The Colombian Mulatto Woman
Research & Storytelling
When a country's violence becomes so much a part of people's daily lives that fleeing is the only way out and the only way of life left.
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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines "fleeing" as "to quickly move away, out of fear or another reason, from people, animals, or things to avoid harm, discomfort, or annoyance." However, Catalina defines fleeing as her lifestyle.
Catalina is a Colombian mulatto, who used to be known as Catalina, but who now carries her roots and history in her skin. She has inherited African heritage and the years of slavery and marginalization that her ancestors suffered, and a little bit herself too. Her skin is dark, but it has a golden glow that reminds one of the Pacific Ocean that witnessed her birth. She is short, around five feet two inches tall, slender, but with broad arms and legs. Her teeth are white as pearls, and when she smiles, they light up her face as if the sun is shining in front of her. Her features are rough, with a large, thick mouth, a wide nose that covers almost the same space as the mouth, and big, perfectly round eyes that are a light brown color. In contrast to her skin, they sometimes appear honey-colored with yellow details. Her hair is short and curly, so much so that it seems to be drawn on her scalp, but she rarely shows her hair because she always wears an African-style turban with pale-colored lines.
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Catalina used to be Catalina, but her memory can only hold so many tragedies and bad memories, and she had exceeded her limit. She was forced to stop being Catalina and is now the Colombian mulatto with a clean memory, ready to accumulate new tragedies and bad memories.
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The last thing Catalina heard before leaving Chocó, a town in the Pacific region of Colombia, part of the Darien jungles where she was born and lived for 27 years, was the sound of gunshots and the surrounding flora. She escaped with nothing but a woven bag containing the little clothing she had and three million Colombian pesos, the equivalent of nineteen thousand and forty Mexican pesos, which she had saved throughout her life working as a cocoa collector and selling various crafts made of silver and copper from the region that attracted eco-tourists visiting the area.
Trying to blend in with different shades of green, she sank deeper and deeper into the jungle. Her palm and wood sandals seemed to work just as well as any sports shoes. She didn't stop. She didn't look back. Perhaps it was fear that the Colombian guerrillas would catch her or that she would fall victim to a stray bullet, but all that could be seen in her eyes was courage.
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Chocó is one of Colombia's poorest departments. Due to the rainy weather and changing temperatures, it is considered the region with the least market opportunity. To be precise, the only market that exists is the trafficking of people. The location of the town in the middle of the jungle makes it easy for the Colombian guerrillas to sell women, making it the region's greatest success. In Colombia, living in jungle regions or near them is the worst curse that can exist. For Colombians, the jungle has become synonymous with guerrillas, as it is well known that these urban cells are entrenched in the jungles. In this Pacific region, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), or as they call themselves, the People's Army, is the extreme left-wing insurgent organization that dominates.
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When Catalina managed to leave the jungle, she started walking towards the town center. Once there, she began to raise her right thumb to ask for a ride to the capital of her department (state), which happens to be also the nearest city. Quibdó is a small city and very similar to the town where she comes from, but for the inhabitants of this place, it is the dream that everyone wants to reach but that very few achieve.
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After standing for a couple of hours on the road outside the town, a man who was headed to the same destination as Catalina stopped and took her with him. Catalina's life in the city was not much different from what it was before in the town, but something had changed: she was no longer raped or forced to serve as a slave to the guerrillas, nor did she have to see her parents cry as they begged her for forgiveness for selling her to the armed forces for a few hours, in exchange for five bills and, above all, to preserve their lives.
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The Catalina of the city worked in the same way as the Catalina of the town, selling crafts to tourists and lovers of Colombian culture. Her life was chaotic. Very difficult. Always living on a tight budget, praying and doing the impossible to make ends meet and cover all her expenses. Living in the house of her new bosses, who took pity on her and gave her asylum.
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Catalina has never been complacent. Her workplace was near the Emberá Natural Park, a tourist site full of stalls like the one she attended, selling crafts and figures that represented what Colombia means. It was there where she met her great love and current husband. It wasn't long before they started making their own crafts and selling them at their stall. The skill that Catalina had developed in Chocó became the main attraction for tourists visiting the park, and they were soon able to open a more formal store. They earned well. Much better than either of them had ever earned in their lives. However, the violence in Colombia did not stop; more and more people were being killed by drug trafficking, and more and more empty stomachs were demanding food with cries that sounded like crunches. About 200 people died every day due to organized crime. The country was facing its worst moment, and Catalina and Camilo could hardly bear it anymore.
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"I don't know how much more I can take, my love. I'm scared shitless. I ran away from all of that, and I promise you that if we don't smarten up, it will swallow us up, it will eat us, man," Catalina would say to her husband with tears in her eyes.
"Damn, I already know that! But where are we going to go, negra?" Camilo would respond with irritation in his voice.
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"To Mexico, Camilo. They speak the same language as us, and things aren't as fucked up there," Catalina finally concluded with great certainty.
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As with everything she set out to do, they moved to Mexico on October 8, 2006. Unfortunately, this was two months before Felipe Calderón took the presidency of Mexico and began his bloody war against drug trafficking.
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Catalina and Camilo were accustomed to the jungle regions, to nature, to living with the characteristic tranquility of small towns and the scent of fresh air and burning wood in the morning. They decided that the best thing for them would be to live in Mazamitla, a town considered magical, near the city of Guadalajara.
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Catalina, as time passed, became more and more of a distant memory. With every breeze that touched her face, a little of what she was disappeared, a little of the pain she carried with her old name vanished. The more Catalina drifted away, the closer the Colombian mulatta came. In Mexico, she was the mulatta and if anyone dared to ask her name, she would answer:
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"My name is the mulatta, what part of that don't you understand, chino? That's what you should call me, man. Is that clear?"
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The Colombian couple and their talent for making crafts thrived in this country, which is sometimes unfriendly to migrants. They began by selling their bracelets and woven bags, typical of the Caribbean regions of Colombia. With a booth on the main street of the town, they became more and more well-known. People knew them as the Colombians of Mazamitla.
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For the first time in a long time, the Colombian mulatta felt her lungs pulling in air. Air that did not last long as, as planned, the war against drug trafficking of the current president had already reached the small town where they lived. Pam, pam, pam, when the same sound that had made her leave Chocó woke her up one night while she was sleeping, she knew that her memory was ready to accumulate bad memories again, she just hoped that this time the number wouldn't exceed, because the aliases and countries to flee to seemed less and less each time.
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Finally, they went from being victims of the Colombian guerrilla to victims of Mexican drug trafficking. Organized crime began to threaten them, asking them for money with the justification that, like the whole country, that town belonged to them, and if they wanted to have a business, they had to pay rent. Camilo and the mulatta found themselves once again being sold to a criminal organization and being slaves to them. They decided to pay, although in reality, the word "decided" was not in their vocabulary those days.
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The Colombians of Mazamitla discovered one day that they were expecting a baby. Camilo junior was born at the worst possible moment. He was born amidst crossfire and shattered dreams. The boy grew up in Mexico but without forgetting his Colombian roots. He was a perfect mix of the mulatta and Camilo. With short, curly hair like his mother's and his cinnamon-colored skin, a blend of his mother's black skin and his father's beige color. His eyes were small and slightly closed, with an intense light brown color, just like his father's.
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The news kept reporting higher and higher numbers of deaths caused by the famous war against drug trafficking. 5,630 in 2008, 7,210 in 2009, almost 9,000 in 2010. The numbers didn't go down. The deaths didn't stop.
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"Oh chino, I don't know if coming here was the best decision," lamented the mulatta.
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"Well, my negra, almost certainly not. But you tell me, which war do you prefer? The guerrilla or the drug trafficking war?" asked Camilo without expecting an answer.
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"Don't talk nonsense, Camilo. If I had to choose, I'd choose none."
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The life of Colombians continued like this. There were ups and downs. Today they are on an upswing. They are doing better than ever and were even able to open two businesses in the town: a dairy where they also sell some Mexican snacks with a Colombian flavor mix, and a shop selling crafts and souvenirs from Mazamitla, all free from paying rent to drug trafficking and all with the same name, the Colombian mulatta. The same name as their house, built on the high part of the town, surrounded by trees and nothing else, just where you can breathe the scent of pine and feel the fresh dew in the mornings.
Their house is more like a rustic cabin, made of brick and tile, with a huge fireplace from which the smoke of home always rises, and in their garden they have a small terrace with pictures from their country and a slide with two swings that serve as entertainment for little Camilo. The gate separating their house from the path where few cars and many horses pass has carved into it the silhouette of a woman painted with black acrylic, wearing a turban with the colors of the Colombian flag, red, blue, and yellow, underneath it reads, the Colombian mulatta.
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The mulatta and Camilo are self-exiles from their country, victims of violence, fugitives from injustice. They are migrants in a country that welcomes them with open arms and is full of the same things they escaped from, a country that forces the mulatta to become Catalina again. It seems that some people, no matter how much they run, cannot escape.
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Today Colombians are also Mexicans. The more time passes, the more it seems that the memory of Catalina being raped by 10 men one after the other no longer exists, and the images stored in Camilo's memory of seeing his father killed for getting involved in the guerrilla drug trafficking business fade away. They increasingly appropriate the violence of this country. They increasingly fill their memories that they worked so hard to erase with the filth that floods Mexico. Today the mulatta and Camilo are part of two countries, and if at any point they exceed the number of painful memories, they will have to escape from two countries.
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Contradictorily, the Colombian mulatta is increasingly becoming Catalina. A different but still the same Catalina, no longer with the painful memories of Colombia but with new ones. Pam, pam, pam, she looks at herself in the mirror while listening to the gunshots that occur every 3 or 4 days near her house, while hearing that sound that terrifies her so much, the same sound she heard when she left her country and her family, and the same sound she recognized when she knew that drug trafficking had caught up with her. She looks in the mirror and sees Catalina.
The mulatta also defines fleeing as her lifestyle, but now she not only flees from the guerrillas, the poverty of her country, or the violence in which she lived, but also from herself.