In 1991, a group of 36 Atacameño immigrant families from several Andean rural villages in northern Chile, driven by the marginal conditions in which they lived, decided to petition land to the Ministry of Government Property. Soon after, they started a squatter settlement in a former pasturing zone in the poverty belt of Calama mining town. It was barren land with no public services or houses to live in. These families had to build their homes from the ground up. Most were slum dwellings with dirt floors and makeshift construction.

From its very beginnings, the people of Likantatay's mission has been to reconstruct their “traditional” Atacameño community, but in an urban space. They have fiercely resisted the manifold aggressions of copper mining on their community: displacements from a rural lifestyle because of the mining companies’ voracious extraction of water in the desert, and the threat of a forced resettlement due to the existence of copper ore beneath their land. They are still fighting today.

In March of 2020, I had the honor to present about the community of Likantatay in the Luther College’s Texts and Issues Lecture Series: “Resistance and Resilience.” My talk entitled Culture as Resistance in the Chilean Andes: An Indigenous Community’s Struggle for Rights and Recognition represents over a decade of work in my research trajectory and is the first chapter in my book Embracing the Anaconda: A Chronicle of Atacameño Life and Mining in the Andes by Lexington Books published in May of 2020. I was invited to give the same talk at Latino/Latin American Studies Program Lecture Series under the theme of “Social Movements in the Americas: Power, Rights, and Resources” hosted at The College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in Minneapolis on March 25. When the pandemic hit, the talk got cancelled, but eventually got rescheduled as a Zoom conference on November 4.

I “Hate” Zoom

Giving talks on Zoom was new to me as it was for many. I was becoming weary of online delivery after months of accommodating my teaching to the Zoom format. I am a firm believer in the tradition of co-presence in a room with actual human beings in it, and wasn’t ready to reinvent tradition Likantatay style. It was hard for me to see benefits, if any, in online teaching or conference talks.

Unknown Possibilities

This view was radically transformed for me when I gave this same talk once again, this time in Spanish, at my undergraduate alma mater Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano in Santiago of Chile also last November via Zoom. Having lived in the United States for over a decade now, I could hardly remember the last time I had had the opportunity to engage an audience in Spanish. Thanks to the technology I had despised and cursed for almost a year now, I came to the realization I could invite for the first time in my career, the actual members of the community I was talking about to hear about their own story. Five community members were able to join that conversation via Zoom: Lila, Ricardo, Camila, Monica, and Vinca. I don’t recall learning as much from any presentation I have ever given.

What I Learned

The participation of community members in the talk completely changed the direction the conversation took in the Q&A portion. A presentation like this, in our pre-pandemic past, would have taken place in a formal venue such as a conference in the United States where the indigenous peoples some anthropologists study are usually not invited, mostly due to the elite nature of these conferences that have high registration fees to begin with. Academics themselves have a hard time affording to attend them.

Hearing Ricardo and Lila respond to many of the questions the audience raised was inspiring. Monica was the one community member present in the meeting I had not met in person before. She was clearly moved by the story and said that to the audience. She told us that all the struggles the community went through that I spoke about were true. Her own children had helped their grandmother work in building an irrigation canal with their bare hands. She added she had forgotten the magnitude of the fights they’d faced and hearing my presentation was a good reminder. Furthermore, she said that the youth in Likantatay didn’t know this story: “They would greatly benefit from hearing what their grandparents went through, so today they can open the tap to get water or turn on a switch to get electricity. Before the struggles of their elders there was nothing”. Her remarks were an eye opener to me. It had never occurred to me to think there were community members that didn’t know their own history. Monica thanked me. She said the work was relevant to educate their own youth: “They can’t forget where they come from and what their ancestors went through to give them the lifestyle they take for granted today”.

In a world where the humanities are under attack and charged with irrelevance, it meant the world to me to be hearing from a community member that the research was important and useful to them. My sacrifice and work had paid off. I felt happy. Since then, I have kept in touch with Monica. In her new role as community leader, she has already shared the recorded Zoom presentation with many of the youths in Likantatay. She is working hard to help them develop respect and understanding for the community they belong to. She wants them to feel proud.

Reinvention of Tradition

A positive outcome of the pandemic was a shift in the way I think about tradition in academia. The implications were deeply felt for me. They offered me the opportunity to practice something I have always believed in: the democratization of knowledge sharing. In my discipline, there has been a lot of talk lately about decolonizing anthropology, but way less talk about how to actually do that. I discovered one possible way is with Zoom technology.