Thinkers Timeline

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian sociologist, historian, and activist of Aymara heritage. She is one of the most important thinkers on colonialism and Indigenous rights in Latin America. She was born in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1949. Her father was Quechua-speaking, her mother Aymara-speaking. At home, Spanish was the main language, though her family's Indigenous roots shaped her whole life. She studied sociology at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz and later earned a master's in anthropology in Lima. Her early adulthood was shaped by Bolivia's violent politics. In the 1970s, the country was ruled by military dictators. Rivera Cusicanqui was arrested and imprisoned for her political activities. Her master's thesis was destroyed in a raid on her home. She went into exile in Argentina while pregnant with her first daughter. These experiences of violence and loss shaped her lifelong commitment to Indigenous and popular movements. When she returned to Bolivia, she became a professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, where she taught sociology for over thirty years. She is now emerita professor there. In 1983 she co-founded the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop), a group that collects and studies the oral histories of Aymara and Quechua communities. She has worked closely with the Katarista Indigenous movement and with coca growers' movements. She writes in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, sometimes mixing languages in a single text. She has written many books and made films. She is known for refusing easy labels. She calls herself a 'sochologist' (a play on 'chola', meaning urban Aymara woman, and 'sociologist'). She has been a harsh critic of how Indigenous struggles are absorbed and changed by Western academics and Bolivian state politics. She is still active and writing in 2026.