brimn – Indigenous Rights in Latin America

Oswaldo Guayasamín (1919-1999) was an influential Quechua painter from Ecuador. Guayasamín used art to communicate the violence, oppression, and poverty of which he was witness. Guayasamín often depicts human figures. His work probably gained such a wide scope of recognition because it feels both highly personal and universal. It communicates universal human emotions of pain, grief, anger, and love — but also the unique conditions and experiences of indigenous Ecuadorians. His style is identified as a part of the Expressionist and Cubist movements.
Guayasamín was born in 1919 in Quito, Ecuador. His father was Quechua and his mother was Mestiza. He was the eldest of ten children. Guayasamín was interested in painting from a young age. He started to watercolor when he was 6 and shifting to oil when he was 10. “As he had already been expelled from six different schools for what his teachers considered a lack of academic talent, he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts [in 1932, at age 13] against his father’s wishes.”
His early was characterized by these artistic developments, and at the same time, it was marked by personal loss and political violence. Guayasamín’s mother died a premature death during his childhood years. Later, in 1932 (the same year he started art school) an armed conflict exploded between then president Neptalí Bonifaz Ascázubi’s far-right base and leftist paramilitary groups who sought to overthrow him. This coup sparked a four-day period of intense violence. During this time, Guayasamín witnessed a stray bullet hit and kill one of his best friends. This event would inspire the painting below, Los niños muertos (The dead children).

This painting was featured in Guayasamín’s “first exhibition in 1942 [which] stirred considerable controversy in the artistic community, as the majority of his works contained critical social and political undertones.”
Having graduated from The School of Fine Arts in 1940, Guayasamín’s career was already in full speed ahead. Soon after graduating, “Nelson Rockefeller visited Quito and was so impressed with Guayasamín’s art that he extended him an invitation to visit the United States, where the artist spent seven months visiting museums.” Soon thereafter, in 1943, Guayasamín traveled to Mexico where he met Diego Rivera and studied under José Clemente Orozco. As we can see, from the beginning of his artistic career, Guayasamín was recognized internationally for his talent, and through his travels gained a broadend international perspective. On his way back from Mexico to Ecuador, Guayasamín traveled through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The injustices that he witnessed during this tour inspired the first peiod of his artistic career, called Huacayñán (A Quechua word that roughly translates to “the trail of tears). It spanned from 1946 to 1953. The two paintings below were produced during this period of his artistic production, during which he created one mural and 103 pictures. He “depict[s] the misery and injustices suffered by racial and ethnic groups, particularly indigenous people, in Latin America. The works portray the cultures, feelings, traditions, identities and religions of these people and attempt to give them a voice.” The figure of Prisonero (1949) is fairly typical of the bodies that Oswaldo renders: thin, showing signs of poverty, with both the face and hands showing the anguish of the figure.

The next period of his artistic production is referred to as La edad de la ira, or The Age of Rage, which spanned roughly from 1953-1993.
The art that Guayasamín created during this middle period of his career was extremely politically and emotionally potent. He expressed his outrage and grief at many of the horrors of the 20th-century, such as the series of dictatorships that sprung forth in Latin America, the disappearings, the continued repression of indigenous peoples, the Vietnam War, and more.

Lágrimas de sangre (Tears of blood), 1973

For example, the image to the left, one of Guayasamín’s most famous, was painted in 1973 in direct response to the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile. Guayasamín admired Allende greatly and dedicated this painting to Allende, and to “the theater director and musician Víctor Jara as well as Guayasamín’s close friend, the poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda.”
Guayasamín not only dedicated some of his paintings to specific political events and figures, but he also tried his hand at portraits. In 1996, he painted a portrait of Rigoberta Menchú, the famous K’iche’ activist from Guatemala.

Photo courtosy of Fundación Guayasamín, 1996.

The later period of Guayasamín’s career is called Ternura (Tenderness). Between the years of 1988 until 1999 when Guayasamín passed, he created about 100 paintings all belonging to this collection. These paintings were all dedicated to his deceased mother. Most of them depict a mother and child embracing. During these later years, Guayasamín shifted his focus, creating these more personal paintings. Like the paintings from earlier in his career, these paintings are centered around people and have his recognizable emotional potency. However, the emotions that Guayasamín conveys shift from angry outrage to a loving melancholy.

All paintings by Oswaldo Guayasamín, courtesy of Fundación Guayasamín.
Sources:
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/oswaldo-guayasamin-art/
https://as.vanderbilt.edu/clas-resources/media/Guayasamin.pdf
http://www.artnet.com/artists/oswaldo-guayasam%C3%ADn/
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/oswaldo-guayasamin-art/
https://www.wikiart.org/en/oswaldo-guayasamin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_Civil_War
https://www.capilladelhombre.com

Historiography is the study of history itself. It is a systematic study of what history is, how people have “done” history, and what role history plays in social systems. In other words, historiography is looking at the forces that determine how history has been told, what is told, and who gets to tell it. So, why is it important to think about historiography? How does it relate to decolonizing history? To Indigenous rights?
When we study history itself, we see its relationship to power and politics. History is a dynamic and subjective system by which communities remember the past and relate it to the present; history can serve to either enforce or dismantle systemic inequality. This is because, as scholar Joanne Rappaport writes, “Knowledge of the past is a fundamental component of land disputes, political agreements and arguments over inheritance. It is also central to efforts at strengthening a communal identity’ [1]. Here, Rappaport points out the inherently political aspect of history that is often made invisible. Many people tend to think of history as a fixed and objective account of the past that, because of these qualities, exists outside of socio political structures.
However, material and immaterial concerns are inextricable from history both in its production and its effects. What I mean is that material resources — such as money and access to formal education — impact who gets to be part of history telling processes. Similarly, immaterial concerns — like societal attitudes — play a role in who is included in telling history. This is the production side of things. In terms of history’s effects, materially, how history is told may impact the way that land and resource disputes are settled; immaterially, how we understand the past has an effect on forming identities and ideologies.
What does this all have to do with colonialism and decolonization? When we think of colonialism, we often think specifically of the political rule of one community over another. Colonialism, in this view, is a political and economic structure that terminates with the material “liberation” of the subaltern. However, when we consider the intimate social and ideological legacies of colonialism — how it fundamentally disrupts native conceptions of gender, of ethnicity, of history — we see coloniality as an ongoing problem.
One colonial legacy is the disruption and erasure of native-storytelling in favor of European tellings of history. When history is colonized in this way, it often throws a veil over the systemic violence that Indigenous people have faced. It also deprives Indigenous communities of the power to tell history in a way that accurately reflects their identities, experiences, and values.
However, history can be transformed from a colonial legacy into a tool of resistance. Knowledge of the past can be “indispensable in the maintenance of autonomy in the face of European domination” [2]. When Indigenous people have the space to tell their own history, it can become an important means of forming and strengthening identities, making claims to land, and unlearning the European histories which often diminish Indigenous experience. What might this look like in practice? How might Indigenous knowledge systems differ from European ones?
For the Nasa (also called the Paez) people in Colombia, history is “difficult to locate […] in time and space” [3]. Nasa storytelling is non-linear, it includes mythic elements, and is episodic. This is not out of an inability to tell history in a European mode — “It is not that indigenous peoples have no sense of the flow of time, nor that they are unable to distinguish fact from fiction, […], but that fictive and fantastic images may help them to reflect more fully upon the real” [4].
This all might demonstrate why historiography and decolonizing history are so important when it comes to indigenous rights. If we do not study how history has been made, we cannot understand how history has been used to perpetuate inequality — or how it can be used to challenge that inequality.
Notes
[1] Rappaport, Joanne, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1998), 11-12.
[2] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 11-12.
[3] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 11.
[4] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 18.
Works Cited
Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1998.

Author: brimn

Oswaldo Guayasamín

Decolonizing History: Past, Present, Power