Anti-racist beauty micro-enterprises: Black women’s subversive entrepreneurship in Cali, Colombia

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how Black women entrepreneurs in Cali, Colombia confront racism and sexism, as they engage in the expanding neoliberal beauty market. We argue that anti-racist entrepreneurial experiences in Cali are shaped by four interconnected processes: First, changes in gender and development policies, aligned with inclusive neoliberal development projects. Second, the limitations of state neoliberal multicultural policies, which has made activists aware of the need to address racism and sexism. Third, activist’s appropriation of the intersectional turn, allowing them to recognize articulations between racism, classism and sexism. Fourth, the adoption of anti-neoliberal discourses supporting distributive and solidarity practices. Our analysis suggests that while entrepreneurial anti-racist actions do not generate radical or permanent changes in the beauty industry, they do have material and symbolic effects in Black women’s experiences of racial justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-racism
• anti-sexism
• Black women
• micro-enterprises
• neoliberalism
• Colombia

Introduction

Since 2004 the Association of Afro-Colombian Women (Amafrocol) have organized Tejiendo Esperanzas (Weaving Hope), an annual public encounter that promotes Natural Black Hair among Black women and girls. In this vibrant and well-attended event, Black hairdressers from the Colombian Pacific region demonstrate sophisticated creative skills by exhibiting varied and beautiful braiding hairstyles in a public competition. Activists, intellectuals, artists, designers, and Black women entrepreneurs collectively praise and visibilize the historical, political and cultural value of Black women’s hair. They also organize hair-care and self-esteem workshops, vindicating the art of braiding and the hairdressing profession for Black women. Recently, this meeting has become a stage for marketing cosmetic products, clothing, and accessories made by various microenterprises, mostly led by young Black women.

The Tejiendo Esperanzas event of 2018 and 2019 particularly promoted workshops and discussions exploring the role of micro-businesses and entrepreneurship. In past events, while sharing their achievements and marketing strategies, women activists had raised concerns about how to protect and patent their innovations and creations in the expanding “Afro-beauty” market (Edmonds 2010; Ford 2015; Tarlo 2019). In 2018, some entrepreneurs focused on strategies for overcoming barriers associated with lack of capital and infrastructure and discussed how to decrease production costs and ensure access to high-quality raw materials. Other activists discussed how to use their micro-enterprises for promoting solidarity and responsible consumption, as well as fair and equitable trade relations that can challenge neoliberalism and capitalism. Despite their differences, all coincided in the common objective of achieving economic justice while simultaneously fighting anti-Black racist aesthetics at the intersection of racism and sexism.

Although many studies have explored the role of women’s microenterprises in Latin America, little research has analysed how these initiatives can be cornerstones of neoliberal development programmes, and yet also generate anti-racist actions. To fill this gap, this article examines how the new microenterprises promoted by Amafrocol support anti-racist struggles in Colombia.¹ We show how these entrepreneurial anti-racist actions are shaped by four interrelated processes: (1) changes in Gender and Development policies which began to integrate and legitimate visions on inclusive neoliberal development; (2) the limits of the Colombian multicultural project and its uncritical celebration of diversity, which ignored or minimized the co-presence of the racism and sexism (Wade 2022); (3) the “intersectional turn” shaping activists’ political awareness and commitments to undermine the articulations between racism, sexism and classism (Moreno Figueroa and Viveros-Vigoya 2022); and (4) the adoption of anti-neoliberal discourses promoting Black women’s control over their labour power and the creation of distributive and solidarity practices.

Our ethnographic analysis recognizes the “hiddenness” and silences of the presence of race within development frameworks (Kothari 2006; Silva 2014; White 2002; Wilson 2012). We draw on Patel’s (2020, 1473) call to explore the ways in which “race permeates every aspect of development”, its agendas, interventions, and everyday practices. We also draw on Black feminist approaches (Collins 2000; Davis [1981] 2004; Gonzalez 1983; Muhammad 2015; Viveros-Vigoya 2016) to address the ways in which race, class and gender shape the formation of female micro-enterprises. We ask if is it possible to challenge racism and sexism, within the confines of entrepreneurial development? How do Black women (and non-white mestiza women) generate anti-racist actions within and beyond the rationality and governmentality of neoliberal development (Wilson 2012)? How do activists create more expansive understandings of the links between racism, anti-racism and development in everyday life?

We demonstrate how development projects (despite their coloniality, capitalist rationality, colour-blind ideologies and domesticating sexist forces) can be flexible and shifting, and resisted from different places. Our ethnographic reflections illustrate how women entrepreneurs envision and create alternative ways of accessing capital, while at the same time challenging one of the key promises and premises of development – that whitening (i.e. becoming mestiza/o in Colombia) is a pathway for accessing capital, wellbeing and inclusion within the multicultural state. Our analysis suggests that Black women entrepreneurs have instead generated diverse anti-racist actions within neoliberal beauty markets to regain control over the re-signification of their racialized bodies by collectively producing and capturing alternative forms of “value”.² We argue that, although entrepreneurial anti-racist actions do not generate structural, radical or permanent changes in the structures of production, exchange and accumulation of the beauty industry, they do have material and symbolic effects on Black women’s everyday experiences and their sense of achieving racial justice.

We now present a brief overview of our collaborative ethnographic approach, followed by a discussion of how entrepreneurial developments projects are shaped by ideologies and practices of gender, race and beauty. We then elaborate on the specific context of female micro-enterprises in Colombia, before analysing the ethno-development projects and discourses embraced by Amafrocol. Finally, we show how new entrepreneurial experiences led by Black women articulate anti-racist discourses and practices using intersectional approaches that call for solidarity and social justice.

Collaborative ethnography: co-reflecting on beauty entrepreneurial practices

Our methodology is based on collaborative ethnography (Lassiter 2021) among a group of women researchers, activists, entrepreneurs, and teachers. Following Black feminist and critical geography approaches to development, we recognize the importance of co-authorship in the process of knowledge making. This approach guided our awareness of the ways in which power shapes the representation of voice and epistemological authority. Stories of development and anti-racism “need to be told [and written] by those who experience them, not by proxy or by others” (Lahiri-Dutt 2017, 329). Accordingly, our research process has involved dialogues for co-creating collective processes of data gathering and for co-writing.

Our data collection involved encounters, informal conversations, tape-recorded semi-structured interviews, participant observation and autoethnography. We agreed to collect memories and narratives of how the practices and discourses of Amafrocol had challenged racism over time. In the process of remembering, re-collecting, and writing stories, some of the authors who have been directly involved in the organization articulated and shared autoethnographic reflections of their own journeys and experiences.

We conducted ethnographic observations during the Tejiendo Esperanzas events in Cali in 2018 and 2019. Memories of other events were retrieved by those authors who had attended this event since its inception. Observations by researchers who were not members of Amafrocol were recorded in notes and photographs and discussed during informal conversations. We conducted participant observation during public workshops focusing on how to take care of different types of hair, how to use turbans and how to apply hair dyes on natural Black hair. 30-minute tape-recorded interviews were conducted with six beauty entrepreneurs at their stands during the Tejiendo Esperanzas events. A focus group was organized at the Makeda beauty salon in the city of Cali, where we discussed beauty and antiracism with twelve women. Some of the authors got new braids with extensions and metal beads, others learned how to do tropas (cornrow braids). Some authors taught participants how to use a product to moisturize and twist out natural Black hair curls, while others engaged in conversations and facilitated discussions.

From our different positionalities³ and diverse degrees of engagement within Amafrocol, we managed to capture different experiences across generations, disciplines, ethno-racial identities, and Black feminist praxis. Four of the authors are Black academic-activist women, originally from the Colombian Pacific region who have been involved in teaching, research, and anti-racist activism in Cali, Buenaventura, and Bogotá. One of the authors is a White-criolla academic woman from northern-central Venezuela, who has participated in collaborative research and pedagogical projects with Black, Indigenous and peasant organizations in Colombia and Venezuela. Two are experts in hairdressing techniques involving different types of braiding, placing extensions, hydration, and supporting transitions from chemically treated hair to natural hair. One of the authors has experience in designing Afro-accessories and applying for state development funds, while another has expertise in manufacturing and marketing beauty products and selecting high quality raw materials. The authors have different disciplinary experiences, as educators, accountants, sociologists, political geographers, and anthropologists. Some were involved in the early feminist and Black movements of the 1970s in Cali, others joined Black organizations and supported ethno-racial state policy and legal reforms after the multicultural turn of the 1990s and others recently joined student organizations and women collectives after the intersectional turn in 2010.

This article aims to integrate our different experiences, co-reflections and understandings of Amafrocol’s anti-racist processes. The paper presents an underlying narrative depicting transitions and changes experienced by some of the activists of Amafrocol as they have engaged in different development projects. Sections of this article were presented in the 2018 Tejiendo Esperanzas Forum, in order to feed back our reflections to the activists and groups there and incorporate their comments.

Beauty microenterprises: development, gender and race

Since the 1990s, female microenterprises have been promoted as a great solution to women’s problems. They are seen as cornerstones for implementing Gender and Development programmes across the Global South (Duflo 2012). Critical studies on “post-development” and “post-feminism” suggest that many development programmes focusing on micro-enterprises tend to re-inscribe processes of domesticity in the body of women and they reproduce stereotypes of masculinity associated with the notions of innovation, discovery, conquest, competition, rational management and geographical mobility (Babb 2001; Bruni, Gherardi, and Poggio 2004; Murdock 2003). According to Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood, female micro-enterprises limit the productive activities of women to practices that correspond to the ideal of modern femininity, in hairdressing, beauty and sewing. In this process, women are seen as passive followers of national development projects by preserving the patriarchal logic of “complementarity” (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996, 151). One of the effects of micro-entrepreneurship is the depoliticization of feminist struggles, as they seek to empower women in an individual-subjective sense (Baden and Goetz 1998). However, as we will see, this positioning of domesticity, passivity and individuality has been challenged by Black women entrepreneurs in Cali, who reconfigure their entrepreneurial experiences as collective processes fostering intersectional political struggles.

Following Uma Kothari (2006) on the silencing of race in development discourses and programmes, we notice that very little research examines the racialized dimensions of women entrepreneurs. Development projects have been explicitly colour-blind, hiding their racialized dimensions and limiting anti-racist programmes and actions (White 2002, 407). Denise Ferreira da Silva (2014) explains that race permeates and gives meaning to development, operating in the definition of the subjects of investigation, the process of intervention and its objectives (Silva 2014, 40–41). Kalpana Wilson expands this critique, arguing that there are different kinds of development, which are adaptable and changing. She calls for attention to the ways in which changing constructions of race appear in different models of development; “in the context of both the changing strategies of capital accumulation and resistance to them” (Wilson 2012, 6–7). We will see how Amafrocol activists seek to produce alternative definitions of race and racism (shaped by intersectional critiques) as they still engage in neoliberal entrepreneurial development projects.

Hytti, Blackburn, and Tegtmeier (2018) also suggest that the academic community has silenced questions about racism in microenterprise practices, despite evidence of the limiting effects generated by racial discrimination in these spaces. According to John Gabriel, racism tends to be opaque in the business field because institutionalized anti-racist policies tend to legitimize solutions associated with the “market” without taking into account that the new ways in which race is marketed are still limited in terms of questioning the reproduction of inequalities and of providing alternatives for racialized groups (Gabriel 2012, 188).

Satnam Virdee (2014) is one of the few authors who examine the direct relationships between racism and entrepreneurship among migrant populations from Southeast Asia in the United Kingdom. These initiatives have been conceived as “buffers” to cushion the impact of racial discrimination and the lack of job opportunities available to racialized migrant populations. In this sense, Adia Harvey illustrates how Black women in the United States have experienced historical oppressions in the labour market, which have caused many of them to become “surviving entrepreneurs”, seeking to recruit other Black women as clients in the field of beauty (Harvey 2008, 39). The author claims that the beauty industry is easily accessible and offers relative financial stability; however, many businesswomen continue to face racial discrimination, wage inequality, and occupational sexual segregation (Harvey 2008). Robert Silverman (1999) further explains that Black businesses do not have the production of profits as their main motivation, instead they aim to consolidate spaces of autonomous labour and social independence. Silverman demonstrates that the economic gains from these types of initiatives generally do not exceed those that can be acquired in the secondary labour market (Silverman 1999, 235).

Many Black women entrepreneurs are linked to or have emerged from the beauty and hairdressing sectors. Black salon owners, hair-care cosmetics manufacturers and fashion designers have expanded the beauty market (Craig 2006; Ford 2015; Harvey 2008; Langevang and Gough 2012). In the early twentieth-century United States, Madame Walker managed to establish a large company manufacturing beauty and hair-care products that targeted Black women. While she gained significant wealth and individual respectability, she also organized a wide network of working-class Black women who not only sold her beauty products but engaged in philanthropic, antiracist and charitable activities (Freeman 2020, 93). Their guiding philosophies were “racial uplift and independence for black women” (Freeman 2020, 16), an ideological dimension that can be found in many Black entrepreneurial projects today.

Beauty shops “represent a female-dominated entrepreneurial sector” for many Black and brown women with limited access to capital and encountering economic barriers (Candelario 2000, 132). These entrepreneurial spaces have been analysed as “sites for both cultural and identity production” where race, class, gender, and sexual “tropes are produced and problematized” (Candelario 2000, 128, 129). Black beauty entrepreneurs have challenged racism and the ways in which beauty practices reproduce racial, gendered and class inequalities (Candelario 2000; Craig 2006; Moreno Figueroa 2013; Tate 2007; Domínguez Mendoza 2022). Beauty landscapes are in constant negotiation and change; they shape racial identities and can challenge Eurocentric aesthetic paradigms (Gimlin 2002). Beauty practices, according to Mónica Moreno Figueroa (2013), are ambivalent, incomplete, relational and open to contestation, and can generate collective change and transformative experiences.

Diverse anti-racist actions have emerged from the beauty sector. The Black fashion industry has been closely linked to critical positions against segregation and racial discrimination. The marketing of the “Afro look” became an anti-racist marker of pride and racial politics at the time of the Black Panthers in the US; while in South Africa it was a sign of cosmopolitan, hip and modern lifestyle that could “transgress racial hierarchies, gendered social norms, and spatial boundaries” (Ford 2015, 30). African style hairstyles (Afros, dreadlocks, braids) expressed a political position against racism (Tate 2007, 303, 304). At global scales the “the Afro look was simultaneously a marker of a woman’s personal style and a symbol of a collective ‘we’” uniting people of African descent across continents and regions (Ford 2015, 31). The global industry of Afro aesthetics and the “Black Is Beautiful” project expressed ideological and spiritual notions of prosperity, pride, beauty and health.

Overall, many beauty micro-enterprises led by Black women have taken anti-racism as part of their political goals or objectives. In Latin America, few studies (with the exception of Domínguez Mendoza 2022) examine the anti-racist effects of Black female microenterprises within the context of neoliberal development. The experiences of Amafrocol and its allied microenterprises in Colombia allow us to examine the changing ways in which anti-racist and anti-sexist agendas intersect and materialize in tangible practices that have economic, symbolic and political effects on the daily lives of Black women.

Microenterprises in Colombia: neoliberal multicultural development

The Latin America and the Caribbean region has the highest rate of female entrepreneurial activity in the world, with entrepreneurs representing 16.7 per cent of the adult female population in 2018 (GEM 2018, 36).⁴ In Colombia, female labour participation rates in entrepreneurial activities have increased significantly, showing a rise from 31 to 44 per cent between 1985 and 2009 (Powers and Magnoni 2013). Colombia also had a wide range of public policies and legislations aimed at promoting the growth of microenterprises in accordance with its state neoliberal development objectives and with the implementation of Plan Colombia.⁵ In 2000, a Law on Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprise was enacted, in order to facilitate the granting of microcredits and support new business initiatives. Based on this legal framework, the Colombian state conceived micro-enterprises as mechanisms of labour inclusion for the vulnerable population (ILO 2014). In 2010, the government Policy to Promote Equal Opportunities proposed that the state should allocate resources to strengthen the micro-enterprises of the Afro-Colombian population, in order to turn them into suppliers of large companies (CONPES 2010, 76). Further research is needed to unpack the long-term outcome of policies to make Black Colombians into basic suppliers for production chains, rather than as intermediaries or at other stages where value is more likely to be created and captured.

International organizations and agencies have provided support and training for the formation of female microenterprises in Colombia, and in most cases, they have been in alignment with neoliberal development precepts and with the direct investment of national and international private capital contributed by the likes of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), IDB, and USAID. Even though Black women in all their diversity participate in these programmes, none of these development projects include critical views on racism within their agendas. In line with the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism,⁶ it is assumed that tailoring development plans to differentially target ethnic groups (also known in the region as desarrollo con enfoque étnico diferencial) will ensure the inclusion and participation of Black and Indigenous women in markets and guarantee their individual social mobility by granting them financial support. Colombian micro-enterprises have thus become devices to guarantee and supervise the insertion and individualized participation of the ethnic population in the neoliberal market. In this sense, neoliberal multiculturalism is not only reduced to the mere celebration of cultural and ethnic diversity, but also contemplates material changes, with micro-enterprises acting as devices of economic “inclusion” that reproduce the rationality and governmentality of neoliberalism (Heo 2015; Liow 2012). Micro-enterprises, guided by the logic of capital production and accumulation, allow the state and its institutions to control how much capital is produced, and by whom, within the rationale of efficiency. They seek to “empower the poor” without modifying the structure of inequality or confronting the economic interests that maintain it (Veltmeyer 2012).

The model of inclusion of neoliberal multiculturalism reflects the tendencies of the labour market to adjust and expand its accumulation mechanisms, while celebrating ethnic difference and silencing racism (Hale 2005) (see Moreno Figueroa and Wade 2024 in this special issue). As Sharma (2006) points out, these development models reproduce a differential inclusion, based on the hierarchical internal containment of race and its neo-racist modality of integration (Sharma 2006, 105). Inclusion via neoliberal development involves plugging marginalized communities into the lower rungs of production networks while promoting docile subjectivities, which can rarely generate reparation, dignity and racial equality.

The experiences of Amafrocol’s activists do not exactly correspond to this diagnosis, as we will see below. Although the difference between structural and individual changes must be considered, the variable and contextual effects of the intersections between capitalism, racism and patriarchy must also be taken into account in order to make visible the ruptures that some of these women are making through their endeavours and everyday struggles. Likewise, it is important to consider the subversive potential that some of these enterprises have when women are aware of the neoliberal agenda shaping the funding that they receive, and they know how to use these projects as political platforms for anti-racist awareness and for gaining control over their bodies, sense of dignity and labour. In this sense, it is necessary to stop conceptualizing the practices of entrepreneurial women in dichotomous terms: questioning/resistance vs. reproduction/submission. These rigid binaries can lead to underestimating the agency of women microentrepreneurs and their diverse range of actions against neoliberalism. Black women engage in entrepreneurial activities to access capital and generate material well-being, while also critiquing development discourses that conceive non-white people as requiring assistance to be integrated into the market and the state.

Amafrocol and its initial entrepreneurial ventures in Cali

At the end of the 1990s, the Black and Indigenous populations of the Colombian Pacific region – historically a Black-majority and marginalized area – were deeply affected by internal displacements due to the escalation of the armed conflict, the expansion of illicit crop economies, and the implementation of large development projects (Oslender 2008; Vélez-Torres and Varela 2014). In 1997, the Afro-Colombian population in the city of Cali represented 28 per cent of the population, of which 42 per cent came from areas of the Pacific such as Tumaco, Buenaventura, Chocó, among others (Posso 2008). At the time, the city was affected by a social crisis, caused by insecurity, drug trafficking, high levels of unemployment, job discrimination, and ethno-racial segmentation (Barbary, Ramírez, and Urrea 2004). Many Black women, who were displaced during the civil war from rural areas into the city, were forced into domestic service, sex work, and the informal economy (Grueso and Arroyo 2002); and they were exposed to new forms of urban violence associated with low pay, labour exploitation and sexual abuse (Posso 2008; Wade 2013). As indicated by AFRODES, and several Black organizations in the Pacific, the practices of exclusion of the displaced Afro-Colombians were marked by racist experiences (Escobar 2003).

The Association of Afro-Colombian Women (Amafrocol), created on 25 August 1996 in Cali, aimed to provide support to displaced Black women from the Colombian Pacific, living in situations of economic precarity and labour exclusion. The initial statutes of the organization included among its objectives: to promote the recovery of the values of the Afro-Colombian ethnic group, foster self-esteem, improve the standard of living and establish a network of mutual solidarity for this population. One of the strategies of the organization, was to create business associations such as: beauty salons (hairdressers), restaurants and schools in order to provide employment to some of the Black women in Cali who lacked resources and work opportunities. Emilia Eneyda Valencia Murraín, one of the authors of this article, remembers that the organization was formed in response to the economic exclusion, racism, sexism and violence experienced by several internally displaced Black women (from the Pacific region) who were living in the cities. She said:

We must first resolve the issue of machismo to be able to empower ourselves later. I realized that women who were in a situation of violence could not get out of this situation as long as they were economically dependent, so it seemed important to us to be able to support women to work as hairdressers, or making bags [to sell]. The girls who now run their micro-enterprises, their economic initiatives allow them to sustain themselves. (Conversation, Cali, July 2017)

Amafrocol started to create enterprises to mitigate the racial exclusion, gender-based violence and the economic precarity experienced by Black women in Cali. The objective was to establish a Network of Hairstylists since the prices charged for braiding in the city of Cali were very low and unstable. Black women hairstylists and braiders worked in an individualized, uncoordinated, and unregulated manner and earned very little. By creating a network of hairdressers, based on mutual solidarity and sisterhood, Amafrocol’s activists were able to establish a common price, and regulate the costs of braiding in accordance with time, complexities and specialized skills involved in each hairstyle. For many years, this strategy enabled Black women to control and increase the value of their labour in the beauty market of Cali, and to create a stable network of solidarity interconnecting women in need of economic and social support.

Amafrocol and the network of hairdressers did not depend primarily on the economic success and monetization of their initiatives, but rather on the possibility of creating ties, solidarity links, exchanges and continuous emotional encounters. Leydis, one of the activists, told us during a workshop in a beauty salon: “I grew up in this process, my daughter has also grown up in this process, in the events. In the meetings we always support each other and learn” (Cali, September 2017). Emilia Eneyda also explains:

In Amafrocol there are many generations. The daughters of the founders have come to our workshops since they were little, they learned how to braid, sew, work together. They listen to our stories and now they continue to participate and help us in all the events. (Conversation, Cali, July 2018)

These experiences show how Amafrocol has managed to produce and circulate practices of solidarity, networking and knowledge exchanges within the beauty market, while moving beyond the strictly neoliberal goals of maximizing economic opportunities and profit.

In 2012, Amafrocol created a micro-company called Makeda – with the aim of creating a beauty salon and Afro Fashion house. In 2016, they received the Women’s Award from the Valle del Cauca provincial government, worth fifteen million Colombian pesos.⁷ With this state financial support, Makeda and Amafrocol managed to establish a new salon in Cali, oriented mainly to the care and braiding of natural Black hair. In this space, workshops were held to teach and advise Black women about the management and care of their hair and the use of turbans. The funds were also used to organize campaigns to promote hair-care products, commercialize traditional accessories and garments, and create small commemorative encounters. Unlike other micro-business projects, this salon had a formative role that encouraged debates on self-esteem, appreciation and visibility of Afro-Colombian women and their histories. The salon was cherished by the activists as an intimate and autonomous space for connecting, sharing stories, celebrating Black joy and life (Lu and Steele 2019), while finding ways to support each other without the intervention of men, state functionaries or cultural managers. However, despite many collective efforts, in 2019, the hairdressing salon had to close because the profits were low, and they could not cover their rental costs.

Despite these cycles of economic precarity, Amafrocol activists continued to defend and support the organization’s anti-racist and political actions, and their overall goal to empower and accompany Black women. Emilia Eneyda explains that even when some enterprises have failed, they continue struggling for the political affirmation of natural Black hair, similarly to the civil rights movement in United States, when Afro hairstyles became a symbol of Black power and resistance:

Now it is a more political project, because people already have more information, they know what it means to have natural hair and how we are resisting against what is standardized by the West, which says that the only beautiful thing, the only valid thing, the only thing that is necessary is the western, the European, the white. (Conversation, Cali, November 2017)

In sum, Amafrocol created collective spaces of solidarity for interconnecting, socializing and sharing anti-racist perspectives. Activists engaged in the neoliberal beauty market and its entrepreneurial model and yet they redefined the objectives of ethno-development projects, while also going beyond the celebration of diversity and multicultural inclusion. They re-connected Black women who were displaced from their home territories by armed conflict, and managed to articulate frameworks about economic justice with discourses of collective emancipation criticizing sexism and racism. As we will see below, these critiques became even more explicit with the participation of new activists and new generations of Black entrepreneurs.

New Afro enterprises

In 2018, 1,500 businesses were dedicated to commercializing, importing and/or producing cosmetics for Black hair in Colombia.⁸ Since 2016, importers and national commercial consortia have begun to include products for natural Black hair in their stocks, responding to the growing demand from new consumers who wish to make transitions towards natural-curly hair and preserve this style. In 2012, Amafrocol started partnering with new micro-businesses led by young Black women who are between 19 and 35 years old, and mostly university students and descendants of displaced families from the Colombian Pacific. Almost all of the young entrepreneurs recognize a close relationship with Amafrocol, as they have participated in many of its workshops and in the annual events and meetings. Most of the new entrepreneurs agree that their goal is not only to generate economic income for Black women, but to mobilize criticism against the racist and sexist stereotypes associated with their bodies, hair and ways of dressing. These enterprises explicitly advocate the abandonment of chemical hair-straightening products due to their harmful effects on the health of Black women. They also question the use of hair extensions (artificial or human) and wigs in braiding hairstyles since they promote early hair loss, environmental damage and devalue the aesthetic characteristics of natural Black hair. They collectively argue that the consumption of hair extensions imported from China and the US, have created a strong economic dependency on these products and reinforced the stigmatization of natural Black hair.

We will briefly focus on the experiences and strategies of Bámbara a micro-enterprise (allied to Amafrocol) dedicated to the production of cosmetics for Black women’s hair.⁹ Bámbara was created in 2011 by Mallely Beleño and Lina Lucumí (one of the authors of this article). Both activists had experienced discrimination in the labour market when wearing their natural hair at work and university. They were linked to organizations of Black university feminists and they started to engage in the process of valuing their natural hair.

The objective of Bámbara was to produce cosmetics for Black women’s hair, since there were no Colombian products available in the market, only some alternatives imported from Brazil or the United States were accessible. Bámbara worked with three laboratories and produced around ten different hair products (balsams, shampoos, moulding conditioners), and oils based on fruits such as chontaduro (Bactris gasipaes), sacha inchi (Plukenetia volubilis), cupoazú (Theobroma grandiflorum), avocado, coconut, cocoa and cacay (Caryodendron orinocense). Some of these raw materials come from the Pacific region and the Amazon and have been historically used by Afro-Colombian and Indigenous people who live in these areas. The botanical formulas and ingredients, as explained by Mallely, are cherished and valued as part of the “ancestral” knowledge of their grandmothers and of the Black women of the Pacific. They explicitly aim to recover this knowledge and use it to generate their product range.

The company had a network of fifteen saleswomen, who distributed their products in five provinces of Colombia. Their marketing was done through social networks, and they actively participated in events and fairs to promote their products. For this initiative, the production of cosmetics not only aims to access a new market niche, but also seek to break consumers’ dependence on imported products and support local communities. As Mallely said: “our aim is that the money we spend on products for our hair stays with us, in our communities, where we produce and distribute them … we want to produce value in our communities” (interview, Bogotá, October 2017). In this sense, Lina indicated:

Before, I did not see any products for natural Black hair in the stores, and I do not know at what point large supermarket chains here became interested in buying products [meant] for us. That is, they are seeing that we are educating some clients who previously belonged to them. The idea is not to migrate from one market to another, the idea is to enrich our people, because our natural resources are finite, and it is time for their revenues to circulate among Black people. (Conversation, Cali, September 2017)

It should be noted that Bámbara as well as other micro-enterprises started with personal capital, derived from the savings of the entrepreneurs themselves or their relatives. This shows a change with respect to Amafrocol, which generally sought support from State development programmes or other organizations to finance its micro-business projects. Likewise, these initiatives seek support from hairdressers of friends and acquaintances to exhibit and commercialize the products in their salons and stores; the majority of the enterprises also increase their sales by participating in various local craft fairs. Another aspect that characterizes this new generation of Afro cosmetic microentrepreneurs is the use of social media not only to market their products but to expand their collective care practices and generate solidarity relationships between activists and consumers (Viveros-Vigoya and Ruette-Orihuela 2021).

We see how the demands and offers of the neoliberal market and the actions of these micro-enterprises are co-dependent. On the one hand, the political work done by Amafrocol and the activists has generated a greater demand for products that are required in the transition to and maintenance of natural Black hair. On the other hand, the pressure of the global market and its supply of imported products prompt Black activists to control the production process and their labour power, as they simultaneously seek to re-value their hair types and repair some of the wounds inscribed by racism and sexism on their bodies. In this sense, we suggest that the formation of these micro-enterprises in itself constitutes an anti-racist action based on the production of material and symbolic value and on the control of labour and distribution chains.

Moreover, these enterprises are aligned with the global “going natural” hair movement, which, according to Emma Tarlo, “has undoubtedly become a powerful means of combating historical prejudice and escaping from hair practices that can be costly, exploitative, and in some cases harmful and addictive” (Tarlo 2019, 338). Yet, these micro-businesses are shaped by specific neoliberal development ideologies focusing on the creation of ethnic niches for cosmetic production. Tarlo (2019) explains how global companies in the beauty industry have begun to target Black women as major consumers of natural Black hair-care products. Marketing agencies have not only created new categories of curly hair in the US and Brazil, but also have promoted the creation of a wide variety of cosmetic products for each category that tend to evoke homemade food textures, the presence of natural and organic components and images of nostalgia. The creation and marketing of various beauty products in Latin America is aimed at attracting Black lower middle-class consumers, a process that is generating complex new racial identifications as well as the use of racialized indexes in advertising campaigns (Edmonds 2010, 156).

Amafrocol and Bámbara align with some of the values of neoliberal development projects that seek wealth and economic wellbeing for local and small entrepreneurs. However, they simultaneously challenge exploitative and unjust structures of wealth accumulation, as well as its ideologies of competition, self-interest and individualism.

Anti-racism, empowerment and intersectionality

Discourses around intersectionality have influenced the anti-racist objectives of some of these microenterprises. In conjunction with the social media platform Entre Chontudas, Bámbara was categorical in highlighting the importance of intersectional forms of oppression experienced by Black women in Colombia. Mallely, co-founder of Bámbara, told us that, by participating in Black university organizations, she was able to recognize the limited spaces that women had for questioning sexism and homophobia, and for gaining access to leadership positions within social movements. In fact, Bámbara’s blog indicated the following:

It should be clarified that in the context of the different intersections that create unique experiences in our societies (such as: sex, race, class, gender, among others), we have chosen to combat not only income inequalities, but also those that have to do with opportunities. Specifically, this idea materializes in the fact that it is not enough to say that we do not reproduce discriminatory practices, but rather that we allow ourselves to reflect and to generate greater opportunities for those people who are confined, excluded and unfairly paid in the world of production.¹⁰

Bambara’s strategy of talking about aesthetics and hair was a way to convey the message of Black feminism, which is sometimes abstract and distant for many Black women. Lina explained: “We use the language of hair as a strategy to introduce the political [dimension]” (conversation, Cali, July 2017). At the 2017 Tejiendo Esperanzas event, Lina clarified to the public and other entrepreneurs the importance of intersectional approaches:

Racial discrimination and gender discrimination are both together and united. I am not Black and, apart from that, also a woman. Rather I am a Black woman, all stuck together, and they look at me as such in a society that is macho, patriarchal, racialized and that discriminates against us and judges us by how they see us … we must recognize that the manifestation of racism that a poor Black woman is going to experience is not the same as a Black woman who has certain economic advantages. (Tejiendo Esperanzas Forum, Cali, July 2017)

These micro-enterprises not only constitute productive initiatives to generate income and combat racist employment discrimination but are also becoming pedagogical devices for anti-racist and anti-sexist training. Their intersectional perspective generates critiques of classism and the structural exclusions that poor Black women experience. In the public events, we observed how many radical activists stated the importance of questioning neoliberalism and capitalism as a system of oppression and the contradictions involved in being engaged in the market. In events and meetings, there were moral and political debates about the possibilities and implications of accumulating capital and the need to find alternative mechanisms to help rural women, who for example cannot purchase their products or access free workshops on social media platforms.

In addition to adopting an intersectional stance, the new initiatives are also beginning to produce discourses associated with social entrepreneurship and solidarity economies. Bámbara states on its webpage: “By economic justice, we mean the committed task of constructing and maintaining commercial and labour relations, that beyond being fair, are able to combat social inequalities and respect life in all its manifestations”.¹¹ Bámbara, for example, aspires to generate endogenous development processes that involve creating and strengthening local production chains and alternative trade networks in the Pacific region. Lina explained:

I think it is important to read the boom of micro-businesses in relation to the crisis of the capitalist system, which transfers the problems of its model to the lack of “entrepreneurship of the people”. For me this is the result of a neoliberal agenda, however, I think that they were not expecting that we would try to use this agenda against them. … That is why we believe that it is not enough to create products for Black hair, but rather that those products are made with our natural resources, to energize our own economies. Now if [you ask whether] that is communism or capitalism, we have not reflected [on that question yet], but we are going to produce what we consume. If our money is our labour force and the hours we work, we are going to spend it and consume it in our own production processes. (Interview, Cali, September 2017)

Activists are clearly aware of the role of neoliberal development in generating new exploitative markets and individualizing production processes. However, activists do not view their political work and efforts in binary terms of accommodation vs resistance to the neoliberal capitalist system. From within development projects (in particular the creation of micro-enterprises), they create alternative pathways for supporting local producers and participating in the market while challenging racial and gender oppression. Bámbara had a policy of not purchasing and not using imported raw materials or ingredients in their products, even when they are cheaper and easily available. Thus, Bámbara tried to generate small alterations in the production chains, as they seek to support local producers from the Pacific and the Amazon, and in turn challenge the deregulated and competitive neoliberal schemes of importation and the monopolies of large raw material suppliers. Moreover, they supported a group of women from Buenaventura, a city in Colombia’s Pacific region, to improve the quality of their coconut oil production. Bámbara also supported producers of the seed-oil plant sacha inchi (plukenetia volubilis) in the Amazon by purchasing and promoting this raw material as an alternative local ingredient in the Colombian cosmetics market.

The strategy of supporting small-scale producers from the Pacific and the Amazon regions shows activists’ commitment to strengthening Black and Indigenous rural economies and their production chains; it is another example of how racial and class-oriented agendas intersect in their actions. Bámbara still seeks to engage in the neoliberal market and to position its products vis-à-vis other imported cosmetics commodities that tend to use ingredients that cannot be traced back to specific territories. For example, Bámbara marketed many of their products as menjurjes (concoctions), alluding to the mixture of natural ingredients that have been used in a traditional way by Afro-Colombian and Indigenous peoples to care for skin and hair. Manteca de Copuazú is promoted as 100 per cent natural and as a moisturizing butter for dry hair that will not have negative health effects. Botanical, spatial and bodily tropes are used not only to add ethno-racial and territorial value to their products but to implicitly contest the effects of the international beauty market on local economies and on the health of producers and consumers.

In sum, these microenterprises, in addition to circulating anti-racist and anti-sexist discourses, are aligned with changes in development discourses, now more oriented to promoting the value of local raw materials as well as the wellbeing of producers from regional territories historically racialized as Black and Indigenous. In some cases, they seek to promote visions of solidarity and thus to transform (even in an incipient way) the logics of exploitation and accumulation of the neoliberal market.

Conclusions

This article explores the engagement of Black women activists as entrepreneurs in neoliberal development projects in Colombia, focusing on the micro-enterprises of Amafrocol and Bámbara. It highlights the shared political endeavour among these Black women to emancipate their bodies from the effects of racism, sexism and economic precarity.

Through a collaborative ethnography, the diverse experiences of Black women in development unfold, encompassing different cycles of production, networking, failure, transformation, and re-activation. Amafrocol’s founders continue to nurture the enduring solidarity of a wide network of Black hairdressers in Colombia. Their resilience in the face of Eurocentric hegemonic beauty standards has challenged whiteness for more than three decades, despite facing fragility and instability due to reliance on state resources. Amafrocol activists hold the Colombian multicultural state accountable for the unfulfilled promise of ethno-development (the inclusion and participation of historical excluded ethno-racial groups within the neoliberal state) and its incapacity to account for the presence of racism.

Some Black women entrepreneurs-activists, particularly those linked to Black student feminist organizations, embrace intersectional approaches. They incorporate explicit anti-racist and anti-sexist stances, drawing from Afro-diasporic literatures. While supplying alternative products for the care of natural Black hair to generate capital and achieve economic stability, these entrepreneurs resist reducing their values to neoliberal principles of competitiveness, individuality and profit maximization. Initiatives in the Colombian Pacific aim to expand opportunities for local suppliers, while going beyond a neoliberal logic. Despite these different trajectories, Amafrocol and its collective allies continue to embrace a common anti-racist project, fostering relations of solidarity among Black women.

Our analysis challenges binary notions that understand development as an oppressive colonial project of domination and co-optation in simple opposition to local grassroots collaborative emancipatory projects. Instead, social actors have dynamic, changing and varied understandings of development (Wilson 2012). Black women entrepreneurs can redefine entrepreneurial praxis, showing that desires for development do not necessarily contradict what they define as ancestral knowledges, nor do they imply mere market consumption practices; instead, development can be interpreted locally as “a promise that was not kept” (de Vries 2015, 74). Amafrocol activists underscore that the promise of development should not be conflated with promises of whiteness. Their actions demonstrate how anti-racism can emerge from what initially seemed to be a development project that promised economic and social inclusion. From this perspective, micro-enterprises are not only thought as avenues for social mobility and capital accumulation, but also as spaces for political activism. Here, Black women actively combat the interplay between racism, sexism and classism within the Colombian multicultural nation and its neoliberal market.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the collaboration and support of all members of Amafrocol and all the Black women who participated in this project. We appreciate the insightful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this volume.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council: [grant number grant ES/N012747/1].

Notes

1 This article focuses on the micro-enterprises of Amafrocol, Makeda, and Bámbara who actively support natural Black hair care practices and the elaboration of cosmetic products in the city of Cali.

2 Following Graeber, we use the term value to refer to the ways in which labour becomes “realized” – socially recognized as a material and symbolic form (Graeber 2013, 225). It refers to the way actors perceive their own activities as meaningful in society.

3 Positionality refers to how our identities (gender, class, race, etc.) influence, and generate specific perspectives in our understanding and perspective of the world.

4 The GEM 2018 report is based on the survey of fifty-four world economies, covering 68% of the world’s population and 86% of the world’s GDP (GEM 2018).

5 Plan Colombia was a United States military and diplomatic aid initiative whose objective was to combat both Colombian drug cartels and leftist insurgent groups in Colombia.

6 Since the late 1980s many nation-states in Latin America have implemented multicultural neoliberal policies recognizing Indigenous and Afrodescendant rights. These reforms have fostered: the demobilization ethno-racial movements, the formation of new subjectivities, the reproduction of older power structures and inequalities, and the invisibility of racism and racial hierarchies (Hale 2005; Hooker 2009).

7 Approximately 4,500 US dollars.

8 https://www.portafolio.co/negocios/productos-para-cabello-afro-un-negocio-creciente-520387.

9 Bambara is currently dissolved as a company. Malleli Beleño has renamed the brand as Chontuda: https://www.instagram.com/p/CxsjXbHgVEw/.

10 https://bambaracol.wordpress.com/economia-solidaria/.

11 Idem.