SUGAR MILL, "MINGA" AND RESISTANCE. AN EXPERIENCE OF POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION

This article presents some advances of the Group Project: Exile, resistance and group action (Botero et al., 2009, in process), specifically at the Coffee Triangle, from experiences of people making part of the sugar mills community from Supia in the Department of Caldas, Colombia. This study investigates "minga" as a scenario of daily resistance in the frame of the political socialization and the shaping of ways of collective, familiar and communal work. This research pretends to recognize the locality construction processes that start from the peasants, indigenous population, afro-american descendents and transnational migration communities' experiences of fights, sudden attacks and popular resistence, as referents for the construction of collective action, retelling history from their own enunciation locus of the social-cultural agents and their affirmation narrative, directed on the way to the configuration of a militant research, in which "practices and experiences of political action" as emergent counter powers that enable the construction of meanings in the communities, according to the lack of identification with neo-colonization forms of local practices and as recognition of alternative development processes to colonial logic are introduced, as well as the expression of denunciation, demonstration and self-management proposals as a non-colonial revolution in politics. The first part of the text analyzes the development of the social-historical context of the social organizations linked to the sugar mills and specifies the methodological considerations of the study. After that, the handicraft production is approached as resistance to technological production.. Then, communal practices of the "minga" as referent of locality construction and political socialization through work are presented. As a conclusion, sugar mills are considered as privileged spaces to strengthen political socialization from communal relations of cooperation, solidarity, reciprocity and autonomy.