Politics, culture and self-perception: the identities in question

The ethnical-racial formation of identity as a social process is came upon several factors which permanently stipulate and transform it. In this article it is intended to analyze the political and cultural factors that have conditioned the identity formation of the black population in the rural and urban zones behind the appearance of the 1991 Colombian Constitution, but through the de-construction of an ethnicity essentialist point of view. In the article, it has been analyzed how an inclusion political mechanism is done by upper groups, but allowing the social organization processes, by reason of the Negritude law. It has allowed to win some ways of political participation and territorial legal appropriation by the "black communities", being this last a word fabricated by the Law 70, to mean the Pacific black rural population that supposedly can show an "ancestral" settlement in the area. On the other hand, it is also analyzed the way that black identity in urban centers has come up and its influence grounds, in the case of Cali city, in which its cultural mix up blends with the reinvented Pacific traditions and urban cultural dynamics. All of this is held in a relation of Negro otherness (alterity), played between black and non-black urban individuals. The article also lays out a critical reflection on the role of academic research about "ethnic-racial" social movements and the ideologies built around this type of social mobilization.

Law of Blackness (Law 70); black identity construction; black communities; perception of the self (and of the other); black otherness (alterity); identity conscience; Cali; Colombia