Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s intellectual trajectory emerges from the intersections of Andean memory, anarchist thought and decolonial critique, offering an epistemological intervention rooted in Aymara cosmology and oral history as counter-narratives to Western hegemonic knowledge systems; as founder of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA) in 1983, Rivera forged a praxis that combined academic insurgency with indigenous political activism, challenging the erasure of Aymara and Quechua agency within colonial and postcolonial historiography by foregrounding the archive of lived experience, testimony, and collective memory, and later, through her concept of lo ch’ixi, she articulated a mestizaje that is not fusion but coexistence of contradictory cultural logics—a grey space of tension where the colonized and the colonizer coexist without resolving into sameness, evading the binary trap of assimilation versus resistance; this ontological proposal radically questions the premises of multiculturalism and developmentalism, privileging instead plural temporalities and relational ontologies that sustain indigenous autonomy within the state without dissolving their alterity, and this approach is concretized in her work with the ayllu-based movement CONAMAQ, her critique of internal colonialism in Bolivia, and her writings such as Sociología de la imagen and Ch’ixinakax utxiwa, where she weaves a discourse that fuses political commitment with aesthetic intuition, offering tools for what she calls “descolonización desde abajo,” a grassroots reclamation of being and knowing that subverts the epistemic violence of the academy while reactivating ancestral ways of relating to land, body, and community—thus Rivera stands not only as a scholar but as a weaver of worlds, cultivating a ch’ixi mode of being that holds complexity without collapse.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ch'ixi, decolonial theory, Andean epistemologies, oral history, anarchism, Bolivia, indigeneity, internal colonialism, ayllu, pluriversality
