bio
Photo: Gildardo Taborda Henao
I was born in Riosucio, a small town in the Colombian Andean region located in Caldas province.
Photo: Gildardo Taborda Henao
My mother and my aunts were all high school teachers, but they also worked in family stores. My father’s family were farmers, and we had a small farm where we produced a couple of thousands of eggs every day and grew fruits and vegetables of many kinds. We also had an agricultural supply store. When I was 8 years old, I began working on the farm and in the store and learned and became very interested in the lives of agricultural workers and their economies.
Riosucio’s population was more than 80% Indigenous people from the Embera-Chami ethnic group. However, despite their large majority over the mestizo population there was a vast social, economic and infrastructure gap between my Indigenous classmates living in rural areas and the rest of us, primarily mestizos, living in the urban core.
When I was 15, I left to medical school in Medellin and lived there for seven years. My medical studies coincided with the most violent period of the narco-trafficking war in the 1990s, and Medellin was its epicenter. Through medical school and my ten years of medical practice in Colombia in urban and rural areas I saw and experienced the effects of armed conflict on the bodies and souls of people. I left Colombia to join my family in Boston, Massachusetts, where we migrated fleeing violence.
Five years later, I relocated again to Canada. In Canada I began re-training to become an anthropologist. This journey of learning and research has allowed to me more deeply explore questions of conflict, migration, economic inequities and more in Colombia and beyond.
Photo: Gildardo Taborda Henao