015269 FER0010.

1177/01417789211015269Feminist ReviewLaura Rodriguez Castro

article feminist review

Feminist Review

extractivism and territorial Issue 128, 44­–61

© 2021 The Author(s)
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DOI: 10.1177/01417789211015269
https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789211015269

Colombia: a decolonial www.feministreview.com

commitment to Campesinas’
politics of place

Laura Rodriguez Castro

abstract
Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya
Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as
merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the
conceptualisations of the coloniality of power and coloniality of gender, I narrate how territorial dispossession
and extractivism are felt in women’s ‘body-lands’ through foreign tourism/conservation development and new
export crops in two rural veredas in the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where I
conducted participatory visual projects in 2016. From a relational understanding of place, I also demonstrate
the ways that the rural population is resisting and negotiating within these processes. Ultimately, I make a call
for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender, and to the resistances
to territorial dispossession and extractivism (epistemic and economic) that rural women are leading in place
in the Global South.

keywords
decolonial feminisms; rurality; Colombia; Latin America; dispossession; place; extractivism
 Laura Rodriguez Castro feminist review 128 45

introduction
This article empirically narrates how the dispossession of the ‘body-land’ (Cabnal, 2010, p. 21) of
Campesinas (female peasantry) in Colombia occurs in place. I demonstrate how colonial dispossession
and extractivist processes persist in the rural Global South, while at the same time, I narrate
Campesinas’ negotiation and resistance in place. Through a compromiso sentipensante (feeling-
thinking commitment) to the epistemic forces of place (see Escobar, 2015; Fals Borda, 2015), I make a
call for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender that
rural women are leading in the Global South.

The coloniality of gender refers to a gender system that is heterosexualist permeating ‘racialized
patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority’
(Lugones, 2007, p. 206). Decolonial and communitarian feminists have illustrated how the coloniality of
gender operates through the historical isolation of gender (see also Lugones, 2008; Gargallo Celentani,
2014; Lozano Lerma, 2017). This conceptualisation critically builds on the work of Aníbal Quijano (2014;
Quijano and Ennis, 2000) on the coloniality of power that demonstrates how the social/mental construct
of ‘race’ became legitimised as a ‘category’ of modernity and tied to classed divisions of labour. Through
the coloniality of gender, the universal has been prioritised over the local, and singular normative
assumptions about rights and development have been privileged (see Segato, 2012; Millán, 2014). Thus,
the social construction and historical separation of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as tied to the colonial/capitalist
classed division of labour continues to have an effect on the actions and ideas around ‘women’s
development’, and has resulted in ongoing colonial logics of dispossession and extraction of the ‘territory
body-land’ (see Cabnal, 2010, p. 21; Cumes in Yaksic, 2017; Lozano Lerma, 2017; Cumes, 2019).

Here, I deliberately refer to the body-land interrelation with the territory—as a politically relevant,
heterogenous and relational space to understand how dispossession and extractivism operate (see
Lozano, 2016; Devine, Ojeda and Yie Garzón, 2020; Rodriguez Castro, 2020). Rather than seeking an
absolute definition of the territory, its complexities are better understood through the processes and
relationships of ‘local realities’ that are interrelated to ‘national and global dynamics and structures of
power’ (Devine, Ojeda and Yie Garzón, 2020, p. 15). Indeed, communitarian feminist Maya-Xinka, Lorena
Cabnal’s (2010) epistemic construction of the cuerpo-tierra is useful for understanding the structures
and dynamics of Colombian rural women’s territorial struggles (see Rodriguez Castro, 2020). Cabnal’s
work (ibid., p. 22) elucidates how territorial struggles are interrelated to the body-land, implicating the
‘conscious recovery of our first territory body as an emancipatory political act’ that has been historically
tied to a communal struggle for land. In Colombia, the struggle for land has been a central form of
resistance for Campesinxs1 and Indigenous and Afro-Colombian people in the context of an ongoing
social and armed conflict (see Reyes Posada, 2009). Thus, I start from Cabnal’s entangled notion of
territorio cuerpo-tierra to engage with the lived experiences of Colombian Campesinas as an act of
resistance, transgression and creation in place.

Specifically, this article focuses on the experiences of Campesinas in the rural regions of Boyacá and the
Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. I start by contextualising body-land territorial dispossession’s entanglement

1 Gender neutral word for the commonly used term Campesino.

46 feminist review 128 extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia

with coloniality/capitalism/modernity and make connections to the specific socio-historic context of

Colombian Campesinas. Following this discussion, I conceptualise the relationality of place, narrating how
the dispossession of rural territories through foreign tourism development and new export crops in two rural
veredas is lived and felt in women’s body-land. Cumulatively, this article provides an empirical contribution
to the projects of decoloniality, which are theorising and foregrounding how coloniality continues to
operate in Abya Yala (see also Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo, 2008; Espinosa Miñoso, 2009; Cabnal,
2010; Gargallo Celentani, 2014; Millán, 2014; Lozano Lerma, 2017; Cumes, 2019).

extractivism and territorial dispossession of the

body-land
Territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala, which focused on
extractive practices of the body-land of Indigenous territories (Cabnal, 2010). Those working in
heterogenous projects for decoloniality have argued that dispossession has not ended, but rather, it is
tied to the colonial/capitalist/modern/neoliberal processes affecting the ‘Global South’ (see
Grosfoguel, 2016; Cumes in Yaksic, 2017, 2019)—that is, the Global South understood beyond geographical
borders and as those places that have been particularly affected by global capitalism (see de Sousa
Santos, 2010). Therefore, in this article, I focus on dispossession as tied to extractivism to expose the
permanency of the processes of coloniality in the rural Global South.

Through an understanding of colonialism’s historical processes of oppression, Cabnal elucidates how

territorial dispossession and extractivist labour occur in the modern period:

The historical process of oppression against nature and its goods, is linked with the current neoliberal
system’s extractivism, that in its vision of Western development pretends to ‘improve the life of the peoples’
with strategies of participation and inclusivity in extractivism labour, which claims to improve the conditions
of poverty. (Cabnal, 2010, p. 23)

Ramón Grosfoguel (2016, p. 126) argues that extractivism, as linked to dispossession, has ‘an attitude
of objectification and destruction produced in our subjectivity and in the power relationships of the
“capitalist/patriarchal westerncentric/christiancentric modern/colonial” civilization in respect to the
world of the human and non-human life’. He defines epistemic extractivism as a process of
objectification, inferiorisation and victimisation, with the objective of pillaging ideas for the
marketisation and transformation of economic capital (ibid.; see also Cumes, 2019).

Indeed, epistemic and ontological extractivism set up the conditions for economic extractivism, which
Grosfoguel broadly explains as:

... pillage and dispossession that we see developing since the colonial epoch up until the neoliberal necolonial
period of our days. It is about the pillage, dispossession, theft and appropriation of resources of the global
south (the south of the north and the south inside the north) for the benefit of some demographic minorities
of the planet considered racially superior that compose the global north (the north of the south and the north
inside the south) and that constitute the capitalist elites of the system-world. (Grosfoguel, 2016, p.128)
 Laura Rodriguez Castro feminist review 128 47

Here, I particularly focus on the relationships of economic and epistemic extractivism by narrating how
the dispossession of the body-land of Campesinas in Colombia occurs in place—that is, based on a
broader understanding of how economic dispossession through the loss of land tenure of Campesinxs is
linked to epistemic dispossession through the extraction of ideas and cultural practices.

the peasantry in Colombia

The context of Colombian Campesinas is complex and not generalisable, because it is defined by
territorial, regional and historical processes of place that are heterogenous. A recent review of the
understandings of the peasantry in Latin America by Devine, Ojeda and Yie Garzón (2020) emphasises
the importance of moving away from fixed definitions to a recognition of Campesinxs’ territorial
processes and relationships in place through historically and geographically grounded understandings
of the reproduction of capital and peasant lives. From this standpoint, I briefly outline the historical
and structural marginalisation of the Colombian peasantry, but then in the findings, I narrate the
specific geographical processes and relationships of power of each region discussed in the article.

In Colombia, at the state level, the Campesinx sector remains largely marginalised due to models of
neoliberal development. Jaime Forero Álvarez (2010) argues that state development plans have
positioned Campesinxs as a pre-modern group incapable of change, with no rights to land ownership and
useful only for cheap labour and as a provider of cheap food. This is despite the fact that the Campesinx
sector in Colombia has historically produced 65 per cent of the nation’s food for direct consumption.
Meanwhile, rural women’s marginalisation persists in Colombia in various forms, including at the state
level, and in academic and political debates. Male farmers, male landowners, the capital market and/or
the global market have permeated debates and policies about rurality in Colombia. This marginality is
not just manifest in scholarly and political debates; it is also evident at a material level, with reports
that 60.1 per cent of rural Campesina and Indigenous Colombian women still do not receive their own
incomes (CEPAL, 2007). Rural women have also historically lacked land ownership rights due to
patriarchal power, manifest for example in not having the formal paperwork to claim land due to
patrilineal inheritance (see Meertens, 2012). Therefore, the positioning of Campesinas in Colombia as
‘cheap labourers’ and its intersection with heteropatriarchy demonstrates how dispossession operates
through extractivist labour and lack of land tenure.

Indeed, rural Colombia has a colonial history of violent dispossession of Indigenous land and extractivist
labour of the rural poor. These factors shape the ongoing economic agrarian relationships in which the
Campesino population is still embedded today, not as ‘subsumed colonial subjects’ but rather as agents
within the struggle for land (see LeGrand, 2016). Orlando Fals Borda (2015) argues that since the colonial
period, the Campesino population has gone through processes of proletarisation that varied depending
on the region and epoch. For instance, during the nineteenth century, the transition of the relations of
production from slavery to capitalist modes of production saw the growing establishment of large
estates owned by the rich. At this time, a jornal payment—an informal and unregulated wage defined by
landowners to pay for labour on a daily basis—was also established and remains in place today in many
rural localities in Colombia (see ibid.). Therefore, it is not my intention to romanticise or essentialise
constructions of the peasantry in Colombia. A breadth of work has demonstrated that there is not a
singular history of peasant struggles in Colombia (Reyes Posada, 2009; Fals Borda, 2015; LeGrand, 2016;
48 feminist review 128 extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia

Devine, Ojeda and Yie Garzón, 2020). In this context, I turn to a relational understanding of place and
territory, from which I narrate the particular contexts of Toca and Minca.

the relationality of place

Doreen Massey (2005, p.15) argues for the importance of understanding the multiplicity of place and its
relationality with space to ‘work towards a groundness that—in an age which globalisation is so easily
imagined as some kind of force emanating always from “elsewhere”—is vital for posing political
questions’. A focus on the multiplicity and relationality of place opens up possibilities to think from the
here and now, to construct the pluriverse (see Escobar, 2015; Kothari et al., 2019) through territoriality
and to contest colonial and neoliberal logics of possession and linear development projects. In the
modern period, places that in the colonial language are called ‘underdeveloped’ continue to be violently
intervened through practices (e.g., extractivism, fracking and territorial dispossession) that claim the
need to ‘develop’ and homogenise life in all its forms, while negating ancestral knowledges’ potential
for political transformation (see Escobar, 2015). Once we shift our understanding to place, then all of
our experiences are embodied and our thoughts, feelings and politics are constantly negotiated in
place. As Julie Graham (2002, p. 22) asks: ‘Why place? Because unless we re-signify the local as “places”,
with all their specificity and independent possibility, we risk being continually recaptured within the
global/local binary of mainstream (and oppositional) globalization discourse’. This local/global binary
also contributes to the logics of the coloniality of gender.

In contrast to the deficit narratives in which the coloniality of gender has positioned the majority of
rural women, the multiplicity and relationality of place have become resistance, negotiation,
re-existence. For example, Ann El Khoury (2015) argues for the importance of the informal order for
grassroots alternative developments, as women are often positioned within the realm of informality
(e.g., informal economies). Through engaging with the multiplicity and relationality of place, she argues
that women who are not active in the public political arena are often portrayed as passive subjects
confined to the private. Therefore, if the informal economies and places in which women live their
everyday are brought to the fore, ideas on new developments (or perhaps other worlds) can arise. When
informal order and places are regarded as essential to the formation of social reality, women are agents
and political actors within these geographies. The above contentions are particularly important given
that rural women have historically supported their communities through subsistence informality but are
often not recognised or rewarded as such.

In saying that, place is not merely resistance to the global, the colonial, the neoliberal (Featherstone and
Painter, 2012). In romanticising place, we can fall into the same trap of understanding and conceptualising
place as being ‘surface’, linear and isolated. Arturo Escobar (in ibid., p. 169), reflecting on Massey’s work,
argues that there is a ‘need to always think of place within networks of relation and forms of power that
stretch beyond places’. This resonates with Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2003, p. 501) early critique of
Western feminisms, which claimed that ‘cross-cultural feminist work must be attentive to the micropolitics
of context, subjectivity, and struggle, as well as to the macropolitics of global economic and political
systems and processes’. Here, I attempt to engage with an understanding of place and territory in all its
multiplicity and relationality while also attending to such micropolitics, in order to reveal how Colombian
Campesinas negotiate with and resist territorial dispossession and extractivism.
 Laura Rodriguez Castro feminist review 128 49

methodology
This article draws on visual participatory feeling-thinking (sentipensando) research (see Escobar,
2015; Fals Borda, 2015) conducted over eight months in 2016 as part of my doctorate (see Rodriguez
Castro, 2018b). Specifically, I report on the core of the project, which involved six months of veredear:
the process of walking through the rural regional subdivisions of Latin America and ‘finding light when
walking through these places, observing other ways, recognising other ways of thinking and feeling,
and through that light we construct a world from other visions and logics’ (Méndez Torres et al., 2013,
pp. 78–79). This included photographic documentation and group interviews as onces2 that involved
photo-elicitation. The project also included the collaborative organisation of two photographic
exhibitions in the municipalities of Minca and Toca in Colombia, and support from an organisation of
mercados campesinos and other local initiatives. The specificities of my doctoral project are outlined
in Table 1.

sentipensando (feeling-thinking)
Here, it is also important to make my positionality visible as a middle-class white-mestiza who grew
up in Bogotá and accessed higher education, which I have addressed broadly in other work (Rodriguez
Castro, 2018a, 2018b). As I spent time with Colombian Campesinas in Toca and the Sierra, and listened
to women’s accounts of resistance and sovereignty from their own cosmovisions, I questioned my
positionality and privileges. This led me to engage with the epistemic-methodological commitment of
sentipensar (Méndez Torres et al., 2013; Escobar, 2015; Fals Borda, 2015), which has become central to
my decolonial feminist praxis. Thus, I also present sentipensar as part of my epistemology-
methodology, not as a goal or framework but as a conscious decision to make my presence visible in
this body of work.

Embedded in Abya Yala’s ancestral knowledge, sentipensar (feeling-thinking) has developed as a way
of feeling and knowing the world, as entangled processes that are fundamental to living in harmony
with Mother Earth (Méndez Torres et al., 2013; Escobar, 2015; Fals Borda, 2015). Fals Borda (2015,
p. 10), who developed Participatory Action Research (PAR) and sentipensar in the Latin American
region, explains that he encountered the construction of feeling-thinking in the Caribbean culture of
the rivers (Río Grande de la Magdalena), as he spent time with fishers, arguing that it ‘combines reason
and love, the body and the heart, to get rid of all of the (mal)formations that dismember harmony, in
order to tell the truth’. Sentipensar also resonated with my own intellectual questions emerging through
veredear on how to move away from the colonial research paradigms of ‘studying people/places/
nature’ to ‘doing knowledge with’. Thus, I conducted the projects presented here, drawing from
ethnographic and PAR, but with a feeling-thinking commitment to the politics of place and organising
processes of Colombian rural women (see Rodriguez Castro, 2018b, 2020). Indeed, decolonial feminists
also question how to develop their own thinking that accepts concepts and theories that exist, but
that, at the same time, opens up spaces to think the new—from the social spaces of activism and
research (Millán, 2014).

2A light meal and social gathering typical of Colombian and other Andean regions eaten either in the late morning or in
the afternoon.
50 feminist review 128 extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia

Table 1 Research projects conducted in 2016

Period Description Location Participants

February to Conducted participatory research with Campesinxs Toca, Boyacá Four onces were conducted
April 2016 that included: (twenty-eight participants).
•  Veredear accompanied by photographic Women’s main remunerated
documentation of the routines of four women. activities involved
• Group interviews, as onces that included photo- traditional farming such as
elicitation. milking, onion and potato
• Collaborative organisation of a photographic crops and customer service.
exhibition with local Campesinas at Toca’s
farmers’ markets.
• Provided support for improving the
infrastructure of a local business run by
Campesinxs called Compro Agro.
May to Conducted participatory research with Campesinxs Minca, Four onces were conducted
July 2016 colonos that included: Magdalena (twenty-eight participants).
•  Veredear accompanied by photographic Women’s main remunerated
documentation of the routines of five women. activities involved
• Group interviews, as onces that included photo- traditional farming such
elicitation. as coffee crops, artisanal
• Collaborative organisation of a photographic businesses, tourism and
exhibition with local Campesinas. customer service.
• Provided support for the organisation of the
inauguration and establishment of the Mercado
Campesino ‘Mi Canasta’ in Minca.

territorial dispossession of the body-land:

Campesinas resisting and negotiating in place
In the following stories of veredear, I narrate how territorial dispossession was felt in the Sierra
through the expansion of a foreign conservation/tourism initiative, and in Toca through the expansion
of the agro-industry of flowers for export. Notably, from a relational understanding of place,
Campesino populations are not passively being oppressed but rather are resisting and negotiating
within these processes.

Toca
The town of Toca located in the region of Boyacá in the Colombian Andes is predominantly comprised
of a Campesino population. The town was named after the Muisca chief Tocavita, who was beheaded
after the colonisation and evangelisation of the region. Carl Henrick Langebaek (2019) argues that
Indigenous populations such as the Muiscas in the Andean region did not disappear entirely, but rather
they transformed into Campesinxs during the violent process of colonialism and mestizaje.3 Therefore,

3 Traditional definitions of this word refer to the process of ethnic, racial and cultural ‘mixing’ in Latin America. Espinosa Miñoso

(2009) refers to mestizaje as a process that has denied the plural worlds that exist in Abya Yala.
 Laura Rodriguez Castro feminist review 128 51

Figure 1 View from a farm in Toca; flower tents are seen in the background
Source: Courtesy of the author

the violence of colonisation precedes the existence of the current Campesino population, and it
continues today through structural inequalities that the population faces. Toca’s landscape reveals a
rural life with cattle, chickens, potatoes, onions, barley and a growing flower industry, as depicted in
Figure 1.

In Toca, the marks of neoliberal development were manifest in the flower company tents that are
now part of the landscape, as seen in the background in Figure 1. Locally grown flowers are housed
on site until mature, then trucked by refrigerated transport to Bogotá for export to multinational
supermarket chains. Women encompass the majority of workers in the agro-industries of the flower
companies in town. This means that Campesinas in the town of Toca have made a transition into the
waged work of these industries through processes of proletarisation (Fals Borda, 2015). At the
same time, as women enter the flower industries, their family units have sold their lands to large
landowners and moved their families to the town centre. Therefore, there is a dispossession of
Campesinxs’ land tenure for farming as forms of extractive waged labour emerge. Similar to the
colonial/capitalist processes that established large estates for the rich and the proletarisation of
the peasantry in the nineteenth century (see Fals Borda, 2015), the loss of land tenure for extractive
and waged labour presupposes an element of territorial dispossession as the flower industry grows
in the region.
52 feminist review 128 extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia

Figure 2 Photos taken during Diosa’s daily routine

Source: Courtesy of the author

Through the logics of the coloniality of gender, mainstream discourses around new export crops have
produced narratives in which women are positioned as empowered through neoliberal economic logics of
investing in poor women as a ‘win-win’ unproblematic situation (see Daily, 2019), or as mere victims of
these new industries (see Radhakrishnan and Solari, 2015). Thus, gender equality has been premised on
access to paid work, ignoring how the coloniality of power operates in the lives of rural women of the
Global South (see Lugones, 2007). Despite the prevalence of discourses of empowerment versus
disempowerment concerning the lives of peasant women and paid work, the stories from Toca demonstrate
that women are neither inherently empowered nor disempowered through employment in the agro-
industries. Rather, Tocan women were negotiating within these spaces in conflicting ways.

It took me several weeks to obtain access to the flower companies in Toca. This was due to the busyness of
the period (January to March 2016), given that the Western Valentine’s Day celebration was approaching
and that there were large orders to fill. After several weeks, I gained access to a smaller flower company run
by a couple who lived in Toca, where I met Diosa and the group of women who became part of the project.
The images in Figure 2 were taken during the days I spent with Diosa and her family, who lived in a small
unit in the town’s centre. In this period, I followed Diosa’s daily routine, which included farm work, care
work, domestic work and waged work. When Diosa had finished cooking lunch, she and her husband
helped their daughters get ready. Diosa and her husband left to work in the flower fields at around 5:30
 Laura Rodriguez Castro feminist review 128 53

a.m. and dropped their youngest daughter at the babysitter on the way. Their oldest daughters (aged
10, 11 and 12) made their own breakfast and went to school. When Diosa arrived at the flower fields, she
was greeted by her workmates, whom she referred to as friends. As the day went on, and over their work
and lunch break, women shared their personal experiences, pleasures, joys, fears and anxieties. When
Diosa finished work at around 3:00 p.m., she often biked for fifteen minutes to her elderly parents’ farm
to help them with milking and with gathering the harvest. During the onces conducted with Diosa and
her friends/co-workers, they explained that it was important to them that their work relationships were
akin to family; as Carolina stated:

Where we are, is just us, well there are people from other places, but the majority are people who know each
other … There [workplace], we treat each other as family. It is a very pleasant environment, and that makes
life happier. It’s not like just going to work and that’s it. [The rest of the women nod.]

Regardless of the challenges of employment, including the long working days, women drew on support
and care from their colleagues in the same way as they would from their family members. In establishing
and maintaining work relationships, which were similar to familial networks, the women demonstrate how
informality assisted them in adapting and recalibrating their incorporation into agro-industrial labour
(see El Khoury, 2015). They brought the values, meanings and beliefs of their personal and communal
constructions of being Campesinas to the workplace. Despite their lack of time, given the length of their
shifts in the flower industry, their family and community networks remained strong. These networks were
important to their well-being and extra economic income. For instance, women often asked for permission
if they had to leave work to attend school meetings or to address urgent family matters, and as the
supervisors were often part of their networks, they did whatever they could to grant them permission.

Isabel and Violeta were caring supervisors who had strong friendships with employees, including Diosa,
who often invited them over to her parents’ farm for Sunday lunch or for a trip to the ‘countryside’ as
they both lived in the town centre. Therefore, women entering the workforce have not broken down the
cultural importance of family and community networks; rather, such informal structures sustain their
families’ livelihoods in the everyday. This was highlighted as women explained that they shared
responsibilities such as cooking, farm work and care work with other family members, colleagues and
friends. In turn, these livelihoods sustain the success of agro-industries. These conflicting processes
demonstrate the relationality in which Campesinas construct their territorial struggles in place and
through their relationships with each other, which are also undoubtedly interrelated to the national and
global dynamics of these new export industries.

Despite the accounts of Diosa and her friends, it is important to be reflexive about the way in which we
conceptualise agency, particularly in light of the scholarship on female employment in the Latin
American flower companies. Greta Friedemann-Sánchez (2012) observes that, despite undertaking paid
work in the flower industry, rural women still have traditional roles as mothers and caregivers, suggesting
that women have not replaced their identities as mothers for that of workers but rather have combined
them. These findings resonate with the experiences I heard of local Tocan women whose workloads have
also increased due to the heteropatriarchies in which their everyday lives are embedded. Most of the
women arrive home to cook for their families, care for children and clean the house, despite the physical
and mental stress of working long hours.
54 feminist review 128 extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia

Notably, many women from the flower industries in Toca were very reflexive about traditional gender
roles and negotiated with these in their everyday lives by asking their husbands to contribute to the
housework, asserting their economic independence or divorcing abusive partners. As she thought about
her life since she entered the flower industry, Diosa said:

And because you get used to having your money since you are young, so you are not like … You cannot stand
to get told off at home, if for example you did not contribute for the groceries, but no! I can also contribute
and give … To some extent it is because of the machismo … There is this idea that the woman needs to cook,
but we have had our liberation. Now we manage our own money however we want.

Although there is still considerable work to do to reduce the triple shift4 (Suárez, 2005) that permeates
the lives of rural women in Colombia, the above excerpt demonstrates that the position of women is one
that is neither homogenous nor inevitably subjugated. Tocan women did not narrate stories as victims
of patriarchy but rather as agents negotiating with and resisting such structures. In this respect,
Campesinas’ struggles resonate with those of many Indigenous women who, as communitarian feminists
explain, must challenge structural patriarchy in society and also within their communities, while
confronting territorial dispossession affecting their bodies-territories (see Cabnal, 2010).

While mainstream accounts of neoliberal globalisation in the countryside would suggest that rural
women in Colombia are at the behest of the global flower industry, the stories of Toca unveiled that they
also utilised the industry to their own advantage and then left when their goals were met. These goals
included to achieve their own economic independence, to access health cover, to overcome periods of
poverty and to save money to raise their children. My sense of how women understood their involvement
in the flower companies in Toca is that they used their employment in this arena as a temporary solution,
and then left the industry when they had met their goals. When I asked ‘Why did you decide to leave after
15 years? What happened in your life?’, Constanza explained: ‘Because my children grew up and my goal
was to give them the possibility of studying until eleventh grade. I said from then on they are going to
have to keep going by themselves’.

At the time of the interview, Constanza worked the jornal whenever she needed to, and stayed at home
working in the house and the garden. On the other hand, Ana had raised and educated her children, who
were now at university, through working in the flower industry. After they finished high school, she
started Compro Agro, an onion-processing business in town. She also taught at the local school in her
vereda. Sofia also explained that women made decisions about working in the flower industry on the
basis of their own individual needs and situations: ‘Well, you look at whatever is best, where you see that
you will get more money, because obviously, right now finding anything is difficult, so what can you do?
Wherever you get something and that is it’. Indeed, in rural Colombia people still rely on the jornal or
other informal income to alleviate everyday economic stress. This is due to the consequences of severe
climate conditions (e.g., extensive drought in Toca) and of social inequality brought by neoliberal
restructuring and state abandonment.

4 The‘triple shift’ encompasses the domestic labour of household tasks, the reproductive work of bearing and raising children
and agricultural and farm labour (Suárez, 2005).
 Laura Rodriguez Castro feminist review 128 55

Altogether, these stories demonstrate how practices of women’s inclusion in the paid workforce through
agro-industries are not inherently effective at reducing poverty in the long term. These practices are
embedded in colonial logics that allow for the labour of the rural poor to remain cheap, while perpetuating
precarious living and working conditions and the dispossession of their land. Although mainstream rural
development literature might not construct this as violence, there are clear elements of economic and
epistemic violence embedded in dispossession and extractive logics of the body-land.

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

Similarly, in Colombia, Diana Ojeda and other critical geographers (see Devine and Ojeda, 2017) have
asserted that tourist mobilities can be linked to dispossession, environmental devastation and different
forms of violence. These contentions were evident in Minca’s town centre and also in the more remote
veredas of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The veredas of Minca presented here have a particular history
where diverse Indigenous populations (e.g., Arhuacos, Kogui, Wiwa, Kakuamo) live alongside Campesinxs
colonos—a population that has experienced various instances of armed violence and forced displacement
and have colonised other regions as a result of this. Forced displacement was first experienced by many
colono families, who mainly came from Santander in these veredas, during La Violencia period (1948–1958).5
After this time, the rural population in these regions experienced ongoing armed conflict violence and
neocolonial territorial dispossession. The Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta mountain range is also a biosphere
reserve and home to many endemic bird species, which demonstrates its great environmental power. The
current apparent peace, brought by the demobilisation of armed actors (2003–2006) from the territories of
the Sierra during the government of Alvaro Uribe Vélez, has seen increased interest in land by foreign
investors. Such investors are attracted by cheap prices, which have been at the expense of a dispossessed
local population. Then, on the basis of ‘green pretexts’, investors have attained state support for neoliberal
tourism and conservation (Ojeda, 2012, p. 357; Gascón and Ojeda, 2014; Devine and Ojeda, 2017).

In 2016, the armed conflict presence had significantly reduced in comparison to previous decades, and
tourist mobilities were visible as foreigners passed by Milena’s house in four-wheel drive cars to visit an
internationally owned natural reserve for bird watching. The increasing presence of this foreign-owned
nature reserve and tourists travelling to bird watch at the top of the mountains elicited several concerns
in the local communities, which were discussed in the onces:

Nieves: That [natural reserve] is destructive.

Noema: But let me tell you something, the ones that have moved up over there it is beneficial for them.
And just for them because they are not helping the Sierra, or the community, or the young people
from the community.
Maria: [The natural reserve] is damaging whatever is left. They are building cabins that are one million
pesos (US$305) for the night.

In informal conversations, people remarked that the establishment of the reserve had resulted in the
privatisation of land. They also commented that the reserve had contaminated the water sources that

5 A ten-year civil war between the Conservative and the Liberal parties, which was aggravated by the assassination of Liberal leader

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 in Bogotá and greatly affected the countryside for over a decade after (see Molano Bravo, 1987).
56 feminist review 128 extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia

originate at the top of the mountain. This demonstrates the ways that certain forms of ecotourism and
conservation practices can also cause environmental degradation and the privatisation of natural
resources. It also shows how local populations are dispossessed from their territories as interrelated to
their body-land for ‘green purposes’ of biodiversity and conservation. In Colombia, the state has
facilitated and allowed these processes of dispossession, as historically the Campesino population has
been conceptualised as environmental predators (Ojeda, 2012).

I was afforded another perspective on the reserve by those who were charged with its care. I came to
know them as they often drove by Milena’s and Margarita’s houses. In conversations with me, they talked
about the reserve’s social responsibility of involving the local community (this is also stated on their
website). However, over time, it became evident that the reserve managers ended up creating additional
pressures for Campesinas. For example, one of their projects involved asking local women to host foreign
tourists under the reserve’s conditions and standards. This was problematic as women said that they
tried to host foreign tourists, but the expected standards were hard to achieve. Margarita told me, for
instance, how they were required to have plates and bed sheets of a certain quality but that they were
too expensive. These are ways in which tourism sells people as objects of consumption and undermines
the cultural autonomy of the local communities (see Devine and Ojeda, 2017)—a common colonial
practice of dehumanisation and objectification through epistemic extractivism (see Grosfoguel, 2016).
At the same time, tourism becomes highly commoditised, and with increasing demands for the hosts
(Brandth and Haugen, 2011). Moreover, it places the burden of tourism on women, creating expectations
for them to perform traditional roles in the domestic sphere without proper remuneration (see ibid.).
Overall, this type of tourism can become a form of epistemic extractivism that ‘others’, dehumanises
and then commoditises local rural inhabitants, while increasing women’s workloads.

The Campesinas closest to the reserve were also involved in a crafts project, making jewellery with local
seeds to sell at the reserve’s shop. This was not an isolated case. Notably, the women of the Sierra often
stated that they were tired of the ‘proyecticos’ (small projects) that visitors and foreigners imposed on
their communities. One afternoon, I attended a meeting at Margarita’s house with the woman overseeing
one of these proyecticos. At the meeting, it became evident that there were very high-quality standards
required of the products women were being asked to produce. The women often had difficulty meeting
these standards, particularly as they had limited training and time. As a result, many of the products
were returned, and women were not paid for their work. As a means to meet cumbersome quality
provisions, women in the vereda with more advanced skills in craft sometimes initiated gatherings to
assist with the meeting of standards, but these initiatives did little to challenge broader inequalities.

Having had many conflicting experiences over time with the reserve, the women from the adjacent
veredas were very reflexive about the forms of marginalisation that new foreign, tourist and conservation
mobilities brought to their lives. Just as Campesinas in Toca used the flower industry, these women
sought to utilise the tourism industry for their own gains and on their own terms. They did so by
conceptualising tourism as an alternative way of work, rather than as the only way possible. Importantly,
they were proposing their own ideas of tourism that aligned with their cosmovisions and experience.
Rosa explained this eloquently:
 Laura Rodriguez Castro feminist review 128 57

I always knew tourism and I know how it can be, but here we have an example, we see it as an alternative and
not like we would live off tourism or that we are now. This is something that we have decided to put in our
heads … Back then it was like the boom. And I said, ‘Well as long as people are still doing their home gardens
and not building a huge infrastructure, to do the super room [for tourists]’ … The idea is that the tourism does
not become a vice, but simply an alternative to work. So people continue here normally, working in their
farms, and in their plots of land, planting the berries, the plantain, the cassava … There was a time when we
started to accommodate people in a normal room the same way we lived and if it was not good enough for
them, well, they could leave to a hotel! You need to know you are going to a Campesino house. You are going
to a place where you will cook or see someone cooking in the charcoal and wood stove. And you will see how an
arepa is made from scratch …

Rosa’s quotation brings to light the often ignored relationality of place and body-land experiences that
shape global processes such as global tourism mobilities. Although tourism was mainly seen as
problematic for the region, when the local population had some ownership over these processes, they
saw it differently. Moreover, by placing farming practices and cultural values at the centre of their
tourism activities, women resisted the epistemic extractivism embedded in the new forms of tourism
brought to the region. For example, Antonia had transformed her farmhouse into a hostel, while
continuing to farm coffee on the land she owned:

So far I think it has been very good because a lot of people come. And at least you learn to communicate with
people from other countries. And the good thing is that they leave money … And I like that. I have had a good
run with the tourists.

Antonia had the economic resources to promote her hostel and to choose the tourists she hosted.
Therefore, she had ownership in administering the hostel and receiving the remuneration herself, which,
in turn, gave her more influence on the farm. In 2016, this region of the Sierra still had limited road
access, which had an impact on the flow of tourist mobilities. As the advancement of a paved road
project develops and reaches these veredas, it is likely that more dramatic changes will occur, as is
happening in Minca’s town centre and nearby regions in the Colombian Caribbean (e.g., Palomino). In
summary, apart from the economic extractivism of territorial dispossession wrought by tourist and
foreign conservation mobilities, it is also epistemic extractivism that challenges the well-being of the
Campesino community of the Sierra.

conclusion
As I have demonstrated in this article, Campesinas are subjected to dispossession and extractivist
practices in place that transcend the more visible violences of the Colombian armed conflict, which
continue today in the current post-Accord period. Extractivism and territorial dispossession experienced
in rural Colombia implicate actors and colonial/capitalist/neoliberal economic development ideologies
and policies that are far away but are felt in place through, for example, exploitative tourism,
conservation and agroexport practices.

At the same time, Campesinas’ body-land experiences in place demonstrate that it is imperative to
disrupt victim narratives associated with rural women in the Global South. In a historical context of
58 feminist review 128 extractivism and territorial dispossession in rural Colombia

colonial dispossession, rural women in Colombia continue to resist, negotiate and survive in place
despite different forms of dispossession and extractivism, while advancing their cosmovisions and
dismantling the multiple patriarchies embedded in their lives. As rural places continue to change,
Campesinas are addressing the everyday subsistence of their family and communities, while also
proposing progressive ideas that contest colonial logics of progress. They are doing this in relation to
gendered extractive labour, climate change and territorial dispossession. These body-land resistances
and negotiations are deeply related to the political agendas of the organised rural social movements led
by women in Colombia (see Rodriguez Castro, 2020).

In conclusion, critiques of the coloniality of gender point to the need to forge dialogues and alliances
with diverse women’s struggles that espouse different metaphysical commitments from those of the
West. It is also important to move away from gender ideologies that seek to govern women in the
majority world. We must have a political commitment to the epistemic forces and relationality of rural
places in the Global South, which in Abya Yala are deeply related to territorial struggles that have
plural herstories of decolonial body-land resistances to coloniality, extractivism and dispossession. As
Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso (2009, p. 52) argues, without losing international connections, we must
‘recover the small space of the community (in its plural sense)’ and ‘set our focus on to those local
processes happening within entire communities’. As feminists and scholars committed to understanding
rurality in place, while supporting the struggles of the body-land, we must feeling-think, and support
the dismantling of all forms of extractivism and dispossession in the countryside.

acknowledgements
Quisiera agradecer a todas las mujeres y sus familias, que hicieron parte de los proyectos en Colombia
por su hospitalidad, amistad y lucha constante. ¡Para seguir sentipensando nuevos mundos para una
vida digna y plena en el campo Colombiano! I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers, Feminist Review
and the Coloniality themed issue editors, and also to my brilliant cousin Diego Andres Castro Bacares
and to Barbara Pini for comments and chats on earlier versions of the article.

author biography
Laura Rodriguez Castro is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and
Globalisation at Deakin University. Her research focuses on the intersections of decolonial feminisms,
anti-racism, memory and rurality. Laura’s forthcoming book, Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place:
Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), explores how rural
women enact and imagine decolonial feminist worlds.

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