“Defending the River to Defend Ourselves” —The Fights of Black People Against Diverting the Ovejas River in the Northern Region of Colombian Cauca Department

«Defender el río para defendernos a nosotros mismos». Luchas de gente negra por la desviación del río Ovejas en el norte del Cauca, Colombia

This article describes and analyzes Black populations’ political organization processes in the municipalities of Suárez and Buenos Aires to oppose the project to divert the course of the Ovejas river, in South Western Colombia, between 1994 and 2001. Drawing on archival ethnography and interviews to community actors engaged in this process, we describe the continuities and discontinuities in the organizational forms set up by these communities. These ones, in turn, account for regional historical, political, and cultural specificities which allowed for the multicultural turn brought about by the 1991 Political Constitution, since the Chart enshrined national Black populations’ ethnic and territorial rights. We found that practices and relations established among local organizations and state institutions allow us to track the emergence of languages and categories that shaped ethnicized and racialized subjects, by establishing new means to relate to the State thus making possible the emergence of political leaderships based on narratives transcending Afro-Colombian people’s ethnic and territorial fights.