Ethnobotany and exchange of traditional medicines on the Southern Bolivian Altiplano

Bolivia is among the countries strongest affected by the consequences of global warming. The rainy season has shortened and intensified, while higher temperatures have led to drought in the other seasons. Especially vulnerable are –mostly indigenous- farmer communities. Women are even more affected, because of the deeply rooted gender inequality in Bolivian society.

The International Day of Indigenous Women is celebrated on September 5 to commemorate the day of Sisa’s death. However, patriarchal and colonial sensibilities have buried these stories.

These women athletes are making a statement with their ancestral clothing. Wearing the mask of a bull with wide, watery eyes, and gilded necklaces adorning her naked breasts and torso, she is a woman who’s comfortable in her sexuality and doesn’t apologize for it. “I wanted her to be completely seductive, completely sexual without being embarrassed about it. I wanted her to feel very powerful,” Mendez says. Madre condemns this outdated approach while testifying the slow but inexorable shift Bolivian society is going through when it comes to shared canons of beauty, women’s roles, and representation.

• When her Indigenous mother died in 1787, Azurduy grew close to her father, who taught her to ride a horse and shoot a gun.
• The Mennonites of Manitoba Colony are a remote religious community of European descent living in Bolivia.
• In these spaces, these two women managed to take the reins of public policy, influencing the development of innovative legislation in the country.

The Chaco Fund is a 5013 non-profit organization that seeks to empower young women in Bolivia by unlocking educational opportunities. While extractive industries like natural gas can spur investment in infrastructure and create jobs, Bolivia’s history provides a stark warning on the fleeting benefits of economic growth based on export commodities.

Around the world: 16 Days of Activism

She supports women newcomers to the sport through her organization Carmen Rosa and the Gladiators of the Ring. Denounced the 1935 municipal ordinance in La Paz that indirectly banned Indigenous women from riding the tram. The city made that decision in response to complaints from upper-class women who claimed that Indigenous women’s baskets tore their stockings and stained their dresses. Outraged at the blatant discrimination, Infantes co-founded the Culinary Workers Union , a group of female, Indigenous cooks who regularly carried food in baskets on the tram.

The Fiery Fortitude of Bolivian Women

The victory inspired other working women, such as florists, to organize. The movement later obtained monumental wins such as the eight-hour workday, free childcare for working mothers and the recognition of cooks as professionals. “By skating in polleras, we want to show that girls and women can do anything, no matter how you look or how people see you,” says Daniela Santiváñez, who founded ImillaSkate with two friends in 2019. Research conducted on the collection, use, and vending of traditional medicines by rural Bolivian women indicates that it is an important economic activity as well as having a place in the health system of high altitude inhabitants. The aim of this paper is to discuss the intersection of an approach that focuses on the exchange of traditional medicines with an ethnobotanical perspective that considers the medicines themselves. Women are the focus of this intersection because they are central to the enterprise of collecting and selling traditional medicines, which is an expanding business opportunity due in part to demands by urban consumers. In 2009, a group of men were convicted of the rape and sexual assault of more than 100 women and girls in the colony.

Photographer Todd Antony captures images of the Aymara women who are defying stereotypes and taking to the mountaintops.

By then, she’d discovered she was not the only woman with a passion for the sport. Tacuri sees the polleras as not only a cultural expression but also a form of empowerment.

Activists like Marfa Inofuentes Perez fought for Afro-Bolivians’ right to be recognized as an ethnic group. https://laisergo.gr/2023/01/07/costa-rican-women-all-about-dating-costa-rican-women/ Inofuentes forayed into activism as a member of the Saya Afro-Bolivian Cultural Movement, an organization set out to protect the cultural heritage of Black Bolivians— especially the traditional song and dance form known as the saya. In 2001—which also happened to be the same year Perez started the Afro-Bolivian Center for Comprehensive and Community Development reed about bolivian women reed about https://latindate.org/central-american-women/bolivian-women/ —the government once again refused to count Afro-descendants in the census. María Luisa Sánchez Bustamante (b. 1896) was the co-founder of Ateneo Feminino, the first feminist organization in Bolivia. Along with her sister and other members of the group, Sánchez fought for a woman’s right to obtain an identification card, control their inheritance, divorce and vote. Like the rest of the group, Sánchez belonged to the elite class.