This talk develops assembly as method to examine how Black youth in Cartagena, Colombia mobilize collective life in the face of anti-Black state violence. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth organizers confronting police brutality in Colombia’s premiere tourism destination, I trace how they reframe state violence not as a discrete event but as an ongoing entanglement—one that is gendered, spatialized, and historically saturated. Through practices of gathering, storytelling, and protest, youth assemble a critique of what they name juvenicidio: the systematic targeting of Black youth under the guise of public security. The talk centers the public denouncements, el parche (informal gatherings), and the epistolary form—letters written on behalf of disappeared peers–—as both method and refusal, one that interrupts linear accounts of violence and stages alternative temporalities of mourning and political life. In tracing these assemblies, I argue that youth render visible the infrastructures of premature death while claiming presence and futurity through relational modes of worldmaking.
Jameelah Imani Morris is an African Diaspora Anthropologist and researcher focusing on anti-Black state violence, social movements, youth political cultures, and urban displacement across Latin America and the Caribbean. She is an ABD Ph.D. Candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University and a Dissertation Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her current research project is a community-engaged ethnographic study investigating the impacts of tourism and state violence on Black communities, and responses to them, across generations in Cartagena, Colombia. She holds a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from Tufts University and an M.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright-Hays Program, and her writing has appeared in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
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