History as a Forward-Looking Endeavor

By: Catalina Muñoz

Associate Professor

Department of History and Geography

Universidad de los Andes

In 2016, in the context of the signing of the Peace Accords with the FARC guerrillas, I co- founded “Historias para lo que Viene” (which translates as Histories for the Future), a research-action group that designs strategies to enrich the public debate about peace in Colombia from a historical perspective. Since then, my work has focused on how history can promote social justice, from both an academic and an applied, activist perspective. Peace-building requires historical thinking; Understanding the root causes of violence, beyond the actions of perpetrators and institutional obstacles, is indispensable to devise effective change. It also requires more than the historical thinking of academics; it needs the historical insights that those who have suffered the most have about what a more just society looks like and how to get there.

I chose to become a historian as a college student because of the thorough understanding of the human experience it offered. Good history does not try to explain a single compartment of human life—the political, the economic, the cultural, the emotional, for example—but rather aims at a comprehensive view that seeks connections between these different domains. It understands the biographical not as self-contained but as part of a particular context that makes some things possible, others difficult, and others impossible at a given time and place. At its core in an approach to the human experience as part of the flux of time: it thinks about roots, about continuity, and change. History, I thought, was full of connection-making.

Yet, when I received my undergraduate academic training in the late 1990s, there was one piece of connection that I missed: academic history grounded the very possibility of historical knowledge in its disconnection from the present and the non-academic world. I was taught that to be a rigorous and objective historian, my professional practice had to remain detached from the present. Furthermore, the task was to understand the past in its own terms; historians had no business in the social struggles of the present, and even less in any futurist endeavor. I was baffled to find myself discouraged to use the tools I had learned to understand my contemporaries as historical agents, to engage with them in a way other than as a teacher, and to think of history as a tool to bring about social change in the present, just as people in the past had done.

I turned to museums and teaching social sciences at the high school level, which was the only avenue open to me at the time. I pursued museum studies for a while but decided to go back to school and get a PhD, aware that I needed to further my abilities for critical thinking as well as gain the credentials to empower myself. Academia sucked me back in and upon completing my dissertation, the same questions came back: all that work, all that terrific insight, for what and for whom? As I began my first job as Assistant Professor of History, I started defying the paradigm I was trained in and sought projects where I could build the connections I had been missing. Interestingly, it was the critical thinking that I learned in my training as a historian that provided me with the tools to question the boundaries that the discipline imposed and push them.

I started learning about oral history and worked on a project with an indigenous community in northern Colombia on their experience of cultural loss after Catholic missionaries were sent by the Colombian government to “civilize” them in the early twentieth century. We combined archival work with oral history and community workshops to produce an exhibit. After this, I took on a new project in a working-class neighborhood adjacent to my university campus facing the prospect of a large urban redevelopment project. We tried to illuminate how residents understood their personal experience of the transformation of the neighborhood and their part in urban renewal processes that extend into the past but also the future. Thus, I reoriented my practice to a more publicly engaged one that felt more rewarding and that has offered me the possibility of continuing to grow and learn, in this case from communities that many in the academic world still think of as “informants” but not as knowledge producers.

My current project, Nuestra Orilla, is a collaboration with two afro-Colombian community leaders in one of the poorest regions of Colombia: Chocó. Ana Luisa Ramírez and Jenry Serna live in Riosucio, a small port town in the Atrato river, which traverses the immensely biodiverse rainforest of the Colombian pacific from south to north. Afro-Colombian communities settled there as they attained freedom in the nineteenth century and migrated from the gold mines where they had been forced to worked as slaves under Spanish rule. Throughout the twentieth century they built autonomous communities throughout the many rivers that fed the basin of the Atrato, raising animals and crops to sustain their families, but also participating in the export markets of rubber, cacao, tagua seeds and timber. They led autonomous lives, with little intervention from the Colombian government: Riosucio still has no running water, no sewer system, and electricity only recently arrived. Towards the 1980s, the FARC guerrillas started having a presence in the area and soon these communities were caught in the crossfire between the guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitary. This happened while community organizations in the region started a struggle to claim collective land rights. It was precisely in this context of attaining communal land titles that they were violently displaced in 1997 by a joint operation of the Colombian armed forces, which bombed the area, and the paramilitary. The army claimed to be fighting the FARC through this operation, but for the communities it was clear that the goal was to force them out, away from their lands, so that these could be taken over by the palm industry.

When this happened, Ana Luisa and Jenry, our community partners, were teenagers. They started participating in community organizations; In the case of Ana Luisa, she struggled to position herself as a woman leader. We met in 2021, as a mutual interest brought us together: we all sought to use collaborative storytelling to counter violence, to contribute to reparations, and to build a more equal society where silenced voices had more room to participate in the democratic debate. A little earlier, I had met Colectiva Normal, a collective of documentarians committed to producing high-quality stories about social issues. As an academic starting to think about producing historical narratives with communities affected by the armed conflict, I was aware that I knew little about storytelling, so we started a collaboration. Daniel Ruiz-Serna, one of the members of Colectiva Normal, had recently finished a PhD dissertation on the impact of war in the Riosucio region and had known Ana Luisa and Jenry for over two decades. He introduced us, and as we identified we shared a common goal, we decided to start looking for funding and designed the project together, incorporating the input from the three partners: the community members, the historian, and the communicators. Collectively, we have researched the history of the lower Atrato region using archival materials, oral histories, secondary sources and appealing to local conceptions of history that tie it to the territory. We have also produced an eight-episode podcast series to bring it to as many ears as possible, inside the region and out.

The professional path I chose as an engaged historian has meant taking risks. As we all know, the academic setting still privileges books in academic presses and articles in well-ranked journals for promotion. Universities are difficult to change; after all, they are very old institutions. But even so, there has been room for creativity and pushing boundaries. The American Historical Association is taking seriously the need to figure out ways to evaluate non-conventional forms of production as more historians are opting for them. So are different Latin American universities where public history is flourishing. History as a discipline is part of historical change, and academics are joining non-academics in using history as a forward-looking endeavor.