The Andean Oral History Workshop: Reweaving Narratives of Indigenous Resistance in Bolivia, Part 2

This week, Benjamin Dangl finalizes his two-part post 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.

In case you missed it, find his first post on the Andean Oral History Workshop here.

By Benjamin Dangl

The Andean Oral History Workshop’s (THOA) methodology was bound up in the organization’s political and intellectual commitments, which aimed to decolonize research and historical production. The THOA members’ closeness to the communities and cultures they were researching helped their work immensely. Their horizontal research methods aided the recovery of communal memory and knowledge. The THOA’s efforts to piece fragments of memory and historical traces together into a whole helped fill in silences and reweave the narrative fabric of Indigenous resistance.

In their research, the THOA deployed various techniques to help elders recall the past with precision and fill in incomplete historical accounts. In some cases, they visited places related to their past in order to help them recall significant events with more detail. The THOA also sought out extended interviews with people who were not necessarily tied to historical events important to the community, but were superb narrators or had a deep knowledge of local history and culture. Through repeated interviews, these individuals provided a wider view of history. These life histories, former THOA member Carlos Mamani explains, helped “enrich our vision of what the common cultural rules are and the individual variants are in a society like ours.”

THOA members were not strangers visiting Indigenous communities from afar; they were considered part of the same community, albeit part of the wider Aymara diaspora triggered by migration to cities. When THOA members conducted their interviews, they approached their work from a space of intimate understanding. They spoke the same language and many had lived in rural communities when they were younger. “The fact of being Indigenous, Indigenous researchers, made us part of the same community,” Felipe Santos Quispe explained in an interview. For many THOA researchers, the experience of gathering testimonies was like an extended family reunion. The THOA’s work was a process of mutual reflection and collective remembering; the line between the researchers and the researched was blurred. Members were investigating themselves, their own identities, and their pasts. “It was a kind of self-reflection, and we shared this self-reflection with the communities,” Santos explains. There was no lack of trust: “We woke up together in the communities conversing, debating.” The activist-researchers and community members were getting to know their ancestral history, culture, and worldview, but also getting to know themselves.

“When we speak in Aymara, when we acullicamos, when we talk in the evenings, a deep history arises, and it is a deep history that comes from long ago.” — Marcelo Fernández

Speaking an Indigenous language was a requirement for early THOA members; the shared knowledge of Aymara strengthened relationships with the communities. In an interview, THOA member Marcelo Fernández reflected on language’s essential role in their early work: “When we speak in Aymara, when we acullicamos [chew coca], when we talk in the evenings, a deep history arises, and it is a deep history that comes from long ago.” Researchers without a common understanding of this language would not have been able to access the same stories or the same meaning and sentiment within them.

Just as the language provided an inroad, sharing coca—a leaf used widely throughout the Andes for medicinal and spiritual purposes—during conversations helped ground the discussions in the rituals and the cultural foundations of the community. “Coca is an element in making a dialogue,” THOA member Filomena Nina explained in an interview. “It is a way of saying, ‘Let’s chat.’ It’s not necessarily saying, but rather showing, and giving coca, so that already has another significance, which is to say, we already know the symbolic language of the communities.” When THOA members conducted their research, they typically brought coca with them for just this purpose.

Early 1980s THOA audio files (located at the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore in La Paz) bring the organization’s methodologies in the communities to life. In various recordings, where Aymara is predominantly spoken, one can hear the rustle of participants grabbing at piles of coca leaves and chewing the leaf during the interviews. In other THOA recordings, snippets of rural daily life are present in the sound of chickens clucking, birds singing, or the wind whipping over the microphone during outdoor conversations. Hours and hours of such recorded interviews and conversations in rural communities formed the core of the THOA’s historical productions.

The researchers and those who provided testimonies shared much of the same culture and lived experience, identified with each other, and spoke the same language, providing the foundation for a participatory and horizontal production of history. This process decentered the typical power of the researcher and focused on a genuine collaboration that THOA members say decolonized their methodology. This style of research was evident in the ways the interviews were organized. In THOA co-founder Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s reflections on the THOA’s early work, she describes how the interviewees themselves decided on the research approach and topics, how the interviews would be formatted and conducted, how the transcriptions would be returned, evaluated, and discussed by the community, and how the final product would be used.

The THOA’s approach, Rivera writes, was “a collective exercise of disalienation, as much for the researcher as for the interlocutor.” This active and collaborative participation on the part of “investigated communities and movements [aimed] toward the disalienation and decolonization of history.” In such a process, the interviewee is not considered an “object of study,” but rather a participant in a collective reflection. Through such collaborations in interviews and discussion, Rivera explains, “one will discover the complexity and richness of the ways of thinking and visions of history that the actors themselves generate in their lived experience.”

The THOA’s interviews were not solely about collecting facts but were often investigations into the past’s role in the transformation of society. Such an approach enabled rich discussions, for example, about the persistence of colonialism in contemporary times. “This allows us to reflect on the present in light of the past: to ask ourselves, for example, if we are living the same reality, or if some change has been produced,” Mamani writes. “In this way, in some communities, collectively or individually, we have generated a reflection about the permanence of the colonial situation as a system of domination of our peoples, and this reflection has enriched the consciousness-raising of the syndical, communal, and other organizations.”

The ideal of such research methods guided the THOA’s work at each stage of the organization’s historical production. From the collection of testimonies to the shaping of the narrative and the piecing together of fragmented histories, this nonhierarchical relationship was an essential part of the THOA’s work to rebuild an Indigenous people’s history of Bolivia.

While Indigenous movements were struggling in the streets, in between barricades, for political power and rights, the THOA was fighting intellectual battles to put Indigenous people on the historical map of the country. THOA members used oral history techniques to recover the silenced and fragmented past of Indigenous people, and produced histories for political action in an era of Indigenous resurgence.

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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 Andrés Jach’aqullu (standing) speaking with the THOA in La Paz, Bolivia in 1990.