Zezy Yadryda, 25

“Identifying oneself as a feminist outside Peru’s capital city is a little complicated.

“That’s because there is a strong oppressive system from the church and machista organizations. I come from a city that has a rich culture of Aymara and Quechua and obviously the Andean cosmovision makes it triply complicated to be a feminist because I’m feminist, campesina and indigenous.

“In Peru there are many feminist movements that fight for the same cause, but they use different forms. We believe in community feminism; that means we don’t need to be grouped together – we can be spread out with diverse proposals. We have criticized the national feminist movement because a lot of times it is very centralized in the capital. We are calling for a decentralization of feminist debates because we want to include women living in rural areas; these are women who don’t even have access to media to inform themselves about what’s going on.

“In the area where we live, we are fighting for the issue of sovereignty; we defend the Pachamama and Mother Earth. And we give feminism an intercultural focus. Our body is our territory; so we defend it. And we promote the interrelation of women with nature—that’s ecofeminism. And that is the concept that unites most of the women in my community.”

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