Interview with Vanessa Peñuela and Cesar Vargas
Past struggles make current struggles possible

How did you find out about your story’s movement?

Interested in the history of the anarchist movement in Latin America, we found the history of the Anarchist Cholas of La Paz, Bolivia, in the book Los Artesanos Libertarios y la Ética del Trabajo (1986) written by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Zulema Lehm. This book contains research on Bolivian anarcho-syndicalism in the first half of the 20th century through interviews with women and men who belonged to the movement.

Why does the world need to learn more about your story’s movement?

We believe that sometimes the past struggles that make current struggles possible are not taken into account, and that makes it difficult to organize social movements since it seems they always start from scratch. The history of the Anarchist Cholas seems relevant to us because it shows us a unique dimension of the political movement of Latin American women, which is not as well-known as the history of the European and North American feminist struggle. In addition, it shows us the struggle of women of Indigenous descent who assimilated foreign ideas in their own way, such as anarchism, a political and social movement that has not been very visible either. We see in the history of the Anarchist Cholas an anti-racist, proletarian and anti-patriarchal struggle—very relevant in our current context.

What was the most surprising discovery you made during your research?

Finding the history of the Anarchist Cholas of Bolivia was a discovery in itself. Its particular form of horizontal organization based on mutual aid and family feeling, its effort to make the union a kind of school where proletarian women could learn to read and write, their autonomy and their organizational strength through direct action etc. were things that surprised us. They did all of this without calling themselves feminists, but we now see those actions in today’s feminist movements.