This interview was translated from Spanish by Nancy Piñeiro. It has been edited for length and clarity.
This is the second installment in a collection of interviews with Indigenous and feminist media makers and community organizers in Bolivia. They explore building community media, Indigenous liberation, and feminist social change through grassroots journalism and people's movements. Read the other interviews here.
The digital feminist media outlet Muy Waso has stood out in the Bolivian media landscape for many years for its engaging uses of social media, digital creativity, and extensive reporting on feminist movements in the country. Their coverage of struggles for reproductive health and rights, gender diversity, and climate justice is extensive, community-focused, and straight from the streets.
In this interview, two Muy Waso founders and journalists talk about their practice and vision for making a different kind of journalism. Michelle Nogales Cardozo is Muy Waso’s operations director, and Mijail Miranda Zapata serves as editorial director.
In the following conversation, Nogales and Miranda explore their trajectory as journalists and how they arrived at starting Muy Waso, the mission of the outlet, and how they cover the country’s social movements. They also dive into their grassroots journalistic practices, building community through journalism, and the role of alternative media spaces to transform society.
Benjamin Dangl: Could you please describe your trajectory as journalists and how and why you started Muy Waso?
Michelle Nogales Cardozo: As for our lives and trajectory, I studied social communications and when I started university I began working on cultural projects and was always very involved in communications and project management. Through this process, I met Mijail and we decided to create Muy Waso. We saw the need of having a feminist journalism based on women and the rights of diversities and Indigenous peoples. Since then, we have embarked on a more rigorous path to build journalism with this type of approach.
Mijail Miranda Zapata: In my case, I’m a med school graduate, but as I was studying, I also did cultural journalism, mainly writing reviews and the like, also some interviews. And then I went fully into journalism in a traditional outlet called Opinión, in Cochabamba. After a few years there I resigned and we saw the opportunity of founding Muy Waso. My trajectory is similar to Michele’s, I did a lot of AV [audio visual], I like cinema and theater too. We come from that line.
Regarding activism, in a way they’ve always been connected; our political and social activity was aways connected to certain demands. In Muy Waso we’ve had a feminist perspective from the beginning, and we think it’s been evolving. We went from being a nonconformist feminist outlet which in terms of content was pretty mainstream; we changed and started having more complex content and with a more conciliatory tone. We don’t want to move away from mass popular sectors in the country who still don’t speak about feminism, or are speaking about it in other terms, so we don’t want to push them away with a discourse that comes from an academic feminism from the North, instead of coming from a Global South reality. We had many transformations.
BD: To expand on the vision, it’s very interesting what you’re saying about how to have accessible content so that more people can understand you on several platforms. So, could you expand on Muy Waso’s vision, and its foundation as an intervention in the media context in Bolivia, and why you wanted to do that?
MNC: Mijail and I come from very traditional communicational contexts, so after many years in those cultural contexts we saw there was a lack, or need, to have an approach that would be more popular, less elitist, but also with a feminist perspective. We saw a lot of work by women writers, filmmakers, painters, etc., that was not made visible at all. There was a status quo in communications too.
We thought we needed media that can show this more general and grassroots reality, not only showing the more privileged groups on the media. That’s when we decided to start Muy Waso. It began as a feminist cultural magazine, but it has been evolving, as Mijail said.
Our community, our public was demanding another type of content, more political, more contextual, more health related, and environmental too. From our readers’ needs we started expanding on the topics we cover, because in those other areas there wasn’t an intersectional view of reality either. The protagonists of these stories were not ordinary, everyday people; the voices of the protagonists were authorities, businessmen, people who were already established in the media. But the other voices were not heard. That’s when we decided to diversify, and with that came a diversification in our functioning.
The situation is very difficult for media, so we opened an agency of services where we offer communicational services to other organizations that are aligned with our values, and at the same time we opened a foundation in late 2022 where we develop social projects. And so the three axes, the three bodies feed each other in Muy Waso. Communication runs through the projects, and the projects also nurture communication. They sustain each other.
MMZ: It’s this functioning that allows us to sustain ourselves, and which was very hard to think up, because we’re careful that there are no conflicts of interest; we understand that our journalism work in no way can be affected by external influences. That’s why we don’t accept advertising from the state in any of its levels, municipal or departmental, neither from private sector publicity. We only work with civil society in projects that are related to communications, but beyond our journalistic work.
I think it’s important to stress, with regards to the evolution of the cultural aspect and of our coverage areas, that the journalistic aspect is always there. We came from traditional communications contexts where journalism becomes a bureaucratic job, it’s the record of what some authority said, or even if they’re leaders. But there’s no deeper reach of what is happening in the streets, and we wanted to focus on those aspects.
We keep trying, it’s not always possible. It requires a lot of work and sometimes there aren’t enough forces. But that’s the idea, a change in perspective and vision as to how we cover certain events, what our view is, and to be disruptive in how we support ourselves financially. In Bolivia it’s unthinkable to have media without ads, even in native digital outlets, they always bet first on publicity. It’s about opening alternatives.
MNC: In your question you also mentioned the feminist practice, why that’s necessary. From our activisms, our construction of the world, our way of understanding the world through feminism, we see that this view adds complexity.
Feminisms not only seek to look at the world from a women’s perspective, but we also have an intersectional view: how is the situation for rural women, working women, racialized women? We always try to reflect this in our journalism. We try to cover stories of the Afro-Bolivian people, women with disabilities, sexually diverse women.
And within the different ways of practicing feminism there is also a more traditional feminism, so we always try to disrupt that. For example, sexual diversities are usually represented as gay or trans women, they are the focus, but you don’t usually see trans men, for instance. So we try to look for stories about them or have them as protagonists, because this feminist view of the world gives us a more complex understanding of the reality and of Bolivia. This is usually polarized, either black or white, yes or no, good or bad. And we think feminisms can bring these nuances to light in the reality we live. And that is the big contribution of feminisms, a more complex understanding of reality, which is already very complex, I think.
BD: Could you please give me an example of how you have covered an action, an assembly or march as this different type of journalist organization that you are? Could you give me an example of how you covered a march like the one that happened this year for International Women’s Day or any other? Of how this is a different way of doing journalism?
MMZ: I think one of the most interesting examples of coverage we did was during the pandemic, when we began doing interviews on the topic of Covid with a focus centered around people. We didn’t have a big database; the media simply reported the number of deaths but not so much the social impact. We did several interviews, some with midwives, others with the number of deaths in El Alto.
One of the aspects that reflect how we cover topics is that we look at the peripheries, the margins, while everyone is looking at the center, we turn around to see what’s happening around.
Another small, concrete example is the march of the previous 8M [International Women’s Day], last year, where Michelle did audiovisual coverage, we published a video on TikTok. We started the video with street sellers, a chicken seller on San Martin in Cochabamba, on a very popular street, holding a feminist flag.
Other media only cover the walls being painted, conflicts with the police, etc. But that celebration with the woman was so moving; those four seconds summarize very well the vision of Muy Waso: a working-class woman with a feminist flag, with feminist slogans, without the need to have been trained in academia or having read 20 bell hooks’ books, without the need to have those standards that urban feminism also establishes. I think that’s pretty representative.
Also, some recent work we did with the Center of Popular Studies in Cochabamba as to what is happening with the grassroots organizations in the Cochabamba valley, I think that also shows a bit of our interests and our perspective. With the fragmentation we see right now due to political issues with the MAS [the governing Movement Toward Socialism party] and inside social organizations there’s a greater impact on the political participation of women.
So we look at that and reflect that, to leave a record. We might not reach millions of readers but there is a record and the new generations will be able to access [those stories] or people who are beginning their research, they can find a clue as to where to start investigating. We think that is our contribution.
MNC: I’d add a very interesting example: the big report we did for 8M two years ago, in 2022, because it was a huge movement for us. We were in Oruro, and we mobilized nine journalists, three editors, and two photographers and we did coverage in eleven cities: El Alto, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, La Paz, all the capitals, in addition to Villa Montes, Bermejo, and two or three other communities.
This was amazing, because as Mijail said, we tried to move away from the center, or the idea of covering only the cities. So we covered El Alto, how working-class women organized without identifying themselves as feminist, but they do fight for women’s rights.
So as Mija says we changed the perspective and asked ourselves where we could find powerful stories that are not being reflected, that are not a La Paz-centered perspective. There are other very beautiful stories happening around that can reflect this popular, social action, a collective organizing around feminisms.
This was a big move for us. Mijail organized the compañeras, the three editors, they contacted their journalists and all of us did a fast scanning of what was going on. They identified some powerful thing happening in line with our editorial line and from that point we started building the story.
And as for the visuals and the image, it’s like Mijail said with the example of the compañera in the 8M, we always seek protagonists who are not usually the protagonists: Aymara, Quechua, Guarani, younger or older people, working class people, we try to have them as protagonists in our photographic coverage.
It’s the same with language, we try to have a very accessible and simple language. We also struggle with that. Journalism is used to using complex terms, or very academic, and academia is very far away from what happens daily, and they can’t reach the people. We try to make it easy, close, and to not widen the existing gap with people’s everyday life. Those are the axes: image, focus, movement, places of coverage, but also language.
MMZ: The visual aspect is very interesting because it also comes from questioning our own work. When we were only a cultural magazine, we looked at our covers and it was mostly writers living outside the country, white, with many privileges and it’s their merit, they’re great writers and intellectuals and they deserve recognition, but our covers were full of those faces.
And, for example, now we go out in the streets of Oruro, and we’re not going to bump into one of them, we won’t run into people with that skin color or clothes. That self-criticism allowed us to check Muy Waso and be proud of those covers because we see pictures of the people around us, they’re not different.
That exercise of questioning our own work makes it possible to optimize it. And regarding the report Michelle mentioned, of 8M two years ago when we published a booklet on that, I think that our own values are reflected behind the journalistic product as such. It was a self-managed job: we paid all editors, all photographers, all journalists, a lot of people. We didn’t give them a big wage for those weeks, but we think it was fair. And all the resources were self-managed by Muy Waso with money coming from the collective efforts we made in the months before 8M.
One beautiful impact I saw recently is that one of the collectives from Trinidad, a city abandoned by the centralized media, this is in the Beni [department], there’s a collective called Las Lorenzas, and they were featured in that report. They’re very happy, and we saw this year that they created their own Facebook page, they organized a bigger mobilization. So, the fact that they were made visible for the whole country gives them strength, hope, and the confidence of knowing that their work is valued. And I think that’s a very beautiful thing that happened in the last weeks.
BD: Yes, I remember that coverage, it was very impressive. In this sense, is it necessary also to train some of your journalists in how to do this type of non-traditional journalism? Do you give training, classes? And also, could you give me some examples of the things you teach them so they do a different type of journalism with Muy Waso?
MMZ: That’s the most difficult thing! This is work we do during several months, with the compañeras who’ve been with us for a long time. It’s one of the most complicated things, because most of them are communicators or come from academia. So, their framework comes from the university and our work from Muy Waso is to break with everything we’ve been taught, finding another focus, changing language, use of language, that’s the most complicated thing to teach.
And what we usually do is we have ongoing editing clinics. We review, thinking why we’re using this word or this syntax and not a different, simpler one. Mainly the teaching we want to give them is what Michelle said, communications is a service, and as such it must be useful for people.
We have many young compañeras, and it is related to young people too, it happened to us when we started with Muy Waso; they want to show off, to write as if they were writing the great novel or the great chronicle of the century. It’s a very Latin American problem due to the huge tradition of cronistas [a prominent style of writing in Latin America that combines narrative journalism with literary techniques] we have, so they want to write a big text, which in the end are only useful to get awards, are read by 500 people tops, and it’s not useful for anybody, sometimes not even for researchers.
So we want to convey a passion for doing things simply. Michelle usually does this job of insisting on a language for everybody. And the concrete work implies holding ongoing editing clinics, editing the texts together over and over. Something we also communicate to them that social media content must be dynamic, and not a copy of what was written in the main report, or the video.
This is complicated, but we try to give them alternatives on how to tell a story, what’s known as “storytelling.” We don’t like the term a lot, but to put it simply, we do try to give them storytelling techniques so that the story can also stay with the people and be replicated, and become more massive, so to speak.
MNC: Something we also insist a lot on is to ask how the story could be better told. Now that we have these possibilities beyond the text, something valuable is to think if this story would function better in a podcast form because there’s a strength in the voice or the sound construction, or if it would be better in audiovisual format because it’s related to the environment, and so you can see an ocean of plastic, right? There’s a strong visual component.
Sometimes we get stuck thinking that the only option is a big report, and we’ve fought over this a lot with new compañeras because they want to write a big report that usually takes a lot of time, and in the meantime the story is gone, it happened, and then we’re not helping in the moment when the story was necessary. So maybe we do need a big report but right now the useful thing to do is to have a short video with the action we need to make visible, so we do the video, and then we can work on the article.
The thing is to break with the idea that the only way is a big report of 10,000-15,000 characters. There are other ways of doing communications and journalism that can be more efficient, with more impact, and that can better represent the story we want to tell.
BD: Could you talk about the importance of media like Muy Waso in Bolivia and elsewhere in the world, specifically the importance of such media for social transformation, which is often different from the aims of traditional media.
MNC: I think this is a key moment for communications and journalism in general, because through all these transformations in communication like AI, Facebook or Meta, and Google, we see that sustaining big media is more complicated.
We had a big media crisis with digitalization, now there’s a new crisis with AI, so we’re seeing that the world of journalism and communications have to transform, or they’re already transforming.
So I think small, alternative, and experimental media are spearheading this moment, they’re trying new things and have the capacity to adapt. Small editorial offices can implement changes in a less traumatic way. I think they are fundamental to guarantee the journalism of the future, they’re like think tanks.
They try new things, they experiment, and they’re also spaces that dare to share, there isn’t so much this secret as there is between big corporations. I think there’s an ecosystem of digital media that are always sharing and in dialogue, there’s a new way of doing journalism.
I also think they’re the ones who are closest to their communities and readers, and they can better reflect the existing diversity in the world. Once, we did an analysis of media in Bolivia, and found out it’s only certain authorized voices who are speaking on the media, and they do have a bias, a political interest and a social interest and they will only say what they’re interested in.
So alternative media diversify voices and show that the world is not only made up of those voices, that there are many other things happening. Hyper-local media are able to reflect these other realities, and to generate dialogue with their own communities, be a real service. Like community radios where they publish the selling of products for farmers, for example, or they help if someone needs economic support due to an accident, things like that.
Small media have a social role in their immediate communities, and the same goes for sexual diversities and feminist and environmental outlets. They respond to a communicational need right now that is very important. Communications is vital right now. And the more the media, the more they can satisfy this need and diversify the vison of certain communities or countries.
MMZ: I think there’s a need to break with a paradigm in Bolivian journalism right now. In Bolivia there’s an outlet I won’t mention, that is digital and independent so to speak, but their slogan is to “go back to the DNA of journalism,” the origins of journalism.
I really dislike this slogan because for me the origin of journalism is what Michelle says, big media that have enough capital to pay big names to do big reporting and big chronicles, and everything is subsumed to “big” things, financed by big capital.
I really dislike these origins, and digitalization has meant a big watershed, and many have been able to recover, some big media. But now we have another technological disruption that will probably be a big blow. I think we need to break that paradigm; we don’t need to go back to that journalism, we don’t want to become big media.
That’s very clear for us in Muy Waso. We don’t want to be a big outlet. We stay in our small community to be able to speak to people and not from a pedestal from afar. I also think it’s important in terms of what we mentioned before: big media, and unfortunately many journalists in digital media, also have this philosophy of charging for their content, and I think it’s key that alternative media keep the philosophy that information has to be free and open for everyone, we can’t keep the information from those who can’t pay for it.
That’s the most anti-democratic thing I’ve heard in my life, and I’ve read opinion pieces saying that media in Bolivia will only survive if they start using a paywall. I think that goes against the course of history too. We’re up against very complicated years in political, social, and even economic terms, and we can’t afford to have a misinformed population. I hope the new digital and alternative media will keep this perspective of democratizing information and continue to uphold the logics of providing a service in order to transform our reality.
Benjamin Dangl is a Lecturer of Public Communication and Journalism at the University of Vermont. He has worked as a journalist across Latin America for over two decades covering social movements and politics. Dangl’s most recent books are The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia and A World Where Many Worlds Fit.
