Mujeres Creando

Mujeres Creando is an anarchist-feminist collective of Bolivian women of different cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds devoted to political resistance and community engagement through art and creativity. Created by María Galindo, Mónica Mendoza, and Julieta Paredes in the early 1990s, the group advocates for women’s rights and greater societal issues through establishing a political and artistic presence in the public sphere. In their early days, the openly lesbian activists challenged the neoliberal governments that plunged the population into poverty and unemployment, and, as a result, led to mass emigration to Argentina and Spain, especially among women. They are the “exiles of neoliberalism,” as María Galindo, a founding member of the movement, calls them.

The movement was born in 1992 as Comunidad Creando, in a neighborhood on the outskirts of La Paz. That same year, it evolved into Mujeres Creando, with an anti-racist feminist approach that challenged an elite of privileged women who separated the public from the private sphere, and manual labor from intellectual work. They also challenged the left, in which the group’s first three members were active and which placed women in the position of objects, and instead revived the anarchism practiced by Bolivian men and women at the beginning of the 20th century. From its beginnings, the group participated in international feminist gatherings, where it drew on different strands of feminism and was able to build its ideological identity with the input of everyone.

Patriarchy, represented by institutions like the Church and the Armed Forces, remains intact. For women, there is no sovereignty over their bodies, nor has motherhood been restored—two proposals, among many, by Mujeres Creando to the Constituent Assembly. Accordingly, the group famously wrote on the walls of the city: “Eve will not come from Evo’s rib,” and “Indians, whores and lesbians, together, mixed up and united.”

The movement is characterized by having built unexpected and unusual relationships between different groups, thus generating a broad network of solidarity, identities, and commitments. This, in itself, has challenged typical peer-to-peer organizations. Its members are lesbians and heterosexuals; married, divorced, and single; students and professionals; Indians and cholas; old and young; domestic workers and women in prostitution. Its goal is to build a social subject from among women that challenges power in all spheres.