Warisata School-Ayllu: a pedagogical experience of community organization for mutual defense

Abstract

This article examines the historical and pedagogical experience of the Warisata School-Ayllu (1931), characterizing it as a nucleus of active resistance, social emancipation, and territorial sovereignty in early twentieth-century Bolivia. Through a documentary and historiographical analysis, the research demonstrates how the creation of self-managed schools represented a critical transition in the Andean struggle: the shift from the legal militancy of the Caciques Apoderados, focused on tactical literacy for legal self-defense, to a broad project of community territorial and productive reconstitution. Sustained by ancestral social technologies such as ayni and mink'a, and governed under the sovereignty of the Parliament of Amautas, the model guaranteed the material subsistence and self-defense of Indigenous peoples against the expansion of the latifundio (landed estates). Finally, the study articulates the daily tensions of the school with the state’s modernizing project, situating its dismantling within the theoretical debate between the structural limits of the period and the relative autonomy of pedagogical praxis.