Abuelo-palenque: estética, pedagogía, y lucha política en las enseñanzas del Abuelo Zenón/Abuelo-Palenque: aesthetics, pedagogy, and political struggle in the teachings of Abuelo Zenón

For fifty years, Afro Ecuadorian intellectual and activist Juan García Salazar (1948–2017) documented the collective wisdom inscribed in the oral tradition of African descent peoples in Ecuador. This archive emerges in the region’s intellectual realm as a political intervention that seeks to vindicate afro Ecuadorian historical demands while protecting and transmitting ancestral knowledge. It is an expression of the guardians of tradition and a community that defies the Ecuadorian state’s whitemestizo hegemony.

In Abuelo Zenón, Juan Garcia’s compiles the Afro Pacific region’s collective wisdom through a dialogical character in his writings. In Zenón’s reflections, it is possible to read the arch in the work of a collection of materials developed by García, the political proposal of the Gran Comarca of northern Esmeraldas as a strategy for protecting the ancestral land of afro descendants in the region, and the pedagogic efforts to promote the sense of identity within the communities.

This paper engages in a dialogue with the aesthetic proposals inscribed in the teachings of Abuelo Zenón. Doing so exemplifies the different stages of a historical process that has adopted different vehicles to document, protect, and strategically share knowledge with concrete political objectives.