About the Pachamama Oral History Project
My name is Anahí Naranjo, and I grew up in Quito, Ecuador. My family is from Guaranda, Ecuador, a growing agrarian town in the Andes of Ecuador’s Bolivar province. I grew up going back and forth between Quito and Guaranda, spending a significant amount of time in my grandparents’ plantations in Santa Fe (outside of Guaranda), and Babahoyo in the coast. I grew alongside the land and alongside the crops they grew. It was part of who we were, and continues to be to this day to indigenous communities like mine who depended on agriculture for sustenance and beyond.
I moved to Brooklyn, New York in the United States in 2002, leaving my extended family and this place that came to define my identity as an Ecuatoriana Andina. My uprooting was challenging, but the thing I struggled with the most was how much my grandparents and other agrarian communities were suffering each year due to circumstances they could not control.
I went back every two years, and each year, the soil felt drier, the rain wouldn’t fall on my face like it used to, and the sun burned my skin. My grandparents made references to a changing climate saying “no era asi antes”, “it wasn’t like this before”. Yields between seasons now varied, posing a threat to my community’s livelihood.
Climate change was dramatically changing the landscape me and my ancestors have depended on for generations. What could I do to center and elevate their narratives?
I went on to attend Middlebury College in Vermont where I gained a B.A. in Environmental Studies to better understand the ways marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by environmental injustices.
I began to realize the power of storytelling: during my first year as a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar at the University of Washington (DDCSP 2015), I had the immense privilege of sharing my own story and journey to decolonizing my identity and the way I perceived my place in the environmental movement. Through this experience and the immense experience of being able to conduct life story projects during my semester abroad in Tanzania and in the Quinault Indian Nation, I grew to understand the immense importance of storytelling as a form of environmental activism.
That’s where the idea of the Pachamama Oral History Project began.
The voices of marginalized communities, like my farmer community back in Ecuador, were silenced by dominant discourses. Yet, these communities were on the frontlines of climate change impacts. I wanted to return to my home community to document the impacts of climate change on agrarian identities and landscapes through oral history. Today, I am an Oral History Master of Arts student at Columbia University, and the Pachamama Oral History Project began as part of the culminating project for my degree. Thank you for visiting, and I hope you enjoy the website and stay tuned for updates!
Why explore climate change?
The effects of climate change are unprecedented, with low-income communities of color across the world on the frontlines of its detrimental effects not only on physical landscapes, but cultural landscapes. Ecuador is considered one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world due to its location in the Intertropical Convergence Zone and its vulnerability in sectors like agriculture, health, and water resources, making the country prone to more catastrophic climactic effects during events like El Niño and La Niña (Adaptation UNDP 2010). In the mountainous Andes region of Ecuador, agriculture extends beyond an economic driver: it’s a cultural heritage. By 2050, the world population is projected to reach 9.8 billion, and with it comes the immense task for farmers all over the world to feed this growing planet as farmers themselves face threats to their livelihoods (UN 2017). For 2030, it’s projected that Ecuador’s deficit in rice production with go from 3% to 60% and 34% for potatoes if limited climate adaptation measures are not improved, posing a threat to both the Andean cultural identity and food security in the region and in the world (World Bank 2019).
