“We broke a paradigm to tell things backwards”: Ana Luisa Ramírez

The water runs through the stones while a voice clear like that river welcomes us. It is Ana Luisa Ramírez Flórez, the host of “Our shore”, a sound adventure created by a group of community leaders and professional storytellers whose love for Chocó brought them together.

In eight episodes of less than 20 minutes, the series explores “the stories of a territory that is talked about a lot, but to which very little is listened to.” Each chapter is an immersion in the local life of Bajo Atrato reconstructed in layers of sound effects and intimate conversations. The murmur of the rain, the bustle of the dock, the babbling of a baby, the slapping of a panga, the screams of children at school mix with intimate testimonies of inhabitants of different communities remembering what it was like to live in the region before. of war, surviving its many violences and being reborn afterwards.

Winners of a scholarship that sought to support creative projects, Ana Luisa along with Jenry Serna Córdoba discovered along the way that they had a common goal: to resist the silence that the armed conflict imposes on the victims to tell the local stories ignored by the information agenda.

They were in the task of joining forces when they met two key allies: Daniel Ruiz-Serna, an anthropologist with years of experience accompanying Chocó communities in the registration of their oral heritage using new technologies, and Catalina Muñoz Rojas, historian and professor at the Universidad de los Andes dedicated to taking history out of the classroom to make it a public good and popular education. Together they finished shaping it.

In exclusive interview for The viewerAna Luisa, Jenry, Daniel and Catalina talk to us about the resilience of the Chocoano people, the importance of breaking stereotypes and the value of words to imagine paths of repair.

How did this idea come about?

Ana Luisa: we are both victims of the armed conflict in Chocó and we have children who are young and who, due to the entire situation that has been experienced, were not aware of the history. For people who were born after 1997, some things that we, those of us who were born and raised in a community, experience seem strange to them. What we said was, “well, we have to show these guys what happened in the 1997 displacement, we want to tell them.”

Jenry: it was born from a leadership process that we have had since we were very children. In the midst of difficulties, we had the ability to take a path that was not that of war. Today we recognize ourselves as survivors of everything that happened: the 1996 paramilitary takeover in the municipality of Ríosucio and Operation Genesis, which led to us leaving the territory. Ana had to go to Pavarandó and I to Quibdó. We were just children, between 12 and 13 years old. From there I began to get involved in the organizational processes of black communities, and one of the things I liked to do was document all those spaces, I liked to record what happened in the meetings or take photos, because I was interested in having those memories remain. Ana too. She has co-authored books and participated in different documentaries. All of this gave rise to the Viva Voz scholarship, which sought community leaders who wanted to tell stories of their resilient territories. There we realized that we had great potential.

Why tell stories? What power did they find in the word?

Jenry: We first planned to tell stories that would not re-victimize us and convert what happened into possibilities that serve to form new generations within the territory. Our elders are dying and we manage to capture part of that history, have an archive. Starting in 1997, there were many, thousands of interviews conducted by journalists and researchers who came from abroad, but where are they? That’s why one of the approaches was that this (podcast) has to serve to preserve memory, so that Riosucio and the department of Chocó can be seen from a perspective that is real. That’s the power. When someone was interviewed in the communities, the only thing they were going to ask was about the armed conflict. But we designed another strategy: first listen. We became listeners.

Ana Luisa: with this podcast we break a paradigm to tell things backwards, that is, starting from the positive: who have been resilient people, why have we been resilient, why have we turned from victims to survivors, what makes people are within the territory, why people live there, why they have not left. The issue of communication in our territory was very difficult in every sense, even between one person and another, it became dangerous, it was like a threat. Many people were killed due to poor communication or misinterpretation of the messages they received. With this work we broke a paradigm, and it has been very important. For example, the station calls us and many people say, “I also want to talk.” It is something very important. Previously, no one spoke out of fear. As comrade Jenry said, we became people who listened to others, and that became a psychosocial process.

At what point does the podcast acquire the structure it has?

Daniel: the co-creation process is also a design process. We were very clear that we needed to tell a story with a protagonist. The exceptionality of Anita’s story is that it is also a larger social story, in which many have participated. It is Anita’s voice, but it is also the voice of her mother, her grandmother, and many other Anitas who have had to go through similar situations. We did pre-production work, a large interview for several weeks in which we tried to find a narrative arc that would allow us to touch on the topics that seemed most important to us. But people’s lives are not exhausted in armed conflict, so war should not be the starting point, nor the central axis. The war is just one chapter in a longer history of structural, racial, gender, and environmental violence. Displacement and armed conflict are only one version of the violence that has been going through the region.

What was the key to creating something so sensorial that it allows one to almost smell and touch what they are telling?

Daniel: Anita (laughs). That people felt confident to tell the things they said, and to do so in that tone, is because they were being interviewed by peers, by people from their community, Anita and Jenry. Neither the best of journalists nor the most experienced ethnographer could (achieve) that texture. They are voices of the community that speak to the community.

How does a historian, academic, dedicated to teaching end up connected to this community project?

Catalina: I trained in the 90s, and they taught me not to apply the historical perspective to the present, but to the past. And much less to think about tomorrow; We leave futurism to other people. But I always had that concern about the relevance of history to our present. When the plebiscite came in 2016, historians and students at the Universidad de los Andes, together with professors Ana María Otero and Constanza Castro, started a group we called “Stories for what is coming,” with the intention of enriching the public debate. Building peace implies the enormous challenge of facing problems with deep historical roots. I began to be interested in how, from the stories we tell ourselves about some inhabitants of our territory, about certain experiences such as those of indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities, we begin to label them as pre-modern, as being outside of history. I was on that search, when through Professor Catherine LeGrand I met Daniel, and through him I met Jenry and Anita. I found that we were united by this intention of wanting to narrate Colombia in another way, to go beyond the armed conflict, to break in our narratives with that hierarchization of experiences, as if some watched more than others, that compartmentalization of past, present and future, and point out how the past is still alive today.

What was your work on the podcast then?

Catalina: I put on my oral historian hat, because one of the challenges of these stories is that the archive falls short: it is in orality where the richness lies. But it was also my task to give historical depth to the research. In a hotbed at the university with the students we began to do historical research. For example, Jenry and Anita told us, “we want to tell a story that escapes the prejudices that exist about Chocó,” so we began to look for prejudices about Chocó in the news and in the archive, to search for travelers around Chocó, from the chroniclers of the 16th century, to show how these ideas come from very far back and have been reproduced over time. The search for historical audio was difficult because there is not much material, but we were able to find some recordings of Pacific music. Finally I had to learn the role of general producer: coordinate the team, apply for financing, manage resources and make difficult decisions along the way.

Daniel: at some point we called Catalina, “the custodian of history” (laughs).

Catalina: but in addition to the podcast we made a website. There are many materials there such as maps, photos, soundscapes, archival documents and bibliography for our listeners to delve deeper. There are also some pedagogical guides that we built together with two teachers, Helga Moreno in Yondó, in Magdalena Medio, and Fernando Gálvez, in Guacarí, in Valle del Cauca. With them, as we were closing episodes, we were listening and thinking about how to make the podcast a tool to teach history in a different way.

How has the reception of the podcast been among the young people of the communities?

Ana Luisa: I feel that it has had a good reception, starting with the school teachers. The pedagogical guide was delivered in physical form. Some booklets were printed, we went to the schools, but before that an exercise was done with the teachers where the methodology was found. The other thing is with the boys. They say, “Look, when did this happen?”, terrified with everything that is said, some want to know more and start with concern, “I’m going to ask my mother then,” “I’m going to ask So-and-So.” The exercise with the young people, especially with the children, has been very cool, the children want to know. An exercise was also carried out with the stations in several municipalities of the department of Chocó to broadcast the podcast. They have come from various universities asking us questions, some professors have called us and told us, “I want my young people to talk to you.”

Jenry: For us, expectations have been very high and I think we are making an impact. With the desire that we have to carry out processes within the territory, it is now necessary that we hold knowledge exchange meetings. I have always said, for me the best narrator I have heard on podcasts is Ana. Because I had to record those narrations and there were things, memories in her that we could not record. She told him, ‘calm down, if she can’t do it today, we’ll do it tomorrow, if she wants to cry’. They were tense moments, but we did it. And then listen to this magnificent production. That’s why I say, Ana is a brave narrator. We want more narrators to appear within the territory and for them to be young, because it is a way to know the history. That is one of the visions we have.

* Lina Britto is a journalist and historian, associate professor in the Department of History, Northwestern University, USA.