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Paper short abstract

Based on the ethnographic work I am currently conducting in the southern Colombian Pacific, this paper shares co-constructed analyses with women who reinvent politics through everyday popular economic practices.

Paper long abstract

Colombia has the second largest Afro-descendant population in Latin America, most of which is concentrated along the Pacific Coast, a region characterized both by its important global biodiversity reserves and by high levels of extreme poverty. In this context, Afro-Colombian women engage in organizing processes in response to the multiple forms of violence that affect both their bodies and the territories and communities they inhabit. They do so primarily through strategies, practices, and economic relationships forged in popular everyday life and oriented toward the reproduction of life. Drawing on the ethnographic work I am conducting in the Colombian Pacific, and taking as a central hypothesis that political work is not separate from the activities that recreate life (Vega Solís, 2019), this paper presents co-constructed analyses developed together with women involved in organizing processes that they describe as socio-ecological and economic. These processes challenge binaries such as legal–illegal and formal–informal, thereby problematizing analyses that contribute to the reproduction of polarizing positions within society.