Maria Fernanda Escallón

My book examines why disparities within Afro-Colombian groups continue to increase despite the heightened public attention for Afro-descendants and creation of public policies intended to combat ethnoracial inequality. I argue that by deliberately using visibility as a form of inclusion, state-sponsored multicultural policies, in practice, further entrench already existing inequalities and maintain structural discrimination. By examining the consequences of UNESCOs declaration of San Basilio de Palenque’s Afro-descendant culture as “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” (ICHH), I show how the implementation of heritage policies end up unintentionally perpetuating the inequalities that multicultural policies were supposed to dismantle. As the declaration operationalized new languages, vocabularies, bureaucracies, procedures, and networks on the ground, locals with varying forms of social and cultural capital were able to capitalize on the recognition, but to the detriment of others. For locals without public policy experience, the expert language used by those managing heritage projects felt intimidating and exclusionary, and the creation of a new class of academic and technocratic leadership undermined traditional systems of authority. My analysis of how heritage governance operates, its language and policies, also shows that while the heritage framework serves to showcase Afro-Colombian culture, Black lives continue to be devalued in the current multicultural regime.