Thinking/doing the (im)possible: Examples of crack-making practices grounded in Medellín, Colombia

Abstract

This research examines the struggles and efforts of Madres Buscadoras, Juntanza de Mujeres and Mujeres Tejedoras situated in Comuna 13, Medellín, Colombia, as decolonial cracks in coloniality and modernity and re-existence as decolonial praxis. Comuna 13, marked by reconfigurations of the colonial/modern order, violence stemming from the internal conflict, forced displacement, and marginalization, provides a critical site for exploring grassroots initiatives that resist the most pervasive reconfigurations of the entanglement of violence-dispossession-war-death (Walsh, 2022). In this context, these grassroots women’s collectives create spaces of memory, reparation, and communal resistance through symbolic, artistic, social, and political practices. Through these actions, they defy war, challenge the exclusion and marginalization they have historically been subjected to, and endeavor to create and construct something else (Walsh, 2022). Drawing on Latin American decolonial and feminist frameworks, the project explores how these initiatives act as crack-making and re-existence decolonial practices that enact and make possible alternative futures outside of the colonial/modern order, where justice, recognition, and reparation are granted and where marginalized communities can re-elaborate life in their own terms and conditions. Using qualitative, participatory ethnography—including pláticas and escrevivência—the research emphasizes these communities' experiences, voices, and creative practices (e.g., textiles-making, chants, songs, symbolic sit-ins) and highlights diverse, but interconnected expressions of decolonial resistance and re-existence through life-affirming practices. The main guiding research question is as follows: How do (communal) forms of being, acting, and relating in Medellín, Colombia, open imaginative, social, political, and/or cultural spaces that contest coloniality through re-existence and crack-making practices? Ultimately, the research aims to examine how the efforts and struggles of Madres Buscadoras, Mujeres Tejedoras, and Juntanza de Mujeres confront what Catherine Walsh describes as the entanglement of violence-dispossession-war-death wrought by coloniality and modernity; to analyze how these initiatives and struggles become examples of crack-making practices grounded in the Global South, and to explore how these efforts and struggles open spaces where decolonial re-existence is possible and enacted.