Social reproduction and the operations of racial capitalism on and against body territories in the Chocó, Colombia.

Keywords: politics of operations, racial capitalism, body-territory, social reproduction, Chocó
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Typically operated by white-mestizo backhoe operators and Black riverine community members, alluvial gold exploitation mines riverbeds and floodplain sediments using a combination of machinery, manual labor, and mercury. The process causes deforestation and poisons rivers, aquatic life, and Black and Indigenous peoples in the Chocó department in northwestern Colombia. Recent publications about gold mining in the Chocó (Castillo & Rubiano, 2019; Tubb, 2020) account for the process but lack a substantive engagement with feminist political ecology. In this paper, I argue AGE embodies an operation of racial capitalism (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019) that transforms gold mining from an artisanal practice into mechanized enclaves, as Black riverine community members take on jobs for wages and the gold then moves along the commodity chain. Drawing from ongoing dissertation research along the upper Atrato River basin, the paper elaborates on how Black women’s social reproduction activities enable and subsidize the risky business cycle of dredges and bulldozers. Through ethnographic richness, I demonstrate that white-mestizo capitalists remotely operate on and against body-territories (Gago, 2020) by extracting and appropriating surplus value from Afro descendant living-labor and rainforest livelihoods. AGE in Chocó shows how capital and patriarchal property norms reconfigured the gendered division of labor and accounts for how gold mining profits are co-produced across racialized and feminized terrains of power (Asher, 2020).