Tsɨuni – Our Silenced Stories
This book invites us to listen to the words that break the silence. Words sustained by voices that remained silent for decades as a means of protection, survival, and care for their loved ones, and that the Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon have now decided to make heard. This book brings together embodied testimonies about the rubber boom, experienced primarily between the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, and about the extreme violence that underpinned one of the most brutal, unpunished, and silenced extractive processes in contemporary history.
Far from being an exercise in looking from the outside, this work is part of an initiative led by young Indigenous people gathered in the Tsɨuni Collective, direct descendants of those who suffered under rubber slavery. In close collaboration with Radio Ucamara, an Indigenous media outlet that has been collecting these accounts since 2014 through listening, close engagement, and community trust, the young people have decided to break the silence passed down through generations by listening to their grandfathers and grandmothers and putting words to what had previously been only a wound. For them, speaking through listening and memory is not only a way to heal and restore dignity to their peoples, but also a collective stance that, as of 13 October 2025, has taken concrete form in the pursuit of legal action. This legal claim demands that the Peruvian State uphold the right to truth, recognition, and justice in response to the crimes committed during the rubber boom.
Tsɨuni does not speak only of the past: it shows how that violence has not disappeared but continues to take new forms, and how memory, when shared and collectively organized, can become a political tool for defending life, territory, and the future.
Gemma Orobitg – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona
ORGANIZATION:
Emanuele Fabiano, Karen Shiratori, Leonardo Tello Imaina
TEXTS:
Danna Gaviota Tello Morey, Emanuele Fabiano, Francisca Orrego Galarce, Gabriel Izard Martínez, Gemma Orobitg Canal, Karen Shiratori, Leonardo Tello Imaina, Marilez Tello Imaina, Marta Nin i Camps, Maruja Gormas Medinez, Stefano Pau
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Year: 2026
ISBN: 979-13-991357-6-3
Language: Catalan and
Format: 11.5 × 19 cm
Number of pages: 144
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: No libros
Free download catalan and spanish (PDF and EPUB)
Source: No libros
Image: No libros
