Fertile instabilities: rural migration and the (un)making of place in Boyacá (Colombia).

Fertile instabilities: rural migration and the (un)making of place in Boyacá (Colombia).

Author:
Mónica Cuéllar Gempeler, PUJ

Abstract:
This paper moves along the fluctuating borders of a rural sector called San Isidro: a place located in the departamento of Boyacá, in the oriental deviation of the Colombia Andes, that has belonged at different times to three neighboring municipalities. Its changing contours incite a question about the way it is constantly taking a shape: a question that opens into earthly stories of snaking dirt roads, those who walked them, and their trades, conflicts, love stories and deaths. Moving on an intimate scale, the paper pays ethnographic attention to the ways in which, just as San Isidro is in a continuous state of becoming through communal practices and webs of care, it is also in a way crumbling back into the earth. Its undoing can be traced into a broader history of unresolved structural inequalities and rural migration which, murking the sight of a collective future, results in a longing for a time when people had a strong attachment to this place. The papers thus asks how to understand the loss of such rootedness when looked at through the movement out of which San Isidro seems to be always only just emerging and it considers the forms of togetherness and of storytelling that come from the recognition of the (fertile) instability implied in the making and unmaking of a place.

Key words:
Rural migration, paths, walking, place, instability, storytelling, care.