Abstract

HERNANDEZ-RODRIGUEZ, Claudia Milena. The Sense of Community. The Case of the Procrear Foundation. Folios [online]. 2020, n.51, pp.199-212.  Epub July 07, 2020. ISSN 0123-4870.  https://doi.org/10.17227/folios.51-9943.

This article is the product of an investigation carried out in the Procrear Foundation, between 2017 and 2018. I addressed a qualitative approach and used ethnographic methods: participant observation, interview and documentary review. Most of the data was collected by the listening to El parche, family dialogues and a girls, boys and youngsters popular school. Those are programs created by Procrear, intended to reach affected and vulnerable population: street dwellers, sex workers, informal workers, Venezuelan immigrants and children who live in one of the most marginalized and stigmatized zones in Bogotá. To start this investigation, I identified two central dimensions: the territory and the emotional. The Santa Fe neighborhood is a territory, meaning, a socio-physical construction of the representations in relation to the inhabited space, its uses, problems, delimitations and transformations amid historical dynamics of power and social meanings (Harvey, 2005). The emotional dimension is manifested in community projects and the emotional bonds that are built between the Foundation and the beneficiary population. Thus, I understood the construction of the Procrear community in the territory, not only as the grouping of individuals whose only element of convergence is the spatial context, but as a set of emotional ties, sustained by the social solidarity that is the commitment and social function of the emotions of the Foundation.

Keywords : community; territory; emotional bonds; social solidarity.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )