From anecdote to biography: ways to disseminate interviews conducted by a colonialist historian

Abstract

In spite of being a historian formed in social history of the colonial period of New Spain, in 1997 I was invited to collaborate in the Oral History Project of Ensenada, Baja California, with the task of interviewing inhabitants of rural areas, mainly indigenous, cowboys and ranchers: I interviewed 25 people willing to share their life story. In 1999, I collaborated on an anthology of fragments of the interviews, which is a sample of anecdotes that we thought were attractive to a broad audience. For my part, in 2005 I published a book with the testimony of the five Kumiai and Paipai women I had interviewed, editing the complete transcripts, but leaving most of the questions. A short time later, an informant (merchant and political activist) asked me for help to write his autobiography, and we started working based on the transcripts of the 1997 interviews. Those that were edited to look like an autobiography. In addition, I started the biography of a cowboy, son of Texan father and mother kiliwa, and iconic character in the construction of the National Observatory of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, which seeks to retake the style of the book of 2005, with the newly delivered. Thus, in this paper I expose my experience as a documentarist colonial historian in the face of “Living history” or interviewing, focused on the construction of knowledge and the editing and analysis strategies for its dissemination.