Extra supermercado juscelino kubitschek biography

By Agathe Faure.

For two years, in 2018 and 2019, I immersed myself in the lives of Emberá Dobidá families who had migrated from Colombia’s Pacific coastal region of the Chocó to the bustling urban environment of Medellín. Their journey from rainforest settlements to the country’s second largest city was clearly a defining feature of their lives. But through my research I learned that ‘movement’ was central to the Emberá Dobidá not only in terms of this life-changing migration but also in the stories they told me of their past and in the observations I made of their everyday experience of the city. Movement, whether in the Chocó or in Medellín, shaped social relationships for the Emberá Dobidá. If it was either expanded or contained, their sociality was impacted.

Early on in my fieldwork, I was struck by the recurrence of news articles and everyday conversations in Colombia that acknowledged the growing urbanisation of Indigenous peoples. But whenever I shared my research interests with governmental and non-governmental institutions, as well as with Indigenous organisations and academics, I hit a wall. Most seemed uncomfortable with the topic, brushing it aside to explain Indigenous migration to cities as a necessity or an embarrassment, something Indigenous people di