The collective actions and organizational initiatives now conceptualized as and termed the 'Afro-Colombian social movement' received strong impetus from the constitutional change of 1991, when the country was declared multiethnic and multicultural. A significant sequel was the approval in 1993 of Law 70, known as the Ley de Derechos de las Negritudes (Law on Black Rights). According to Law 70, the subject of collective rights to land, ethnic education, and political representation are comunidades negras (black communities). One of the leading social movement organizations emerging in 1990s Colombia was the Proceso de Comunidades Negras en Colombia (Process of Black Communities in Colombia), which waves the flag of blackness in its name. In contrast, another major social movement organization, the Movimiento Nacional Cimarrón (National Maroon Movement), rejects the term negro with the argument that to identify with it is to use a dehumanizing label coined by the colonizers who enslaved us as people of African descent. Nonetheless, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras en Colombia defends the use of all such terms, namely, negro, afrocolombiana, and afrodescendiente, as meaningful categories for  
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[^0]:    26 There are several other identifiers of Afro-Colombian local cultures, such as palenqueros for those from San Basilio de Palenque, raizales for the islanders of San Andrés, afrocaribeños for Afrodescendants of the Colombian Caribbean and afro-pacificos for Afrodescendants of the Pacific coast of Colombia, Ecuador and Panama.
27 The second conference was held in Panama in 1979 and the third, in Brazil in 1985. See Valderrama Pibe's master's thesis on the importance of cultural organizing since the 1940s for fighting racism and affirming blackness in Colombia.