"Report It And They'll Kill You": Resisting Dominant Discourses Of Violence In Santa Fé, Bogota.

The piece of writing that follows has a number of goals. I begin with a detailed outline of the research methods used in this project. I hope to provide the reader with a strong sense of the strengths and the blind spots of this project, as well as some of the very real compromises required when conducting ethnography in a context such as the Santa Fé neighbourhood. I then turn to a discussion of the popular representations of Santa Fé. I hope to call attention to some of the popular media and government narratives of Santa Fé and the ways that Santa Fé is constructed as a neighbourhood filled with anonymous violence, as well as highly sexualized, but anonymous and voiceless, women.

I will contextualize these constructions of Santa Fé in light of the writing which contemplates the experience of governmental use of space as a mechanism for social control in Colombia, and in Bogotá specifically. I will focus both on the rich literature which considers the connection between space, public visibility and government control of urban spaces, as well as the literature which considers the ways that Colombia's long-running civil war has been wrapped up in the use of territory and space as a mechanism for social control. I will follow this chapter with one which contemplates the ways that government control of public space is tied to agendas that, in the name of capitalism and production, seek to exclude sex workers from particular spaces.

I will then turn to the main task of this project, which is to highlight the voices of people living and working in Santa Fé, specifically, the trans sex workers and people living and working in street sales or as street recyclers. I will highlight some of the ways that they understand their own neighbourhood, and connect these understandings to the literature which conceptualizes the Colombian government's use of space as a mechanism for social control.

Specifically, I will consider four tactics that people used to push back against dominant narratives of the neighbourhood. First, some chose to deny the neighbourhood was a site of violence at all. Second, some chose to focus on calls to a racialized understanding of community, and distinguish between insiders and outsiders in the neighbourhood. Third, many offered pointed comments regarding the nature of individual police behaviour as well as overall policing strategy within the neighbourhood. Finally, others chose to critique or call attention to the overall patterns of government behaviour in the neighbourhood.