‘Memory is the Force of Resistance’: An Other Politics Through Spatial Commemoration Embodied in the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Apartadó, Colombia

Abstract

Memory scholars have shown that it is an embodied and material practice able to generate fairer possible futures, and that peaces is a politicized, context-specific process. Yet, what is the real contribution of memory to peace building by social movements? The San José de Apartadó Peace Community is a group of small-scaled farmers based in Urabá, a Colombian region devastated by war. This paper is a study of commemorative pilgrimages to massacre sites by community members, and of the stones with the victims’ names painted on them. The authors carried out a fifteen-month ethnographic research in Colombia between 2011 and 2014, following the participant observation methodology. They also conducted 49 interviews, and studied the relationship between these space-embodied practices and the community’s resistance to armed conflict, as well as its peace-construction process. I state  that such ways of materialization encourage essential aspects for the construction of an autonomist “Other Politics” including solidarity with partners; the movilization of the body in the space to defend life and land; reflection, education and continuous strategic planning to strengthen the community’s cohesion and organization. After integrating the studies on the practice of memory, the geographies of peace and social movements, I describe how the commemoration of massacres in San José de Apartadó by the Peace Community, as well as the stones they collect, express their rejection to vindictive violence. Instead, they build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics, on the grounds of internal and external solidarity.