| Sumario: | This article examines a recently discovered oral history interview of a woman peasant (campesina), Emelina Sagredo, who was a leader of Chile's most important campesino uprising, the 1934 Ránquil rebellion. The article explores Sagredo's 1965 interview with the Chilean playwright Isidora Aguirre to raise questions about how to write the history of largely illiterate women, gender, and sexuality and the limits of both archival and published sources. I read the oral history and Aguirre's 1969 theatrical dramatization of the Ránquil rebellion together to demonstrate how the Left's "Communist morality" imposed limits on historical representations of women's lives. I argue that the interview is valuable both because it provides a unique view of women's historical experience and because it exposes the limits of the available archival and published material. Finally, the article raises questions about the historian's ethical obligation to respect the privacy of their subjects even in the face of extraordinary archival discoveries. The interview was never intended to be made public and was found among Aguirre's papers posthumously. I ask: What responsibility does the historian have to keep private aspects of a life history, a conversation, as valuable as it may be as a source?
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