The permanent construction of narratives, and oral tradition as an expression of self-development, marks a notable difference between black communities and other ethnic groups. These communities dynamically build and transmit their way of living, their traditions, and their way of staying in the territory. The construction of new discourses on ancestrality resignifies the traditional debate between Africanism traces and the new ethnicization that defines the cultural processes and the criteria for categorization and current recognition of black community councils as ethnic groups. The relevance of the construction of narratives lies in its ability to keep ancestrality present, reactivate its symbolism, its connections, and reinforce the collective fabric. These narratives speak of spatiality and time, a time, that of orality, dynamic. This time modifies the relationship between past and present. It is the basis of oral transmission in black communities, which permanently updates tradition and its spatiality. The recognition of these values, such as the declaration of San Basilio de Palenque as a Masterpiece of the Material and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005 by UNESCO, can mean the recognition of cultural identity or end in an exoticization of cultural practices. Territory, memory, and culture represent the foundations of the ethnicization of black communities. Thus, the discussion about the alterity in the discursive construction of the black ethnic subject debates how the conditions from which the perspective of ethnic development operates in Colombia hinder the process of cultural valorization in three different frameworks: the territorial organizational, the ethnic identity, and that of historical vindication. Afro-rural housing, in this case, emerges as a spatiality that could articulate these three conditions.
Ph.D. Architect and Master (rated excellent cum laude) from the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He teaches architectural design and forms part of the Pedagogies of Habitat and the Public research group at the University of Los Andes. He has been a researcher at the Observatorio de Territorios Étnicos y Campesinos for emerging cartographies of Afro-descendant communities in the Colombian Caribbean. He worked as an adviser for the Instituto Pensar at the Pontificia Javeriana University (PJU) for Territorial Planning in Transitional Justice projects. Additionally, he took part in developing architectural strategies for the defence of human rights in processes of territorial affirmation for the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz. He worked as coordinator of the New Territories Project of the International Studies Programme at the PJU. He was responsible for Research of the Life and Territory Project at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University until 2015. He taught architecture and coordinated the Research and Doctorate Department in the Department of Architecture at the University of Madrid and was the director of the research group [AAOO *] Occasional Architectures: research laboratory on architectural processes and urban strategies, and coordinator of the Urban Replay research group until 2012.