NOTES ON THE THOUGHT OF JUAN GARCÍA SALAZAR

Abstract

This article represents an initial approach to the work of Juan García Salazar, a historian, ethnographer, pedagogue or, as he called himself, a worker of the process, a social, cultural, pedagogical and political process whose aim was to search for and bring to light the ideas, images, culture and past and present life stories of the Afro-descendants of the province of Esmeraldas, in Ecuador, especially those communities in rural areas. The analysis, or rather, the reading that we have carried out, we have called critical materialist hermeneutics, which seeks the relationship of the concepts and ideas that the text brings out among themselves, the relationship with the ideas of other authors, and the relationship of these ideas with the historical context in which they are developed. It is concluded that the ideas shown by Juan García Salazar point the way to build a theoretical and practical project of a socialist nature that emerges from the thought, history, culture, and society of the people of Esmeraldas.