“Recovering” public space and race: Afro-Colombian street vendors in Bogotá,Colombia

Abstract

Bogotá, Colombia is one of the largest migrant-receiving cities in the Americas, and in the last two decades, the city has received an influx of over one million people displaced by internal violent political conflicts. Currently, the Afro-Colombian population constitutes approximately 10% of the total population, but continues to be highly concentrated in the lowest socioeconomic strata in the Pacific region of Colombia. Informal vending in Bogotá is comprised of primarily rural and/or internally displaced migrants, including Afro-Colombians and indigenous populations who journey to large urban centers in search of better education and income opportunities and a higher quality of life. In this paper, I argue that Afro-Colombians endure higher marginality and discrimination as street vendors than self-identified as mestizos. Thus, Black bodies are multiple marked by discourses of crime, displacement, and undesirability in public spaces. In addition, street vending in Bogotá is understood by urban scholars as well as the local state as a classed struggle, this understanding through class effectively deracializes the informal vending landscape, while also further reifying the invisibility of Black racialized bodies in Bogotá’s equality discourses. The failure to recognize the diverse racial makeup of informal vendors and understanding these struggles only through class obscure the social and economic realities encountered by racialized bodies in public space.

Keywords

Street vendors public space Bogota urban governance race

Bogotá, Colombia is one of the largest migrant-receiving cities in the Americas, and in the last two decades, the city has received an influx of over one million people displaced by internal violent political conflicts (Castañeda and Garcia, 2007; Galvis, 2014; Hunt, 2009). In 2013, an estimated 5.7 million internally displaced migrants relocated to mainly urban centers in Colombia; that year, the nation’s armed conflict alone produced nearly 400,000 refugees (Shultz et al., 2014). The continued flow of migration to Bogotá is a consequence of decades of armed conflict, paramilitary forces, and drug wars, in addition to a lack of education and economic opportunities that have resulted in the considerable growth of the informal sector in Bogotá, particularly in the form of street vending.

Currently the Afro-Colombian population constitutes approximately 10% of the total population, but continues to be highly concentrated in the lowest socioeconomic strata in the Pacific region of Colombia. Informal vending in Bogotá is comprised of primarily rural and/or internally displaced migrants, including Afro-Colombians and indigenous populations who journey to large urban centers in search of better education and income opportunities and a higher quality of life (Orozco et al., 2008). Yet, Bogotá́ lacks the socioeconomic and physical infrastructure to adequately support the major influx of labor and displaced migrants. The Instituto para la Economia Social estimated that in 2006, there were 134,554 informal vendors in Bogotá’s historical center, primarily selling food, nonperishable goods, art, and a myriad of services including “health” services, and accounting for a large percentage of the city’s employed population (Castañeda and Garcia, 2007). However, there are no reliable statistics that accurately record the number of street vendors selling in Bogotá. Meanwhile, the local government has never accounted for vendors’ racial identity. What is clear is that the continual rise of informal vendors in the city runs counter to Bogotá’s urban regeneration spatial policies that seek to redevelop public space for the safe use by its citizens by “rescuing” public space from illicit use and violence.

Since the 1990s, Bogotá has implemented aggressive spatial recovery policies that have been internationally recognized as a model for innovative urban redevelopment designed to produce class equality in public spaces and equitable resource distribution across the city (Berney, 2010). Bogotá’s urban redevelopment projects have focused on creating socially sustainable urbanism through the creation and enforcement of urban policies designed to “recover” public space and as a way to reduce urban equalities. The perceived success of Bogotá’s spatial equality has been acclaimed by local governments in cities of the Global South as a possible solution toward their own urban regimes that have continued to foster inequalities across their populations. Yet, it is clear that Bogotá’s neoliberal regime has resulted in the creation of spaces of exclusion based on class and racial inequalities by prioritizing social elites’ visions of the appropriate design and usage of public space. Thus, in trying to produce “classless” spaces, the government failed to include the needs of marginalized populations in the city, in particular street vendors and the homeless, and failing to fold into spatial discourses the historical spatial entanglements of race and class in Colombia as they relate to local urban regimes (Berney, 2011; Donovan, 2008; Galvis, 2014; Hunt, 2009). Furthermore, Bogotá’s spatial “recovery” policies aggressively criminalize vendors because street vending is associated with health risks, crime, public disorder, and unemployment. As such, the local aims to eradicate crime and take back public space primarily from expelling street vendors.

A growing body of literature critiques Colombia’s neoliberal urban spatial policies as increasing class inequalities through the implementation of policies seeking to maximize profits through beatifying public spaces for elite consumption and capital accumulation. However, there is little understanding on how race, class, and space dialectically inform and shape the experiences of Afro-Colombian informal vendors in Bogotá. Black bodies are marked by distinct historical and contemporary discourses of crime, displacement, and undesirability in public space that are differently racialized from “mestizo” street vendors. Specifically, Black bodies are read as already criminal, and as such, street vendors endure higher rates of discrimination.

Meza’s (2003) study on Afro-Colombian street vendors in Bogotá is one of the few studies highlighting the experiences of Afro-descendant vendors who endure heightened harassment not only due to being vendors but also being Black. There remains a lacuna of studies dealing with spatial analysis of the intersection of race in discourses of public space in Bogotá́.

I build on Meza’s (2003) study to argue that Afro-Colombians endure higher marginality and discrimination as street vendors than self-identified as mestizos. Thus, Black bodies are multiple marked by discourses of crime, displacement, and undesirability in public spaces. I argue that as street vending in Bogotá is understood by urban scholars as well as the local state as a classed struggle, this understanding through class effectively deracializes the informal vending landscape, while also further reifying the invisibility of Black racialized bodies in Bogotá’s equality discourses. The failure to recognize the diverse racial makeup of informal vendors and understanding these struggles only through class obscure the social and economic realities encountered by racialized bodies in public space.

To make this argument, I draw from interview data collected during six months in 2015–2016 under the larger project Recovering Public Space: Violence, Migration, and Informal Vending in Bogotá, Colombia.¹ This paper is based on 54 survey interviews and five oral histories of Afro-Colombian adults working as street vendors in 12 different areas of the city, among a total of 163 interviews with both Afro-Colombian, mestizo, and indigenous vendors. The majority of the participants (81%) are victims of forced displacement and relocated from the Pacific region of Colombia to Bogotá. All of the participants did not have a permit to operate a street-vending business at the time of interview, and thus were considered by the local state as selling “illegally.” The vendors sold a variety of perishable and nonperishable food and material goods, such as tinto (Colombian coffee), newspapers and magazines, flowers, prepared foods, cell phone time cards, cheap plastic goods, and snacks. Although, the interview was focused on a diversity of themes ranging from access to health services to street vending experiences, the data for this paper are focused on how Afro-Colombian participants experienced the entanglements of raced, gendered, and classed processes part of street-vending systems in Bogotá.

Recovering public space and “pluri-ethnic” recognition

In 1991, Colombia adopted a new constitution that officially recognized diverse ethnic populations by acknowledging the country as a “pluri-ethnic” and “multicultural” society. Through the adoption of Law 70, known as the Law of Black Communities, the nation constitutionally recognized cultural differences of Afro-Colombian communities and adopted legislation to remedy the invisibility of this historically marginalized population in the Colombian cultural landscape. In particular, this new legislation created two special seats in Congress representing and recognizing “Black communities” as a distinct cultural ethnic group. In addition, it mandated that the national curriculum incorporate Afro-Colombian history, and granted rights to the development of “Black communities” and rights toward participation in development projects that would directly affect them (Arocha, 1996; Bocarejo, 2009; Hurtado, 2001, 2006).

The Constitution of, 1991 was declared as a radical strategy toward recognizing Afro-Colombian populations as part of, and therefore belonging to, the Nation. Activists saw the constitutional mandate for the historical inclusion of Afro-Colombian cultural communities in the national education curriculum as a strategy to remediate the proliferation of inferiority of Blacks. Afro-Colombians were represented in educational curriculum until the 1980s as “inherently lazy, libidinous, muscular, impervious to pain, and stupid (Friedemann, 1984), while authorities were particularly negligent in supplying public works and educational, health and legal services in regions mostly settled by Afro-Colombians” (Arocha, 1998: 71–72). However, this remediation has fallen short. Although Afro-Colombians are perceived as celebrated cultural communities in historical curriculum, in practice they encounter multiple forms of discrimination based on the same stereotype that the Constitution was intended to eradicate.

The new policies targeting Afro-Colombians have been limited in achieving change, mostly due to deep historical economic, social, and regional inequalities, including displacement by armed militias and paramilitaries that have disproportionally affected this population. In their study on ethnic–racial discrimination, displacement, and gender within the “Black” population across popular sectors describe how Afro-Colombian women are the object of sexism, racism, and specifically sexual harassment. Black women are simultaneously sexualized and thought of as socially inferior, and are disrespected in public space. Furthermore, they argue that in Colombia, the bodies of Afro-Colombian women are often read as poor, equating Blackness with poverty. As Meertens, Viveros, and Arango elaborate:

Women’s struggle for respect also depends on cultural and economic resources that enable them to overcome the double “symbolic deficit” that assumes their position in the sexual and racial order. This is also a difficult task, since the equation (female + black = poor) seems to operate persistently in the common classifications. (Meertens et al., 2008: 188)²

Throughout the decades, Colombian and Latin American scholars have furthered knowledge production about racialized discourses as they relate to Afro-Colombians (Mosquera et al., 2007; Restrepo, 2004, 2005; Rojas and Alejandro, 2004). Afro-Colombians have also engaged with academic and activist discourses that have advanced a diverse Black Colombian agenda. Hence, according to Grosfoguel (2007), the participation of Afro-Colombian professionals, activists, and academics studying themselves as subjects ruptured traditional epistemological production, in addition to producing knowledge from bodies, identities, and subaltern spaces. There is a rupture in the 1990s toward racialized knowledge, understood and developed through transdisciplinary, intersectional frameworks underscoring the importance of race and racialization as entangled with social, economic, and cultural processes particular to Latin America, including new perspectives on Blackness, slavery, and colonization.

Blackness is analyzed and understood as entangled with histories of slavery and colonization in Colombia. In other words, while Columbia shares histories of slavery and supremacy regimes with the U.S. and elsewhere in Latin America, Colombian nation building has produced specific cultural imaginaries of Black Colombian bodies. The territories of New Spain (later Colombia) contributed significantly to the transatlantic slave trade, particularly through the Port Cartagena de Indias. During the 1650s, San Basilio de Palenque, founded by fugitive slaves from Cartagena, was the first of many free communities in the Americas. Today, San Basilio, located 70 miles from Cartagena, has a population of over 5000 Afro-Colombians, who struggle to maintain their own language, politics, and cultural practices. Afro-Colombians who live or are from former emancipated communities or villages along northern Caribbean and Pacific coasts in Columbia are palenqueros. The term palequera originates from female-free slave fruit and sweets vendors dressed in colorful dresses that solidified the Black female body as a character of the public landscape since the 1650s, and continues to refer to female Afro-Colombian street vendors to this day. These historical complex understandings of slavery, emancipation, and street vending are important for recognizing the spatial process of racialization of Blackness in Colombia. As such, it is important to understand how the racialized experiences of Afro-Colombian street vendors in Colombia are historically entangled with class, gender, and the state.

Prior to the, 1991 constitution, Colombia had established mestizaje as the sociocultural force underlying social hierarchies in the nation. Importantly, since independence, mestizaje has shaped discursive understandings of eliminating racial hierarchies among its populations. Racial discourse in Colombia was understood through mestizaje and its emphasis on the importance of eliminating racial hierarchies while fostering an inclusive national identity (Paschel, 2010). It was not until the, 1991 constitution a “pluri-ethnic” and “multicultural” society was born, subsequently establishing protections for the country’s ethnic and cultural minorities. However, legal discourse was focused on recognition of diverse communities and not on “racial equality” (Paschel, 2011). The Law of Black Communities guaranteed recognition of ethnic communities in rural zones and cities with high Afro-Colombian populations, but did not confer individual rights outside of these geographic location, such as Bogotá. Hence, inequality in Colombia was and continues to be entangled with race, regional disparities, and regionalism. Regionalism proxies race. Paschel (2011: 737) insists, “The prevalence of mestizaje, on one hand, and regionalism on the other, make race, class and region nearly inseparable in Colombia.”

Prior to the 1990s, mestizaje in Colombia, as well as other Latin American countries, was the discourse that organized forms of nationalism around racial mixing and cultural hybridity. Mestizaje reified the notion that Latin American countries did not have ethno-racial hierarchies, rather populations organized by homogeneous national identities (Arocha, 1998; Chaves and Zambrano, 2006; Viveros Vigoya, 2015; Williams Castro, 2013). While it is understood that inequalities exist in Latin America, they are interpreted in class and not racial terms. Scholars who have challenged mestizaje have shown that “official state discourses that encouraged racial mixture were not inconsistent with racial hierarchy and inequality” (Paschel, 2010: 732). The lack of acknowledgment of racial differences and racial discourse in turn furthered the marginalization of racial groups by integrating and lumping racial populations into categories as excluded “others.”

Historically in Colombia, not unlike other Latin American countries, the ideology of mestizaje ensured the exclusion of Black women and men from debates about national identity, and thus, not seen as representatives of Colombian national identity (Bocarejo, 2009; Viveros Vigoya, 2015). This meant that Black Colombians were seen as part of the homogenization project and resisted their claims regarding racial and ethnic discrimination. Until the 1990s, ethnic recognition served as a way to legitimize cultural difference among a “multicultural” society (Bocarejo, 2009; Viveros Vigoya, 2015). However, multiculturalism, has not “managed to reduce the racialized effects of neoliberal politics that impact particularly these social groups and populations…[and] it has contributed to reproducing their marginality” (Viveros Vigoya, 2015: 501). Hence, the Law of Black Communities is interpreted as a way to culturally protect “Black Communities” and their rights to education and land in specific territories, particularly in the areas around the Pacific, while disfranchising Afro-Colombians residing in cities like Bogotá.

Recovering public spaces in Bogotá, Colombia

Urban scholars have recently challenged the perceived success of Bogotá’s neoliberal restructuring of public spaces, as they critique Bogotá’s official discourse of achieving social harmony through the production of urban “classless” public spaces (Berney, 2011; Donovan, 2008; Galvis, 2014; Hunt, 2009). These studies suggest that the articulation of inclusive, equitable, and classless spaces in Bogotá is actually deeply rooted and entangled with historical processes of class difference (Galvis, 2014), further noting that the right to the city is not fully accessible to all citizens across class lines, particularly street vendors and the homeless population. When implemented, these spatial policies are influenced by Western neoliberal ideologies of what public spaces should look like, how these spaces should be used, and by whom. During the 1990s, Western neoliberal ideologies of space, not limited to Bogotá, quickly expanded to major cities in Latin America packaged as recovering public space programs as the democratization public space, including Recuperacion de Espacios Publicos (Recovery of Public Space) programs in Mexico City (Crossa, 2016) and City center regeneration programs in San Jose, Costa Rica (Low, 2005).

Recent studies by urban scholars and geographers have argued that urban redevelopment policies aimed at reimagining urban space have significantly excluded the urban poor (Donovan, 2008; Dupont, 2011; Huang et al., 2013; Swanson, 2007). Thus, in reality, neoliberal urban programs of redevelopment in large urban centers in Latin America attempt to “rescue” and “recover” the use of spaces in the city from marginalized populations. Specifically, these programs aim to implement systematic exclusions and the removal of street vendors and homeless populations in the sites targeted for redevelopment, as they are not seen as productive civic participants part of the newly imagined urban aesthetic milieu (Galvis, 2014). Crossa explains:

Much of this literature has argued that new urban middle classes in the Global South are subscribing to, and inscribing urban space with an aesthetic of “world classism” that evidently does not include the urban poor…More recently, work on the informal sector has been motivated by a concern for looking at the politics of informality within the context of urban neoliberalism which is targeting groups who do not fit the imagined global city. (2016: 287)

As expected, street vendors are often blamed for crime, trash, and violence, a well-rehearsed narrative that calls for removal, relocation, and often eradication of vending practices in public spaces targeted for regeneration by the local state (Cross, 2007; Crossa, 2016). Local state policies created under the banner of “safe space as a constitutional right” aggressively target street vendors because street vending, as it is dominantly depicted, represents health risks, crime, public disorder, and unemployment. Arising from decades of crime activity (bombings, kidnappings, murders) in the historic center of Bogotá and other highly frequented public spaces in the city, the local state has taken aggressive to eradicate crime and take back public space by “cleaning up” populations deemed undesirable, echoing Neil Smith’s (1996) notion of revanchist policies of exclusion against marginalized populations in order to recover spaces for elite civil society.

Scholars have also critiqued Bogotá’s vision of achieving urban equality through public space policy, stating that a limited notion of equality has in turn created exclusionary spaces based on class (Berney, 2011; Donovan, 2008; Galvis, 2014; Hunt, 2009). While there is recognition that Bogotá has achieved success in creating and expanding public spaces in the city, it is clear that “success” does not apply to all citizens (Berney, 2011). However, these studies have made invisible the spatial relationship with race and ethnicity in Bogotá. There has been a failure to recognize that knowledge production is a racialized project in Colombia, where geographic areas and the people who inhabit them are positioned as existing outside of discourses about race and spatial governance.

Bogotá: Neoliberal ideologies in practice

Bogotá’s massive urban transformation was spearheaded by two key local state administrations: Antanas Mockus Sivickas (1995–1997 and 2001–2003) and Enrique Peñalosa Lodoño (1998–2000 and 2016–current).³ Although other mayors after the 1990s also implemented public space programs that targeted street vendors, street vendors viewed the administrations of Antanas Mockus Sivickas and Enrique Peñalosa Lodoño as especially aggressive toward them.

Mockus focused on developing a citizen culture through pedagogical programs on appropriate citizen use and behavior in public spaces, while Peñalosa prioritized the expansion and democratization of public spaces in the name of creating “classless” spaces of inclusion and toward a vision of an equitable and accessible city (Berney, 2010). Peñaloza consolidated the New Bogotá and its neoliberal ideologies of urban renewal, mobility, aesthetics, and public–private partnership that continued and extended the plan Mockus began in the mid-1990s. In stages, he implemented his vision of public spaces during his first term as mayor, and then continuing as the current mayor of Bogotá. Peñalosa began his first term as mayor by aggressively implementing anti-vending policies under the constitutional mandate of “Recovery of public space.” Under this program, the area San Victorino was transformed into the “Plaza de la Mariposa,” exemplifying “first-world spaces,” or a world-class urban renewal project of renovating the city center through the regulation and securitization of space. The project included the adoption of regulated spaces for street vendors, the widening of sidewalks for pedestrian use, and the dedication of space for public transportation and bicycle mobility. Through the implementation of neoliberal urban renewal, Peñalosa experimented with a new logic of regulation of public space that regulated the informal economy, created public transportation, and envisioned new private investments.

The ideology that drives these neoliberal public space projects are centered on creating “classless” urban spaces of inclusion and equality as sites of encounters that cuts across class lines. In reality, the success of public space “recovery” policies has been unequally distributed as they have created spaces of exclusion based on class, the opposite of what was intended (Berney, 2011; Donovan, 2008; Galvis, 2014; Hunt, 2009). Street vendors have been the most affected by these policies as the local state sees them as agents of disruption and crime, counter to “city beautiful” urban projects. Most of the studies have analyzed the production of unequal spaces in the city through class cultural politics, and have failed to understand the constitutive relationship among class and race that shape spatial discourses as it relates to Bogotá’s public space programs. The relationship between class and race has recently been studied in relation to regional distribution of resources, highlighting the lack of mobility of Afro-Colombians as one quarter of its population resides in Southwestern Valle de Cauca and in Cali, home to the largest population of Afro-Colombians in the nation (Moncada, 2010). Race has not been examined in discourses of “recovering public” space in Bogotá where the Afro-Colombian population remains largely invisible. The continuation of a “deracialized” discourse facilitates the invisibility and exclusion of Afro-Colombians as targets of Bogotá’s aggressive neoliberal public space discourses.

During the 1990s, Bogotá’s local government operationalized spatial recovery policies through a series of newly formed agencies charged to “recover” public space, particularly from street vendors. Policies included (a) Taller de Espacio Publico (The workshop on public space) to produce plans for the recovery and maintenance of public space, (b) Defensoria de el Espacio Publico (Space defender’s office) for the protection and regulation of public space, (c) The Police Brigade for Urban Space to ensure proper use of public space, (d) the dedication of two telephone lines to receive and act upon citizens’ complaints regarding invasions of public space, and (e) Fondo de Ventas Ambulantes (Popular sales fund), which was created in 1972, but was charged with overseeing the relocation of vendors away from the city center in, 1993 (Hunt, 2009). The majority of citizens’ complaints were about illegally parked cars, construction, and formal business taking over the sidewalks, which was bolstered by local state agencies stating that the major problem of public space invasion was due to illegally parked cars. While only 16% of the complaints were against street vendors, these new public space agencies and programs focused solely on “recovering” public space from street vendors. As of 2005, the local state had implemented 606 different interventions throughout the city that “recovered” 659 areas from street vendors (Hunt, 2009). Anti-vending narratives further plagued the city’s imaginary, this time with the creation and implementation of educational programs toward changing the culture of informality in Bogotá at the level of individual vendor’s behavior.

These aggressive policies toward informal vendors further marginalize these populations and produce severe economic problems for their daily survival. Local agencies have acknowledged the hardship these policies bestow upon street vendors. As Hunt states, “The Popular Sales Fund and Vendor House both acknowledge that street vendors in Bogotá are the poorest of the working class, and are victims of the civil war, neoliberal economic restructuring, and severe economic recession” (2009: 336). While it was clear to various local agencies that street vending was not the major threat to public space as it was perceived to be, Mayor Peñalosa has continued to describe the invasion and attack of street vendors as the primary threat toward urban progress.

Racializing Afro-Colombian street-vending experiences: Displacement, isolation, belonging, and employment

Although Colombia’s Constitution of 1991 helped parts of the population secure important rights, I argue that street vendors’ rights are understood in terms of class struggle, and such an understanding effectively deracializes the informal vending landscape, and further reifies the invisibility of Black racialized bodies in Bogotá’s equality discourses. The Afro-Colombian vendors in this study identified barriers toward street vending by discussing issues of racialization, displacement, isolation, belonging, and employment. It is important to understand how displacement and forced migration informs the experiences of Afro-Colombian street vendors in Bogotá. In this study, 81% of the Afro-Colombian participants identified as victims of forced displacement due to internal armed conflicts and violence.

Colombia has a long history of violent political conflict since the 1940s between the Colombian Government and multiple armed guerrilla groups, including the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), two groups that remain active. To complicate matters, the armed conflict is not just a battle among the state and guerrillas, but also includes a variety of paramilitary groups that have been attributed to horrific amounts of violence against civilians to maintain control over their territory. At one point, some paramilitary groups were state-sanctioned to aid against the armed conflict with guerrillas and cartels; however, some right-wing paramilitary groups protect the interest of cartels against the state. Wirtz et al. (2014) describe how the armed conflict has directly and indirectly caused the displacement of millions people across Colombia:

Whether displacement of civilians is purposely forced or as a consequence of violence between the various armed groups, Colombia has become a country with the highest number of IDPs across the globe: as of December 2013, an estimated 5.2 million people are displaced within the country. Most IDPs have been displaced from rural to urban areas; yet, violence in larger urban centers has led to substantial intra-urban displacement, signifying a shift in displacement modalities. Urban violence has been attributed to clashes between illegal armed groups and government forces, activities of post-demobilization groups, disputes over the control of urban areas that include profitable micro-drug trade, forced recruitment or labor, and pressure on communities to engage in illegal mining and illicit plant cultivation. (2)

In her ethnographic study on displacement and ethnicity, failures of multiculturalism in Colombia, Velez Torres (2013) identifies the effects of displacement in the everyday lives of marginalized ethnic communities in cities like Bogotá. She argues that displacement dissolves social networks, values, and local knowledges that had been part of the survival of ethnic communities in Colombia. Additionally, ethnic and racial communities have more difficulty in incorporating into economic and social networks in the city due to discrimination and lack of social support. Moreover, they encounter hostile social environments in urban spaces that promote isolation and disruption from community ties (Velez, 2013).

The Afro-Colombian participants discussed feelings of displacement and isolation through their difficulty in finding viable communities in order to advocate for their vending rights. They expressed feelings of isolation in Bogotá compared to the communities from which they came from, mainly in the Pacific and Caribbean area of Colombia that were until today where the majority of the Afro-Colombian population had been located. An Afro-Colombian vendor who had been living in Bogotá for over 20 years expressed that he still has feelings of not being part of a community in Bogotá. He elaborated:

I have lived in Bogotá for more than 20 years now, my children are all born here and now I even have grandchildren…[when asked where is he from] I don’t say that I am from Bogotá and my children all know where they are from [San Basilio], how can we claim to be from somewhere that does not want us…I still feel I don’t belong here after all these years.⁴

Overall, the Afro-Colombian participants who relocated to Bogotá due to forced displacement from their communities described a sense of loss of community and cultural ties from the communities to which they belonged. They described feelings of being “different” in the so-called multicultural urban landscape of Bogotá. As one participant described:

Back in my community, I was just another person. Everybody looked like me. We did not see difference in people…here in Bogotá, it is different. I feel different than anybody else, I sometimes don’t know if it is because I am Black or poor or both I guess. There are not a lot of people who look like me here [Bogotá́]… I head people saying in the streets, here in Bogotá, there are no Blacks; they only live in the jungle.⁵

Thus, “difference” is racialized as inferior. As a female Afro-Colombian street vendor described:

When I first arrived in Bogotá, it was hard to understand why I made so many people uncomfortable just with my presence. People in the street would call me names and I started to notice that when the police arrived to remove vendors from the site, I was always the first one they targeted. Of course, I know it is because they see me as invading a space where I do not belong…not only as a vendor, but because I am Black. They see me as poor and ignorant, even when I joined the association [vending union] I felt that I was ignored…I stopped going there, it was really uncomfortable being the only Negra in the room.⁶

Afro-Colombians who have forcible moved to Bogotá encounter new forms of embodied racialization that is delegitimized by a multicultural national discourse. In practice, they experience a rupture with ways of understanding and racial, cultural, and social practices of their communities, which are in turn often erased by the celebratory multicultural discourse in their new urban environments. It is clear, then, that there is a need to understand how bodies are racialized differently in their geographic communities of departure and the urban environments where they are received. In practice, racial meanings change as they operate in different scales as racial distinctions are deeply embedded in the colonial project of Latin America, and have persisted as forms of social ordering, historically under mestizaje and currently through multicultural discourses (Thomas and Clarke, 2013).

Spatial policies in practice: Criminalizing Afro-Colombian vendors

In January 2016, Mayor Peñalosa began evicting street vendors from the city center. A few weeks later, he launched an operation to control public space in the Restrepo neighborhood, prohibiting the occupation of public space by street vendors, declaring informal vending as illegal, and creating a system where informal street vendors could be prosecuted and penalized. Additionally, he militarized the city center by increasing the police presence in order to deter vendors from returning to sell in the city center. These strategies were not new to Peñalosa, as he continued the work he started during his previous administration (1998–2001) with the eviction of 12,000 street vendors from various public spaces in the city. These anti-vending policies and street vendor evictions made possible the construction of a large park in the center of the city, along with the creation of open spaces that visually changed the urban landscape of Bogotá. These policies secured Peñalosa’s vision of Bogotá as a site of securitized and democratized public spaces, and also reified his vision for future development and progress of the city.

Peñalosa restricted sales near and around the Transmilenio, the public transportation system. Afro-Colombian vendors described this campaign as going further than just removing vendors from these areas, but using police to breakup and harass Afro-Colombians hanging around public transportation areas even when they were not selling. As an Afro-Colombian street vendor elaborated:

I was hanging out with my friends in a Transmilenio stop, and I was not even selling anything. I was just hanging out. Well, the police came and removed us from the area and accused us of trying to sell drugs…They also removed other vendors who were selling in the same area, but they were not treated as badly as they treated us, calling us names, and we were not even selling anything.⁷

Peñalosa’s aggressive strategies, toward recovering public space from the public transportation bus stops were a strategy to remove vendors and bodies deemed “other” that criminalized these public spaces. Accordingly, vendors’ bodies are read as criminal because they are illegally selling in public space. For some Afro-Colombians, it was clear that their bodies were twice criminalized as street vendors and as Black. Notably, this double criminalization only came up with Afro-Colombian street vendors in this study; in contrast, mestiza(o) vendors expressed being criminalized because of class, such as being poor and working as a street vendor, but not because of race and/or racialization processes.

In a study of Afro-Colombian vendors in Bogotá, Meza (2003) elucidates how Afro-Colombians living in Bogotá́ view the city as cold, hateful, and racist. Afro-Colombian street vendors in Bogotá experience socio-racial discrimination based on restrictive street-vending policies in public spaces and the criminalization of Black bodies. Meza writes:

While vending, the constant pursuit of the police generates an atmosphere of tension among all street vendors, but especially among those who work with carts and will have more difficulty escaping. Often, passers-by are witnesses to the fierce and ruthless persecutions and bullying sellers [by the Police]. When one of them fails to escape the ambush, he [the vendor] loses his merchandise. If you resist, the police can beat you, insult you, and imprison you. Black people are victims of all these humiliations, which weigh more because they are accompanied by racist phrases and designations that heighten the feelings of rejection from the city. (Meza, 2003: 92–93)⁸

The experience of Afro-Colombian street vendors in this study also differs by gender. Black men acknowledged and discussed that they are double criminalized by being street vendors and by being Black. Afro-Colombian female vendors expressed how in addition to being double criminalized, they are often sexualized by their male customers. A vendor described her constant harassment by male customers: “If I am nice…well I have to be nice to the customers…some think because I am nice, it’s an invitation or permission for them to flirt with me and call me names or joke about ‘monos’ [monkeys] in front of me. I get so angry but have to keep it in if I want to sell.”⁹ According to Meza (2013), Afro-Colombian women vendors in Bogotá are victims of racial and sexual harassment on the streets. In Meza’s study, Black women who sold Chontaduro,¹⁰ which is believed to have aphrodisiac powers, were often stereotyped as sexual objects, and vendors had to tolerate the obscene looks, jokes, and gestures of some men. Often the actions of men reflected beliefs about Black women as easy, sexually available, and unworthy of being taken seriously (Meza, 2013: 94).

Race and employment

With more education and employment opportunities than any other city in Columbia, it is no surprise that Bogotá continues to be a destination for internal migration (Meza, 2013). Yet, thousands of migrants are not able to find sustainable employment, resulting in needing to create their own entrepreneurial opportunities as street vendors. A study on the discrimination of Afro-Colombians in the national labor market (2007) further confirms that Black Colombians suffer a higher degree or racial discrimination in the workforce. It is not a surprise then, that this population faces multiple barriers to entry to formal employment is overrepresented in the informal economy of major cities in Colombia.

Colombia has institutionalized a system of socioeconomic infrastructure that characterizes poverty levels in order to distribute public services across the nation. This system institutionalizes class (income, housing conditions, education etc.) by assigning class categories to its citizens. The system is classified from 1 to 6 with 1 representing the lowest poverty levels (poorest living conditions) and 6 representing the highest income areas and citizens. All of the participants in this study that self-identified as Afro-Colombians declared their economic situation as precarious while living in harsh economic conditions (stratus 1–2) compared to Mestizos declaring their stratus within the range of 2–4.¹¹ Compared to mestizo participants, the Afro-Colombian participants in this study lived in harsher economic conditions as well as described higher discrimination and harassment incidents, particularly based on race.

Afro-Colombians also unanimously described barriers toward formal employment due to lack of educational opportunities, but also because they are Black. As such, 98% of the Afro-Colombian participants in this study described experiences with racial discrimination either in the workplace (formal employment) and/or applying for employment. Although most of the Afro-Colombian participants described having experienced some type of racial discrimination, they unanimously expressed their frustration of their non-Black friends and family that constantly negated their racialized experiences. As one vendor describes:

When I told my friends [non-Black] that I know I did not get the job as a security guard, because the supervisor did not want to hire lazy Black people, they did not believe me. They quickly say that I am as Colombian as they are and I have to stop saying that it is because I am Black that I have disadvantages.¹²

It was clear to this vendor that being Black is a disadvantage when competing for formal employment. This perspective also points to the way non-Black Colombians do not believe that discrimination based on race exists; rather it exists due to class in terms of lack of education, underemployment, and resource allocations.

Racial discrimination was not only discussed in the context of employment (by seeking employment or by working as a street vendor) but also while navigating economically affluent spaces in the city. One vendor described how his children have an easier time in the city since they were born and raised in Bogotá as long as they stay “close to home.” However, he and his family have experienced harassment and racial discrimination while walking in higher income communities. As the vendor elaborates

…in those rich areas you feel immediately that you don’t belong…if we go to a store, we are followed. Restaurant employees are disrespectful. It is not fun…you would think that they [rich people] own the sidewalks, because we get harassed by the police for just walking.¹³

The Afro-Colombian participants read and understood their own Black bodies as marked by discourses of crime, displacement, and undesirability in public spaces. Afro-Colombians described being harassed by the police at higher rates not only because they were selling without permits but also because they were Black. These racialized and classed understandings by Afro-Colombian vendors differed from the experiences with discrimination described by non-Black vendors perceived solely as classed (being poor, uneducated etc.). As such, the failure to recognize the diverse racial makeup of informal vendors in Bogotá, and exclusively understanding these struggles as classed, obscures the social and economic realities encountered by racialized bodies in public space.

Conclusion

Neoliberal ideologies of space in Bogotá, as well as the creation of a “multicultural” society that defined Afro-Colombians as a geographically located cultural community, produced an “indigenization of Blackness” whose bodies were dislocated in the urban landscape, further marginalizing and disfranchising Black people living outside their cultural communities in urban centers. Although the inclusive narrative of multiculturalism was intended to recognize various ethnic communities by affirming a diverse nation, it detached race and racial inequalities from local discourses in Bogotá.

The Colombian, 1991 Constitution legally secured citizens’ rights to public space, as well as the recognition of ethnic communities. But in practice, it produced spaces of exclusion in Bogotá along the lines of race and class, additionally marginalizing the street vendor population as undesirable, criminalized bodies. By solely understanding public space programs as classed, the local state renders invisible and isolates the Afro-Colombian street vendor populations living in the city. This study suggests a need to for further analysis of race and class of spatial regimes of urban governance that aim to democratize public spaces in the city.

Local state policies created under the banner of “safe space as a constitutional right” in Bogotá makes legible the bodies of street vendors as undesirable, imagined in proximity to health risks, crime, public disorder, and unemployment in urban spaces. However, it is important to recognize the racialized historical colonial context of Colombia in terms of mestizaje and more recent neoliberal multicultural practices that shape the lived experiences of those who use public space for their economic lives. Spaces are not solely produced through class struggles but also by racial and ethnic processes that affect mobility, displacement, access to education, and so on. While it is clear that most higher income spaces in the city are clearly legible as inhospitable to poor people, they are also inhospitable based on race. Afro-Colombian mobility across the city is marked by their own understanding of their racialized bodies, that in turn shapes their economic practices of street vending and their understandings of additional barriers based on race.

This study urgently calls for further analysis that elucidates current de-racializing neoliberal ideologies of space in Bogotá. Thus, Bogotá’s recognition of urban development and social programs has been marketed and adopted in cities of the Global South as solutions toward creating equitable and just cities. However, everyday discriminatory racial practices and unequal access toward social-economic mobility, as Afro-Colombians acutely experience, are left outside of Bogotá’s spatial imaginary.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Lorena Munoz is an assistant professor in gender women and sexuality studies and American studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the intersections of place, space, gender, sexuality, health, and race. Her transdisciplinary research agenda has been focused on Latinas/Latinos in the global south, particularly in the areas (in)formal economy, labor, health, and productive/transformative agency.

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