The Aymara educator, writer and visual artist Sharoll Fernández Siñani (La Paz, 39 years old) inaugurates her exhibitions and book presentations by “invoking” her dead. The people he thinks of and alludes to in the rituals he performs in every event are his grandparents because, he says, they represent his identity. It is a way to honor them: the peasants, a historically neglected sector in Bolivia, with basic services lacking, whose income depended on informal subsistence jobs. But they paved the way for their granddaughter to become the first indigenous Bolivian woman to graduate from Harvard and now develop her work from New York.
“That my grandmother died illiterate and I was able to graduate from Harvard is crazy,” Fernández says on a video call. As a symbolic act, to receive her master’s degree in Education Policy at Harvard in 2023, she dressed as a Paceña chola for the luncheon ceremony, complete with skirt, top hat and large ornate earrings. “It was a way of taking her career and giving her space. In one of my last conversations with her before she died she told me: ‘Never depend on a man and educate yourself as much as possible.’ Her grandmother, Petrolina Catacora, or as she calls her “Mother Petra”, is present in her collection of poems. To Senkata and my dead, because his memory is part of the historical memory of a majority but marginalized population.
The book is written in Aymara, English and Spanish, and was presented in March at the Queens Museum along with a painting exhibition by the author. The space, usually intended for Latin American activities, that day was invaded by pan flutes, drums, popular dances and typical Bolivian dishes. To Senkata and my dead It’s a conversation between a girl and a ajayua spirit in the Andean worldview. Reading the coca leaf, they retrace the history of the Indians in Bolivian territory, from the Colonia, when they were in the lowest social stratum in conditions of semi-slavery, to the Senkata massacre, where more than ten repressed indigenous people died during a protest after the overthrow of former president Evo Morales in 2019.
The then president, Jeanine Áñez, signed a supreme decree exempting the military from any criminal liability. The wound was reopened this month for the victims when Áñez was released after spending almost five years in prison, by decision of the Supreme Court of Justice. “So many deaths, deaths, deaths, children of ancestors born in the highlands,” it reads To Senkata and my deadwhich includes abstract black and white illustrations by Fernández herself.
The underlying theme of the book is actually the question “who are each person’s dead?” “It was important to ask this question because it’s about identity, they could be your biological or mythical dead,” explains Fernández. We take the concept of mythical dead from anthropologist and poet Margaret Mead, who defines them as historical figures who have so profoundly influenced an individual’s life that they are considered ancestors. “With this answer you are saying the values that really move you inside. This cannot be falsified. Surely, my mythical dead are Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Paulo Freire.”
But it was one of her biological deaths, her grandmother, whose motto of standing up for herself definitely reached her mother first, who allowed her to build her career. Fernández’s mother used much of her savings from her work as a nurse to pay for her daughter’s English course at the Bolivian American Center. Every day he made the hour-and-a-half journey from his home in the La Portada neighborhood – considered the “gateway” to La Paz if you come from the Aymara city of El Alto – to the center of La Paz. Mastery of the language was the jewel in the crown of his career. Thanks to this, he was able to apply for the Harvard scholarship system, although he did not have a degree.
Fernández studied Fine Arts, Literature and Business Administration, but none of them convinced her. “I was very bored. I thought I could learn more by reading a book.” Therefore, he opted for the rare exception offered by Harvard, that is, admitting people without college degrees, based on their merit. He highlighted an inclusive educational project he was working on, Zera, and, above all, a good recommendation, that of the pedagogue Marshall Ganz. “He made me understand that it was very important to him that people like me reach those spaces, that it was part of his own commitment. At Harvard there are people from Latin America, there are Bolivians, but they are always historical elites. The Latin Americans who are there are owners of their countries.”
What emerged from the Aymara writer after her training abroad is an agent of change with sophisticated and modern techniques, but a bearer of an ancient culture. This is visible in his painting, in which, in the series Madonna AND petratraces of Paul Gauguin or primitivism can be traced, although used to represent the plateau woman. “I wanted to portray a woman like my grandmother was: broad, strong, with big breasts and hips, with lots of hair.” But this fusion between the West and the South of the world is reflected above all in his educational project Zera. Fernández takes the theory of emotional intelligence from Yale professor Marc Brackett to adapt and apply it to Bolivian children and adults in vulnerable situations.
The initiative was born in 2013, training 13 children who lived in the Obrajes women’s prison, in La Paz, accompanying their mothers deprived of their freedom. He now works with the Bolivian Ministry of Education and has developed a program in all children’s hospitals in the country, as well as in homes, public schools and prisons. “We take Brackett’s theory, but with the understanding that we operate in a high-context culture, unlike in the United States.” The content taught is related to critical thinking, alternative history and financial literacy.
“It is important that this does not happen in a context of charity, because when an NGO comes, at worst it is neocolonization and, at best, sharing maladaptive knowledge. Therefore, it is essential that we, Aymara educators, teach our children and youth. Not as charity, but as solidarity,” says the educator from La Paz. The promotion of critical consciousness and historical revisionism is presented as urgent in a structurally racist country like Bolivia. A representative’s statements on the rural and peasant vote sparked controversy in the last November elections.
The victory of the Christian Democrats was largely due to the vote from the peripheral areas. The parliamentarian argued in a video broadcast on social networks that it makes no sense “to tell these people to analyze the government’s proposals” because “they vote out of emotion and the level of education they have”. For Fernández, he is nothing more than yet another victim of a society that is “racist by default.” “We all grow up as sexists and racists. If you don’t make a conscious effort to ask yourself difficult, anti-racist questions, you will become that way.”
However, he believes that behind statements like these lies an insecurity typical of discriminatory behaviour. “Why do you need someone else to bend their knees, to bow their heads, someone to be beneath you? Because, without that, you’re not whole?
