Black Freed Gold Miners Reshaping the Legal Language: Subsoil Property Regime Transition in Late Nineteenth Century, Colombia

Daniel Varela Corredor, University of Michigan

On March 15, 1887, the newly unified Republic of Colombia adopted a Mining Code, permitting exclusive private entitlements to subsoil deposits. The new law aimed to facilitate the formalization of claims and to organize the exploitation of mineral resources in marginal regions such as Chocó, where the activities of African-descendant small-scale gold miners had largely been illegible to the State. Contrary to the image promoted by the law of a chaotic distribution of ownership rights, the access to mines and agricultural lands in Chocó followed its own categories and internal logic among former slaves. By focusing on local notarial and legal sources, this presentation examines how freed Afro-Colombians experienced and interacted with the Mining Code to formalize ownership rights over the two decades following its promulgation. I focus on how they incorporated vernacular categories such as “terrains,” “mines,” and “rastrojos” into their engagement with the law, and how they locally unpacked, adapted, and translated other concepts promoted by the code, such as “possession” and “public notoriety.” Under the law, mining property was to be established by disrupting the continuum linking agricultural soil and mining subsoil that characterized the previous regime and by fracturing the networks of people connected to these agro-mining spaces. However, I argue that the issuance of mining titles during this property transition in Chocó depended heavily on the porosity of those boundaries. Rather than simply breaking with older forms of ownership, the new property regime needed to preserve them informally in order to create new actors and enable them to become claimants.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 79. Comparative-Historical Environmental Sociology Part One: Empirics and Theory