How Does Racial Inequality Happen?

The persistence of racial inequality in Latin America is puzzling. Unlike the US, racial disparities persisted without official policies enforcing racial categorization and instituting spatial segregation. This presentation explores the relationship between racialization and rurality as mutually constitutive processes that help explain the persistence of racial inequality in Latin America. Focusing on the territorial configuration of the Colombian Pacific Region, this analysis reconstructs three different moments in the formation of a racialized geography: 1) the colonial distribution of mining and slavery from the 16th to the 18th century, 2) the racialized peasantization of the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, and 3) the violent dispossession of the late 20th and early 21st century. Although Colombia, like other Latin American countries, did not legalize racial distinctions, the uneven incorporation of the Pacific Region in national and international markets (either legal or illegal) contributed to reproducing ruralized forms of ethnoracial inequality.

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