Paper short abstract:

My work focuses, through interviews and life histories, on the pain of loss and the process of reconstructing identity of the 3 million people who have been forcefully displaced from their homes as a direct or indirect consequence of the armed conflict in Colombia.

Paper long abstract:

There are around 3 million people who have been forcefully displaced from their homes as a direct or indirect consequence of the armed conflict in Colombia.

The invisibility of such a massive and constant flow of migration is a three-branched phenomenon: international, national and indidivual . Overcoming this invisibility is by far one of the main challenges these community face day after day.

This article also focuses, through interviews and life histories, on the pain of loss and the process of reconstructing identity of the displaced families.

The ethnographic research in marginal neighborhoods around Bogotá on which this article is based on shows that "real" space and time vanish into an emotional succession of events, idealized lost paradises, unknown future paths and impossible dreams of return. The enterviewees are mainly peasants from the countryside alien to the dynamics and rhythm of a big city, with a very low level of education and in many cases with no family or social connections in Bogotá.

Displaced people talk about an irreparable break in their cultural and socio-economic way of life. Despite the deep loss suffered by these people, their migration is changing the shape of major cities, the role and participation level of women in the urban life, the rural-urban relation all over the country, and it could determine in a not so distant future the possibility of real change in Colombian society.