Today I am remembering my friend and collaborator Espiritu Bautista Pascual, who passed away exactly one year ago today. He was an indigenous Yanesha cultural expert from the southcentral Peruvian Amazon. I had the privilege of working with him on various projects between 2008 and 2015.
Mr. Bautista was a dedicated language activist who recorded dozens of elders throughout Yanesha territory. He participated in many cultural and linguistic documentation projects, including documentary films, ethnohistorical mapping initiatives, the Yanesha Talking Dictionary, and much more. He was one of the forces behind el Archivo Digital de la Memoria Yanesha, an ongoing digital project to catalog and transcribe Yanesha oral history. Yanesha is an endangered language spoken by around 3000 people or less (exact number unknown).
I miss you, Espiritu! Your work lives on the generations of young people you mentored, inspired and performed alongside.