By Bernardo Moreno
Cherán is a town in Michoacán that has suffered the indiscriminate, clandestine, felling of trees by criminal groups in collusion with the municipal government. The area is filled with oaks and pines and is inhabited mainly by Purépecha indigenous women. In 2011 the women organized the community, captured some criminals and police officers, and threatened to lynch them. With that action they managed to undo the municipal council and expel all political parties and police. Today the area is free of politicians and criminals and has its own security and communal laws. Many women have changed history and we owe a lot to them for doing so. In the collective imagination women are better than men, and here we will talk about some of them.
Violeta Parra was a Chilean artist, but more than that she is a banner for folklore of her country. She came from a humble cradle, but at a very young age Parra toured her country. With her fine ear she was taking in and learning her nation’s traditions—the music, rites, and festivals of the towns. She rescued songs and lyrics that perhaps without her would be lost and forgotten today. In addition to being a singer-songwriter and musician, Parra was also a poet, and plastic artist. After she passed away, some of her pieces were exhibited at the Louvre museum in France. Thanks to her, Chilean popular songs were heard all over the world. Her irreverent and passionate speech, always in favor of the most vulnerable, made her a benchmark for social movements. Parra lived from 1917 to 1967; she died very young.
Mercedes Sosa was born in Tucuman, the smallest province of Argentina, to a humble, hard-working family. From the time she was a little girl, she liked singing popular songs. As an adolescent she won a singing contest that allowed her to appear on a radio station for two months; that became her artistic beginning. Later, she became part of the Nuevo Cancionero movement which emphasized popular songs that spoke of the daily life of peasant people. Her incredible musical performances led her to tour Argentina and many major cities around the world. In the mid-70s in Argentina, the beginning of a military dictatorship was emerging. Sosa produced one of her most famous albums, “Mercedes Sosa,” in which she rescued and sang the Latin American poetry of major poets like Víctor Jara, Pablo Neruda, both from Chile; Alicia Maguiña, from Peru; and Ignacio Villa, from Cuba. In 1977, when Argentina was under an oppressive political climate, she paid homage to one of the great Argentine composers of popular music, Atahualpa Yupanqui. Two years later, in 1979, while she was giving a concert, she was arrested along with all those attending the concert. She was exiled to Paris. By the time the dictatorship began to show signs of collapse in 1982, Sosa returned to Argentina and with Charly García and other artists appeared at the Teatro Colon Theater in Buenos Aires. She reconnected with a younger audience that soon made her an idol of the resistance. In 1984 she released the album “¿Será posible el sur?” (Could it be possible, south?) and saw the return of democracy to Argentina. Sosa is considered by many to be the foundational stone of folklore, popular music, and resistance. She was born in 1935, and died in 2009.
Ahed Tamimi is a Palestinian woman born on January 31, 2001. She has been an activist from a very young age. She joined her father in seeking the total cessation of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. She became famous at the age of 16 by confronting two Israeli soldiers outside her home in the town of Nabi Saleh, part of occupied Palestine. The soldiers had shot her cousin in the head with a rubber bullet, leaving her with lifelong scars. Tamimi was sentenced to eight months in prison, but this opened up conversation about the status of Palestine and brought out its legitimate defense against the Israeli occupations. This is now discussed publicly, as are the flagrant violations of the rights of a minor. She was released from prison after seven months following international pressure. Upon leaving prison, she said: «I am happy, but I will be even happier when all Palestinian women are released from the prisons of the Israeli occupation.» Ahed Tamimi has become a symbol for Palestinian women.
