“Becoming Alijuna”: The Wayuu People Facing Climate Change and Territorial Plundering

Abstract

In the four centuries following the first contacts with Europeans, the Wayuu managed to maintain a remarkable socio-political and cultural semi-autonomy by incorporating and adapting elements from outside their original socio-cosmological and cosmo-political principles. This situation has deteriorated in recent decades due to increasing pressure from various forces from the non-indigenous world and their interaction with demographic dynamics and climate change. In the article, I examine how the Wayuu people experience these profound transformations as a ‘becoming alijuna’, i.e. non-indigenous, that affects not only human persons, but the whole of their cosmic environment. ‘Becoming alijuna’ is seen as a process closely related to following less and less the sükuaitpa wayuu, an expression that can be translated as “that which has proceeded together with the Wayuu”. In the article, I propose an analysis of this concept and of its importance for understanding the principles of socio-cosmology and cosmo-politics associated with the ‘Wayuu way of being, doing and living’. I highlight how the sükuaitpa wayuu can be understood as the process and product of a constant attempt to maintain and/or re-establish balance in the relations between the Wayuu and the other forces that populate their cosmic environment through an activity of ‘readjustment’ of situations of cosmo-political conflict. In this sense, ‘becoming alijuna’ is experienced as a deep crisis of this capacity. This is evident when one examines the Wayuu interpretation of climate change, particularly regarding the rainfall patterns in their territory.