Pilar Riaño-Alcalá

Emplaced witnessing: Commemorative practices among the Wayuu in the Upper Guajira

This article explores witnessing in the context of mass violation of human rights. It analyses the commemorative practices of a Wayuu community around the 2004 massacre when six Wayuu, four of them women, were killed and the entire community forcibly displaced from their ancestral territory in the north-eastern part of Colombia (Guajira region). The annual commemoration temporarily brings the displaced back to their land to share, remember and have political discussions on the demands for justice and return to the territory. During these days, the Wayuu perform plural forms of testimony through the recreation of everyday life; the walking and re-signifying of the paths and sites of destruction; the remaking of places; and the re-enactment of their demands for return. This analysis highlights the restorative nature of these emplaced forms of witnessing and the role of testimony through which leaders and elders give public voice to their suffering and resistance to violence. These practices relocate the witnessing authority of outsider researchers in a relational field where survivor testimonial practices share space, knowledge production and political agendas with outsider witnesses.

Medellin, Colombia: Reinhabiting Memory

The project La Piel del Memoria/The Skin of Memory brought together the public-art vision of the artist Suzanne Lacy and the research and community work of the anthropologist Pilar Riaño-Alcalá. It responded to local needs and situations influenced by specific global forces, using art, ritual, and commemoration. The project took place in 1998–99 in the Colombian city of Medellín, in a barrio called Antioquia, a neighborhood with a distinct history marked by exclusion, social tensions, and multiple forms of drug-related, territorial, political, and everyday violence. Lacy and Riaño worked in collaboration with local youth, women, and community leaders, with five local nongovernmental and governmental organizations, and with a multidisciplinary team of historians, social workers, educators, artists, and architects. The following text intersperses a description of the project with excerpts from an ongoing conversation between Lacy and Riaño.

Land, justice, and memory: challenges for peace in Colombia

ABSTRACT In this introduction, the editors present the seven articles that constitute this special issue on Colombia. They explain the context of the war that has wracked the country for more than 50 years and highlight the central themes that connect the articles. This essay also analyzes how the 2016 accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) aims to address the causes of the conflict so as to establish a durable peace with justice. The essay then looks at the challenges ahead for the implementation of the agreement. Issues of rural inequality, displacement, impunity, the illegal drug economy, the military, private armed groups, new social demands, innovative memory projects, and the changing role of the state are discussed. The bibliography provides a guide to some of the best Colombian literature on the armed conflict, its impact, and possible outcomes of the peace process.

Incorporating individual community assets in neighbourhood houses: Beyond the community-building tradition of settlement houses

As a global movement, neighbourhood houses (NHs) are found in urban communities all over the world. Following the community-building tradition of early settlement houses, NHs have been actively nurturing and mobilizing community assets to serve the local community, but it is not known whether NHs have incorporated these assets in their infrastructure. This article reports the findings of a clearinghouse survey of 15 NHs in Metro Vancouver, Canada, which indicate that they nurtured community assets and incorporated them into their infrastructure as paid staff. Yet at the leadership level, the incorporation falls short of ethno-racial minority members from the community.

Forced Migration of Colombians: A Relational Perspective

This chapter examines the research process and the methodological and ethical challenges of a comparative study of the forced migration of Colombians in three national contexts: Colombia, Ecuador and Canada. During the years in which this research study was carried out (2005–2009), Colombia was the country with the second highest rate of internal displacement in the world and the primary source of persons from the region seeking refuge. The chapter discusses the insights and questions that emerge from examining the dynamics of fear in the displacement and integration processes of forced migrants and the various social and political locations used by internally displaced persons and refugees in their interactions with local societies and a host of local, national and international institutions. It discusses the challenges the research team encountered in the attempt to construct differentiated typologies of forced migration, which risked missing the complexities of the phenomenon and the continuities between different forms of migration. The chapter highlights the research potential of a relational comparative perspective that reconstructs fields of relations and variations between the experiences of internally displaced persons and persons living in refugee situations. Our analysis of the forced migration experiences of displaced persons and refugees in a number of sites revealed a host of factors that impact on forced migration and integration processes and the links between local, internal, regional and international migration movements.