Re‐listening in Colombia to ‘Women's Voices from the Rainforest’

Women's Voices from the Rainforest. Janet Gabriel Townsend (in collaboration with Ursula Arrevillaga, Jennie Bain, Socorro Cancino, Susan F. Frenk, Silvana Pacheco and Elia Pérez). Routledge, London, UK and New York, USA, 1995, pp. viii + 212. ISBN 978-0-415-10532-3 (pbk). Sarah Radcliffe (2019) points out that after the Cuban revolution, the British government became much more aware of the lack of experts in the Latin American region. This led to the creation of five Latin American studies centres in the UK with academics in Latin American geography in 1964. Notwithstanding the Cold War geopolitics that spurred these developments, these centres and the wider Latin American agenda provided space for progressive scholarship. In contrast to many in the early Latin Americanist geographers, Radcliffe highlights the work of Janet Townsend as a geographer ‘whose work constitutes a distinct and significant collaboration’ (Radcliffe, 2019: 142). Janet applied a feminist and participatory geography and returned her publications to those who were part of it. Alongside Women's Voices from the Rainforest (WVFTR), she published a companion volume in Mexico, Voces Femeninas de las Selvas (Townsend et al., 1994). Although it has the same title and addresses similar themes, it was not a translation, but a different book, credited to the four field staff and written around the project's reports on work in the four Mexican States involved in the fieldwork. Whereas Women's Voices focuses on projects in Mexico but is explicitly informed by reflection on her previous work in Colombia, Voces Femeninas focuses entirely on her work in Mexico. Radcliffe remarks that David Slater (1971, 2004) and Janet Townsend's (1995) WVFTR are two examples of how to interact with civil society and social movements, and offer an innovative analysis, where the objective was not to capture data from Latin America and bring it to the UK, but to maintain a respectful and open connection to the thinking and knowledge of people in the region. It can be said then that Janet's work sought and developed in a pioneering way, decolonial practices of producing knowledge in more symmetrical relationships, aware of the inequalities of power within and outside universities. Before bringing some of the current voices of the women of the Colombian rainforest, I have looked at the citation of Janet's book in the academic literature in the Scopus records. I will only say that most citations logically come from where Janet formed a close school of thought, that is: Durham University, University of St Andrews, University of Cambridge, Victoria University of Wellington, Newcastle University, and others. But because of her publications in Spanish, she also had a direct influence on Latin American academic literature, especially in Mexico. Based on my own work and on a review of the work of fellow women Colombian geographers, who have worked with rural women in similar and nearby locations where Janet worked during her visits between the late 1960s and mid-1980s, I will present the most recent voices that they bring from women in the rainforest. The conversions or epistemological turns that Janet describes in her book give voices to women in land settlement and construct situated knowledge. Contemporary feminist critical geography takes up Janet's epistemological turns to analyse the continuity of relations of power and violence in the processes of dispossession of colonized lands in previous decades. Eloísa Berman-Arévalo and Diana Ojeda (2020) have worked during the second decade of this century in Montes de María, a region north of the Serranía de San Lucas, where Janet worked with women and families who came from land settlement processes. Much has changed in the region over the past forty years: motorcycles have replaced mules, cell phones have reduced isolation, and the market has entered the most remote areas. But social inequalities, power relations, and violence persist. From what the authors call ordinary geographies, they point out that ‘Montes de María is a region where the complementarities of war and agrarian extractivism have resulted in complex and violent landscapes’ (Berman-Arévalo & Ojeda, 2020: 1584). As in other rural areas of the country, the authors point out that during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, paramilitary control exercised through massacres, sexual violence, torture, forced displacement and confinement contributed to the implementation and rapid expansion of oil palm plantations. Introduced through state subsidies and growing demand, the expansion of oil palm plantations has played a central role in the continued dispossession of local peasant, Afro-descendant and indigenous populations. The geographies of dispossession have been recently documented in several Latin American countries, but in Colombia it has historically occurred through cycles of violence. During the 1990s and early years of this century, what has been called a counter-agrarian reform was introduced in Colombia (Grajales, 2011). In Montes de María as in other regions of the country, land-grabbing has gone together with the appropriation and privatization of water for agro-industrial production. Water-grabbing has materialized through the enclosure of communal wells and ponds, making use of private fences, physical violence against people and free-roaming farm animals, or the presence of security guards associated with paramilitary groups. In the three decades since Janet's work, peasant settlement lands have been largely dispossessed by the violence of the late twentieth century, displacing labour for new agro-industrial monoculture plantations. In this new order, women are basically in charge of carrying out the care work, such as cooking, cleaning, taking care of children, and other activities that guarantee that men are able to carry out their jobs at the plantations. ‘In Marialabaja, capitalism, race and gender acted as interlocking systems of power that enabled the violent appropriation of land and water’ (Berman-Arévalo & Ojeda, 2020: 1589). On the other hand, several geographers are reflecting extensively on the implications of recognizing all the effects of racialized geographies. This is in terms of the permanence or expulsion of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasants, which implies their movement from one territory to another to flee the conflict. Racialized geographies also focus on the spatial dynamics of the extractivist conflicts, and how they exacerbated various forms of violence against Black and Indigenous women and feminized bodies. In relation to indigenous communities, geographer Astrid Ulloa (2024) investigates from the perspectives of indigenous territories and spatialities. She points out that these feminist geographies are disruptive and in permanent dialogue and exchange, and they propose key challenges and opportunities for the discipline in Colombia. Not only have they contributed to highlighting the dispossession of life resources (land, water, symbols and cultures), but they do so with interdisciplinary methodologies, gender visions that overcome binarism and strengthen intersectionality. ‘They highlight feminist corporalities and discussions from the perspectives of indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant feminisms, as well as new masculinities’ (Ulloa, 2024: 5). In the work of Jennifer Devine and Diana Ojeda (2017) on the tourism industry in Colombia and Guatemala, from a critical geographical approach, they point out that ‘everyday tourism practices are intimately related to diverse expressions of violence in various forms, of which dispossession is a prominent expression’ (Devine & Ojeda, 2017: 605). They illustrate how diverse practices of dispossession in tourism manifest in violent practices and recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, which they indicate as destructive creation and (neo)colonialism. Geographies of tourism have focused on the need to study tourism in relation to dispossession, displacement and the disenfranchisement of local populations. Donny Meertens, a contemporary geographer of Janet and one of her friends, also investigated the issues of land, women and violence in Colombia (Meertens, 1997). Recently, she analysed how land restitution processes and reparation policies implemented after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC have addressed women's rights to land and property. Meertens (2019) explores the structural, institutional and cultural barriers that hinder women's access to justice and land ownership, highlighting gender inequality in rural areas. In the tremendously diverse geographies of Colombia and Latin America, these new geographies are rethinking the debates not only with new concepts, but also with different cartographic representations that come from the dispossessed and native communities of the territories. These geographies open new perspectives that provide an opportunity to rethink the relationships with water and land and the territorial dynamics of peasants, indigenous people and black communities in the face of the demands of extractivism and the global economy. Critical geographies in Colombia connect with contemporary geography in the world, allowing networks, mobility of researchers and fruitful dialogues in cooperative relationships. The seeds that Janet Townsend planted in WVFTR germinate decades later in a generational change that continues to critically investigate more just societies. Through my work with rural women in the Andean mountains of southwestern Colombia who produce coffee, I have continued the work that Janet developed in her last years of academic production: women's self-empowerment (Pineda et al., 2019). In line with Janet's legacy, we have explored women's agency, especially collective agency, in different dimensions and categories of analysis to change power relations in the territories. Our findings highlight the need to strengthen female associativity as a central mechanism for the exercise of collective agency and empowerment (Castiblanco-Moreno & Pineda, 2022). Thanks to Janet's generosity, pedagogy and dedication to those of us who were her disciples, today I feel satisfied to have been able to create the Master's Degree in Gender Studies at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and to have supervised several doctoral and Master's theses, not only on the topic of female empowerment but also multiple relevant topics on gender, masculinities, care and critical geographies

Active listening · Geography · Rainforest · Sociology · Afro-Latin American Studies · Communication · Ecology · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American Literature Studies

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• Ordinary Geographies

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