October 2, 2025

Racial Economies: Black and Indigenous Politics and the Making of the Colombian Left, 1930–1948

Key Points

Activists organized in multiracial class movements, advocating for racial equality beyond racial definitions.
Black and Indigenous struggles criticized exploitation and sought to merge race and class as overlapping issues.
Dominant ideologies often misrepresented racial issues, limiting the claims and policies needed for true equity.
Historical engagement of diverse groups in Leftist politics influenced contemporary understandings of race and class.

Abstract

Abstract In the 1930s and 1940s, Indigenous and Black activists in Colombia mobilized through the Left to challenge what the prominent Black socialist Diego Luis Córdoba called racial economies. Scholars have tended to focus on racially defined organizing while ignoring the participation of Black and Indigenous people in multiracial class movements that advanced policies of racial equality and that predate the multicultural turn. Studies of leftist politics also tend to forgo systemic engagement with questions of race. Black and Indigenous activists criticized racialized hierarchies of land and labor exploitation but also insisted that class and race were overlapping modes of struggle that required organizing through multiracial class channels. Despite these shared histories of struggle, dominant ideologies of racial harmony and mixture shaped the claims that these populations could make. Whereas Indigenous people were seen as a separate ethnic group that required specific policies, Black people's problems were mainly understood to be a matter of economic exclusion.

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