The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space by Ulrich Oslender (review)

With this carefully researched, well-written examination of issues facing Colombia’s Pacific lowlands in the twenty-first century, Ulrich Oslender offers two important contributions: first, the elaboration of an innovative, theoretical template inspired by the region’s unique geography as a lens to analyze developments that have and are occurring there; and second, a history of the region that reviews its development from colonial times to the present, but emphasizes the twenty years after the adoption of Colombia’s Constitution of 1991, including Article AT-55 that specifically acknowledged Afro-descendants as a distinct culture group and empowered the mobilization of black communities. Based on a thorough review of primary and secondary sources as well as more than twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the author in and around the town of Guapi, Cauca, the book is an important addition to geographical understanding and the historiography of this understudied Colombian region.

Colombia’s Pacific lowlands cover an area of almost ten million hectares of tropical rainforest that is set apart from the republic’s interior by the Eastern Andean mountain range. It is a region of jungle and swamp cut by numerous streams that flow westward to the Pacific. The largest of these waterways that make river settlements accessible to major Atlantic ports is the navigable Río Atrato, which flows northward to the Golfo de Urabá. To understand the development of this region, which is rich in biodiversity and alluvial gold deposits, Oslender proposes a critical place perspective. He shows how the residents’ social relationships are entangled with the region’s rivers, streams, swamps, rain, and tides, and that this “aquatic space”—his conceptualization of the mutually constitutive relationships between people and their rain forest environment—provides a local epistemology that has shaped the political process. From this construct, he goes on to demonstrate that social mobilization among the black communities is best understood as emerging out of their place-based identity and environmental imaginaries, and he argues that this proposed “critical place perspective” accounts more fully for the multiple, multiscalar connections and the rooted, networked experiences within social movements (17).

In the first three chapters, Oslender develops various aspects of his “critical place perspective,” and in the last three he applies this analysis to developments in the region since 1991 when Article AT-55 (later Ley 70) opened a way to grant collective land rights to rural black communities in the Pacific Coast region. In chapter four, he shows how the Atrato River is a key resource for political mobilization of newly-formed community councils that, far more than being mere administrative bodies, are complex spaces of negotiation between capitalists, the state, and residents. In chapter five, he describes in greater detail the role that leadership and previous organizational experience have played in the emerging councils.

With its engaging narrative that includes sympathetic portraits of Oslender’s informants, the book, nevertheless, relies heavily on geographic terminology that will have the greatest relevance for geographers, anthropologists, and their graduate students. From a historian’s point of view, however, it is the epilogue that engages the greatest attention for Oslender brings his analysis up to the present. In this section, he discusses the devastation caused by an aggressive return in the early twenty-first century to extractivist economic practices–specifically oil palm cultivation and mechanical gold mining–and he contrasts the current dehumanizing conditions and relentless environmental destruction with the progressive spirit and winds of hope that blew across the Pacific lowlands in the early 1990s. The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations by large conglomerates with national and transnational capital on lands collectively owned by rural black communities is systematically destroying the biodiversity of this unique natural region and forcibly uprooting hundreds of thousands of Afro-Colombians from the very lands Law 70 granted them.

Further complicating the situation is the spread of illegal coca crops accompanied by aerial fumigations...