Who are the Oppressed?
This article explores the author’s journey of personal change via political activism and ultimately de-colonizing herself by living with Andean peasant farmers (campesinos). After suffering many hardships and exile in the 70s, the author turned to participatory education (PE) as a tool for organizing social-revolutionary change among Bolivian campesinos. This was an expression of a deep commitment to Socialist-Leninist views to societal liberation grounded on the premise that the working masses could never form their own philosophy of change. However, dialectics, has little meaning from an Andean-centered perspective. The authors relationship to the communities was based on workshops stressing action-reflection-action, which started with the campesino’s practical experiences, then moved on to reflection and the realization of larger patterns at play in their lives. But the campesinos were not able to abstract their own practices as phenomenon at the margins of their lives. Instead they
