Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The Sierra de Perijá is explored as a border mountain area shaped by layered refuge histories. Focusing on Yukpa and peasant territories, displacement and post–peace accord land claims, this paper examines mountain territoriality as sedimented practices of refuge, mobility and coexistence.

Paper long abstract

The Sierra de Perijá, forming the border between Colombia and Venezuela, is a mountain region historically constituted through successive waves of refuge, displacement, and re-materialization. Long home to the Yukpa, the only Indigenous group inhabiting the Sierra, the mountains functioned as a refuge from colonial expansion. During Colombia’s internal armed conflict, the region became a shelter for peasant communities displaced from other parts of the country, before later turning into a site of expulsions once violence entered the Sierra itself. Since 2016, the area has been further reshaped by cross-border mobility, the use of transit zones for contraband, the arrival of Venezuelan refugees, and the establishment of demobilization camps for disarmed ex-FARC combatants.

This paper conceptualizes the Sierra de Perijá through the lens of mountain refuge histories, approaching the region as a layered territory of belonging in which past and present modes of refuge sediment into overlapping and competing territorial projects. These include legally recognized Indigenous resguardos, claims to ancestral Indigenous territories, proposals for peasant reserve zones, individual property regimes, military infrastructures, and international border arrangements. In the post–peace accord context on the Colombian side of the Sierra, these layers are re-articulated through land claims, victim compensation, reconciliation, and territorial “healing,” while simultaneously being shaped by infrastructure expansion, emerging tourism, and the anticipation of future resource extraction.

Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper argues that belonging in border mountain regions emerges not from fixed or exclusive claims to autochthony, but from historically sedimented practices of refuge, mobility, and negotiated coexistence.