Oral History in the Americas

Abstract

There was a period when the historical craft in Latin America was based primarily on oral sources. In the sixteenth century, Iberian chroniclers, conquerors, and priests sought to reconstruct the indigenous past to gain knowledge useful for colonization and conversion. Although their aims were not scholarly, these Europeans recorded much history based on oral testimonies from survivors of the large civilizations of Mexico, Central America, and the Andes. In particular, they collected information about social, economic, and religious traditions. The classic example is Bernardino de Sahaguin's Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Espana, first published in 1665. A Franciscan friar, Sahaguin relied primarily on the accounts of numerous indigenous informants, which he transcribed in the original Nahuatl language and then translated into Spanish. There is also a rich literature on the conquest and colonization that, although colored by the cultural assumptions of sixteenth-century Europeans, provides important information about the major Indian civilizations. Representative examples are Bernal Diaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (1568) and Pedro Cieza de Leon's Crdnica delPerfi (1553). Oral history, during the colonial era, was primarily an instrument of colonization, a transitional tool used by Europeans while they created their own records and traditions.1 In the nineteenth century, the descendants of the original colonizers, now prominent revolutionary leaders of new Latin American nations, used oral testimonies to build national identity and history. They sought to justify their break from the colonial past and to rationalize their position of leadership by developing histories that relied heavily on interviews with leaders of the independence movement in the first