Introduction to special issue of Tabula Rasa : Orlando Fals Borda and Historia doble de la Costa.

Introducción a la edición especial de Tabula Rasa : Orlando Fals Borda e Historia doble de la Costa.

During the second half of 2014, I had the privilege of conducting a postdisciplinary interdisciplinary seminar at Georgetown University focused on the work of the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. One of the multiple projects of the Thread of Research and Social Action, an organization of activism and social research that in the early 1970s began to explore the possibilities of what would become known as Participatory Action Research, Fals worked for a good part of the decade with the National Association of Peasant Users (ANUC) in the departments of Sucre and Córdoba, as well as with local research groups, the best known of which was the Caribbean Foundation in Monteria. ANUC, La Rosca and the Caribbean Foundation worked collaboratively to recover the memory of past peasant struggles, with the aim of producing educational materials that highlight the strategies of past agricultural organizers, which could be useful for ANUC in the 1970s. To this end, they published a series of graphic stories of grassroots organizations from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century in a variety of coastal places (Chalarka, 1985). In addition to projections, puppet presentations, history manuals and chronicles, cartoons were shared with peasant leaders and ordinary activists in workshops and workshops (Negrete, 2008). While the team worked on these materials, they also actively supported ANUC with procedures and legal and development projects.