"Afro-Pacific" Cultural Industries: Crossroads of Multiculturalism in Cali, Colombia

Abstract

| This article analyzes the incursion of cultural industry projects in various scenarios in the city of Cali (Colombia) and their linkage with Afro-Colombian cultural diversity, which is one of the city’s strongest socio-demographic and cultural components. The municipal Secretariat of Culture and Tourism has fomented this process since 2008 and has gradually sought to strengthen the ideological and praxeological proposal. It has done this by articulating the city’s cultural offerings with efforts to create economic opportunities in the trade and services sectors and, simultaneously, with the multicultural discourse of the Colombian nation-state. The argumentation of the article was constructed through a documentary methodology, recovering reports and studies from the public archives of the Secretariat of Culture and Tourism, and taking the “Petronio Alvarez” Pacific Music Festival as the case for analysis. The article demonstrates that diverse tensions arise in implementing these projects which overlook the experiences of the city’s Afro-Colombian populations who are trying to participate, since they have been designed by the nation-state in such a way as to condition and sectorize the benefits.