By Agathe Faure.
For two years, in 2018 and 2019, I immersed myself in the lives of Emberá Dobidá families who had migrated from Colombia’s Pacific coastal region of the Chocó to the bustling urban environment of Medellín. Their journey from rainforest settlements to the country’s second largest city was clearly a defining feature of their lives. But through my research I learned that ‘movement’ was central to the Emberá Dobidá not only in terms of this life-changing migration but also in the stories they told me of their past and in the observations I made of their everyday experience of the city. Movement, whether in the Chocó or in Medellín, shaped social relationships for the Emberá Dobidá. If it was either expanded or contained, their sociality was impacted.
Early on in my fieldwork, I was struck by the recurrence of news articles and everyday conversations in Colombia that acknowledged the growing urbanisation of Indigenous peoples. But whenever I shared my research interests with governmental and non-governmental institutions, as well as with Indigenous organisations and academics, I hit a wall. Most seemed uncomfortable with the topic, brushing it aside to explain Indigenous migration to cities as a necessity or an embarrassment, something Indigenous people did to study and find better economic opportunities, or to flee the armed conflict that continues to rage in their territories. When I turned to published studies, I mainly found official reports that emphasised the automatic acculturation of Indigenous peoples who, presumably forced to settle in cities, lost the material and spiritual resources that had ensured their cultural reproduction in their ancestral territories (for example, ACNUR 2006).
The Emberá Dobidá have been seen as one of the most dramatic examples of this process of urbanisation and acculturation (Corte Constitucional, 2009, 2010; RCN 2022). But following my fieldwork I am critical of the tendency to link Indigenous urbanisation with cultural erosion. Instead, my perspective has been informed by studies of multiculturalism in Colombia (for example, Chaves and Zambrano, 2006; Jaramillo, 2011; Vélez-Torres, 2013), which go beyond a static understanding of attaching cultures to specific geographical spaces. This perspective shows that, since the Colombian constitutional reform of 1991, the idea of internal difference has grounded each corner of the country in a specific cultural identity and has led to the sedentarisation of ethnic groups in bounded territories.
The ethnographic history of the Emberá Dobidá shows that they have long lived in fluid, small and mobile settlements, scattered across the rainforest of the Chocó (see, for example, Faron, 1962; Losonczy, 1997a, 1997b, 2006; Pardo-Rojas, 1992; Tayler, 1996). According to these records, movement between settlements enabled a flexible form of cooperation amongst Emberá Dobidá kin and non-kin, tying and untying relations between them. In the life stories I collected, however, I quickly realised that the sedentarisation of Emberá Dobidá in villages since the 1990s had threatened cooperation and heightened conflicts. Coupled with various forms of territorial encroachment and a long-standing aspiration for urban life, sedentarisation led to longer, wider, patterns of migration, with a growing population of Emberá Dobidá settling in faraway cities.
Through my long-term, intimate engagement with the Emberá Dobidá I came to know how they tried to adjust their mobility in urban contexts. Often during fieldwork, I was caught out by lengthy conversations about the exact details of journeys here and there, modes of transport, lengths of journeys, costs and surprises on the way. Discussions then always shifted towards the everyday practice of moving, outside of the house and in the street. Emberá Dobidá men and women liked to share with me stories of what they had observed and gathered when they walked around Medellín – from the boxes and bags full of fruits and vegetables that they were given from merchants in various spots of the city, to the jewellery or toys they found in bins. In order for them to get hold of the things Medellín had to offer, most Emberá Dobidá knew they had to take particular routes around the city and move at a particular pace. The ones who moved would know about and collect things they needed, desired, on their path. Others, ‘the ones who didn’t walk’ (los que no caminan) or the ones who ‘stayed still in the house’ (se quedan quieto/as en la casa), would remain ‘ignorant’ (no saben), poor in knowledge as well as in material goods.
It was also through the unrelenting streams of demands I received from the Emberá Dobidá that I became more aware of the social texture that movement held for them. Because I was travelling a lot, between Emberá Dobidá households, across Medellín, back to France and the UK, the Emberá Dobidá said I knew and had a lot. But they also expected me to revoke the inequalities movement temporarily created by giving what I had to them – those who, in comparison to me, had stayed put. The intricate dynamics in our relationships sharpened my eye to the multitude of physical, embodied movements that shaped my interlocutors’ daily realities. I slowly realised that moving had to have a specific social purpose for them: it rippled through their relationships and translated into reciprocal gestures of giving and receiving. These, in turn, produced the ‘good energies’ that moved between bodies and sustained moral life for the Emberá Dobidá.
But most of the times in the city, the Emberá Dobidá I know found it hard to preserve the precarious and delicate balance between movement of people, exchanges of care and flows of energy, and the egalitarian ethos this balance aims to support. Unemployment, poverty, racial discrimination or institutional exclusion have immobilised them. This has resulted in the rise of what my interlocutors often described as ‘bad energies’ and provoked a general sense of decline in how the Emberá Dobidá people manage social relations today. Through my work with the families in Medellín I became aware of forms of social disruption that are not captured in the conventional understanding of cultural erosion through displacement. The Emberá Dobidá did not feel they lost culture because they left their villages. Instead, complex, historical disturbances in their practices of movement have shaken their sociality. This suggests that an attention to various scales and textures of movement may shed light on the everyday experiences of social change that occur with Indigenous urbanisation beyond the Emberá Dobidá context alone.