Mujeres Manglar [Mangrove Women]
A collective response to the absence
By: Sebastian Giraldo
Lee en Español
Introduction
This narrative offers a glimpse into the collective organizational experience of a group of women who, in their search for truth and justice, find a way to process their pain, build community, strengthen their voices, and work toward achieving dignified living conditions in their territory. “Mujeres Manglar” [Mangrove Women] is an initiative focused on weaving community bonds through support and emotional nurturing to confront violence.
The mangrove is a life-giving space; it’s where our community gathers its sustenance, where they fish, cast nets, and collect shellfish; it’s an important place for our spirituality, where herbalists and traditional healers gather the vines and plants they use for ancestral medicine, the mangrove is part of who we are as a community, and it was where our ancestors settled when they arrived in Buenaventura (Asprilla, 2024).
“Mujeres Manglar” is part of the organizational effort of these women, who, in addition to carrying out political actions in search of their missing relatives, found in shared crafts a means of economic self-management for their lives. This initiative was born from a reflection on caring for their bodies, the intention to support each other in that care, and their commitment to defending their territory.
In Buenaventura, the country’s main seaport operates, located in the western part of the Valle del Cauca department, between the Western mountain range and the Pacific Ocean. About 60% of the country’s exportable cargo passes through this port, and its strategic location, along with the Free Trade Agreements signed by Colombia, makes it a focal point for Colombia’s commercial development. This characteristic has led to various alliances among armed groups, business groups, and state actors to control the territory based on the interests of port development through corruption and violence. It is a region marked by a central tension: the port city, representing an economic project of global connectivity, and the communal territory, the heart of an Afro-descendant region that gathers traditional economic and cultural practices with an identity that has for decades stated: “The territory is life, and life is not possible without the territory.”
Most of the illegal armed groups that have shaped Colombia’s social and political conflict have had a presence in this territory, and the effects of this dynamic have deeply impacted the lives of the communities residing there. This process has also fostered a movement of resistance, characterized by community leaderships that have confronted these forms of violence and seek to build alternatives for justice and equity in caring for their territory and creating conditions for a dignified life.
Buenaventura is also one of the cities with one of the most significant inequality rates in the country, with 81% of its population in extreme poverty and 41% in destitution (Buenaventura Cómo Vamos, 2020). The impoverishment, lack of access to basic services, and dynamics of violence and territorial dispossession reveal conditions of systemic violence that are not only related to the dynamics of the armed conflict or sociopolitical violence in the country, but also respond to a structural logic that impedes the development of life in conditions of security and dignity for the communities.
In this context, forced disappearance has been one of the most concerning violent practices, as it threatens life, endangers territorial survival, and disrupts the cultural dynamics surrounding the funeral rituals of the Afro communities that live there. Currently, in Buenaventura, there are about 2,000 people who have gone missing since the 1990s to the present. Social organization processes led by the families of the victims have been critical to making this crime visible and demanding truth, justice, comprehensive reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition for these events.
Forced disappearance became a modality of violence that allowed the concealment of the evidence of the war’s intensity. Homicide rates dropped, but disappearances increased. The ambiguity surrounding the unknown fate of the victims also enabled the increase of armed dominance over the population through a repertoire of terror (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica [National Center for Historical Memory] et al., 2015, p. 196).
In response to this context of violence, social and political organizations have mobilized to claim the rights of the victims. The collective action agenda of social movements has motivated continuous support for the victims by social, humanitarian, and non-governmental organizations, both local and international.
Mujeres Manglar is an example of this history of association, seeking different ways to inhabit this territory, focusing on collective healing, the construction of historical memory, and the daily reproduction of life from a community perspective.
Within the group of women who are part of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Movice, by its Spanish acronym) in Valle del Cauca, Mujeres Manglar started as an economic self-management proposal focused on body care and territorial care through sewing-related crafts. Initially, it began as a proposal to develop manual crafts as a therapeutic approach. After making woven bags and other products, they incorporated the idea of reusable sanitary pads and have been developing this project to generate an economic alternative for the group.
The following are some questions that continually guide the work with families of disappeared persons: How can the daily relationship with pain be transformed into an opportunity to weave solidarity links to build community? How can one endure absence while getting to know the stories of other people who live the same reality? How can relationships of support and equity be built from collective leaderships that strengthen their efforts to sustain life in their territories? The stories of the women who are part of this organization invite us to reflect on ways to face pain, and they serve as a powerful reminder of the strength that collective organization, companionship, and mutual support can have.
The approach to narrating and analyzing this story is based on understanding the different ways in which collective leadership, relationships of equity, and systemic change intersect, guided by some theoretical frameworks that I consider essential to framing the actions and forms of relationship developed in this organization.
Throughout this text, I will develop the notions of emotional communities (Jimeno, 2010) and community networks (Gutiérrez & Salazar, 2015) as references for understanding the relationship between collective organization processes and social transformation. I will also reflect on the testimonial footprint (Jelin, 2002) and the potentials of constructing memory as an exercise of political imagination and building alternative resistance to violence. Additionally, I will address the therapeutic characteristics of crafts as glimpses of hope for the material and symbolic reproduction of life.
Caring for Words: Ethical-Political Reflections on Methodological Development
This article is part of a process of collective knowledge-building, framed within a collaborative research initiative we have developed as part of strategic litigation to promote political and legal action in cases of forced disappearances in the municipality of Buenaventura. One way to describe my role has been as a supporting professional or technical assistant, from my work as a social researcher in relation to the state institutions with which we pursue rights claims. However, in a local organization with a small team and no fixed budget for its operation, the predominant bond is one of commitment and political conviction in the struggle for truth, justice, comprehensive reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition of these crimes.
Throughout this narrative, I systematize their historical process of formation, document the effects that coming together and mutual recognition have had by belonging to this group, and explore the insights that the creation of a social, political, and economic project allows for improving their material conditions for the communal reproduction of life. The development of these reflections is based on in-depth interviews with the participants in the process, specific conversations about the creative process of their economic project, and a constant review of the various editorial stages where we revise the narrative lines of the article, providing feedback to improve the narrative.
Being part of this process has entailed fundamental challenges for those of us who are involved in and support the organizational work. My boundaries concerning my approach to this territory and my relationship with its conflicts are an important part of the analysis. From a perspective of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988; Rosaldo, 2000), I acknowledge my position as a man in a predominantly female organization, as a white-mestizo person in a predominantly racialized context, and as someone who does not live in the territory or experience the daily realities of structural and direct violence there. These are three essential conditions that limit and create a clear sense of distance in understanding this experience.
The emotional bonds we build in this setting are based on trust. During hearings, we support each other, care for the babies, accompany the preparation of testimonies, create maps and materials as needed, and manage the emotional breakdowns that arise along the way. In internal spaces, we set up offerings, pray, design methodologies, facilitate workshops, and prepare reports. Anyone who has been in a similar organizational context understands what it means to be a jack-of-all-trades, doing whatever is needed to support, as a team, the development of the spaces we aim to create.
Analytical Approach to the Experience
Engaging with the stories of disappearance experienced by these women has led us to understand what Elizabeth Jelin (2002) suggests as testimonial footprint, seen as the “social capacity to listen,” establishing a way to grasp the relationship between empathy and responsibility that implies active listening to a testimony. When we bear witness to a testimony, we become part of its story, not entirely its pain, but the possibility of creating a shared dialogue space that gives a place to their voice based on an ethic of recognition, which is also an ethic of listening. In Jelin’s words: “when the path to dialogue opens, those who speak and those who listen begin to name, make sense of, and build memories” (2002, p. 84).
These shared memories are part of the emotional ties we weave collectively and are the foundation of this commitment to collaboration and mutual learning in the fight for truth and justice. Macleod and Marinis (2019) coordinate a book addressing the concept of emotional communities from a Latin American perspective. Their aim is to expand how this concept has been used to understand the intersections between the emotional and the political in the analysis of resistance experiences to violence in the region. Three elements are fundamental in this analysis: emotions, as a central factor in the configuration of collective bonds around the fight for justice; collective action as an associative exercise in resistance processes against violence; and the testimonial element as the basis of complicity in sharing pain, anger, indignation, or sadness as a process of mutual identification through storytelling.
[…] in the performative settings of testimony and public denunciation by [the] victims, an affective mesh emerges in which victims, researchers, and the public participate in various ways. This is what Jimeno and his team have conceptualized as “emotional communities.” This concept allows us to identify proximity and care, empathy, complicity, and the ethics of collaboration in the construction of affective and political bonds in the search for justice (Macleod & Marinis, 2019, p. 166).
Over the years, as part of this organization, the bonds of support that have been woven in this space exceed the boundaries of political organization and the objectives around their struggle as victims. The network of relationships created in this space affects the material and symbolic reproduction of life. These forms of mutual support are evident in how they care for each other when one of them is sick, the determination with which they uphold the memory of the disappeared even when a member who once advocated for them is no longer around due to illness or death, and the strategies they use to navigate in and out of their neighborhoods due to the presence of armed actors. There are many nuances in their relationships beyond the formal political-institutional action that brings them together, which, on a daily basis, sustains the possibility of being together. This aligns with the concept of community networks proposed by Gutiérrez and Salazar (2015) as an expression of anti-capitalist forms of communal reproduction of life:
We understand community networks as a constellation of social relationships of ‘sharing’ — never harmonious or idyllic, but full of tensions and contradictions — that operate in a coordinated and/or cooperative way, more or less stable over time, with multiple objectives — always concrete, always different as they are renewed — aimed at satisfying or expanding the satisfaction of basic needs of social and therefore individual existence. (Gutiérrez & Salazar, 2015, p. 22)
Following this, my intention is to consider this organizational effort through the lens of what has been termed “emotional communities,” framed within a broad fabric of relationships of solidarity, complicity, and collaboration. This requires understanding the communal basis of these bonds and the complexity of the network that enables life. The political work logic of these women is embedded in a broad perspective that views social transformation from a systemic change approach. Later in the analysis of this experience, I will delve into the different dimensions of their practice and the understanding of their political performance.
Mujeres Manglar: A Perspective on Emotional Communities
Most of the women who are part of this organization are Afro-descendants living in Buenaventura and are relatives of people who were disappeared by various armed actors during the ongoing social and political conflict in this territory. The understanding of this violent event in their lives has deeply transformed their everyday experience, their family relationships, and their community support networks in their neighborhoods.
The conditions of structural violence and systematic impoverishment in Buenaventura hold a state of vulnerability for these women, hindering their ability to live in conditions of justice and dignity to guarantee their basic rights as citizens. For this reason, the creation of this organization as a political effort for collective emotional care and as an alternative to jointly build a means of economic support is significant in the context of the discussion about their collective leadership and the development of equitable conditions among them in terms of the material and symbolic reproduction of their lives.
The Formation of the Emotional Community
To narrate this experience, it’s essential to understand how the group came into being. Initially, this group of women emerged as a political accompaniment process to document and organize actions in the search for their missing relatives. Over the years, the consolidation of the group has allowed for the development of therapeutic accompaniment actions and the strengthening of their lived experiences in the territory. These psychotherapeutic activities are done through art and crafts; embroidery and weaving are two central exercises in this process, and from their collective material work, proposals emerge that go beyond reflections on pain and violence.
“The group is just that, a gathering where we learned to deal with our feelings together. Oh, there’s so much pain, so much nostalgia. When we’re together, we de-stress because that’s the only place where we can speak freely, where we’re understood. Because when you talk to someone who hasn’t been through it, they hardly understand how you feel. You leave feeling strengthened with the psychosocial support. Because you learn. The breathing exercises and relaxation exercises have helped me a lot. You leave feeling different. Your thinking changes. Besides, you learn about your rights; you learn to speak. I didn’t know how to talk, but I learned to open up and fight for my rights. And to know things. And to understand. To study.” (Asprilla, 2024)
The possibility of sharing experiences with people who have been through similar situations, or are in similar shared struggles, allows you to gain perspective on personal pain and expand your understanding of the effects of violence, dispossession, and terror as exercises in controlling territory and their collective impact. This feature is reflected in Yurani’s story, where she finds the strength of her voice in a collective setting, allowing her to enrich her own experience and deepen her understanding through her companions’ stories. In one of the personal interviews with a group member, she describes this shift in her perspective on her leadership and personal journey:
I remember one of my comrades told me to turn all those tears into struggle, into resistance. That I should stand up and do my stuff to search for my brother. So that’s when, little by little, I started to wake up, no?” (Interview with Mercedes Balanta, 2024)
The importance of recognizing yourself in a collective process and giving space to the voices that encourage personal experience and awareness of each individual’s political articulation within the organization are fundamental to understanding the personal and collective impacts the organization has on the lives of its members. The recognition of this collective experience contains an understanding of the vulnerable state in which each one arrived, and it strengthens the narrative of transformation and the possibility of building together other horizons of meaning and a future in their daily lives.
This group started from our own need, as women, relatives, victims of forced disappearance, to learn a craft or learn to do something. For example, in weaving, my comrades say their minds start to weave, and they gain a different perspective on life. They remember without so much sadness. And we, who make the sanitary towels, we talk and de-stress during our meetings. It’s good help because we know that when we sell the towels, we at least have something for transportation, for going out in our search. I think it comes from our need to feel useful. (Interview with Yurany Asprilla, 2024)
Through learning these crafts and identifying their needs, they begin to understand the possibilities they have to create and make a space where they can meet from a different perspective, that it’s not just about the painful experiences they go through but also about finding economic alternatives to the conditions of their life with which they subsist. This is a space for political imagination that allows them to dream their own proposals, explore healing approaches, and create sharing spaces that broaden their understanding of themselves as a community.
In our struggle, well that’s where we’ve found other family members, we’ve come together, and we’ve resisted to continue fighting and we will not tire until we meet our goal of finding our loved ones and giving them a proper burial. And be grateful to the organizations that have been supporting us in this search.
For me, it has been crucial because I’ve felt that I’m not alone because a single swallow doesn’t make a summer. And if we’re together, we’re a chain, and we can embrace crying together, and search together. We all feel the same pain, and we support each other, which has been very important, very beautiful, learning all we have learned, which has taught us to live together and share each of the experiences we’ve had.
Walking with other women and other relatives, we’ve gained knowledge; for us, we’ve learned to demand our rights, to fight, and to teach other people who face the same difficulties we do, and then we’ve taught them how to claim their rights and fight with us, to keep going, not to give up, that we must keep on moving forward, we’ve set out to show them they can do it, to keep moving forward, keeping their heads up and not be afraid. (Movice Valle del Cauca, 2020)
I would like to highlight several element that show how this collective space is constituted. First, it’s a safe place where they can calmly express what they feel, unlike their family environments where conversations about pain and absence are taboo. Second, it’s a space where they can relieve tensions, sharing a common vulnerability, and where meeting together allows for conversations that nurture their emotional bonds and transform their outlook on the world. Third, the possibility of holding this collective space, attending and making it possible, creates a crucial emotional support network that has evolved over the years, addressing possibilities for life that strengthen the community environment they are building over time. Fourth, it’s a space to understand the political, technical, and legal dimensions of their search, allowing them to expand their networks and, with the support of accompanying organizations, learn how to navigate the complex and barren institutional landscape to become spokespeople at State institutions.
The Mangrove as a Symbol
Mujeres Manglar began as a project linking the development of female leadership in a context of collective struggle for territorial defense and the rights of forced disappearance victims in the Buenaventura district. When women recall the moment when this group was created, their narrative includes elements which centrally link the mangrove as a symbol of their roots and belonging to the territory.
“We chose the mangrove because it’s native, indigenous to us, to Buenaventura. And for the significance the mangrove has, no?. These roots are firmly grounded in the earth. And the waves hit them, ebb and flow, but they’re still there. They’re strong and large roots. And they don’t move from there. And the mangrove creates, how can I say it? It creates life, because there, in spite of what the armed actors have done, it still sustains life. There’s mud, there’s fish, there’s everything in the mangrove. The mangrove roots have a direct meaning with black women’s hair. For the shapes it develops. And in its roots it shelters nature, it shelters life. And they don’t move despite the waves.” (Interview with Yurany Asprilla, 2024)
The image they choose to represent their economic initiative reflects the strength of their emotional journey, the transformations they’ve undergone in these encounters, and the importance of describing themselves with dignity, rooted in their territory, and showing their connection to their identity. This narrative underscores the symbolic and territorial references that allow them to tell the world who they are and how they confront the adversities they’ve faced.
Collective Organizing as a Creative Possibility
The reflection on crafts and creation as an economic initiative is grounded not only in the need for material subsistence but also in a deep analysis of their ancestral knowledge regarding body care and territory stewardship. There is a particular recognition of the experiences of the women who are midwives and traditional healers within the group. The choice of their proposal to create reusable sanitary pads is part of the broader analysis of female care and the need to eliminate the waste produced by single-use products.
The reusable sanitary pads idea started in 2016, we held workshops, sessions that had like a psychotherapeutic component, and in this psychotherapeutic component, given that there were several midwives in the group, we would bring plants, like plants from the region, from the zone, plants they used to heal, to make remedies, then they started bringing plants, and the sessions became that, like a topic to share, all that ancestral knowledge about the plants of the Pacific, from the municipality of Buenaventura, and from that there were like many plants that were said, for instance, to alleviate menstrual pain, ease ovarian pain, that could help with the topic of menopause symptoms, that would also help women who had given birth, especially if there was heavy bleeding in childbirth, that one plant could be applied to the vagina or used in a tea, and that plant would immediately stop a hemorrhage from a home birth. Then especially this topic of the plants with respect to specific medical issues or women’s diseases. Then all of this, let’s say, was like a time for deep reflection, resulting finally in the idea of creating a product that would allow them to create it with their own hands, which wouldn’t be too costly to make, and that would also support with all of this environmental care. (Giraldo, 2024)
This reflection on creating their economic proposal seems crucial to me for understanding their approach to systemic change. The decision to think of a product to commercialize and generate a collective income is not based on its marketability but rather on a clear message about care that starts with the body but extends to collective care and care for the territory in which they live. It’s a call to understand the connection between consumption and its environmental impacts, and with this message, they also invite women who use the product to consider their relationship with their bodies based on their menstrual cycles.
Final Reflections
The development of this narrative seems valuable to me because it allows us to tell a concrete, situated, and local experience, demonstrating how female leadership is articulated in a collective as a strategy for systemic change through manual and artisanal crafts. This initiative addresses the building of a form of leadership from a place of emotional vulnerability, transformed through empathy, collective support, and the recognition of shared pain.
Witnessing the formation of this emotional community has allowed me to understand, among other things, the possibilities for action and impact on processes that, from my perspective, are distant but build an intimate foundation through commitment, deep listening, and reciprocal recognition of each person’s life experience.
Another fundamental conclusion that is part of this story is how the pursuit of justice, in this case, has enabled a collective reflection on cultural roots, from which the construction of shared symbols begins, and with that, common worlds of meaning that integrate their identity with the notion of territory. This reflects the evident tension between their territorial connection in a space that is also the setting of conflict in which they become victims.
The reflexion in terms of equity takes on a prominent role in this experience, from the perspective of the common economic initiative, which transcends the mercantile logic of entrepreneurship and is constructed as a possibility for community management of life to address an economic need while integrating reflections on body care, healing, a deep reflection of female menstrual cycles, and consciousness regarding consumption to face the environmental crisis caused by waste in their territory.
Finally, I would like to highlight the importance of narrating the creation of this emotional community as a transformation of a painful experience, which starts from individual tragedy and moves to a collective mourning process. It involves the political advocacy of their rights, fostering a conversation about what it means to be Afro-descendant women living in poverty, under conditions of structural exclusion and oppression in Buenaventura. It showcases the ways to weave collectivity through emotional bonds that narrate pain and vulnerability, and allows generating resistance processes as a manifestation of efforts to envision and build systemic change alternatives from local contexts.
Bibliography
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Interviews
Asprilla, Y. (2024) ‘Entrevista sobre Mujeres Manglar’ [Interview about Mujeres Manglar]. 10/01/2024. Buenaventura, Colombia.
Balanta, M. (2024) ‘Entrevista sobre Mujeres Manglar’ [Interview about Mujeres Manglar]. 14/02/2024 Buenaventura, Colombia
Giraldo, M. (2024) “Entrevista sobre Mujeres Manglar” [Interview about Mujeres Manglar]. 05/02/2024. Buenaventura, Colombia
Podcast