Despite the disturbing scene and my deep concern, Cecilia was never willing to talk about this incident with me or answer my many questions about her health. Not when we were alone, and not in front of her partner Luis, her two kids, or her elderly mother. I knew something was wrong, but she insisted that there was nothing I could do. I never learned the full truth about what happened that day. I will never know if the condition that made her faint also led to her early death. All I saw was her suffering, her embarrassment, and her refusal to be labeled as sick.

This chapter examines how one of the most iconic elements of Palenque’s culture, its funerary ritual lumbalú, has been depicted in academia and public policy. I contrast these depictions with community members’ lived experiences of death before and after the untimely passing of my host family member, Cecilia. This contrast highlights how attention has been paid to the cultural and historical elements of Palenque’s culture, often to the detriment of addressing the many issues that make life in Palenque so difficult. The declaration unequivocally brought more attention to Palenque, raising public awareness about poverty and discrimination there. However, an analysis of the language of heritage recognition highlights how Black lives have been showcased and yet continuously devalued in Colombia’s multicultural regime.

Bringing attention back to Palenqueros’ bodies, to the root causes of Palenqueros’ precarity, and to the emotional landscape of loss, I argue that academic heritage narratives produce a sort of cognitive dissonance around death. These formal scholarly stories engage in a process I identify as analytical flattening, focusing on commemoration rituals rather than human life and representing the deaths of Black people as if they are disembodied cultural artifacts, void of humanity. By focusing on the emotional toll on those who survive, I reveal how Palenqueros’ deaths are part of a broader lived experience of racial marginalization, one with which heritage narratives have yet to reckon.

This chapter traces how Palenque’s heritage declaration, despite being a source of communal pride and collective empowerment, entrenched hierarchical differences that led to conflict between Palenqueros. While the declaration opened new possibilities for additional income and visibility, Palenqueros’ ability to benefit from it varied considerably. Funds intended to support and administer Palenque’s heritage were mediated by bureaucratic channels of disbursement, access to which required technical expertise and political connections. This contest over limited heritage resources drove a wedge between and within groups claiming a right to represent and control Palenque’s heritage. Ultimately, the heritage declaration reinforced hierarchies between Palenque’s leaders as well as between leaders and the community at large.

In this chapter I show how a second, politico-economic type of exclusion materialized. As the heritage declaration manifested in concrete safeguarding projects, public-intellectuals-turned-heritage-entrepreneurs continued to be perceived as better equipped to manage the declaration’s operationalization. Many Palenqueros, including elders and those with no public policy experience, felt they could not compete with local experts who had experience navigating complicated bureaucratic procedures. As the rift between those who practiced ICH and those who managed it grew, heritage management expertise entrenched a form of exclusion between Palenqueros, which in turn delegitimized traditional systems and standards of authority. I explore what I call technocratic capture: how the promotion of Palenque’s ethnic identity has been tied to the elevation of heritage entrepreneurs and their spaces of intellectual and political power.

This chapter examines how the double-edged quality of Palenque’s ICH declaration plays out in the politics of representation. I focus on the lived experience of Palenquero women who work as informal fruit vendors in Cartagena, and who for decades have been one of the most widely recognized images of Colombia’s tourism and heritage industries. I analyze a 2018 incident in which police in Cartagena attacked a well-known vendor named Angelina Cassini, confiscating her fruit stand and merchandise for allegedly illegal occupation of public space. As this incident underscores, Palenqueras’ national and international fame as touristic icons and representatives of UNESCO-recognized culture provides them with no protection for their work. In tracing the disconnect between Palenqueras’ public image and lived experience, I highlight the system that profits from Palenqueras’ visibility while erasing the difficulty and precarity of their lives as street vendors.

I connect this incident to a crucial flaw in Palenque’s heritage declaration: it has mostly resulted in safeguarding activities taking place in town. As such, even though Palenque has an ever-growing diaspora, most of the safeguarding projects and institutional attention surrounding heritage are tied to Palenque itself. Despite its intangible nature, ICH attaches to place, not people, and leaves Palenqueras anchored to a limited geo-ethnic imaginary that restricts rather than empowers them. In this example of heritage exclusion, the declaration that recognized Palenqueros’ cultural practices neglects its most emblematic icon.

The book concludes with a discussion of the transformations wrought on Palenque’s heritage discourse by the advent of new technologies and a digitally connected world. Based on my more recent visits, I argue that new murals around town and Palenqueros’ international connections with Black tourists from the United States suggest that Palenqueros are more closely aligning themselves and their heritage displays with anti-racist activism. A display of heritage as a claim to ethnic difference is now also a site for building a hemispheric anti-racial discrimination alliance which uses different iconography and the English language to build bridges within and beyond Colombia. This is a significant shift away from conceptualizing Blackness mostly as an ethnic marker and toward re-racializing Blackness in a post-heritage reality. The emergence of these new claims alters the heritage field I observed for almost a decade, and though it may not completely reframe the ethnicization of Black political activism, it aligns it with global demands for racial justice, an emphasis on Black love, a denaturalization of internalized racism, and life-affirming strategies. Perhaps repositioning Palenque’s heritage movement in this way will help generate creative anti-racist strategies that transcend the limitations of the neoliberal multicultural paradigm, affirming Afro-descendant vulnerability, resiliency, and humanity.

This chapter traces the history of heritage making in Palenque. I examine the process by which Palenque was transformed from an anthropological field site in the mid-twentieth century to a site of “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in the early 2000s. This chapter highlights the role of academics and their research as it was later used by both Palenqueros and bureaucrats to secure Palenque’s heritage nomination. Although academics did not singlehandedly originate the recognition process, their research, language, and connections contributed to leveraging claims made locally since the 1980s for state support and political rights.

By analyzing how Palenqueros have presented themselves in writing and through guided tours, I show how academic epistemology and language became the legitimizing frameworks for Palenqueros to claim recognition and justify the heritage declaration. An analysis of the language and epistemology of Palenque’s UNESCO dossier reveals that academic scholarship made Palenqueros’ claims legible to UNESCO and the Colombian state. Yet, in so doing, the emphasis on scholarship created a hierarchical distinction that prioritized academic over so-called traditional knowledge. Even as this “expert knowledge” garnered recognition for Palenque, it marginalized community members with less formal academic training and empowered a new class of leaders. I document Palenque’s first type of heritage exclusion through what I call the hierarchization of knowledge, in which the framework used to claim recognition for Palenque’s cultural heritage entrenched hierarchical distinctions among Palenqueros rooted in their unequal access to academic expertise, with both political and economic ramifications.