Marginalized, but not Marginals: Blacks and Mulattos and their Disputes for the Territorial Autonomy in Chocó, Colombia (1903-1947)

Abstract

Chocó, due to the status of intendancy that maintained until 1947, was a territory with low levels of political, economic and administrative autonomy. Being an intendancy and not a department, it made Chocó electorally dependent on Antioquia, legally on Cauca and administratively on Bogota. In this article, we study the role that leaders of Afro-descendant origin played in achieving greater levels of territorial autonomy for Chocó during the first half of the 20th century. We suggest that the status of Intendancy, reserved to territories with low population density and low productive indexes, was not only a reaction of Colombian government to the trauma that meant the separation of Panama from Colombia. That status, we argue, had also to do with the derogatory racial representations that historically weighed about this territory and its inhabitants. National officials, travelers and members of the political and intellectual elite of Colombia insisted that Chocó, for its majority black population, was a territory inhabited by savages that needed a sort of tutelage from the national government. We conclude that, faced with the process of marginalization that was built on the Intendency of the Chocó from the center of the country, some black and mulatto people, far from feeling marginal individuals, advanced actions and debates that were definitive in achieving the department status for this territory of the Pacific Coast.