Territory without land: extended territoriality and interjurisdictional navigation in the Yanacona urban cabildo of Popayán, Colombia

Urban Indigenous groups in Latin America encounter a critical challenge: maintaining territorial connections and ancestral legal frameworks while removed from common grounds. In Colombia, almost 36 per cent of the Indigenous population lives outside resguardos, while constitutional provisions assume that special Indigenous jurisdiction necessitates a constant physical foundation. This study employs a conversational method with 10 Yanacona comuneros in Popayán’s urban cabildo to investigate how Indigenous peoples displaced by armed conflict and threats against their leaders conceptualise and express what we define as extended territoriality: forms of territorial relations functioning without a constant physical base, manifested through practices such as ‘the permission of the elders’ and the ritual actualisation of ancestral connections. Participants’ accounts illustrate interjurisdictional navigation, the tactical movement between normative frameworks represented by ‘the strategically courageous Indian,’ and pragmatic translatability, effective articulations that facilitate coordination without reconciling ontological disparities, encapsulated in the metaphor of ‘two rivers converging yet retaining distinct waters.’ Rather than diminished territoriality, comuneros articulate mechanisms that extend their ancestral territorial relation into urban space. The study provides analytical terminology, etic constructs grounded in participants’ own emic theorizations, for comprehending Indigenous territorial claims beyond physical boundaries, a politically pressing endeavour as demographic realities increasingly deviate from constitutional assumptions.