Translated from Spanish by Nancy Piñeiro.
This is the first 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.
After moving from her rural community in the Bolivian Andes to the capital city of La Paz, Aymara journalist Yolanda Mamani started out as a domestic worker. Faced with racism from employers, urban society, and the media, Mamani helped launch a radio program by and for domestic workers. This is where she began amplifying women’s struggles, solidarity, and mutual aid through feminist media.
The radio show was created out of the domestic workers’ union in collaboration with the Bolivian feminist organization Mujeres Creando and their popular broadcast Radio Deseo. It serves as an organizing platform to denounce abusive employers, defend rights, and discuss the realities faced by workers, especially women in precarious and informal sectors. This led to Mamani’s own YouTube Channel called Chola Bocona, where she shares her views on racism, politics, and capitalism from her standpoint as an Indigenous woman in Bolivia today.
Mamani’s journalistic work reflects her view of media as a tool for community organizing, amplifying marginalized voices, and challenging systems of oppression. As the title of her show suggests—the “Chola Bocona,” referring to a loud-mouthed Indigenous women living in the city—Mamani also uses her platform to challenge misogynist and racist notions of Indigenous women as subservient and ornamental.
In this interview she discusses her journey from rural Bolivia to the city and her experience organizing with the National Federation of Domestic Workers of Bolivia. Mamani also provides insight into her practice, philosophy, and vision as a feminist media maker for social change.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Benjamin Dangl: Can you please discuss your trajectory and how you started working as a radio journalist in La Paz?
Yolanda Mamani: I am a domestic worker, Aymara chola feminist, and a radio worker or social communicator. I migrated from my community searching for better work and study opportunities. We had education programs in my community, but I had to walk 1.5 hours to get to school. I once heard about a rape happening in those circumstances. It was an 18-year-old who raped a 15-year-old during her walk to school. At that time women were beginning to attend high school, whereas before they used to go until 3rd grade. Back then those things used to happen, and I worried a lot. My dad used to take me to school on a donkey so when it was very rainy, we could cross the river when it flooded. I remember we used to lose our shoes when trying to cross those rivers.
My parents also wanted me to learn Spanish, that’s why they sent me to the Warisata Ayllu- School, the first Indigenous school, as it was a bilingual school. At the same time, it was a discriminatory space against community members who travelled by foot, because we arrived covered in dust, our shoes were not polished. We had to walk on dirt roads covered in mud. That’s in part why I wanted to come to La Paz, and my parents encouraged me to do it as well.
I was nine years old and I had an aunt who came to our community during winter vacations, and my dad told me I should go see the city with her and know another culture where Spanish was spoken. My mom is also illiterate, she almost begged me not to stop studying and to learn how to speak Spanish properly and not forget about Aymara either. So that’s how I came to the city when I was nine.
Since then, I’ve worked as a domestic worker a lot, and I also became a chola in a racist, classist city, where I learned those words. In my community I was just another kid enjoying running in the hills, singing, and hearing the echo of my voice in the mountains. That’s who I was: I was myself. When I arrived in the city, all that changed. That’s why I say I became a chola in the city, I became “imilla bocona” (big-mouthed girl), and I’m proud.
BD: In thinking about the work you have done as a journalist and media maker over the years, it seems to be a way of organizing people and defending their rights. Your work is focused on trying to change attitudes and do critical reflection. It is media about how to transform society and a way of organizing with the audience and public. Could you describe the philosophy and vision behind this specific type of media work?
YM: It’s been very important for me to have joined the union, to think how we can access communications media to talk about the injustices we face as a sector. I joined the Domestic Workers’ Union when I was around 18 or 20. We had to go to the media [to be interviewed as domestic workers] and they wanted us to cry, or they criminalized us; I remember well that the journalists were also employers [of domestic workers]. A woman journalist interviewed me and said, “but you also steal from us, you take away food, you stop working on Sunday and then return on Wednesday, and sometimes you don’t even come back,” just like that. That’s why we were enraged.
We wanted a space where we had all the time in the world to speak about ourselves, to be able to explain to society, and question employers for how abusive, exploitative, racist they are, and classist.
So, 25 of us [domestic workers] started doing radio [on a new show called “I am a domestic worker with pride and dignity.”] It was incredible how we arrived to the radio and how we learned so much, how we went from being domestic workers who only knew how to wash and iron clothes and cook—obviously we were experts in that—but then we started to operate radio controls, the computer, and most of us hadn’t finished our bachelor’s degree yet, so we didn’t know how to use a computer. But all of us managed to learn.
We had a month of training [at Mujeres Creando] in writing, basic research techniques, control operation, editing software, etc. It was a beautiful time, we had great professors, very generous people who shared their knowledge with us without keeping anything like a secret. And that was so nice!
They wanted us to have professors and journalists to teach us to do radio, because being domestic workers shouldn’t mean we were going to produce poor quality work in radio. For that very same reason people were paying attention: “Oh, let’s see what domestic workers will say if they only know how to wash and iron. What can they say?” We’ve heard those criticisms even when we were doing our show.
That’s why we needed to be trained and create a program that could also teach others why it’s important to speak for yourself, in the first person, not to repeat what we already know and what much of media does— all the bad habits journalists have. We wanted to change that and the things they did, victimizing or criminalizing us or just giving us the floor once a year. We didn’t want to make the same mistakes.
In the alliance through the radio between Mujeres Creando and the domestic workers, it was key to base the relationship on respect. We learned to respect what Mujeres Creando proposed back then. And they learned to respect us too, and to understand our struggles, just as we learned about theirs. That was a learning experience for both Mujeres Creando and for domestic workers: it opened us to society because we worked in homes, and the society we knew was that of our employers. We didn’t have social relations in other spaces outside that of our employers.
So we started our program called “I am a domestic worker with pride and dignity;” it has been on the air every day for an hour for seven years. That was the beginning of opening up to society, and that kept growing as we met other women like sweepers, sellers, women bricklayers, women construction workers, etc., other sectors that were as exploited and discriminated against as we were. We are not the only ones suffering. That gave us strength to do our radio program with other women, to open ourselves up to other women who shared our labor situation.
With the show “I am a domestic worker…”, I remember that for a while we said, “we have to be boconas (loudmouthed), we mustn’t’ remain silent about injustice.”
It turns out that a rebellious girl who was 18 years old, who also migrated when she was 13 and used to listen to the radio a lot, she was fired from her job [as a domestic worker]. And she said: “You say we have to speak up, and I have, and now I don’t know what to do.” It’s one thing to say it on air openly, but without offering alternatives to all these people you’re telling them they should rebel and not silence abuse.
So from then on, we created a coop called Sin Patrón ni Patrona (Without Bosses),where we offer pet sitting services, cleaning, food delivery—we had a space for cooking, and before the pandemic we had catering too—and also laundry.
We created the coop for other compañeras who were fired because they denounced something on the radio. With those compañeras we formed this coop because some did care work, or liked pets or kids, so they were very good nannies, or they liked cleaning. And that was a beautiful project; it worked well.
Another thing the radio show has done is that when we receive a complaint [about an employer], we do the follow up; we support the compañera. When you are part of a coop you feel supported, just as when I joined the union and I felt its strength, I didn’t feel alone.
BD: Can you tell me a bit about why you started the YouTube program Chola Bocona and your thinking about the importance of this type of media platform and space in Bolivia?
YM: Back then there were many jailones [young elites in La Paz] doing YouTube and it was a way to respond to them: a chola can also do YouTube! Why Not?
It was important for me that cholas were also in those spaces. Let’s stop thinking that the chola needs to be stuck in the past, so that she ends up being a relic from a museum. That’s not what a chola is; a chola is a living character, and you don’t need to go to the museum to see her. She is adapting to this global world; we don’t lack anything.
So, it was a way of responding, of saying that we cholas also have ideas, we can think from our own being, without the need of being an anthropologist or a sociologist —although I’m studying sociology. Mostly, what gave me strength to do this YouTube program was seeing so many people speaking about “la chola” without being one, and in a very bad way.
For me, it’s important to speak for yourself, because that’s how your voice and thinking can have strength. The beauty of taking the floor is that you’re narrating in the first person: “I’m being exploited right now.” That’s when your voice has a force and in that sense it’s important to speak in the first person.
It has power because you’re not telling what someone else has told you, you’re saying what you are going through. Sometimes people say, “I’m not pretty, I don’t have a nice voice and therefore I can’t speak for myself.” That’s what TV shows us.
In order to speak in the first person, you don’t need a good voice or to be pretty; you need to have a lot to say to society and you have the authority that comes from your place in it, from the place you have in society. That place is important because speaking from it is very powerful. I invite you all to speak your word in the first person.
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.
