El Chocó

Photographer Kike Arnal first traveled to the state of Chocó in the late 1990s, on a boat trip through the jungle. He was there to participate in a conservation project, but he learned more about the region and its history he became so engaged that he returned again and again. Chocó’s population is predominantly Black, the balance Indigenous, a legacy from the days when enslaved Africans escaped from captivity and established free communities along the Pacific coast of Colombia.

The Spanish first arrived in what is now known as Colombia in the early 1500s. They knew there was gold to be found in the Pacific coastal region, and they set to making the Indigenous population their work force in order to unearth it. It wasn’t long before those native peoples were decimated, killed off by the diseases the Spanish had brought with them, as well as by the grueling work of mining gold. By the mid-1500s, the Spanish began bringing enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to replenish their workforce. African labor was essential in all areas of the colony—in gold mines, the homes of the elites, on sugar cane plantations, and cattle ranches. By the early 1600s, so many enslaved people had been brought to the Pacific area that the majority of the population was of African origin.

Many enslaved Africans resisted their captivity from their first moments in Colombia; those who escaped created towns of self-proclaimed free people. Known as palenques, these towns were homes to cimarrones, a term for fugitives derived from French, Spanish, and Hispaniola Taino. Chocó remains their home today.

Slavery in Colombia was not abolished until 1851. Shortly after emancipation, the Colombian state introduced an ideology of blanqueamiento, or whitening of society. The idea was to hold white Hispanic heritage as the Colombian racial standard, with a clear intention of minimizing or even eliminating African or Indigenous traits in the population. To maintain their identity, many African and Indigenous peoples continued to move deeper into inaccessible, unincorporated and isolated jungles.

The departamento of El Chocó was officially created in 1947, the first predominantly Black government district. The creation of an official state gave Black people hope of building a geographic identity and political power, but that dream has never been realized. Though over 80 percent of the current population of the state of Chocó are people of African descent, Black representation in the halls of power is scarce. It is one of the poorest areas of the country; 37 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty, another 63 percent live below the poverty line. And while Colombia’s Black minority is thought by some to be as high as 40 percent of the nation’s population, official recognition varies and has been reported by the government as slightly over 10 percent. Either way, Co- lombia is home to the second largest population of people of African descent in Latin America, after Brazil.

Like much of Colombia, Chocó is home to the stark contrast of crushing poverty and enormous wealth. After farming, mining is one of the main ways to make a living. Artisanal, by-hand mining for gold had traditionally been an activity for the African and Indigenous residents of the region, but after the rise in gold prices in the 1990s, the mechanized mining companies have had a larger presence. They’ve replaced the traditional mining methods that preserve the environment, arriving with heavy machinery, foreign labor and chemicals to extract gold, leaving mercury in the rivers and destroying the land. In order to make a living, local people mine in the wake of these companies. The scant amounts they find are weighed on small scales in shops, the local currency to procure life’s necessities. This subsistence mining in the sites already gouged out by backhoes extracts a high price, in lost fingers and arduous labor that oftentimes amounts to nothing. Yet these descendants of self-proclaimed free Africans make their lives along Chocó’s rivers.

Arnal has visited Chocó many times over the last 20 years, talking with and photographing the local people. Through his portraits, we meet Chocoanos as they find a gleaming day’s wage in the silt, travel to the anchor city of Quibdó for harder-to-find supplies, or pass an afternoon on the main artery of the Baudó River that runs through their community. There is the former teacher in a school girl’s uniform, confronting the camera, hand on hip. The miner standing in the deep mud of the Americo gold mine. And, as in every part of the world, teenagers dressed for the ritual of their graduation ball.

—Kyla Kupferstein Torres