The Bonita Chola uses images of strong activist female role models from the Abya Yala, Indigenous, and Black communities, who have been ignored and erased by history. She evokes collective memories and stories of struggle through digital collage making. With only her mobile phone, she creates tools with minimum resources to share with grassroots organising back home, to explore the reconstruction and deconstruction of identity, and focus on her inner feelings and thoughts.

DÍA DE LA RESISTENCIA INDÍGENA (Indigenous Resistance Day)

Text by The Bonita Chola and @ja_kgender, translation by The Bonita Chola. This text is an excerpt from their essay “From Colonial Barbarism to the Present of Capitalist Looting: Abya Yala (So-Called Americas) in Struggle”.

…On 12 October 1492, the colonisation began by means of which the gigantic original capitalist accumulation was perpetrated, which promoted the Industrial Revolution and European supremacy worldwide and which threw the Abya Yala peoples into centuries of colonial plunder and later into centuries of neocolonialism and capitalist plunder. From the genocide and looting perpetrated during the colonisation, the aristocracy and the European bourgeoisie accumulated an unprecedented fortune, which would propel Europe as a capitalist metropolis. The British and European population colony—that today is known as the United States—would also propel itself as a capitalist metropolis based on slavery and the expansionist policy of its bourgeoisie, who would assume the predatory continuity against the rest of the continent.

The world’s greatest fortunes were built through genocide, deportation, enslavement, and looting. The current geopolitical relations between capitalist metropolises and the peripheries of capitalism have a historical origin marked in blood. The members of the exploiting class in the American continent, from north to south, are the direct descendants of colonial barbarism and are the accomplices of the looting perpetrated by transnational capitalism (slave fortunes continue to prevail, along with new looters).

For 528 years since October 1492, we verify the continuity of the struggle of the Abya Yala (America) people, as well as the continuing predatory behaviour of imperialism. The peoples rise up, against capitalism and their barbarism, against the bourgeois states who agree to poisoned loans with imperialist institutions like the IMF, whose amounts will go to the infrastructure required by the multinationals, to increase plundering the resources and line the pockets of the bourgeoisie, and whose usury interests the peoples will have to pay with their blood…

DÍA INTERNACIONAL DE LA MUJER AFROLATINAMERICANA, AFROCARIBEÑA Y DE LA DIÁSPORA (International Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women’s Day)

Text by The Bonita Chola and Ana Lucía Mosquera, translation by The Bonita Chola.

1. Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women’s Day has been celebrated every 25 July since 1992.
   
   
2. Cultural Relevance. The central axis of this commemoration is the struggle for inclusion, for justice and equality for Afro-descendant women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Likewise, that first meeting on 25 July 1992 in the Dominican Republic is commemorated, the starting point for the struggle towards the vindication and visibility of the Afro woman and all her cultural and social contributions in the conformation of the States, a struggle marked by advocacy for the change and structural transformation of racial discrimination, violence, sexism, exclusion, poverty, and migration.

3. History. This commemoration was instituted in 1992, within the framework of the First Meeting of Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean Women held in the Dominican Republic. Around 400 women from different countries in Latin America and the Caribbean met, in order to analyse the consequences of racism and sexism in the region, articulate actions to combat it and honour Afro-descendant women leaders of this struggle.

4. With this meeting, the Network of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women emerged. It recognises itself as a space for reflection and commitment to work for the rights of Black women, in their capacity as full and committed citizens with the construction of more just and equitable nations.

5. The commemoration of this date should invite us to have an intersectional look at the situation of Afro-descendant women, to claim their existence and their struggles, to respect their culture and their manifestations; and to address their contexts in a differentiated way, traversed by violence as a product of racism, colonization, sexism, classism, capitalism, homo-lesbo-transphobia, and other oppressions.

In the collage on the previous page are: Ochy Curiel, Victoria Santa Cruz, Marialle Franco, Sueli Carneiro, and Liniker.

Pride

Text by The Bonita Chola and @ ja_kgender, translation by The Bonita Chola.

Today we reaffirm and remember that cisheterosexualidad is a colonial system. Sexual diversity has historically been the norm, not the exception, among Indigenous peoples. The ancestral languages prove it. In Juchitán, Mexico, the muxes are neither male nor female, but rather a hybrid of both as the Zapotec gender. For our brothers of North America, the identity “two spirits” refers to a person who identifies male and female, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity.

In the Andes region of what is now called Bolivia, we have the word “Chacha-Warmi”, which means man-woman. In Hawai’i, the māhū encompass both the feminine and the masculine. The Maori term takatāpui describes intimate same-sex friendships. Non-monogamy is the norm among the Zo’é peoples in the Amazon and the Ladakhis in the Himalayas. In other words, Indigenous sexualities/sexual identities were never heterosexual: from cross-dressing to homo-affective families, they are as diverse as the peoples who practise them. The disagreements that belong to Indigenous communities are doubly segregated. Despite the fact that both machismo and heteronorma were systems of violence imposed by colonialism, they continue to prevail in most Indigenous communities. The resistance of the communities is a double struggle: they have to choose between living their diverse identity or their Indigenous identity.

Mucho amor y fuego en su lucha! Que es la nuestra tambien, quemar la heteronorma y el patriarcado: RESABIOS DE LA COLONIZACIÓN!