How To Work Together

What we learned from two weeks filming multiple organisations resisting racism and extractivism in Colombia

The day after finishing with Vision Suoreste in Antioquia, sitting beneath the tin roof of a cafe’s verandah in La Pintada, we waited for the bus that would take us the 8 hours to Cali. Parked at the back of a bus we watched the landscape change as we descended south from Antioquia, through Caldas, Risapalda and finally Valle de Cauca. We observed as the wildly differing landscapes which create the beautiful patchwork of Colombia disappeared, replaced by a sea of green sugar cane the locals refer to as ‘The Green Monster’. We had been invited to film a series of initiatives by Arturo Escobar, a leading academic writing about the “pluriverse” for many years. Escobar is part of a group of academics who are trying to connect different grassroots initiatives in the area, both materially and by providing new linguistic and political frameworks. The Tapestry of Alternatives seeks to facilitate a diversity of visions in the region surrounding the river Cauca which has been dominated and exploited by the sugarcane industry for decades.

You can drive for an hour in any one direction out of the city and not yet reach the end of these mass sugarcane plantations which have replaced natural ecosystems and the traditional fincas which supported families and the local flora and fauna. Fincas are small farms which use agro-ecological techniques — although back in the day, when they were aplenty, these techniques were just deemed common sense. Walking through a finca is walking through a food forest: different fruit trees and vegetable patches sprout up through the rich soil, some growing high over head. Rather than stand in uniform rows, they grow wildly and seemingly without order, although a trained eye will notice how plants are rooted next to neighbours which support their growth, creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem of nutrient-swapping. The air buzzes with insects and bird song, and the soil tamps under one’s feet, unlike the soil in neighbouring sugarcane plantations which send up dust clouds as one traipses through. And there is a lot of dust. 243,000 of the region’s 300,000 hectares are now sugarcane. 75,000 tonnes of raw material are produced every year. The campesinos call it “the green monster”.

Cauca is a diverse region, made up of indigenous populations, white Colombians and Afro-Colombians. The finca tradition supported the campesinos (farmers) including much of the Black population. Just two generations ago, these lands would have been a patchwork of connected fincas, all providing direct support for families and wider communities. The fincas fed into local economies by nurturing local markets and trade between neighbours. But they were erased by what one campesino called “the green revolution”.

When the sugarcane industry descended on Cauca in the sixties, they used many of the same techniques the mining industry is now using in Antioquia. They promised the Afro-Colombian population that they would be much wealthier if they sold or leased their land to produce sugarcane, insisting that “fincas” were no way to continue living. Under either promise or threat, lands were handed over to huge corporate interests, and the living standards of the population suffered. Rather than spending their days directly working for their own needs, they were either hired to work the fields or forced into urban centres to find a waged salary in order to provide the food they had previously grown themselves.

This didn’t just damage the social fabric of communities. It damaged the local environment. Where the campasinos had never needed pesticides thanks to knowledge, passed down through generations, of what we now call agro-ecological practices, the sugarcane industry depended on it to produce seas of monoculture. Insects disappeared, along with birds. Local fauna had nothing to support them and the river herself suffered as water resources were sucked up to support the plantations despite laws that prevent planting within a certain area of rivers. As in much of Colombia, the Cauca region has been beset by violence as different groups sought to gain control of the land.

Farmers in this region have already experienced the destruction of one green revolution. They do not want to see another. Instead, they are trying to take back land from multinational interests to renew its health and repair their social cultures.

Rachel: Obviously, the original green revolution which displaced farmers in Cauca had nothing to do with ‘sustainability’ which the word green now implies. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to hear, after having spent time in Antioquia with a community fighting against the mining industry, how that green revolution became a green monster. Considering the amount of stories around the world of indigenous populations displaced to make way for green industry — let alone the damage caused to the planet — it’s fair to say that our own green transition, for many, is a green monster.

One initiative, about twenty minutes from Cali, is to create a corridor of fincas right through the middle of the sugarcane plantations. We spoke to two Afro-Colombian campesinos who have adjoining fincas and are collaborating with another about ten minutes from their land. In their middle age with grown up children, they themselves are the children of the generation whose land was removed by lies. They hope more campesinos will join them to create this corridor between their two plots, healing the soil and regenerating the local economy.

This idea has its roots in an astonishing story. Its initiator, a middle-aged woman with soil-stained fingers, explained how when she was a child she saw the 1977 miniseries Roots. It follows the journey of Kunta Kinte, captured in his homeland in the Gambia and transported to colonial America, where he is sold into slavery.

She said she saw her family and community weep while watching it and didn’t understand. This began her long journey of self-education about racism, slavery, and the roots of her own people. She found a professor who told her she needed to learn about her rights, and gave her the book Liberty and Slavery. She kept researching, and found others in the region who knew about the desperate and cruel history of the Black community in Colombia. She then brought this knowledge home to her people, and they began to organise.

As with the people of Antioquia, who know the value of their land, these campesinos understood their freedom was linked to their ability to support themselves. Unlike the Antioquians, however, their land had already been taken from them. They had already been displaced, and with the loss of territory came an erosion of knowledge. In 1991, they launched the organisation AfroRights to explain what had been lost and what needed to be returned to them, traveling around different municipalities to seed the message through communities.

Other organisations have since sprung out of AfroRights and there is a strong network of self-education, political activism and grassroots organising among the Afro-Colombian community in Cauca. These farmers have successfully gotten back their land and tended the soil which now feeds them and their families, and the surplus of which is sold back to their communities at local markets.

We were given a generous tour of one of the fincas, and it was resplendent, hidden in the middle of a labyrinth of sugar cane. We picked mangos directly from the trees, offering them to the farmer who quickly peeled and sliced them up with his machete. He insisted we keep picking, keep tasting, keep eating. There were enormous banana and cacao trees, low chili plants, mandarina bushes, and fruits we had never come across. A rubber tree stretched high into the sky and wild bushes wound their vines and leaves across the soil. Our host delighted in showing us the wonders of his garden and, truly, the amount of produce was astonishing. We ate as we walked and talked in a group, and in the end it took us two hours to do the rounds of what is not a large plot of land, so rich it was with life.

Land and education were the themes of our time in Cali. We visited an urban area on the outskirts of Cali, whose residents are predominately Afro-Colombian. They have almost no green infrastructure—no parks or even trees on the streets—to cool the blazing heat. There is almost no soil to tend, and the neighbouring marsh lands have been polluted through years of industrial abuse. Yet, one haven has sprouted among the concrete.

Next to the marshlands, on a relatively small section of soil, is an urban garden. Tended by 17 people, it produces enough to feed their families and then share the leftover produce with their community. In the late 80s, this land was a street of makeshift homes built by Colombians who had been displaced by violence. It was demolished by the government after they were re-housed and became a local dumping ground. Then a group of teenagers who called themselves ‘Gardeners for Peace’ started trying to clear the area and plant trees. Cali at that time was teeming with violence due to drug gangs and police. One of the Gardeners was killed in the early 90s. The tree he planted now towers above the earth, providing shade to the garden that has been nurtured by the local community through eras of violence, peace, and, continuously, political abandonment.

Just down the street, a community centre which has been running for even longer sits unobtrusively between flats. With activity in two buildings on opposite sides of the road, laughing children dart between their open doors to engage in education programs, play, art, and read in a back room library which boasts hundreds of books. Here, graduates of the self-governed education programs who have gone on to university return voluntarily to nurture the next generation of children who must navigate violence and racial injustice, and sift through this labyrinth of disadvantage. The centre teaches about equality, justice, female empowerment, diversity, critical thought and perhaps, above all, how to overcome fear. One young woman we interviewed explained how prior to joining the centre she was full of fear, unable to speak up. Another woman, a grandmother, explained how, without the program, she would have been unable to look us in the eye, so ingrained was the racism which casts her on the lowest rung of Colombian society. The centre also runs an exam program to help local teenagers learn the curriculum for the national university entrance exam. By promoting the possibility of a different life, this initiative has helped 80 youths get into college, some of whom have gone on to get PhDs. Its grassroots, hands on approach, is tailored by the experience of its volunteers and their own lessons in overcoming self doubt and a political environment that has historically showed them apathy.

Robert: This framework of volunteers who have been with the program, I think, is a key pillar of its success. In Sydney, I used to volunteer with teen Polynesian boys in a mentoring program designed to promote their pathway into University. Being half-Samoan, I was excited to be involved. But before long I was chastised for providing alternative pathways to higher education. The program, run by my own university, had no understanding and little interest in the experiences of this community. It had one agenda set independent of its participants. It did not account for the higher likelihood of imprisonment in Polynesian men, the expectation that money would need to be sent back to the islands, or what would be required to overcome the implication that university was not a space for people that looked like them. So the program was scrapped when the university could not see, or advertise, an uptake in Polynesian enrollment. Because the Cali centre is facilitated by former members, its understanding of lived experience is intimate, its goals wide and its approaches flexible to whatever the present needs of the community should be. That is why, I have no doubt, the program has lasted 38 years, despite less funding than the program in Sydney, which only lasted 3.

Many of the organisations we spoke with throughout our two weeks have been working independently for decades and are now actively being interwoven into the Tapestry of Alternatives. We also spoke with some community organisers who are part of the Tapestry but not as far along in their journey, focussed on the stage which identifies the problem. One such organisation in Suarez is next to one of the biggest hydroelectric dams in Colombia, built in part to facilitate the harvesting of sugar cane. According to the binary narrative of renewables vs fossil fuels, the Salvajina dam should be a good thing. But it has devastated the local community, most of whom were Afro-Colombian finca farmers who for generations had produced food on the rich soil near the river. In building the dam, the government flooded those fincas, displacing hundreds of people and drowning the local economy.

As with the finca farmers closer to Cali, the community quite suddenly lost their way of life. There is little else to do in the area but farm, meaning most have been driven into poverty. Another acute example of institutional apathy towards this community is that they do not even access the electricity generated by the dam just five minutes down the road. They are still paying a premium for fossil fuel-generated electricity while the cheap “renewable” energy is sent to Cali.

It is almost impossible to describe the dam. What used to be the flowing spirit of the Cauca river is now a reservoir spanning 31 kilometres, over 1 kilometre in depth at its deepest. It is more like an immense lake, which took us an hour to drive round in a motor boat while hearing about all that had been lost from our guide. As we passed over the redirected water we were told of the buildings, churches and cemeteries that lay beneath us. The water also flushed out Suarez’s local, artisinal mining sector. It is possible to see some tiny mines still operating, carving out small slivers of the mountain at the hands of just a few people. But the revenue source was mostly lost.

Rachel: We were halfway across the reservoir when we asked how deep it gets, after having listened in horror about how this valley of farms was washed away. Hearing the number gave me a sense of vertigo as I let my gaze drop into the water and imagined it going deeper and deeper not into blue, but into green, until the land levelled out and patchworks of fincas emerged. I cannot understand what possesses anyone, be they individuals or institutions, to consider their plans to be more important than another’s reality. That such things have been done in the name of “renewable” energy for decades should serve as a stark warning for those who believe it is the energy source — and not our human system — which is the problem.

The community of Suarez do not yet have a clear vision of what they would like to achieve. Quite simply, at the beginning, they would like some reparations from the dam: access to its electricity and a share of the profits which came at the expense of their own livelihoods. The sense we got was that the dam is not going anywhere and, unlike the sugarcane plantations, they cannot take back parcels of the land which sit under its depths to regenerate the finca culture which was lost. Land and water are the ultimate currencies in Colombia, and underpin all currencies around the world. When rivers are dammed and lands submerged, all seems lost, along with the flora and fauna which were sacrificed in the pursuit of something immense.

And perhaps it is the absolute nature of that loss at the direction of powerful people which inflected our hosts in Suarez with a wariness. The campaign leader was willing to speak with us, but wasn’t quite sure what to make of us. There was no hostility but also little warmth, as, on first glance, perhaps we looked like gringos coming into their territory to extract their story for profit or attention. We encountered this a few times throughout our two weeks in Cali and, on reflection, it was most present in those who had been ripped away from their sense of place, and who could never return.

One memorable afternoon was spent with a collection of grandmothers on a rooftop who we interviewed as a group. There were differing levels of curiosity and concern directed towards us and, in moments, hostility. These women had grown up on the Caribbean coast, tending the soils as they had been taught by their mothers and grandmothers. Yet, the violence which swept Colombia for decades between paramilitary groups, government forces, and armed resistance as men fought over land, displaced these women. Women who know they are in Colombia because of an ancient and unforgivable displacement. Arriving in Cali, there was no land for them to tend, no riches to nurture in the soil. They have suffered under Colombian racism, perhaps more acutely in the city where the only work available to them was cleaning the homes of the wealthy, light-skinned urban elite. They are part of the women who are self-educating about the impacts of slavery, racism, sexism and violence against their people. It has given them confidence to speak out — and it is the White Man they speak out against.

Rachel: I come from the United Kingdom, a country built on the exploitation of its own people and then the thievery, enslavement and exploitation of people it deemed lesser. It is now a country which makes overtures, regretful of its violent past, but is still racist. Increasingly so. Yet, there is perhaps more of an overlap of race and class in the Western world, one in which middle class Black men can become Presidents but working class Black men are still incarcerated at disproportionate rates. In Colombia, though, skin colour seems to be an absolute divide in and of itself. Communities are violated not just because it is possible to take advantage of some vulnerability, but because they are Black. Because of this, I had to accept the suspicions which hung in the gaze of some interviewees because of the colour of my skin, suspicions which, more often than not, were soothed slightly during our time together. I could not help but remark, though, it was those who were the most vulnerable, who had had something absolute snatched away from them — territory — for whom my ‘Whiteness’ was paramount.

Robert: On one occasion there was some back and forth as our interviewees requested we change the format of the interviews and Rachel offered alternatives. Whilst I agreed that her suggestions made more sense, at least for us, I clocked something that Rachel was not yet aware of, a dynamic that I have known since childhood: we were being judged for what we represent, not what we were doing.

As a half-Samoan, or afakasi, in Australia and lighter skinned than the rest of my father’s side of the family, I learned very early that my appearance could be a cause of discomfort. Older members of my Samoan family spoke in harsher tones to me, or refused to acknowledge me entirely. Some of my cousins would say demeaning things to me, things they no doubt overheard from their parents, words and phrases none of us yet understood. My father, acutely aware of how his family perceived me, held me to a higher standards than the other children. He’d become easily embarrassed of me for behaviour that would go unnoticed in others. I felt a burden I didn’t yet understand: To be twice as behaved and twice as polite as my cousins because I was half as Samoan.

Later I would realise that my presence, and that of my mother and my siblings, sparked a reaction based on trauma. My family perceived us a threat. We made them uneasy because we resembled the people that had all the power and denied that power to them. After decades of unfair treatment in Australia and New Zealand at the hands of papalagi (white people) they had carved out a safe space to practice their own culture, eat their own food, listen to their own music, and be Samoan. My presence was a reminder to them of what they had suffered, and consciously or not, they treated me differently. So I learned to make the appropriate gestures and observe the necessary space. Stay quiet, don’t talk back, care for the younger kids, and so on. And when I would see a judgmental look perched behind squinted eyes, I would fall into this behaviour and hold the space.

Fast forward to Cali, and we (although Rachel much more than myself) is getting the same reactions 9-year old Robert is getting from his aunties. Body language is shifting, whispers are being exchanged, squinted eyes are glancing over us. Rachel can’t see it because she hasn’t experienced it before: we’re being judged for what we represent, not what we are doing. We’re not simply asking to shoot the interviews in a different way, we’re challenging them in their safe space and, behind our words, privilege, extraction and entitlement is being perceived because that is their experience in dealing with people that look like us.

“Just do it the way they want,” I said quietly to Rachel. Some might argue it is unwise or enabling or unfair to regulate one’s behaviour based on another’s interpretation of you. But the way I see it, whatever unfairness there is in me being judged pales compared to what happened to our interviewees, or my family.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it is okay to judge, even if it is because of trauma. Doing so puts a burden on the judged. But are we, when judged, to fall at the first hurdle and react? Ignoring all the pain that causes someone to lash out? To do so would be hypocrisy, to preach that our systems are broken and then pretend like those broken systems don’t take a toll on people, or too large a toll to tolerate.

So I hold the space for their anger or mistrust, not because they are right in acting that way, but because I can. That alone will never change someone’s mind. They have to do that themselves and there must obviously be a limit to how one can treat you in that context. But I can try to create the atmosphere necessary for collaboration amongst people who have been mistreated and traumatised, and not reinforce the perceptions that they have. They are wrong to judge, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make the effort to understand the pain motivating their thoughts and actions. Maybe thats the first step in creating trust.

What began in Cali as a project about alternative, grassroots visions for the region became an internal interrogation as to how we learn to trust one another. How do we do the incredibly difficult work of both acknowledging oppression whilst working to dismantle it alongside those who have benefited from it? How do we create spaces which invite in those whose political identity signals danger but whose personhood is willing? How do we find strength in collective anger without putting it at the feet of individuals?

Rachel: Every day, after filming, I was writing thousands of words to meet the deadline for my book proposal. What I witnessed and experienced in Cali shifted the tone of the book, which shows how violence against Earth facilitates violence against women. It forced me to shine a light on the anger in my belly about my own experiences of violation which sometimes spill out into people who share a political identity with those who violated me. Over the course of the two weeks, I learned more about identity than in my years at university studying the theory.

While we had managed to build bridges with most of the people we spoke with, there was one urban academic/organiser with whom it was particularly difficult. When the opportunity arose to probe this, I felt confident enough to do so with clarity, having spent almost every evening interrogating how my own anger, fear and mistrust has clouded how I view “men” as a group. The conversation was tough, and I had to find the line between absolutely empathising for the horrors set upon Afro-Colombians at the hands of the White Man, whilst also refusing to be cast in the role of the White Man. In the end, it turned out a minor misunderstanding at the very beginning of our time with them had underwritten the two weeks, a misunderstanding cleared by the end of the conversation.

This report is reaching you much later than we planned because we were unsure whether or not to include these experiences, despite them being absolutely formative. We were concerned of colouring truly important and impressive initiatives with extraneous information. But, at the end of the day, the goal of Planet: Coordinate is to figure out what needs to be done for a world in crisis, and part of that is interrogating how we work together. That includes not only how this network of organisations collaborates to strengthen their resources and deepen their vision, but also how they choose to work with two filmmakers with inequitable power and privilege, and us with them.

We were very careful throughout the filmmaking process to put that power and privilege at the feet of these communities. We interviewed who we were told, when we were told, in the style we were told, about the subjects we were instructed to ask questions about. We asked permission before turning on the camera and offered final cuts to be viewed before publishing so that everyone’s safety can be assured. We had no preconceptions and no money at our backs. We were not using the footage to sell the film to a distributor. Most importantly, we were committed to telling the stories that these communities wanted to tell, in the way they wanted to tell them.

Yet, that wasn’t always possible. How journalism differs from public relations is that journalists put words to what is happening, not what someone would like to happen. There were times when we tried from as many angles as possible but could not quite find what we had been told was happening. This was never a waste of time, as these interviews revealed more information about the difficult reality for Afro-Colombians in the region, but we cannot bend the narrative to include what we didn’t catch on film. There were other times when what we had been told was happening was only the tip of the iceberg, and this story was just the most recent iteration of decades of history, care and resistance. In these cases, we made sure to capture those roots of love stretching deep into the past.

We spent our last day of filming at the finca we introduced at the beginning of this report. We began with lengthy translated introductions, the farmer introducing himself, his family, his history and questions about our interest in his story. We responded with our names, histories, and explained we believed that communities who have faced existential threat may be best placed to navigate this global turbulence, that we had come to show people all over the world that resistance is possible, and to provide them with a library of ideas of things they can do in the corner of their world.

He was satisfied with the answer, but an academic with whom we had spoken many times beforehand about all of this insisted we address the power imbalance in the group. That we, as journalists from the Global North, should acknowledge the history of narrative and knowledge extraction. And in doing so, offer that the film be edited in tandem with the communities we were working with.

Very calmly and clearly, we declined. We are just two people, we said, there is no wider team supporting us. To go back and forth between the seven different branches of this network we’ve interviewed would be a logistical nightmare, especially in Spanish, which neither of us speak. We asked that they adhere to the philosophy of the Tapestry, which is about building community and practicing care, and take a leap of faith that we were being honest about our intentions.

At this moment, the farmer’s daughter, a vivacious and joyful woman, jumped in: “I agree! We should take that leap of faith and trust what they’ve said about why they’re here. We won’t get anywhere if we don’t. Now, can we get on with the tour? I’m hungry!”

I grinned widely at her as this was translated into my ear, and she laughed. Her father laughed with her. We got out the camera and started working, and the following two hours we spent with them were the most enjoyable, generous and open of our time in Cali. We were nourished, not just on the endless supply of fruits pressed into our palms, but the delight in which they showed us their life, land and history. They laughed at our ignorance when showing us fruits we had never seen and, seeing us marvel at the taste, insisted on plying us, taking joy in our discoveries. We were rapt when they talked and they leaned into our attention. When we shook hands at the end of the day, thanking them for their time and their initiative, it felt like we had achieved something important — beyond capturing necessary footage for the film, we had been invited deep into the lives of strangers so that, when we left, they were no longer strangers, but intimate portraits of people with rich lives, vivid dreams and absolute focus. By inviting us in, they, too, had gotten a feel for us. By the time we left, we knew something of each other, something that felt solid and sure; something upon which to build.

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Our first film will be published next week, so stay tuned! We plan on doing this all year and are compiling a list of potential partners all over the world. If you know of a movement which would be perfect for this project, please fill out this form.