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  • Nicha Preciado Bone y Juana C. Francis Bone

RECLAMA: the importance of collective memory


Collective memory is the most powerful tool to support our territories.


RECLAMA arrives in Esmeraldas at the most critical social and political moment: our reality is that of a territory that is dying due to state abandonment; of women and girls in constant vulnerability; of a lack of full, comprehensive human rights. Our oral memory is the means by which we express resistance, as a community that generates our knowledge and tools in the margins of a state that invisibles us.


Esmeraldas, as a province, was historically disconnected from colonization: it was a palenque, a community where cimarrones (free black people) lived. Oral communication was, and continues to be, the main way of transmitting information and memory, and of strengthening of our social, political and cultural DNA.


Considering ourselves as a link in a ‘heritage of knowledge’ that can be passed between generations makes us see RECLAMA as a decolonial and feminist opportunity to place the science of blackness on paper, between multiple narratives. It rejects the prejudices imposed by a white mestizo academy, that has historically animalized Afro-Ecuadorian thinking and knowledge and its capacity for creating a social fabric: "If it is not in the books, it has no validity". Traditional scientists have spent their entire lives repeating that exclusive, limited and racist discourse to us. The learning of a group that does not have access to traditional western education, the library-based model of learning where ancestral knowledge is seen from a laboratory as something strange to be investigated, then launched as an exotic discovery – that is our knowledge: that of rurality, that of our grandmothers who, without knowing chemistry, made an exact concoction that cured any pain; that of women who wove freedom from their hair, or who generated strategies in colourful fabrics, reinforcing their identity and aesthetics in their turbans; of those dads and mums who, with their songs, told us about the pain of loss, or of most fortunate encounters. That is the knowledge of a people that has known how to resist their obstacles, and with RECLAMA we celebrate and commemorate all of this using a black feminist lens.


Societies have been formed by intercommunication through language, and for many years they relied exclusively on oral language. Behaviour, reasoning and reactions were oral; therefore, orality is partly an inheritance, something that comes to us from afar, something that, like walking upright, evolution has given to us: an inheritance that sustains the re-existencia (literally: re-existence) of the black, Afro-descendant people of Esmeraldas.

RECLAMA thus opens the door to redefine our diasporic history; the cloudy present with its lack of opportunities; and a promising future, where women can strengthen their tools and be the protagonists of their own stories.


In the photograph below, you can see how important and significant rituals are in black communities, at the start of an activity or event. These and other processes are part of an inheritance that has been passed from generation to generation, for example the braiding of hair. It is important that new generations do not lose this heritage, and that they continue to cultivate and honour it.


Fotos por Claudia Cortez

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