For me, as for many Andean people of my generation, oral traditions are not myths or legends confined to books, but living stories that can be heard, felt, and recognized in people, our ancestors, and other non-human entities with whom we share the world. As a child, I heard them from my grandparents, parents, and neighbors: stories about our ancestors, communal work, festivals, migrations, and times of political violence that helped us understand who we were and where we came from. For this reason, oral tradition and oral history—though academia often distinguishes them as separate fields—are part of the same process of transmitting knowledge, memories, and experiences. They constitute forms of knowledge that link the past and the present, guiding collective life within a temporality that is closer to a spiral and cyclical pattern than to the linear notion of progress associated with Western modernity—whose dichotomies between tradition and modernity have historically contributed to the delegitimization of Indigenous knowledge.
In this regard, as the Māori oral historian Nēpia Mahuika argues in “Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective,” oral traditions are also oral histories. From an Indigenous perspective, they constitute legitimate ways of producing and transmitting knowledge about the origins, trajectories, and transformations of our peoples. Far from being mere traditional tales or sources subordinate to written history, they contain memories that are fundamental to understanding the past and guiding the present. Rather than separating history and tradition, indigenous stories keep the relationships between people, territories, memories, and ancestors alive.
That is precisely the context for Sarhuapa Willakuynin: Stories and Songs of Sarhua (Sarhuapa Willakuynin; Cuentos y cantos de Sarhua), an extraordinary work created by and for the community of Sarhua—also a district located some three hours south of Ayacucho, in the southern Peruvian Andes—by the Puriyninchik Association, an organization led by Quechua educators Yesenia Montes and Mizael Lunazco Quispe, who co-authored the book with the community. Based in the city of Ayacucho—also known as Huamanga—the association is dedicated to promoting reading among children and preserving and revitalizing the Quechua language and Andean oral traditions. Through handmade cardboard books, an open library for children, and itinerant visits to rural communities, Puriyninchik provides a space where young people can share their experiences, express their creativity, and strengthen their connection to Quechua, the language of their ancestors.
Initiatives like this one also help preserve the memories, knowledge, and storytelling traditions that continue to give meaning to Andean community life.
Initiatives like this one also help preserve the memories, knowledge, and storytelling traditions that continue to give meaning to Andean community life. In this sense, Sarhuapa Willakuynin is a contemporary expression of how oral histories continue to resonate in the present, transmitting knowledge, strengthening intergenerational bonds, and reaffirming the cultural continuity of the Sarhuina community.
The book can be divided into four parts, even though it does not include a table of contents or explicit sections. The narrators are the community itself, speaking with a collective voice, as well as some of its most representative members. Within this structure, the different voices intertwine to offer a choral vision of Sarhuina history, memory, and daily life.
In what I consider to be the first section, the text welcomes the reader by situating them geographically and culturally in Sarhua. It introduces us to a community that presents itself on its own terms, through its language and its ways of narrating and inhabiting the world. These pages describe the origins of Sarhua, its organization into ayllus—a system of extended families or kinship groups—the system of varayuqkuna, or indigenous authorities, and various forms of knowledge related to agriculture, clothing, textile art, and chimaycha music.
Also noteworthy are the famous Sarhua Paintings, one of the community’s most representative cultural expressions, closely linked to its collective memory and communal identity. The Sarhua Paintings have sparked the interest of anthropologists and art historians who have documented various aspects of Sarhua social and historical life, such as Olga M. González, who examines how the Sarhuinos depicted violence, forced displacement, loss, and the complex dynamics of memory and silence that emerged during the internal armed conflict between Shining Path and the state (1980–2000).
The second part of the book, Hatun kuento willakuy, brings together stories that explain the origins of certain places, animals, and customs, while also conveying moral lessons and ways of understanding the world. Through human and non-human characters, these tales highlight values of reciprocity, prudence, respect, and coexistence among different beings who share the pacha—the living, dynamic whole that encompasses earth, territory, time, space, and the cosmos, where the material and the spiritual are deeply intertwined.
The third section, Watuchi (riddles), brings together word games that stimulate observation, memory, and ingenuity. Through questions and answers about animals, plants, objects, and everyday phenomena, this section conveys knowledge about the natural and cultural environment, while strengthening the creative use of the Quechua language.
The fourth and final section brings together traditional songs from Sarhua, many of which are linked to festivals, community work, love, migration, and daily life. In an innovative way, the book includes a QR code that allows readers to listen to and even watch performances of these songs, bridging the gap between the written word and the community’s living oral tradition.
The Puriyninchik Association’s cartonera publishing initiative with Sarhuapa Willakuynin is part of an emerging trend of community-based knowledge production in the Peruvian Andes.
The book’s afterword—which, in my opinion, would have worked better as a prologue or introduction—offers a valuable methodological reflection on the book’s creation process. Inspired by a previous experience of community collaboration—the book Huaynacancha (the Community): May 17, the Other Uchuraccay . Memories for Allin Kawsay, which reconstructs the massacre of peasants at the hands of Shining Path in that community in 1983—the Puriyninchik Association and the community of Sarhua launched a project that acknowledges community members themselves as agents of cultural production, custodians of collective memory, and narrators of their own history. This participatory and innovative methodology makes the book a significant example of how research, education, and language revitalization can be articulated from and for the community, blurring the boundaries between authors, researchers, and subjects of knowledge.
This type of approach, however, is still in its infancy in Peru compared to other indigenous experiences in Abya Yala, where organizations such as the Andean Oral History Workshop (Taller de Historia Oral Andina, THOA) in Bolivia, the Mapuche History Community in Chile, and the Mayan Studies Community (Comunidad de Estudios Mayas, Cemijw) have been developing systematic projects for decades to produce history, memory, and knowledge within their own epistemological frameworks. In these cases, orality, writing, and research are not conceived as separate domains, but rather as integrated practices of political affirmation and conscious processes of decolonizing knowledge production.
The Puriyninchik Association’s cartonera publishing initiative with Sarhuapa Willakuynin is part of an emerging trend of community-based knowledge production in the Peruvian Andes, where bilingual writing, transformative education, and orality come together in a process of intergenerational transmission. From an Indigenous perspective on oral history, such initiatives help empower historically marginalized populations—whose stories have often been silenced or erased—by offering accessible tools—including writing, oral tradition, and digital media—to narrate their own experiences from their own conceptual frameworks and worldviews.
In this sense, oral history should not be understood as an exercise in “giving a voice to those who have none”—a formulation that reproduces a paternalistic logic that minimizes the agency of indigenous historical subjects—but rather as a practice of knowledge production “from within” communities, as Nēpia Mahuika suggests. Sarhuapa Willakuynin contributes to this vision through its bilingual Quechua-Spanish format and digital access to the songs via QR codes, making it a useful resource both for the community and for a broader audience interested in engaging with the living memories of their ancestors.
Renzo S. Aroni Sulca is a Quechua scholar, musician, podcaster, and oral historian based in New York City. He is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at New York University, where he teaches and writes on Latin American history and studies, focusing on the Andes, and on hip-hop studies, with an emphasis on Indigenous rap.