Instigators of New Ideas: Peasant Pedagogies of Praxis

Borrowing loosely from the Gramscian notion of “organic intellectual,” chapter 5 focuses on the interplay between peasant activism, political knowledge, and circuits of oral and written communication that flourished in the 1940s. Tracking several peasant organizers, this chapter shows how Bolivia's most consequential educative and cultural sphere flourished on the margins—in the informal spaces of the peasant assembly, agrarian union, regional congress, and incipient leftist political party. Myriad forms of popular education nurtured this postwar generation of Aymara-and Quechua-speaking political activists and teachers, who adapted their strategies and messages to postwar conditions and its hopeful possibilities. Grassroots rural mobilization culminated in the cascade of events surrounding the 1945 National Indian Congress and its prolonged and bitter aftermath.