Caring life in and from the urban margins: Women, ollas comunitarias, and everyday resistance in Cali, Colombia

Funded by the De/Coloniality Now initiative, this research project by early career researchers brings together a multidisciplinary team of three researchers based in Freiburg and Cali, Colombia.

This interdisciplinary project studies how women in Cali (Colombia) use cooking as both a counter strategy to challenge violence and multiple forms of oppression and a means for co-creating new worlds in the context of a (post)colonial city. Colombia experienced the biggest wave of protests in its recent history between April and June 2021 during the so-called "National Strike" (El Paro Nacional). A group of women (most of them mothers) emerged as one of the key figures as they cooked tirelessly in protester-occupied spaces. The olla comunitaria (community-based cooking pot) became a symbol of resistance, and the cornerstone of the reproduction of life amid the eventful times of the protests. By bringing the kitchen to the centre of the occupied spaces, these women – who identify themselves and are informally known as mamás ollas – not only fed the protestors but forged an affective ensemble of solidarity and mutual care around makeshift cooking and sharing infrastructures on the streets of urban margins. Cooking as a form of political participation did not cease with the end of the National Strike. On the contrary, the olla comunitaria became a key component in the repertoire of collective action of the social movements in the city. 

Based on collaborative ethnography and knowledge co-production, the project will (1) delve into the ways these women make sense, experience, and navigate the urban order etched by coloniality and violence and (2) explore the role of cooking as a form of care and everyday resistance at the urban margins, and (3) formulate ethnographic critique by interrogating some of the dominant conceptualizations of care, caring and political agency in academic literature. The project takes everyday life and city margins as vantage points to address epistemic and social practices of contestation and resistance by subaltern groups and to explore how new patterns of coloniality and capitalism manifest and shape urban life, especially in the Global South. Based on a serious engagement with the critique to coloniality of knowledge and epistemic extractivism in academia, the project builds on the principles of co-production and openness to different forms of knowledge and storytelling. The projected outcomes include a series of workshops, a video documenting these activities, and an illustrated booklet with the life histories and testimonies of the mamás ollas. 

This project is funded by