When Francia Márquez was born, -in the village of Yolombó, in the village of La Toma, in the north of Cauca-, the midwives who received her cut her umbilical cord and that small and viscous carnal connection of the mother with her was buried in the land.
Earth and mother were converted from that very moment into a single thing.
France's own body, a part of it, was mixed forever with everything that has lived under the ground for centuries.
This ritualistic act, traditional in this area of the Colombian Pacific, has conjured from the beginning of all lives that deep, intense and, for many, incomprehensible relationship, felt by the vice-presidential candidate and environmental activist Francia Márquez and all her people, for the territories that their ancestors inherited.
Far from this being a fanciful and mythical story of childhood, the connection with the place of origin is remembered and honored by Francia Márquez every day, when in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the campaign as Gustavo Petro's formula, he breaks the greyish silence of rooms full of formal suits and comes out with their dresses made of unexpected colors like red and yellow, with elegant silhouettes and peasant skirts, with African prints on one hundred percent cotton fabrics.
France every day gets the land of it.
He dresses with her.
“What this country needs to understand is that clothing is one of the most sacred, ancestral and immaterial expressions of a territory and a nation.
The notion of territory involves not only the land, but also the multiple ways of being, eating, praying, dressing and protecting and preserving that cultural memory”, states Jenny de la Torre Córdoba, doctor in gender studies and one of the Afro women who participated in the decisive processes of ethnic recognition included in the Colombian constitutional reform of 1991.
“When I look at France, from my ethnographer's eye, I see Africa tattooed on the body of a woman who now has a political spokesperson.
She spoke out that she does not want to blur her roots in her territory, her African ancestry, nor does she want to blur her vision of being a woman who, without speaking, is ethnically self-identifying”.
To get into politics (in fact, to get into almost any sphere of the social) Afro-descendant women have historically had to resort to something that Georgetown University professor Nadia E. Brown, author of the book
Sister Style
, called "respectability".
A tactic, she says, "of survival", which consists of an adjustment to the white and Eurocentric canons, which implies for Afro women a distancing from the shapes of their own bodies, their peoples and their own hair, so inclined, for example, to grow curly and up, instead of down.
The connection with her place of origin is remembered and honored by Francia Márquez every day with her clothing. Sebastian Barros (Getty Images)
Francia Márquez at an event with women from Caquetá, on April 23, 2022. RR SS
"I don't want to wear a black jacket at presentations, I want to be me, I want to be safe," said Francia Márquez. Camilo Erasso (Long Visual Press/Universal Imag)
Francia Márquez during an event in Garagoa, Boyacá, with peasants and producers.RR SS
In the midst of the hustle and bustle of the campaign as Gustavo Petro's formula, Márquez breaks the gray silence of formal suits and goes out with his dresses of unexpected colors.Ivan Valencia (AP)
“With Francia Márquez, women like me in Colombia are recovering something that was stolen from us.
We are reclaiming our place in global aesthetics," explains activist Edna Liliana Valencia. Ivan Valencia (Bloomberg)
In keeping with her curly hairstyle, Márquez has decided not to nuance her accent, and wear dresses with wide skirts, skirt type, below the knee, with 'kente' fabrics, fabrics that evoke the baskets of African collectors, typical of Ghana. JOAQUIN SARMIENTO (AFP)
The vice-presidential candidate accompanied by Verónica Alcocer, wife of Gustavo Petro.JOAQUIN SARMIENTO (AFP)
Far from all the mandates of political aesthetics, the politician has decided to attend all the rallies and televised interviews with her Afro hair.Fredy Builes (Getty Images)
Márquez ponders the colors in the fabrics with ancestral patterns.Carlos Ortega (EFE)
Francia Márquez during an event in Bogotá, in March 2022. LUISA GONZALEZ (REUTERS)
Francia Márquez with Gustavo Petro during the presentation of his candidacy for the vice presidency of Colombia.LUISA GONZALEZ (Reuters)
That tactic of respectability, that invisible corset that imprisons the natural forms of the Afro in the narrow regimes of the white and that mandates that Afro women in decision-making spaces wear their hair always straightened, seems to be unknown to Francia Márquez.
“Francia Marquez's hair texture is 4c.
The division of hair goes from 1, straight, 2, wavy, 3, curly to 4, afro.
Each number is accompanied by the letters a, b and c, with 1a being the straightest hair and 4c being the curliest.
This type of hair, the 4c that Francia Márquez wears natural, has been so invisible, so denied, so labeled as ugly, that when I suggested to Disney, as a consultant for the film 'Encanto', that the 12 hair textures that exist, they had to invent software to do that level of curl.
There had never been someone so curly in her filmography, ”says the expert in Afro studies certified by Harvard University Edna Liliana Valencia, who was a consultant for the film inspired by Walt Disney's Colombia.
Far from all the mandates of political aesthetics, the candidate for the Historical Pact has decided to attend all the rallies and televised interviews with her natural Afro hair, the most African there is, sometimes briefly gathered up with a sneaker (an elastic piece, many times the same color as her suit) telling all Afro-Colombian, Palenquera, black and Raizal women that there is nothing "wrong" with their hair.
In keeping with her curly hairstyle, France has decided not to nuance her accent, and wear dresses with wide skirts, skirt type, below the knee, with 'kente' fabrics, fabrics that evoke the baskets of African collectors, typical of Ghana.
“The new Afro generations have realized that we have great power in the influences and heritage of the African diaspora.
Neither my mother nor my grandmother wore dresses like the ones I design for France today, it seemed impossible at the time.
They dressed for the needs we had in the Pacific.
But we have begun to make that connection and we have begun to see that our clothes are beautiful and formal and do not have to be condemned to folkloric events”, explains Esteban Sinisterra Paz, the young designer from Guapi, based in Cali, who France Márquez chose to accompany her, with her creations, on political journeys.
“France tells me: “I don't want to wear a black jacket at presentations, I want to be me, I want to be safe”.
What is safer than wearing clothes that speak of where she comes from?
Now that she's wearing these navy blue with purple, orange with red, textured, ruffled suits, I see more women taking risks.
It is as if it were the clothing of dissidence, it gives Afro women a breaking power, ”adds Esteban.
The candidate's devotion to yellow, her reluctance to green, despite being the color that canonically pigments one of her greatest struggles, the environmental one, and Esteban's insistence that it blends beautifully with her skin;
the very fact that she has chosen a young man who baptized her brand Esteban Afrika, instead of other well-known Colombian designers, is evidence of her devotion to the land where her ancestors come from, of her decision to declare herself as a woman who comes from a diaspora
“The clothes that France wears are the clothes that an Afro woman would normally wear if our ancestors had not been enslaved.
The first thing they took from us was our clothes, that is one of the first forms of domination.
For this reason, in the images of the conquests we only see blacks in loincloths.
Many of these men and women were teachers, artisans, warriors, some aborigines, princes, princesses and people of all categories who were dressed, and who were stripped naked and their hair smoothed with caustic soda to torture them and burn their identity”, explains the activist. and also a journalist Edna Liliana Valencia.
“With Francia Márquez, women like me in Colombia are recovering something that was stolen from us.
We are reclaiming our place in the global aesthetic.
We are so used to the aesthetic reference of the slave, or the service employee or the driver, that we do not see that Africa can have a worthy aesthetic”, concludes Valencia who recalls that the Afro-descendant population in Colombia reaches 15 million people, it is say a population comparable to that of Senegal.
The politics of clothing and its halo of protection
It was the first weeks of November.
It was the year 2014. The tensions in the north of Cauca seemed unsustainable.
One day, Francia Márquez, by then a renowned leader in the region, decided to convene 70 women who, like her, had resisted the multiple extractivist projects that wanted to take the gold from their lands, the hydroelectric plants that wanted to channel their rivers to give force to the dams, to the armed groups that had wanted, at the point of violence and fear, to get rid of all their people.
“We are going to walk to Bogotá!” Márquez said before the astonished attitude of those who heard her.
Francia Márquez in the studio of the designer who makes her clothes. Courtesy
They needed to get their fight out of that remote part of the country.
Leave Cauca to become visible and demand that the Government comply with the orders of the Constitutional Court that had demanded the protection of those ancestral territories.
On November 17 they undertook 'The March of the Turbans', as they themselves baptized it, a path that would take them ten days to reach Bogotá and which they did precisely armed with their concave trays, their rafts, with which historically they have traditionally extracted the gold from the rivers and with their turbans, made of white scarves and ribbons of African colors knotted in their hair.
Those symbolic, differential, aesthetic but fundamental elements to cope with the suffocating heat that is concentrated in the head and strategic, gave them a kind of halo of protection.
By becoming highly visible, by flooding every road they crossed with color, the Colombian press followed them, filling news pages with graphic reports.
The exhibition made them visible, protected them, served as an echo of their struggles.
That visual call for attention, that act of protest and courage, was for many Colombians the revelation of the radical role that women have fulfilled in this area of the Pacific.
Why were they the ones marching?
“In the north of Cauca, it is the women who have been on the front line of defending the territory.
In these communities, they have fulfilled a social role of being the navel, the knot, the ones that bind and weave with the collective”, explains journalist Carolina Gutiérrez, author of the master's thesis of the National University of Colombia 'Violences against female leaders Afro-territorial and environmental groups from the north of Cauca, Colombia: the spiral that does not stop (2000-2020)', and who since 2016 has been closely following the trail of Francia Márquez.
The dynamics of the conflict, at first, were vicious in this area of the country against the men, but soon, the armed groups realized that it was not them, but the women, who supported the communities.
“They are the ones who protect their men and take the lead in the field, because they have to hide, because they are going to be killed, recruited or because they are already dead.
They are the ones left on the front line of the historic battle that has been going on for at least 20 years,” adds Gutiérrez.
When France makes its stylistic choices every morning, when it makes the decision not to choose just any tailored trousers or a white-collared shirt and blazer, but instead ponders colors woven into ancestral patterns that she puts on her hair and on her skin, the candidate remembers those women who marched with her and who are part of what she calls 'nobodies', -those that no one has seen or recognized- and gives them dignity and makes their bodies less vulnerable, because with her, their clothes , their bodies, their struggles become visible.
It is as if she shouted, as the African legend says, 'Ubuntu!': 'I am because we are!'
That's what her dress talks about.