Body and Territory

Violence experienced by an Afro-Ecuadorian woman

Abstract

Violence against the bodies of Afro-Ecuadorian women and the material exploitation of land are two epistemological categories to be rethought together. The land and the body have become objects of exploitation, expulsion and exclusion as a result of capitalist insertion subject to the colonial system. This article exposes the multidimensionality of violence that crosses the territory and the body of an Afro-Ecuadorian woman in the province of Esmeraldas, in a context of capitalist industrialization that places the racialized body as an object, which does not represent subjectivity, and therefore is exploited and dominated. The territory is also reduced to a simplistic form of object, a commodity for capitalist purposes. Through the analysis of the life story of Sofia Corozo, an Afro-Ecuadorian woman, elderly and leader of the community of La Chiquita, located in the north of the province of Esmeraldas, the article seeks to show the forms of violence experienced by Afro-Ecuadorian women, as well as the processes of struggle, resistance and defense of their bodies, understood as “body-territory” and territory as “land-nature”, from their position against the industrialization of oil palm.