CLACS and Ni Una Menos NYC present Verónika Mendoza – last year’s Peruvian presidential candidate and women’s rights advocate- in a conversation about the power of inter sectional feminist leadership in the process of ending feminicides and gender inequality in Peru and Latin America. This conversation will also feature Claudia Salazar, author of "La Sangre de la Aurora, will be moderated by CLACS faculty member Pamela Calla as part of her Feminist Constellations and Intercultural Paradigms working group. The event will be held in Spanish and simultaneous interpretation will be provided.
During the last few years there has been an increased awareness and active response to fight violence against women. The rising of social movements such as Ni Una Menos and the International Womens’ Strike have introduced a growing force of resistance, which seeks to attain gender equality at a national and international level. These solidarity networks aren’t orchestrated for or by political parties but by individuals and communities that aim to encourage their governments to stand up for women’s rights and put and end to feminicides and gender inequality.
Ending feminicides and achieving gender equality is the responsibility of us all. Please come and join the conversation!
About the speakers:
Veronika Mendoza. Born in Cusco in 1980, Verónika Mendoza is the leader of the Peruvian Leftist organization New Peru Movement, and a former candidate to the presidency of her country in the recent 2016 elections, where she finished third with 20% of the national vote. A psychologist by training, Mendoza was elected to Congress in 2011, as part of the victorious Nationalist Party, led by Ollanta Humala. However, Humala’s government betrayed its original, progressive platform, and engaged in police repression against peasants demanding environmental protections around mining projects. After clashes resulted in the deaths of demonstrators in her region, Mendoza resigned from Humala’s party, and decided to caucus with independent progressives. During her tenure in Congress, Mendoza was a champion of progressive causes, such as the protection of the environment, the defense of women’s rights, and advocacy for LGBT rights. She has consistently worked against corruption and for a fair redistribution of resources between the capital of Peru, Lima, and the provinces.
In 2015, she was elected in open primaries as the presidential candidate of the Left-wing alliance Broad Front, and she went on to secure almost 20% of the popular vote in the April 2016 elections, including majorities in one third of the about 1800 districts of the country, with a strong showing in Andean areas, especially those most affected by mining. As Peru has a two-round system, the second round was to be decided between Keiko Fujimori, daughter of jailed dictator Alberto Fujimori, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a center-right technocrat. Mendoza called her supporters to cast their votes against Fujimorismo, which the Left deemed as fatal to democracy and human rights. After the defeat of Fujimori by a hair-breadth distance in June this year, Mendoza has become the leader of the progressive opposition and one of the most recognizable figures in the Latin American Left.
Pamela Calla, an anthropologist, is Clinical Associate Professor at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University and director of the Observatory on Racism of the Universidad de la Cordillera in La Paz, Bolivia. Currently she also co-coordinates the "Network of Observatories on Racism in the Americas", an initiative launched by the Universidad de la Cordillera and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas. She is the author of works on race, racism, gender, sexism, ethnicity, interculturality and state formation in Bolivia and coeditor of Antropología del Estado: Dominación y prácticas contestatarias en America Latina. She was an Associate Researcher of the "The State of the State in Bolivia", a project ofthe Informe sobre Desarrollo Humano, 2007, United Nations Development Project and coeditor and author of Observando el Racismo: Racismo y Regionalismo en el Proceso Constituyente Boliviano, Agenda Defensorial No. 11 and 13, Defensor del Pueblo and Universidad de la Cordillera. IN 2017, Dr. Calla was awarded the New York University Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award for excellence in teaching, leadership, social justice advocacy, and community building.
Claudia Salazar Jimenez, studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and holds a PhD in Latin American Literature from NYU. She is the editor of two anthologies, Voces para Lilith (2011), and Escribir en Nueva York. Antología de narradores hispanoamericanos (2014). Her short fiction has been published in several anthologies and journals. In 2013, she published her first novel, La sangre de la aurora, which was awarded the prestigious Premio Las Américas in 2014. She currently lives in New York City.
About Ni Una Menos:
Ni Una Menos is an international women’s movement that started in Argentina in response to the fact that there every 30 hours a woman is killed just because she is a woman. This movement calls for change at socio-political, economical and cultural levels. #NiUnaMenos demands prevention, assistance and eradication of all forms of violence against women in Latin America and around the world.