1
Producing the Frontier
Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. A whirling leaf storm had been stirred up, formed out of the human and material dregs of other towns, the chaff of a civil war that seemed ever more remote and unlikely. The whirlwind was implacable⊠. In less than a year it sowed over the town the rubble of many catastrophes that had come before it, scattering its mixed cargo of rubbish in the streets.
âGabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez, Leaf Storm (1955)
In preparation for his trial El AlemĂĄn wrote a book-length manuscript on the history of UrabĂĄ. One of the first sections of the text bears the title âUrabĂĄ: A Land without a State.â1 It begins with a story about an engineering mission that set out for UrabĂĄ from MedellĂn in 1927. It took the group five weeks of travel by car, foot, horseback, and boat to reach the waters of the Gulf of UrabĂĄ. According to El AlemĂĄn, the mission had to bushwhack much of the way, so the âonly guide for navigating through the treacherous junglesâ was a lone telegraph line.
The leader of the mission was Gonzalo MejĂa, a famous businessman from MedellĂn and a âvisionary antioqueño,â according to the jailed paramilitary chief (antioqueño is someone from the department of Antioquia). MejĂa helped pioneer so many modern industries in Colombia, including automotive, aviation, and cinema ventures that the press had dubbed him âthe dream maker.â2 But his most ambitious plan of all was the one that had led him to trudge through the swamps of UrabĂĄ: the construction of a road connecting Antioquiaâs capital of MedellĂn to the departmentâs only outlet to the sea, the Gulf of UrabĂĄ.
Through an elaborate marketing and public relations campaign, MejĂa had whipped up a frenzy of support for the project among his fellow antioqueños. MedellĂnâs newspapers fanned the excitement, predicting the road would be Antioquiaâs âmagnum opus.â MejĂa and his allies claimed the âHighway to the Sea,â as they branded it, would be âuna obra redentoraâ (a redemptive public work).3 The Highway to the Sea inspired nothing less than a creole version of Manifest Destiny, but rather than Horace Greeleyâs âGo West, young man,â the call was âÂĄHacia UrabĂĄ! ÂĄAl Mar!â (To UrabĂĄ! To the Sea!)4
Antioquiaâs version of Manifest Destiny had just as racialized an underpinning as its U.S. counterpart and was based on the same master narrative of all frontiers: the duel between civilization and barbarism. âYes, weâre heading west to both civilize and civilize ourselves,â wrote one newspaper columnist, âto repel barbarism and attract healthier elements of morality and work.â He described UrabĂĄ as the unconcluded business of colonial conquest: âLetâs finish what those audacious Spanish conquistadors were unable to do: subjugate and exploit that promised land.â5
Despite the feverish enthusiasm behind it, the construction of the two-lane road, spanning a mere two hundred miles, dragged on for three decades. The Highway to the Sea opened in 1954, two years before MejĂaâs death. The project stalled repeatedly due to administrative disarray, the financial strains of the Great Depression, and the ruggedness of the terrain. In his manuscript El AlemĂĄn points out that the rainy season still occasionally renders the highway impassable, a fact he laments as proof that âeven today, the road is holding back UrabĂĄâs genuine progress.â In his eyes the civilizing mission begun by MejĂa remains, âeven today,â a work in progress.
The torturous construction of the Highway to the Sea exemplifies the paradoxical quality of frontiers as spaces produced by both the power and the limits of reigning regimes of accumulation and rule. On one hand, frontiers are spaces undergoing profound material transformation, epitomes of the âwreckage upon wreckageâ witnessed by Walter Benjaminâs angel of history, its face turned toward the past and a violent storm caught in its wings. âThis storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned,â wrote Benjamin, âwhile the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.â6 And yet frontiers are also spaces in which these storms of âprogressâ have supposedly not yet run their course. Frontiers, then, are made by forces that somehow manage to be both brutal and brittle.
They achieve this contradictory feat because frontiers are consummate examples of what Lefebvre meant by the social production of space: frontiers are ideological and discursive formations as much as material ones; they are, in every sense, both real and imagined.7 The symbolic realm of, say, myths and maps are just as integral to their production as the physical materiality of, say, railroads and landscape transformations. Frontiers are also inherently relational spaces: every frontier is the frontier of somewhere for someone. In the case of UrabĂĄ, the somewhere was MedellĂn and the someone was the cityâs light-skinned, ultraconservative elites.
The historicalâgeographical contours of UrabĂĄâs production as a frontier zone was driven by a profoundly racist set of cultural politics emanating from the city. Following a classic metropoleâsatellite relation, the frontier emerged via MedellĂnâs attempt to bring the gulf region into the cityâs cultural, political, and economic orbit, and the construction of the Highway to the Sea was a central part of this process.8 The relationship turned into a form of uneven development: the accumulation of wealth by a small elite in MedellĂn was systematically linked to the accumulation of exploitation and poverty in UrabĂĄ.9
In the language of Latin American dependency theory, MedellĂnâs relationship with UrabĂĄ was a form of internal colonialism, a term with intentionally racialized overtones.10 As a concept, internal colonialism highlights the way in which the uneven development of UrabĂĄ as a frontier zone was as much a racial and cultural process as a structural effect of the geographies of capitalism. However, the fact that this form of colonialism is primarily internal or subnational does not mean it happens in a vacuum; internal colonialism is not divorced from forces operating at other scales. Indeed, as I show, the making of UrabĂĄ into a frontier was the product of global interconnections: from the tentacles of the United Fruit Company to the wide-ranging geopolitics of the Cold War.
UrabĂĄâs statelessness in these years was problematized and expressed from the point of view of MedellĂn through racialized idioms of civilization and barbarism and claims about the regionâs lack of progress and abandonment. As late as 1950 an army fact-finding mission reported, âThe place is dreadfully abandoned; thereâs no Inspector, no Police, no official form of authority of any kind.â11 Driven by the imperative to resolve these problems, the frontier effect unleashed a succession of state projects in UrabĂĄ led by urban elites based in MedellĂn.
Frontiers as Racialized Spaces of Uneven Development
Frontiers have a long and infamous history in Latin America.12 As the product of colonial discourses, frontiers in the region are as old as Christopher Columbusâs first letters from the Caribbean and the early myths of El Dorado. Once Latin America gained independence from Spain, frontiers became an integral part of the ways in which early nation builders shored up fledgling forms of national identity. Perpetuated by everything from the geographical expeditions of Alexander von Humboldt and his successors to Domingo Sarmientoâs influential classic Civilization and Barbarism, frontiers were what the new âimagined communitiesâ of Latin America were to be formed against.13 They became, in the words of the anthropologist Margarita Serje, âthe opposite of the nation.â14
Race and identity were central to why these spaces were cast out as areas beyond the pale of the nation. In post-Independence Colombia, as elsewhere in Latin America, the idea of mestizaje (racial mixture) came to define national identity in ways that encompassed the multiracial makeup of the country without undermining the core ideology of white supremacy. Mestizaje allowed elites, alongside their darker-skinned compatriots, to rally around the imagined community of Colombia as a mestizo nation while still emphasizing their own whiteness and superiority. By disparaging Afro-descendent and indigenous identities, mestizo nationalism further marginalized spaces, such as UrabĂĄ, where these racialized groups formed a majority of the population.15
Informed by ideologies of scientific racism from abroad, nationalist discourses turned race and nature into conjoined essentialisms that further exoticized, racialized, and thus produced entire swaths of national territory as unincorporated âsavage lands.â In Colombia the racialized projection of frontiers as spatial Others was part and parcel of extremely violent forms of resource extraction and the hyperexploitation of their populationsâfrom the genocidal rubber booms of the Amazon to the cattle enclosures of the countryâs eastern flatlands.16 In a vicious feedback loop, the racialized poverty and exclusion resulting from these neocolonial projects reinforced the frontier imaginary that helped cause these problems in the first place.
The long history of UrabĂĄâs experience with racialized colonial violence could be said to begin with the fact that it was the site of Spainâs first colonial settlement on the mainland of the Americas. The indigenous Urabaes put up fierce resistance to the Spaniards.17 UrabĂĄ was also where the Crown sent enslaved Africans to mine for gold along the banks of the Atrato River, giving the region a solid place within the geographies of the Black Atlantic. Many of those who escaped slavery formed autonomous maroon communities in the jungle, setting an early precedent for the regionâs enduring reputation as a fugitive space. In short, UrabĂĄ was an early crucible of colonial violence.
For centuries, however, it remained a sparsely populated region of scattered fishing villages, tiny family farms, and trading posts. It was much more connected to the maritime networks of the Caribbean than to the major cities in the interior of the country. But all this started to change when a confluence of events pushed MedellĂn to take a greater interest in the region. The cityâs elites increasingly saw the need for a road or railroad to the coast as a cultural, economic, and geopolitical imperative. One event in particular set things in motion.
Major national attention only turned toward UrabĂĄ after the United States engineered the 1903 secession of neighboring Panama, which had until then been a department of Colombia. The Panama debacle was the culmination of a multidimensional crisis. A severe economic depression had deepened age-old political schisms between the Liberal and Conservative parties, plunging Colombia into a bloodletting known as the War of a Thousand Days (1899â1902).18 The political and economic turmoil had the added misfortune of coinciding with one of the most aggressive periods of U.S. imperialism toward Latin America.
With an eye on U.S. ambitions in the region, a Colombian diplomat passing through the department of Panama in 1902 predicted that its loss was simply a matter of time: âThe Isthmus is lost for Colombia; it is painful to say it, but it is true. Here Yankee influence predominates, and all Panamanians, with few exceptions, are capable of selling the Canal, the Isthmus, and even their own mother.â19 With the canalâs construction stalled and with the War of a Thousand Days having further stoked preexisting separatist sentiments, Washington seized the opportunity to nudge, bless, and militarily defend Panamaâs declaration of independence on November 3, 1903.
The loss of Panama left a deeply wounded sense of nationhood along with a serious case of geopolitical paranoia. Rafael Reyes, Colombiaâs new president, immediately moved to forestall any further dismemberment of the nation. He called for an administrativeâterritorial reorganization of the country that would centralize power in BogotĂĄ and partition the countryâs departments into smaller, more manageable units. President Reyesâs plans turned into a chance for Antioquia to reclaim its territorial jurisdiction over UrabĂĄ, which it had lost to the department of Cauca during a previous national shakeup. As Reyes pushed his reforms through Congress, land-locked Antioquia, led by its capital, MedellĂn, tapped into the countryâs lingering geopolitical anxieties to lobby for its repossession of UrabĂĄ.
With Panama as the subtext, MedellĂnâs city council implored Congress âto return territory that has always properly belonged to Antioquia, thus placing the area on the road to progress and helping defend our national integrity.â20 After all, went the argument, it was hardy antioqueños who just decades earlier had settled the lands to the south of MedellĂn, turning them into Colombiaâs âeje cafeteroâ (coffee axis). As the creators of the countryâs mighty coffee boom, antioqueñosâor paisas, as they call themselvesâclaimed they had a proven track record of spearheading a successful mission of civilizing untamed lands and turning a profit in the process.
The colonization of Colombiaâs coffee heartland is one of the founding myths of paisa (pronounced pie·sa) exceptionalism. A play on the word âpaisanoâ (countryman), paisa is, in its ugliest incarnation, a chauvinistic regionalâcultural identity assumed by people from the highlands of Antioquia and a few neighbor...