Experiences of the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Northern Colombia

This paper is a preliminary presentation of findings of a project that explores the experiences of the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia with the establishment of a Capuchin mission in their territory (1917-1982).  The project explores their experiences as being at the same time material and symbolic, by looking into its different dimensions beyond the issue of conversion to include land tenure, labor relations, gender relations, kinship, forms of resistance and adaptation, and the construction of historical narratives about the mission. Using a combination of archival research and fieldwork, this paper concentrates on the period of arrival of the missionaries. The existing narratives (produced by the missionaries, anthropologists and the Arhuacos themselves) have tended to explain the establishment of the mission as a cultural confrontation between autonomous groups. Despite the differences between them, these narratives share a notion of the Arhuaco as “autochthonous” and passive in face of the mission, as well as an interpretation of a clash of two homogeneous groups each on a side of a “frontier”. Looking at a longer process that reaches a couple of decades before the formal establishment of the mission, what I find is a process of configuration of a middle ground—concept I adapt from Richard White’s—in which diverse agents including missionaries, indigenous peoples, colonos and local public officials found strategies and common vocabularies to defend their interests and face the imperative of interaction. I seek to go beyond interpretive models that understand the relationship between the Arhuaco and the non-Arhuaco as a bipolar, vertical and unyielding one in which the former are victimized and the latter demonized by exploring concrete interactions and conflicts that allow me to formulate a more balanced interpretation of a process of transformation of a marginal territory in early twentieth century Colombia.