Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order

In Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order: Black Middle Classes through an Intersectional Lens, anthropologist and Black feminist Mara Viveros-Vigoya examines what it means to be Black and middle class in Colombia and how that meaning has been configured over almost a century of the country’s history. By applying an intersectional perspective, the book introduces two important theoretical shifts. First, it challenges the perception of Afro-descendant 'communities' as uniformly impoverished and second, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of class with geographical and historical contexts and with axes of social inequality such as gender, race, and age. Viveros-Vigoya emphasizes the role of Black women in their shaping of the Black middle classes and their values, in ways which at times counter the individualist and capitalist paradigms in which the idea of social mobility is deeply embedded. She also argues that since the inauguration of neoliberal multiculturalism in the 1990s, while Blackness and upward social mobility have become more compatible, it remains to be seen whether we are advancing towards a global agenda of social justice or if we are simply opening some spaces for social and political mobility that serve largely to reproduce the status quo in the name of racial equality.