We are pleased to invite you to the presentation “The Afterlives of Indigenous Communists in Ecuador, 1980s-Present” by Dr. Marlen Rosas, an Assistant Professor of History at Haverford College. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Her book project, Recording Indigenous Resistance: Literacy, Archives, and Narrative Power in Twentieth-Century Ecuador, employs critical archive scholarship, oral history, and memory studies approaches to the examination of Indigenous mobilization in twentieth-century Ecuador, arguably the most organized Indigenous movement in the history of the Americas.
In the 1960s, after decades of organizing work strikes, building schools, and facing antagonism from landowners and government officials alike, Indigenous labor activists on the haciendas of Cayambe, Ecuador, were hit with two Agrarian Reforms that left their communities geographically and politically divided. At the same time, activists such as Dolores Cacuango and Transito Amaguana recorded oral histories with anthropologists from 1968 to 1988, allowing them to disseminate their militant politics in the national arena. I argue the historical activists’ narratives became the raw material for subsequent, often conflicting projects of memory production by the state, education activists, and women's rights organizers, who sought to re-envision and re-employ the politics of Cayambe’s union leaders.
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