While working with campesino, or peasant, community leaders in the northwestern border of the Colombian Amazon, I was struck by their deep familiarity with the department's land-planning terminology. Terms like ‘forest preserve zone Type A or B’ were part of everyday conversations among them. People responded to the question ‘what figure is your farm located in?’ as naturally as I learned to answer questions about my ethnicity in surveys during my first year as an international student in Illinois. However, while my categorization as ‘Hispanic’ has been a minor inconvenience at most, for my interlocutors, living in Type A or Type B areas of the forest preserve zone entails a specific governance regime that limits access to rights and the realization of family and community projects.

As I continued working with peasant community leaders, my attention was continuously drawn to their knowledge of the state—how they developed and used it, and why. Perhaps because my main research interest was on the integration of information technologies to peasant struggles in the Amazon, I noticed that digital information technologies played a key role in supporting this knowledge. Drawing on this modest insight, this short paper introduces the concept of state literacy, defined as the ability to obtain, understand, and engage with information about the conditions of governance of one’s community in situated encounters with the state. By looking at the illustrative case of one particular peasant community in the department of Guaviare, I identify three characteristics of state literacy emerging in the struggles of marginalized communities: 1) it is collective, networked, and critical, 2) it is embedded in alternative sociotechnical infrastructures, and 3) it configures subversive information practices. Mobile phones have become key tools for peasant community leaders, and they are part of each of these characteristics.

Researchers have centered the agency of marginalized communities and individuals, examining their responses to barriers and risks imposed by structural inequalities (Espinoza Vasquez & Oltmann, 2023; Kitzie et al., 2020). Espinoza Vasquez and Oltmann identify ‘defensive, proactive, and subversive information practices’ employed by communities to navigate information marginalization. Defensive information practices are those in which people react to new barriers, seeking to protect themselves, their family, or their community. Proactive information practices are actions undertaken in anticipation of actual barriers or risks, stemming from social interdependency and shared vulnerability and deep understanding of community needs, structure, and knowledge. Subversive information practices are actions that counter or challenge the status quo and systemic inequalities (Espinoza Vasquez & Oltmann, 2023, p. 528).

Within science and technology studies (STS), ‘material literacy’ describes how communities navigate bureaucratic infrastructures by sharing tacit knowledge about their material constraints. This knowledge helps create alternative infrastructures, enabling new forms of existence and restoring justice through alliances between committed groups of humans and accessible material objects (Mora-Gámez, 2020; Papadopoulos, 2018). In these situations, (Espinoza Vasquez 2023) identifies activists’ ‘seamful work’ (Vertesi, 2014), where situated knowledge and available resources (actors, organizations, technologies) are used to build sociotechnical infrastructures that counter state-driven inequalities. Research has also shown how communities organize to intervene state infrastructures and tools of governance that ‘quietly determine the limits of the possible by both narrowing down certain options and opening the possibility of creating different, and maybe better, worlds’ (Ballestero, 2019, p. 5). This type of activism requires a nuanced understanding of the relationship between knowledge/legibility and power, as explained by scholars like Foucault or Scott (Foucault, 2012; Scott, 2008).

In public administration and political science, scholars have explored everyday encounters between subaltern citizens and the state, focusing on how the state’s failure to deliver services disproportionately affects those lacking cultural capital, bureaucratic literacy, or social networks (Moodie, 2013). (Döring 2021) extends the concept of health literacy to ‘administrative literacy’, defined as ‘the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic information and services from public organizations needed to make appropriate decisions’ (p. 1155). Administrative literacy often emerges in specific contexts over time, as citizens compensate for the state’s inability to provide training opportunities or usable information (Abou Moumouni & Krauß, 2023). (Moodie 2013) illustrates how bureaucratic literacy gained through state employment may become collective knowledge, supporting community struggles through imaginative applications. Her research invites attention to the importance of bureaucratic literacy emerging from unintended information flows and proximities in state policy.

Research in community informatics has long explored the relationship between information infrastructures and the practices of social movements and local communities. For example, Jack Linchuan Qiu introduced the concept of the ‘have-less’ to describe social groups in China who had limited access to ICTs but used them to network their communities under structural constraints (2009). Similarly, David Nemer studied how marginalized residents of Brazil’s favelas appropriated technology centers to navigate oppressive conditions (2022). In Colombia, Rocio Rueda Ortiz and her team analysed how an indigenous organization integrated digital technologies into their struggles by centering the life and work of one of the organizations’ key figures (Rueda Ortiz, 2011). Researchers have also examined the domain learning that occurs in interactions with digital infrastructures, which is often mediated by social actors that help others achieve certain tasks online (Prieto-Nanez, 2016; Williams, 2012). Finally, they have studied forms of community learning and teaching mediated by computing infrastructures (Grisales Bohorquez et al., 2021; Levy, 1999).

This research draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between April and December 2023 in Guaviare, Colombia. Working with eight campesino leaders, I employed feminist and action-research methodologies, conducting participant observation, collecting field notes, documents, and photographs, and focusing on information practices and interactions with state bureaucracies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven community leaders and eight community members to explore their relationships with information technologies and discuss ethnographic observations. The data was analyzed using thematic analysis and iterative coding, emphasizing the work and knowledge campesinos use to navigate and challenge marginalization.

In 2013, the Colombian state divided the lands of the forest preserve zone in Guaviare into Type A areas, reserved for ecological processes, and Type B areas, designated for sustainable forestry management. The zoning effectively rendered peasants ‘unfit’ to inhabit these lands, reinforcing stereotypes of peasants as coca-growers allied with armed guerrillas. In response, peasant communities in the municipality of Calamar, Guaviare have organized to demand recognition as valid interlocutors in territorial management and access to rights. For more than a decade, they have engaged in protective, proactive, and subversive practices, including refusing to sign documents and provide information, writing letters, attending meetings and trainings with state officer and NGOs, participating in mobilizations, sought the support of lawyers and activists, and collectively developed strategies to achieve the recognition of community expectations and plans for their own future. In 2023, community leaders presented a comprehensive proposal for the recognition of their collective land rights that was grounded in existing Colombian law, but alternative to the state’s proposed strategy. This demonstrated an understanding of conditions under which the state made peasants and their land legible, and thus governed or administered them (Scott, 2008). The community’s proposal made peasants legible as environmental agents, demanding recognition of their collective rights inhabit and decide over their territory as a strategy for the protection of the Amazon jungle based on community environmental governance.

This paper has introduced the concept of state literacy, demonstrating how it emerges from the struggles of marginalized communities as a set of skills, knowledge, and attitudes enabling communities to navigate, challenge, and transform their conditions of governance. Future research should explore how peasant leaders carefully resist governance by illegal armed groups while simultaneously dealing with state marginalization, a dangerous endeavor given the ongoing threats to social leaders in Colombia. Since 2016, over 1,200 social leaders and human rights defenders have been murdered in the country (Human Rights Watch, 2023). This situation highlights the importance of supporting community leaders and human rights defenders by approaching ‘access to information’ from their situated perspectives, considering the specific risks, burdens, and barriers they face and working with them to address them. Further research should also look at the emergence and use of state literacy in the struggles of marginalized communities in diverse situations, so that a more general framework related to theory of information marginalization and precarity might be proposed.