Let Me Speak!

Domitila Barrios De Chungara (Author) Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the daughter of a mine worker, was born in 1937, and lived most of her life in a tin mining camp in the Bolivian highlands. She was rendered motherless at the age of 10, and as a result Domitila was forced to leave primary school to care for her four younger sisters. Nonetheless, she graduated from the school of life and the Bolivian trade union movement, as an active participant in the "Housewives Committee" of the Siglo XX-Catavi tin mine trade union movement, from 1963 onward. In 1975 Domitila was invited to testify at the first United Nations Conference on Women, Development and Peace, and there, she met Moema Viezzer, who helped her publish her life story in the form of this book. After a 2-year exile in Sweden during Garcia Meza's government, Domitila and her husband returned to Bolivia, but shortly thereafter, alongside 30,000 others, her husband was laid off from his mining job. Domitila was thence forced to move from her native land, to the city of Cochabamba, where she died in 2013. She lives on through Let Me Speak!, which has been translated into 14 languages. Moema Viezzer (Author) Moema Viezzer is a Brazilian sociologist and popular educator who has dedicated her life to women's causes and environmental issues. Following a period of exile during the military dictatorship in Brazil, she returned to Brazil, where she established the Women's Network on Education (Rede Mulher de Educacao) before working at the local, national, and international level, mostly with the Latin American Council of Popular Education (CEAAL), the International Council of Adult Education (ICAE) the Latin American and Caribbean Network on Women's Popular Education (REPEM), and the International Network of Women for Peace Around the World (PWAR), among others. From 2003 to2011, she was an environmental education consultant for the Cultivating Good Water program in the western region of Parana, and for the Gender Equity Program of the Itaipu Binacional. Moema wrote eight books, from which the most well known internationally is Let Me Speak!, and in recent years, with her husband Marcelo Grondin, she wrote the book Abya Lalal: Genocide, Resistance, Survival of First Nations Peoples in the Americas. Viezzer continues to fight for the international recognition and application of the Declaration of the Rights of the Mother Earth-- Pachamama, with an emphasis on the rights of water.