Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place by Laura Rodríguez Castro

Author:Laura Rodríguez Castro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030594404
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3 The Vereda

During my time spent in rural Colombia, I also became acutely aware of the importance of places that contributed to community building in the lives of Campesina women. This resonated with organised struggles such as the demand for communal rights in agrarian reforms in Latin America in the last century (Teubal and Ortega Breña 2009), and the communal paradigm that underpins the Buen Vivir in Ecuador (Huanacuni Mamani 2010). Beyond the home, Campesinas mobilise daily in their neighbours’ homes to exchange produce, to work the jornal , to buy from the local store, to attend the local school and community meetings, or to have a tinto and to socialise with friends nearby. This mobility contests the discourse of ‘private female sphere and a male public sphere’ that ignores the unity of experience of women’s everyday lives and their contributions to their communities (Stephen 1997, 7–8).

In the Colombian countryside, rural communities are geographically divided into veredas. The veredas are a geographical space where rural communities live and wherein certain collective projects are developed. Beyond its geographical definition, the vereda is a social entity that has power in the communal unions that negotiate with the state. Therefore, Campesinxs are independent citizens who perform productive activities within the family, who belong to a rural community (vereda) and who identify with a broader context that includes the town, the city and the country (Forero Álvarez 2010). In the vereda, people construct place through social, cultural and economic relationships.

In this section, I focus on the multiplicity and relationality that construct veredas. My particular focus is on the informal processes that women undertake in veredas as a politics of place (see El Khoury 2015). I will narrate two stories in the veredas of Toca and Minca. It is important to note here that these are not isolated cases. Rather, in the Colombian countryside, there are numerous instances of women’s local and community organising among the rural populations living in particular veredas (see, for example, Courtheyn 2017).

The first of the veredas is located within a 15-minute bike ride from Toca’s town centre. It is part of the Municipality of Toca, which is made up of seven veredas. Ana and I met through a mutual friend. We first met in town after she had finished teaching at the local school one afternoon. As I chatted with her about the project, Ana offered to take me to her vereda the following day to show me the enterprise she had established a year earlier. Ana, the community members and I subsequently met several times over three months, forging a relationship that reflected feeling-thinking processes emerging from the Colombian territories (Fals Borda 2015).

Ana’s enterprise is called Compro Agro . The enterprise processes onions that are sold in a major supermarket in Colombia every week. Employees peel and measure the onions to meet the quality standards of large supermarket chains. Ana’s work is to source the onions locally for the weekly orders. Her son and daughter have created a web platform to source potential buyers and sellers.

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