Guajiro terrors. A cross-reading through the policies of identity, the mass violence and transnational economy

Abstract

Focusing on the recent experiences of the Wayuu indigenous people of Colombian Guajira, I analyze the ways in which memory practices in situations of mass violence are intertwined with the politics of multiculturalism and expansion of transnational mining. In the first part I describe the current context of La Guajira and the expansion of the transnational economy. In the second part I use the concept of mediations to analyze some of the ways in which indigenous peoples have been processing their experiences of mass violence. In the third part I analyze the events of mass violence and various forms of articulation with other fields. In the last part, I propose a cross-reading of these fields, trying to show why the notion of mediations of memory helps to analyze the acts of violence without getting caught up in the phenomenology of the event or circumscribed to the grammars of culture.