From Sacred Leaf to Illicit Crop: Coca, Memory, and the Politics of Vegetal Excess in Colombia

The Anthropology Department, with co-sponsorship from the Humanities Center welcomes Miryam de Jesus Nacimento, the Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at SU, to deliver her lecture, “From Sacred Leaf to Illicit Crop: Coca, Memory, and the Politics of Vegetal Excess in Colombia.”

Nacimento takes relationships between mestizo peasant farmers (campesinos) and the coca plant as a lens to understand the changing place of rural mestizos in Colombia's racial politics. Focusing on a peasant village in the country's southwest, she traces how farmers' identities transformed as coca shifted from being cultivated for traditional consumption to being grown for the illicit drug trade. Farmers describe this transition as the destruction of their "ancestral peasant essence" and a "profound cultural loss"—experiences that have motivated their claims for recognition as a group in need of special constitutional protection.

First, Nacimento argues that these cultural claims emerge at the intersection of the illicit drug trade economy, the war on drugs and neoliberal multiculturalism—three overlapping value projects that, since the 1970s, have defined the meaning of coca in Colombia. Together, these projects erode the web of living relations that once connected land, coca and mestizo communities. Second, Nacimento shows how coca itself unsettles farmers' narratives of cultural collapse during episodes of what she calls "vegetal excess": moments of unruly growth and proliferation in which the plant reasserts itself as a lively, unpredictable force—resisting confinement within dominant value regimes and troubling farmers' efforts to reclaim a coherent campesino identity.