Miryam Nacimento

This research explores the formation of ethnic-like identities among mestizo (mixed race) cultivators who produce illicit coca in Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with two peasant organizations in the southwestern department of Cauca, I will examine small farmers’ stories of displacement, land expropriation, and environmental degradation, experiences of dispossession caused by drug lords that control cocaine production and by a plant-centered state-enforced antidrug policy focused on eradicating illicit coca. Inspired by Colombia’s multiculturalist framework that grants differential representation to Indigenous and Black communities, the mestizo farmers demand territory and recognition as a special protection group with a distinct “peasant culture.” Mestizo farmers insist they are not drug traffickers but victims of the war on drugs, a conflict that puts their identities and cultures at risk of disappearing. This research argues that the coca growers’ identity claims constitute an “ethnicized” cultural formation grounded in the violence they receive from the drug business and the war on drugs. Drawing on studies of the contradictions and limitations of contemporary multiculturalism, I show that these farmers are pushing the boundaries of a multicultural state that excludes mestizo cultivators for not being “ethnically different.”