Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Works

• 1984Oppressed but Not Defeated

  A history of Aymara and Quechua peasant struggles in Bolivia, 1900–1980, read through the long memory of anticolonial revolt.

• 2010Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses

  Decolonisation must be practised, not only theorised – with a sharp critique of the decolonial theory of the North American academy.

Position

Oppressed but Not Defeated (1984), her history of Aymara and Quechua peasant struggles from 1900 to 1980, distinguished two layers of memory: a “short memory” of the 1952 revolution and its land reform, and a “long memory” of anticolonial revolt reaching back to Tupac Katari’s siege of La Paz in 1781. Bolivia, she argued, had never ceased to be a colonial society; independence and revolution had left an “internal colonialism” intact, in which the line between indigenous and non-indigenous organised work, land and citizenship. Against both the national ideology of mestizaje and the official multiculturalism of the 1990s, which recognised indigenous people as folkloric figures of the past, she set the Aymara word ch’ixi, a grey made of tiny black and white dots: different worlds coexist and contend without merging into a harmonious whole. In Ch’ixinakax utxiwa (2010) she insisted that decolonisation is a practice before it is a discourse and accused North American decolonial theorists, Walter Mignolo by name, of building “a small empire within the empire” by turning the ideas of Andean thinkers into academic capital without citing them. Her Sociología de la imagen (2015) reads images, from Guaman Poma’s drawings to photographs, as sources of a knowledge that writing has suppressed. Her critique has been widely taken up, including in the North American universities she criticised.

Life & context

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui was born in La Paz in 1949 into a family of Aymara and European descent, and she describes herself as ch’ixi rather than mestiza. She studied sociology at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) in La Paz, graduating in 1976, and took a master’s degree in social sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 1979. In 1983 she co-founded with mainly Aymara students the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), which used oral history to recover the memory of indigenous uprisings and helped revive the ayllus, the traditional Andean communities. She taught sociology at UMSA for decades and is now professor emerita; she has also held visiting posts in the United States, Spain and Argentina. She has worked with the Katarist movement, coca growers and migrant Aymara women, and with collectives that combine research, art and political action. In later years she became a critic, from the left, of Evo Morales’s government and its use of indigenous symbols.

Further main works

• Las fronteras de la coca (2003)
• Sociología de la imagen (2015)
• Un mundo ch’ixi es posible (2018)

Appears in

• Journey ‘Latin America and the Indigenous Americas’ · Stop 13 of 13