Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order: Black Middle Classes through an Intersectional Lens (Social Movements in the Americas)

In Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order: Black Middle Classes through an Intersectional Lens, anthropologist and intersectional feminist Mara Viveros-Vigoya examines what it means to be Black and middle class in Colombia and how that meaning has been configured over almost a century of the country’s history. By applying an intersectional perspective, this book introduces two important theoretical shifts. First, it challenges the perception of Afrodescendant ‘communities’ as uniformly impoverished and second, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of class with geographical and historical contexts and with axes of social inequality such as gender, race, and age. Viveros-Vigoya argues that since the inauguration of neoliberal multiculturalism in the 1990s, while Blackness and upward social mobility have become more compatible, it remains to be seen whether we are advancing towards a global agenda of social justice or if we are simply opening some spaces for social and political mobility that serve largely to reproduce the status quo in the name of racial equality.

Mara Viveros-Vigoya is professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidad Nacional de Colombia.