What process of change can come from a people who do not know who they are, or where they come from? If they do not know who they are, how can they know what they deserve to be?
In 1976, after being imprisoned and forced into exile from his home country, Uruguay, Eduardo Galeano defiantly wrote “Defensa De La Palabra” (In Defense of the Word). In it, he argued that denying people access to their histories obstructs their vision of themselves as a people connected across time, and therefore restricts their ability to envision change for their future. He believed contributions to the revelation of the past depended on “the intensity level of the writer's responsiveness to his or her people—their roots, their vicissitudes, their destiny.” Forty-four years later, Galeano's reflections remain timely and methodologically instructive for those working at the nexus of history and education:
Our authentic collective identity is born out of the past and nourished by it—our feet tread where others trod before us; the steps we take were prefigured—but this identity is not frozen in nostalgia. … We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are: our identity resides in action and in struggle [emphasis in original].
