ResumenEn Colombia, la Constitución de 1991 y la Ley 70 de 1993 reconocen derechos territoriales a las poblaciones negras ribereñas del Pacífi-co, al atribuirles títulos colectivos sobre territorios ancestralmente ocupados y explotados, previa organización de los campesinos en "Consejos comunitarios" encargados de manejar los territorios en el futuro. El artí-culo explora las transformaciones que esto implica en la organización regional, basándose en un análisis espacial que recalca tres modelos de estructura socio-espacial. Se puede así combinar tiempos y espacios, y analizar el papel que los distintos actores sociales, económicos y políticos juegan en estas transformaciones.Palabras claves: territorio, análisis espacial, actores étnicos, comunidades negras, Pacífico, Colombia. Abstract Spaces and mobility of black people in the Colombian South Pacific: toward the built of a "regional society"?In Colombia, the 1991 Constitution an the Law 70 of 1993 assure territorial rights to the black populations of Pacific coast, attributing them collective titles on the previously occupied and exploited territories and previous organization of peasants under the "Communities Counsels", which are responsible to guide the ethnic Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Ano 24, n o 3, 2002, pp. 43-74 territory for the future. The article analyze the transformations on the regional organization of this process, based on the spatial analysis that holds three models of social-spatial structure. Therefore, it is possible to combine times and spaces, and analyze the role played by different social, economical and political actors in these transformations.

In the Pacific region of Colombia the new conditions for acceding to land and to territory are arousing a strong drive to redefine identities. Blacks who had never perceived or "categorized" themselves as such in their own milieux, unless as "free agents" or in reference to names of places or rivers in areas where they had lived, without land rights, for more than a century "became" so in order to ensure themselves a degree of land security, in application of a law (N° 70 of 1993). This legislation provides for the assignment of collective land titles to "black communities inhabiting the Pacific coastal region". For similar reasons, some Whites associate themselves (become assimilated?) with the Blacks and the mixed-race people, often close to the South-American Indians, sometimes claim to be "blacks", causing incomprehension and annoyance among their neighbours and officials alike, who are white. This strange merry-go-round of identity, triggered at the start by preoccupations concerning access and control over territories, is leading to a shift in the balance of power, on the symbolic front (and soon in the sphere) as much within the groups directly concerned as on their fringes. Consequently, analysis of this trend is contributing to clarification of the processes by which barriers and frontiers are being built between groups [Barth, 1995], by defining by whom, to what end, and especially how these are being used and by emphasizing what social, historical and political contexts-at local, national and international level and at their interface-favour or induce their construction. The approach adopted is deliberately descriptive. It starts from observation of "situations" in which these adopted identity descriptions are negotiated, by distinguishing those taking shape at the heart of black "communities" from those which are beginning to emerge at their borders (to simplify: Indians, mixed-race and Whites). In each case the study seeks to identify the conditions in which new discourses are formulated and expressed (the arenas and the tools), the individual or collective actors who contribute to this and possibly the new practices that these shifts of position involve. The accurate contextualization of these three components (tools, actors, practices) by situating them

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This paper presents an analysis of the processes of classification and racial-ethnic categorization of Belize's population during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, based on population censuses and government reports. We are not too interested in figures as such but in the categories of counting and their evolution, as indicators of the political logic of building a colonial and later a national society. While the censuses for the XIX century relate to different forms of population management (transition from slavery to freedom, affirmation or denial of ethnic and racial diversity), the administrative reports paint a static and stereotyped demographic-territorial model as a tool of the political project. For the twentieth century, we analyze the difficult road to independence and the changes introduced by the new Belizean state (categories, methods, actors) in the process of creating a "national identity".