Project Overview

Catalina Muñoz-Rojas

Nuestra Orilla is an eight-episode podcast series that tells the story of the lower Atrato, a region of the Colombian Pacific, from the perspectives of its inhabitants and through the life experience of narrator and co-producer Ana Luisa Ramírez. The story, told in the voices of women and men from a community that is rarely heard and often presented as “backward,” illuminates the interconnections between past and present forms of violence and exclusion, as well as resistance. The series was researched and co-produced by an alliance of two Afro-Colombian community leaders (Ana Luisa Ramírez and Jenry Serna), a public historian based at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá (Catalina Muñoz-Rojas), and a group of podcast producers (Colectiva Normal) that includes a journalist, a designer, an anthropologist, and a musician. Our common goal has been to challenge the places, temporalities, and methodologies used to tell the stories of violence in Colombia in the hope of producing counter-stories that contribute to reparations.

The lower Atrato is one the most biodiverse regions on the planet and a strategic site within the Colombian armed conflict, which has generated massive human rights violations in the last three decades. Through storytelling and collective research-creation our team seeks to strengthen community organizing, especially among the local youth, and to amplify their voices in the national public debate. These populations have been represented throughout history by political and intellectual elites in ways that deny their political and organizational agency: they have appeared in national narratives as ahistorical, premodern, poor, and, most recently, reduced to the category of “victims.” Our project used a collaborative methodology in which they represented themselves directly. Ramírez and Serna chose to emphasize not the hardships their communities have been through, but rather their long historical persistence in combating injustice and procuring dignified lives in their territory.

While the storytelling efforts around memories of violence in Colombia have focused on human rights violations in the recent past, our podcast sought to move beyond stories of victimhood and to provide a longue durée perspective that illuminates the roots of structural violence beyond narratives of victims and perpetrators. We chose audio as our medium because radio reaches communities where internet connectivity is still precarious. Nuestra Orilla is available in most podcast platforms and YouTube, and it was also broadcast in six community radio stations throughout the region.

Our research-creation process included collecting oral histories among elders and youth, archival and historical research, training our community partners in research and podcast production techniques, collecting soundscapes, the production of original music, scriptwriting overseen by the community partners, sound design, community listening gatherings for feedback, website and lesson plan design, and workshops with community radio stations to generate programming. The podcast series is accompanied by two other products: a website where audiences can access a curated selection of maps, archival documents, soundscapes, photographs, and academic bibliographies related to each episode, and (2) downloadable lesson plans for each episode connected to social sciences, Spanish language, and ethics curricula.

This work was made possible by grants of the Open Society University Network and the Education, Justice and Memory Network. Local media have reported on Nuestra Orilla: RTVC Noticias, Telepacífico, Javeriana Estéreo Cali, Chocó 7 días, El Tiempo, AlOído, Revista Chocó, Radio Nacional de Colombia, and El Baudoseño. As a result of the process, our community partners founded Ronca el Canalete, a training school in leadership and communication skills for the youth of their hometown.

Project Review

Maria José Afanador Llach

The podcast series Nuestra Orilla exemplifies public humanities work with media production and co-creation with communities of a marginalized region: the lower Atrato, in the department of Chocó, located in the Pacific region of Colombia. The digital interface of the podcast series comprises eight episodes linked to historical documents and other resources related to the content of each episode. The site also contains a pedagogical guide that is linked to the podcast and is intended for use in middle and high school contexts.

The eight episodes transports the listener to a long durée history about the municipality of Riosucio through the voice and life experience of Ana Luisa Ramírez, a social leader of the region. She introduces the listener to the social, geographical, historical, and cultural landscape in which the story unfolds. Drawing on sources from the early colonial period to the 20th century, the episodes present keys for understanding the impacts of colonialism on today's prejudices and stereotypes about a region in which 95% of its population is Afro-descendent and Indigenous. Mixing fragments from media reporting, political discourses, and oral testimonies, the podcast shows historical stereotypes and offers a counter-narrative about the region.

Throughout the episodes, Ramírez's voice travels to the past to tell us the history of her enslaved ancestors who came to Chocó through the transatlantic slave trade. We learn about Afro-descendant residents’ views of the territory linked to traditional practices through oral testimonies of midwives and inhabitants of the region. The podcast also presents an overview of the difficulties that inhabitants of the lower Atrato face accessing education. As the story unfolds, the listener learns about forced displacement caused by the arrival of armed groups to the region in 1997. This tragedy was scarcely reported by mainstream media. What follows is the story of life in a refugee camp where hunger, little water, and difficult living conditions were the norm. The last episodes are about resilience, creativity, and community organization in the search to return to their territory. Overall, the technical quality of the podcast is very good, including soundscapes and music. However, in a couple of episodes there are inconsistencies in audio quality that the creators may wish to address.

The pedagogical resources appear in a booklet that can be downloaded from the webpage. It seeks to "promote inclusive narratives about the past and the present in Colombia." The document has an introduction, learning objectives, key concepts, a sequence of activities, a classroom project to connect the narrated histories to the reality of students, and a set of reflections and materials for students.

The episodes of Nuestra Orilla have been broadcast in several community radio stations across the Pacific region. The podcast demonstrates that public history can emerge from dialogue and collaboration between professional historians, community leaders, media producers, and pedagogy experts. Focusing on the testimonies and worldviews of inhabitants of the Atrato region, the podcast series is an example of history making from below. It represents an act of resistance to mainstream historical and media narratives that have perpetuated stereotypes about the inhabitants of Chocó.

Review: Nuestra Orilla

Project Overview

Project Review