- B
In the coffee region of Colombia, a group of indigenous transwomen have been working for some years to re-appropriate their bodies, their identities, and their form of community. Fled or displaced from their respective Embera-Chami and Embera-Katio communities because of their gender identity, they wove their communities together under the name Traviesas and have since been inventing new forms of family, community organization, and administration.
The Traviesas embrace traditional Embera cultural practices through music, dance, storytelling, bead work, and spiritual rituals in combination with newly adopted aesthetics from the local culture of Santuario to affirm their identities and politically assert their status as a distinct indigenous community and thus manifest their vision of a new, inclusive and decolonial kind of community of freedom, equality, and acceptance.
To some extent, the challenges faced by Embera transwomen are unique, based on a complex history of colonialism and cultural and social oppression. They struggle not only with the loss of their families and original communities, but also with what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society. Although they have found a place of freedom, and a new community in the coffee plantations, they work and live at the coffee farms under precarious living and payment conditions that make for them impossible to afford to have a place of their own. In a context where their basic human rights as indigenous, transwomen, peasant, and displaced women are under constant threat, for Las Traviesas to have a safe place is mandatory for them to flourish as a new community.
The fact that they are no longer part of their original Embera communities means that they cannot claim the rights that indigenous people in Colombia are entitled to, including those who contemplate land reassignments. Their struggle for recognition of their identity is also the struggle for political and juridical recognition by the Colombian state of the new community they are creating.
This crowdfunding seeks to support Las Traviesas to fulfil the dream of having a land of their own, where the community will be able to set up their own coffee plantation, create their own cooperative and become independent, free of exploitation, and where they can create a safe working and living environment without transphobic violence.
The Traviesas embrace traditional Embera cultural practices through music, dance, storytelling, bead work, and spiritual rituals in combination with newly adopted aesthetics from the local culture of Santuario to affirm their identities and politically assert their status as a distinct indigenous community and thus manifest their vision of a new, inclusive and decolonial kind of community of freedom, equality, and acceptance.
To some extent, the challenges faced by Embera transwomen are unique, based on a complex history of colonialism and cultural and social oppression. They struggle not only with the loss of their families and original communities, but also with what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society. Although they have found a place of freedom, and a new community in the coffee plantations, they work and live at the coffee farms under precarious living and payment conditions that make for them impossible to afford to have a place of their own. In a context where their basic human rights as indigenous, transwomen, peasant, and displaced women are under constant threat, for Las Traviesas to have a safe place is mandatory for them to flourish as a new community.
The fact that they are no longer part of their original Embera communities means that they cannot claim the rights that indigenous people in Colombia are entitled to, including those who contemplate land reassignments. Their struggle for recognition of their identity is also the struggle for political and juridical recognition by the Colombian state of the new community they are creating.
This crowdfunding seeks to support Las Traviesas to fulfil the dream of having a land of their own, where the community will be able to set up their own coffee plantation, create their own cooperative and become independent, free of exploitation, and where they can create a safe working and living environment without transphobic violence.