The Andean Oral History Workshop: Decolonizing Historical Research Methods in Bolivia, Part 1

In the first of two installments, Benjamin Dangl writes about the Taller de Historia Oral Andina and how a small group of Indigenous Bolivian activists have been using oral history to decolonize their collective past since 1983.

By Benjamin Dangl

At the top of a winding street in La Paz, Bolivia, heading up from the city’s downtown toward El Alto, lies an inconspicuous brick building that looks exactly like the others in this working-class neighborhood. A small metal sign reads: Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop, THOA). Behind the doors of the building are the organization’s offices, libraries, archives, and meeting rooms. A vast mural depicting the altiplano covers one wall, and bags of coca sit on the long table where THOA members hold meetings. This is the headquarters of a grassroots research group that sought to create an alternative to the standard Bolivian historiography by tapping into the wellspring of oral history in Indigenous communities. 

Founded in 1983, the THOA was formed by nearly a dozen Indigenous activist-scholars and still operates to this day. The founders and early members were professors and students at the public Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) in La Paz, one of the nation’s most important public universities. Most of the early members were Indigenous people who had recently migrated from the rural highlands to La Paz for studies; they discovered a void when it came to Indigenous Bolivian people’s history and sought to correct this by saving the stories of Indigenous resistance, using oral history as their primary methodology. 

Alongside the resurgent Indigenous movements of the period, the THOA challenged prevailing historical understandings at the university and embraced oral history as a tool for the reconstruction of silenced and fragmented Indigenous histories. In both its theory and methodology, the THOA broke new ground in historical research in Bolivia. Their commitment to recovering and promoting Indigenous culture and history was reflected in the organization’s research, production, and distribution. Not only did its work throughout the 1980s and beyond make use of new techniques and strategies for gathering oral history, but it also created a historical record of the majority of the country’s people that was previously absent, contributing to the transformation of historical consciousness in Bolivia. 

“The central objective of the institution framed itself in the accompaniment and empowerment of the Indigenous communities…. The THOA generated a space of reflection on and analysis of hot-button issues about national needs and the Indigenous communities.“

In “Una mirada autocrítica a la historia del THOA,” THOA member Felipe Santos Quispe outlines the organization’s accomplishments: “The central objective of the institution framed itself in the accompaniment and empowerment of the Indigenous communities, based on the strengthening of Indigenous identity through the investigation, dissemination [of the histories], formation [of researchers], and education [based on the histories produced]. The THOA generated a space of reflection on and analysis of hot-button issues about national needs and the Indigenous communities. Lastly, the community recuperated the organic model of reciprocity in relation to the communities. This made it easier to implement the oral history method in interactive investigations.” 

The THOA collected oral histories primarily in the rural Aymara communities where many members originated. Researchers worked alongside the communities and developed a process in which the interviewees set up the parameters of the interview, the research, and the historical production; they complemented oral history material with archival research to produce booklets and radio programs. With this work, they filled in the public silences surrounding Indigenous pasts, rebels, and uprisings, and in doing so, they strengthened historical self-awareness among Indigenous Bolivians.  

The THOA’s emergence onto the sociopolitical scene in the early 1980s was part of a national shift toward Indigenous organizing and politics. While activists fought in the streets to change the course of history, the THOA produced Indigenous histories and transformed the way the country’s Indigenous majority saw themselves, their past, and their future in the nation they wanted to rebuild. 

Recovering Histories of Indigenous Resistance 

Through the collection of oral histories, the THOA sought to recover the silenced Indigenous past of the Andes. Members saw the Spanish conquest and colonialism of the Americas as forces that destroyed and fragmented Indigenous history. For THOA member Carlos Mamani, the long duration of colonialism inflicted a political, economic, and social trauma on Indigenous Bolivians, a trauma that fractured people’s historical memory and consciousness, relegating Aymara history to the underground. “From this moment [of conquest],” Mamani writes in a booklet on the methods the THOA used in its research, “our historical memory was destined to survive clandestinely and to manifest itself in myths and oral traditions.” Oral history provided a way to weave together the Indigenous histories fractured by colonialism and neocolonialism, and to rescue Indigenous history, and therefore identity, from imminent disappearance. “If we do not care to know our own history and to recuperate our own historical destiny, very soon the aymaras, quichwas, urus, guaranís will be converted into museum artifacts,” Mamani writes.

The THOA’s publications were widely distributed to rural areas and had a direct political and social impact. In the early years, member-investigators used their research to create short and inexpensively produced works for distribution in rural communities. Themes included histories of Indigenous rebels of the early twentieth century, women’s avenues of resistance in Indigenous movements, the history of the ayllu, a collection of important dates in Bolivian history on resistance and oppression, popular Indigenous traditions, and children’s stories set in rural Aymara communities. 

The THOA also organized radio programs and public discussions that brought debates on Indigenous culture and politics out of the university and into the wider public, in La Paz and rural highland communities. In addition, the THOA organized groundbreaking cultural events in university spaces where, for the first time, academic debaters spoke publicly and intentionally in Aymara and, instead of wine, shared coca leaves in the communal act of acullicu, the ritual “chewing” of coca. THOA publications were available in Spanish but, most notably, were also published in Aymara and Quechua, a move that was rare in the 1980s for history publications. 

The THOA was a generational expression of the influx of Indigenous students from rural parts of the country into the university system. These heirs of the educational reforms of the 1952 National Revolution found allies among Indigenous university professors, most notably THOA co-founder Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The seeds of the THOA were planted in the classrooms where Indigenous issues were newly included in the curricula and openly discussed. Indigenous professors and students addressed what they saw as the ongoing colonization of Bolivia and found Indigenous histories that existed on the margins of society, in the oral testimonies and archival fragments of this past that remained. Their views were oriented by roots in rural Bolivia and the memory of their communities and ancestors. Such Indigenous histories and shared experiences converged in UMSA classrooms, leading to the creation of the THOA. 

Reflecting on the work of the THOA, Silvia Rivera explains in “El potencial epistemológico y teórico de la historia oral” that as Indigenous movements worked for self-determination and rights, they also reclaimed their “right to generate their own ideological and political systematizations, displacing the role of intermediaries assumed by the intellectuals […].” Such political mobilizations at the time demanded a rethinking of anthropological methods and research approaches practiced by academics regarding Indigenous people and culture. This shift, Rivera writes, came “thanks to the fact that Indian mobilizations and organizations assumed a growing and critical control in the face of the researchers’ and leftist politicians’ attempts at instrumentalization [of their movements].” 

The THOA fused the demands, ideologies, and organizational strategies of the new Indigenous movements with a historical research approach that placed the power of investigation into the hands of the Indigenous subjects themselves. Rivera explains, “Obviously, the emphasis on history is central to all these movements. The past acquires new life in being the central foundation of cultural and political Indian identity, and a source of radical criticism to the successive forms of oppression that q’ara [Western] society exercises on the Indian. It is in this context that the oral history projects of the THOA emerge, as an attempt to put the Indian movements’ demands for historic recuperation into practice.” The THOA’s work contributed to the shifts in historical consciousness, both within and outside of the academy, which were taking place thanks to a new generation of Indigenous leaders. 

You can find the second half of this post here

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Dr. Benjamin Dangl is a Lecturer of Public Communication at the University of Vermont. He is a longtime journalist in Latin America and the author of three books on Bolivia, most recently The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia, which focuses largely on the work, methods, and impact of The Andean Oral History Workshop.

Featured image depicts Don Lúcas Miranda, son of the cacique Toribio Miranda, conducting an Andean ceremony during a gathering of indigenous elders in 1990. The meeting was organized by the Andean Oral History Workshop to collect oral histories on the struggle of the caciques apoderados Indigenous movement in the early twentieth century. Courtesy of the Andean Oral History Workshop.