Lideresas wounaan baud mos que construyen comunidad y resistencia en Bogotá

Abstract

This research arises from an interest in understanding the processes of political participation and identity construction of Wounaan Baud Mos women in the city of Bogotá. After experiencing forced displacement and migration from Colombia’s Pacific coast, these women have had to reconstruct their ways of life, organization, and leadership within urban contexts marked by inequality and exclusion. In a country shaped by armed, racial, and gender-based conflicts, Indigenous women emerge as political subjects who reconfigure territory through the body, the spoken word, and memory, contributing new ways of understanding peace, resistance, and citizenship. The study recognizes that Indigenous identity in the city is not preserved intact, but rather reconfigured through the tension between continuity and transformation. As Stuart Hall (1990) argues, identity is not a fixed state but a constant production; in the case of Wounaan women, this production is interwoven with ancestral memories, orally transmitted knowledge, werregue weaving practices, and everyday rituals that allow them to sustain their symbolic world within the urban context. In this sense, the research is based on a key premise: the political participation of Indigenous women is not limited to institutional or electoral spaces, but is expressed through community practices, acts of care, and the collective organization that sustains communal life. The study is developed under a qualitative and interpretative approach, grounded in Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology and ethnographic tools such as interviews, participant observation, and body mapping. These methodologies make it possible to understand women’s voices from their own positions of enunciation, recognizing them as producers of knowledge rather than merely sources of information. Thus, the analysis seeks to make visible how Wounaan women build their leadership and political participation through symbolic, affective, and territorial practices, and how these constitute a response to displacement and the coloniality that permeates their experiences. The theoretical framework brings together authors from decolonial studies, community feminism, and critical geography. From Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1987) and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010), identity is understood as a living process that persists in the face of the historical denial of Indigenous civilizations. With Gladys Tzul Tzul (2016), female leadership is interpreted as part of communal governance and the sustaining of collective life; meanwhile, Lorena Cabnal (2010) and Catherine Walsh (2007) allow for an understanding of the body–territory relationship as a political space that links gender-based violence with territorial dispossession. For their part, Escobar (2014) and Haesbaert (2011) broaden the notion of territory toward an ontological and relational understanding, in which urban space can also become Indigenous territory when inhabited through ancestral knowledge and memory. In the context of Bogotá, the Wounaan Baud Mos community faces multiple challenges, such as the invisibilization of their culture, economic precariousness, racial discrimination, and difficulties in maintaining communal networks. However, these women transform adversity into collective action through organization, weaving, the transmission of knowledge, and participation in intercultural spaces. Their everyday practices reveal that politics is also exercised from the intimate and the quotidian, where care, the spoken word, and spirituality become tools of resistance. This thesis seeks to analyze the political participation of Wounaan Baud Mos women by examining the reconfiguration of gender roles in the urban context and the processes of community leadership that have emerged within the community. Through a dialogue between decolonial theory and empirical experience, it argues that these women’s practices are not only survival strategies, but also forms of political and epistemological production through which they challenge colonial structures and propose alternative ways of inhabiting the world. The work is thus positioned horizontally alongside the women, aiming to recognize them as central subjects whose voices and existence are fundamental to the construction of life, culture, cosmogony, and connection with their ancestors, their territory, their spirituality, and their community.