Latin America
From OHA Wiki
Oral History in Latin America
Oral history and testimony is not necessarily a phenomenon unique to the late-twentieth century western world. During the 1700s priests, conquerors, and chroniclers recorded the histories of indigenous peoples in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes Mountains through interviews and personal testimony. The main goal of collecting information found in these testimonies was to gain knowledge that could help in colonization and religious conversion processes. Although the written records of these interviews were “colored by cultural assumptions of sixteenth century Europeans,” they still provided crucial information about the social, economic, and religious traditions of the major civilizations in the region.
In the nineteenth century Latin America, the descendents of the colonizers began to use oral history for a new purpose: nation building. The goal of this practice was to create national identities and histories. Leaders of independence movements interviewed other prominent individuals. For example, during the late 1800s President Bartolomé Mitre of Argentina and Chilean politician Diego Barros Arana solicited interviews of themselves to chronicle political movements in their countries.
At the dawn of the 1960s oral history in Latin America still focused on nation building events, but the scope of interviewees began to widen. In 1959 The Instituto Nacional de Antropologiá e Historia (INAH) sent researchers to interview participants of the Mexican Revolution. Those interviewed were not just the major actors in the conflict; oral histories participants of all levels were collected and placed in the INAH’s Sound Archive of the Mexican Revolution.
In the 1970s and 1980s the purpose and methodology behind oral history changed from nation building to activism. One example is that of Chile. During the seventeen year military dictatorship that began in 1973, censorship prevented the prevented historians and social scientists, as well as the press from recording the poverty and violence that wreaked havoc on the nation. Oral history interviews published in the underground press were able to capture events and atrocities that could not be published openly. By the late 1980s thousands of oral history interviews of victims, labor leaders, clergy, former soldiers, and even regime supporters appeared in alternative magazines and newspapers. The story told in these publications contradicted the official one given by the government. Personal testimonies found in the alternative press informed citizens of the consequences of military rule; as a result, Chileans beat the regime in contested elections in 1988 and 1989.
Activist oral history in Latin America is used to help people cope with tragedy and political unrest in addition to regime change. In Oral History and Public Memory, Riaño-Alcalá discusses the use of group oral history interviewing in the form memory workshops in Colombia. Approximately three million people have fled their homes and almost three hundred thousand live as refugees in their own country because of more than forty years of fighting between guerillas, paramilitary organizations, the military, and drug traffickers. Riaño-Alcalá created the workshops as a forum where displaced people could rebuild their lost senses of trust and community through sharing oral testimonies with each other.
