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Abstract This paper is an ethnography of the articulation of ethnicity in the politics of blackness in Colombia. Based. on the author's fieldwork in the southern Pacific region over the last 10 years, the paper briefly describe the ethnicization of blackness in Colombia and shows how this process implies a particular articulation of memories and identities in the politics of representation of alterity. The ethnicization of blackness involves a specific 'imagined. (black) community' both within and beyond the nation. The specificity of this imagined. black community is anchored. in the objectification of memory, culture, nature and identity. Therefore, it is argued. that the ethnicization of blackness is not a new euphemism for race, but that to understand the particular inscriptions of blackness as an ethnic group one has to problematize the 'racial closure' assumed. by most scholars in the study of blackness. Keywords: ethnicizationracial closureblacknessregimes of memorypolitics of subjectivityColombia lowlands Acknowledgments During the last year, drafts of this paper were discussed. several times both separately and collectively with faculties and graduate students of UNC-Chapel Hill. Particularly, I want to thank Arturo Escobar, Lawrence Grossberg, Jon Lepofsky and Michal Osterweil for our engaging discussions and their challenging effects on my own thoughts. Their frank feedback was very insightful and helped. me to overcome shortcomings of early versions of this paper. Obviously, those shortcomings that still persist in this paper are entirely my responsibility. Notes I am aware of the contrast and parallels of these sorts of questions that could be found in other places of black presence such as the Caribbean, Brazil, Venezuela or the USA. In particular, other studies on maroons have dealt with similar issues lending to opposite conclusions such as Richard Price () in the Caribbean or in Friedemann and Cross (). Even though it would be very interesting to make a comparison with these cases, this kind of exercise would involve a step further of my paper, which is an attempt to focus on a specific historical juncture. It is important to bear in mind that local people are not limited. to reproducing in advance what has been assigned. to them by the 'ethnic imaginary'. On the contrary, the local populations have taken different positions in relation with their interpellation into the ethnization of blackness. They have inscribed, transformed. and engaged. it in multiple ways. Some of them have been opposed. to its more concrete implications as the collective legalization of their land, whereas others have taken part openly in the process. In this paper, I will not describe this local polyphony of the ethnicization of blackness because my point is to illustrate the emergence and transformation of this articulation through the production of a novel regime of memory and identity as well as political subjects and subjectivities in the discursive field mainly constitute by the state, NGOs and the ethnic organizations. This dense weaving of memory, identity and power has been theorized. recently for the Latin American context with the notion of politics of culture (Alvarez et al. ). I do not want to argue that all the black people in the Pacific region had 'erased' their oral memories about slavery or their African origin. On the contrary, there are places in which those articulations have been made. For example, for the case of El Charco, the oral tradition registers the last master of the region, but as Almario () has demonstrated. this register is much more complex and polysemic than at first glance one would assume. In a recent thesis, Oslender (, p. 177) quoted. a report from a state institution in which the 'community' in the river San Francisco had an oral memory about slavery: '"The cultural memory of the communities [of the river San Francisco] speak of the slave uprising in Cascajero, when the slaves used. the absence of their master Julián to stage a rebellious attack throwing the kitchen and work instruments into the river and onto its beach. When the master saw this mess he called. the place Cascajero [a mess]. That's how the community got its name. (INCORA 1998c, point 2.1)"'. Nevertheless, this 'erasure' of slavery and African origin from oral tradition has been a widespread process (c.f. Hoffmann , Losonczy , Wade ). Needless to say that the explanation about this uneven 'retention' of African origin and slavery is beyond the scope of this paper. Interview by Oscar Almario and the author with Nelson Montaño, president of Orisa (Organization of Satinga River), Bocas de Satinga, 24 November 1998. Interview by Oscar Almario and the author with Father Alex Jiménez del Castillo, activist of Organichar (Organization of Black Communities of El Charco), El Charco, 21 November 1998. This labour has not been simple and is far from being finished. There are many zones where this labour has been less intensive than others, multiple are the dynamics of hybridization and confrontation with local knowledge. Thus, when I speak about ethnicization, I do not consider that it has been led. to an end with equal intensity and with the same effects on all levels. In order to have an image more according to what has happened. in the south Pacific region, I would say that depending on the different places and levels this ethnicization has spread out with greater or lesser intensity, managing in an unequal way to restore this economy of visibilities of black community as ethnic group. The Transitory Article 55 (AT-55) of the Political Constitution of 1991 defined. the creation by the government of one Special Commission of Black Communities, with the participation of the activists that represented. the communities involved. This Special Commission wrote the text of the Law 70 of 1993, which recognized. the collective propriety over the lands of the Colombian Pacific of these communities that have inhabited. this region, according with their traditional production practices. For detailed. analyses of the Transitory Article 55 and Law 70, as well as for their implications in the ethnicization of blackness, see the recent special issue of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology edited. by Wade (). A similar irruption was produced. on the national level (Agudelo ). For an ethnography of the local narratives and practices of intervention of the Catholic see Niño (). For a description and analysis of this legislation and the development of the social movement of black communities, see Grueso et al. (), Pardo (), Oslender (, ) and Wade (). See also Giddens () and Anderson (1993). In the same way, Anderson (1993) has argued. how censuses, maps and museums have been technologies of representation since the colonial states. For a more detailed. analysis of the context of creation of these Community Councils and the process of legal recognition of the territories of black communities, see Oslender ().