Country: Colombia

Group: Raizal

Date Finalized: 11/07/20

Team: Maya Shrikant (lead), Colleen Clauss, Natasha Chandra, Michael Demangone

Content Warning: slavery

Approximate Time Period: 1500-1834

The Raizal ethnic group have a history of subjection to forced labor, with enough evidence to support the positive code.

The Raizal people are a Creole-speaking, Afro-Colombian group which descends from the union of  English, Spanish and Dutch colonizers and African slaves. The group was brought by British settlers to the islands of San Andres, Providencia and Santa Catalina as slave laborers for cotton plantations and cattle raising (Londono, 2017). When the British decided to abandon the Caribbean islands, the enslaved Raizals remained there becoming free merchants and generating their own economies and trades (Londono, 2017). Slavery on the island was abolished in 1851 by the country of Columbia (Brooke, 1994). The Raizal people argue that the discrimination against them today is racial, religious, linguistic, political, and socio-economic (Minority Rights Group International n.d.). Data quality is a 2, because much of the evidence for the Raizal group was lumped together with Afro-Colombian accounts of forced labor. Many of the sources focused on more cultural aspects of the group than social and historical details.

Sources

  1. Brooke, J. (1994, March 29). Long Neglected, Colombia’s Blacks Win Changes (Published 1994). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/29/world/long-neglected-colombia-s-blacks-win-changes.html
  2. Londoño, W., & González, P. (2017). From plantation to proletariat: Raizals in San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina. Race & Class, 59(1), 84–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396817701680
  3. Minority Rights Group International. (n.d.). Raizales. Retrieved October 31, 2020, from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/raizales/.
  4. Raizal people of Colombian Caribbean archipelago defend cultural traditions | Life | English edition | Agencia EFE. (n.d.). Retrieved October 26, 2020, from https://www.efe.com/efe/english/life/raizal-people-of-colombian-caribbean-archipelago-defend-cultural-traditions/50000263-2712907