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PLEASE FORWARD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT TO
YOUR STUDENTS AND COLLEAGUES
The Black Cities Lab at the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research and the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, present
Intersectional Frictions in a Rebel City:
Urban Insurrection and the Politics of Memory in Colombia
A Talk by
Tathagatan Ravindran
University of Guadalajara, BAOBAB Center
Wednesday, November 19th, 2025
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
McCune Room | HSSB 6020
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In 2021, Colombia witnessed a massive insurrection against neoliberal policies that paralyzed the country for about three months. Cali was the epicenter of the insurrection, as points of blockade were established throughout the city. The insurrection had a major impact on the future of the country, such as the politicization of large sectors of urban youth, the emergence of new social leaders, and the election of the first leftist government in the country’s history. Even after the insurrection, the points of blockade and public spaces in the city became sites for the preservation of the social memory of struggle. The elites and the new right-wing local administration have sought to erase that collective memory by covering the murals with uniform coats of grey paint, while activists persistently return to restore and repaint them in the same sites.
This contest over memory between local elites and activists has unfolded alongside internal struggles among the latter over how the insurrection should be symbolically represented. Afro-descendant, feminist, and LGBTQ groups have denounced the reproduction of racial, patriarchal, and heteronormative hegemony within both the mobilization process and its symbolic representations. As the insurrection in Cali brought together diverse social sectors yet also revealed internal frictions, it offers a particularly generative ethnographic site for advancing theoretical reflections on intersectional justice in social movement praxis.
This talk draws on an activist research project to create a repository of oral narratives and audiovisual material on the memory of the insurrection. It discusses the participatory strategies used to create knowledge in a collaborative fashion, putting academic knowledge in dialogue with the knowledge that emerges in the trenches of struggle, and generating dialogues and debates on the question of intersectional frictions in processes of mobilization.
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Tathagatan Ravindran is an anthropologist with research specializations in race and ethnicity, political anthropology, social movements, anti-racist education, and activist research methods. He is currently the Director of Epistemic Justice and Laboratory of Data at the Baobab Center for Innovation in Ethno-racial, Gender, and Environmental Justice in Colombia and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) in the University of Guadalajara. He has done extensive research in Bolivia and Colombia. His book entitled The Social Life of Indianism: Politics and Indigeneity in 21st Century Bolivia was published by the University of Texas Press. His research has been funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and National Science Foundation.
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This event is part of the Black Cities Lab Security and Refusal Series, which explores new directions in urban studies by centering race as a political device that informs regimes of security and practices of refusal. In this sense, we are interested in understanding how the urban organizes and gives coherence to the dispersed violence of racial capitalism through the securitization of bodies and space. Rather than approaching urban space through an inclusion/exclusion framework, we consider gentrification, food deserts, uneven urban temperatures, police violence, unemployment, and similar phenomena as co-constitutive political resources for city-making. As a privileged locus for reinforcing the citizens/enemies, free/enslaved, and human/nonhuman divides, the city reinstates the time and space of the colony.
At the same time, attentive to the rebellious impetus of Black urbanity, we are interested in clandestine forms of placemaking that refuse the urban as confinement, dispossession, and death. These refusals may take the form of organized protests against police violence and urban strikes, or seemingly dispersed fugitive practices such as bus fare evasion, gang territoriality, or neighborhood-level self-help initiatives.
We ask: How do localized forms of control interplay with regional and global dynamics of security? How do people move within and across these racialized cityscapes? What are the limits and possibilities of right-to-the-city politics within the context of urbicidal wars? What can we learn from Black people's spatial experiences of captivity and fugitivity? How do their acts of refusal challenge the city as a colonialscape?
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