Memory, struggle and the feminist era in Bolivia

Image by Karen con K for Ojalá.

Opinion • Lucia Herbas Cordero • July 7, 2023 • Leer en castellano

Autonomous feminisms and the women's movement have allowed many of us not only to survive, but also to recover our voice and our territory.

And though we're increasingly able to articulate shared fronts and actions, we often feel that there isn’t enough time to talk through and debate what is taking place in more depth.

That’s why in March, following the mobilization on the 8th, we called for a gathering called "From the Tinku to our Relations," a temporary autonomous zone in the foothills of the green mountains surrounding the Cochabamba valley.

Even though the call wasn’t public, more than 60 women of different ages and territories showed up.

As organizers—members of Aquelarre Subversiva Kocha and Chullas Autónomas—we began with a collective sense of desire to create a space where we could share the words we often find so hard to name and hear.

From the early hours of the morning, locals and women from Santa Cruz, La Paz, Sucre and Mexico started to arrive.

Pots boiled over and the smell of coffee filled the air as our compas from the visual cooperative hurriedly hung artwork from their photo embroidery workshop. Others made a circle with chairs and phullus (blankets), and the tables soon became too small for the fresh food everyone brought for the apthapi (Andean communal meal).

Over the course of two days, we sought to open a time-not-time of deep receptivity in order to find (at least for now) communal equilibrium. To do so, we invoked and inhabited the Tinku as a political and ritual practice-form-methodology.

Tinku is an ancestral and communal practice in Aymara and Quechua communities, which serves as a catalyst for encounter/confrontation between "opposites" in order to try out other ways of inhabiting, revealing and managing our differences.

I’d like to share some of the reflections that arose in the initial stages of our Tinku gathering and collective exchange, in a way that protects the shared and communal spirit of these exchanges. The phrases in italics were said word for word by different compañeras.

The time of the Tinku

Once everyone was seated in a large circle with a tari (small artisanal cloth) at the center and coca being passed around, the acullicu (ritual chewing of coca) was inaugurated in three rounds. Each participant named her intentions, aloud or to herself. We opened with a rite.

While we pressed the liquid from the coca between our teeth, a collective word was born. We spoke from our realities and experiences, collective or individual. We spoke from our own histories.

Speaking about these experiences moved us somewhere else. These histories were the place we chose to open the Tinku.

The first memory that appeared was that of 2019. It's the most present today, and it was also named as the wound, the colonial wound or as collective trauma.

Undoing 2019

Far beneath all the grand meta-narratives of a coup d’état or latent fraud in 2019, there lies silence.

Being unable to speak and territorial control. We see 2019 as a masculine war traversing everything, from kitchens and dinner tables to the streets where we have fought for so long.

For us, 2019 is about broken relations. It is about death, militarism and paramilitarism. It is about the 39 people killed and hundreds of others wounded. It is about the media controlling narratives. It was a war of symbols, the burning whipala.

"It's seeing my grandmother in the lady wearing the pollera (traditional skirt) being attacked," said one. Others mentioned the spreading of terror through the national flag, crosses and the bible.

It's deep pain, sleepless days of alertness, confusion, fear, aggression, death and desolation. It's the macro forces from outside that interfere, the partisan rot and the colonial left. The patriarchal pacts being co-produced in real time, with some threads that are visible and others that are harder to see.

Words emerge gradually in different tones of voice. This history also implies connecting with the memory of resistance, and with histories of anti-colonial rebellion. It's recognizing (once again) that the state will always be the master's house.

What took place in Bolivia in 2019 was also the scene of intense individual and collective politicization. It was assemblies in the squares, vigils and the women's parliaments. Naming how we have resisted—in lowercase—apart, from another place, from other discourses. It's a history of trauma being transformed into political action.

The coca circulates again, in an evocative act. One history invokes another.

Then as now, 2019 meant the activation of older histories—not only those inherited through long-term memory, but also those we harvest from our individual and collective experiences—and which grow together like a vine.

The histories we carry

It is here that the history of 2007 was first mentioned. In a similar moment of right-wing organization, the first Anti-Fascist Coordinating Committee was created in Cochabamba. Several of those present helped to create this Coordinating Committee, others had just started elementary school at the time.

January 2007 was followed by the memory of 2008, with the Tahuamanu massacre. At that time there was still hope in the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government, hope that faded as it showed its willingness to participate in practices based on death and the sacrifice of others.

Then, histories from Sucre were added. In the middle of the constituent process in November 2007 in La Calancha, three young university students were killed.

Later, histories etched into the lowlands emerge, such as the day that members of the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (Youth Union of Santa Cruz) joined the MAS. The destruction and division of Indigenous and peasant organizations as state policy was also mentioned.

It was the fight for the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) which, nurtured by dissident indigenous politics, revealed what power is capable of, even coming from a political project that we believed to be our own. This history was a moment of deep politicization and profound questioning of our lives and forms of organization.

With the TIPNIS, came the history of the repression of the VIII March in Chaparina. And with that we remembered 2012, the terrorism against and criminalization of the anarchist movement, and how we learned "repressive logics could permeate to the very depths of our spaces."

From pain to organization

Naming all these histories, all jumbled and all together, allows us to recognize how what's inscribed from macropolitics can be reflected and refracted into perspectives of struggle, and how these histories can turn into histories of strength.

Histories of strength are created when the colonial wound activates anticolonial heritage.

When we recognize that the culture of deep politicization and the organization of our societies is what constitutes us.

When self-determination and territorial reconstitution is recognized as a communal struggle that begins in the body.

When the relational logic of body, territory, life and dignity runs through everyday life and has everything to do with anti-extractivism.

When we make explicit that no woman should be imprisoned for defending herself against sexist violence.

Or when we point out that our genealogy is also marked by the changes we and others have made in order to speak out and politicize in different ways.

Another rite, our autonomy 

After long talks and many moments of reflection, we came together for the closing of “From the Tinku to our Relations”. We rehearse. The freedom and possibility of trying something different is part of the autonomy that we inhabit and desire, that which grants us the possibility of reinventing and transforming ourselves all the time, of becoming a better version of ourselves.

In order to do this, we need each other and we need others. Together, in this practice of experimentation, talking and listening to each other in new ways, we care for each other by subverting the world, our world at least, which is what we're responsible for.

World to inhabit rites, aculli to enable listening, listening to activate Tinku, Tinku to balance world.

We reopen the tari that holds the pieces of paper with our intentions and add them carefully to the khoa that burns, turns into smoke and dissolves like our presence.

Signing off, until the next Tinku!