the newly founded offices of the national bureaucracy.

From Colombianisation to heritagisation

The policy implemented between the 1960s and 1990s by Colombia shaped the Raizals as a racial ‘other’ that could be Colombianised through educational policies and de-racialisation. And that implied flooding the archipelago with mestizo people to fill the perceived deficiencies of this population in terms of their adherence to subsistence economies and ethics of frugality derived from their religion. The state consolidated some public jobs to legitimise the subjection to the central government. However, the picture was to change in the 2010s. First, the new millennium brought a series of shocks to Latin America with a neoliberal wave of fiscal adjustments that sought to minimise state spending and to dismantle the (precarious) welfare state. The consequence was that regional governments began to dispense with the majority of their officials, leaving many people without jobs. Most work carried out by former officials was outsourced, which set in motion an avalanche of non-governmental organisations that were put in charge of providing services previously in the hands of public officials. Second, the ruling in favour of Nicaragua at The Hague in 2012 meant that the fishermen of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina were forced to drastically reduce their fishing areas, which left them in practice without the marine resources now deemed to be in Nicaraguan waters.

This situation led the Colombian state, at a time of high oil prices, to invest in projects that could replace or complement the traditional subsistence economies of islanders. This was the case with the project to recover the archaeological site of Fort Warwick. Through a public tender, the municipal government of Providencia called for a contractor to conduct studies leading to the heritagisation and tourist promotion of the archaeological ruins. The ostensible aim was to generate alternative sources of income for the residents, especially those of Santa Catalina, who had suffered most from Nicaragua’s ban on exploiting their waters. After the call for tenders, the firm that won the competition hired a team of professionals to carry out the necessary research before the opening of the site to tourists. It is important to note that the official bidding process’s call stated that archaeological work had to be carried out to evaluate the feasibility of rebuilding El Fuerte de la Libertad (The Fort of Freedom). This name had been given to the archaeological site in the second decade of the nineteenth century by the nascent Colombian state in its attempt to gain legitimacy for the republican order. At different points over time during the development of the project and community archaeology, the Raizals called into question this designation and name, which they considered mistaken: for them, the site should not have had the republican name but the traditional name of ‘Warwick’.

The ‘socialisation strategy’ of the consultancy included questions about how to create access to the sites, their scripts and museology, or the consequences for the local ecosystem and how to mitigate them. Eventually, the consultants took into account the local designation of ‘Fort Warwick’. Ultimately, however, the firm aimed to establish a business model of heritage exploitation based on foreign investment that would, at best, hand the villagers the ‘opportunity’ to be employed in the tourist enterprise. This is a classic example of how apparent multicultural tolerance of symbolic and cultural features can be harnessed to a neoliberal economic project. And we want to emphasise how the broader transformation of the paradigms of ‘otherness’ and ‘subalternity’ ascribed to Raizals, became, under the Colombianisation process, differences to be included and even highlighted, labelled as heritage, and promoted by tourist enterprises. Thus the state supports the global tendency to commodify ethnicity.

Now that Raizals are not ethnically differentiated, they are seen as different in terms of class: they are the proletarians, manual workers and bartenders working for entrepreneurs. They are now Colombian proletarians subject to the state regime of ethnic normalisation, in an area privileged for the arrival of capital due to the lack of armed conflict and high tourist potential. Thus, despite the fact that the heritagisation project deploys a rhetoric of symbolic incorporation and respect for local culture that will generate ‘new jobs’, it does not set out any alternative models allowing the community to be owner and manager of the site and of its own territory.

From racial to class difference

In conclusion, the recent history of the archipelago has seen the move from a form of rule, based on the Colombianisation project, to a multicultural paradigm based on ‘respect for difference’ and the neoliberalisation of the economy. The first phase saw the construction of a racial ‘other’ that the state attempted to incorporate by means of the ‘Andeanisation’ of the islands, that is, through trying cultural, linguistic and religious homogenisation. Although this policy had some positive outcomes (for the state, of course), the recent withdrawal of the welfare state and geopolitical changes have led to a shift from this integrationist policy, albeit under racialist criteria, to the articulation of strategies of normalisation through proletarianisation. This shift is most clearly expressed in the heritage policies being implemented, which emphasise local culture and highlight difference so as to create a more ‘authentic’ and attractive tourist resource. The dominance of the heritage paradigm attempts to make people believe that enhancing cultural identities and their associated material culture can improve the living conditions of the population through tourism’s commodification. In practice, however, this move entails a shift from the relative autonomy provided by the subsistence economy to the subservience brought about by waged work under the precarious conditions of neoliberalism.