Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, New Edition

A classic recounting of a unionists’ struggle against exploitation and dictatorship-from within the mines of Bolivia

Let Me Speak! is a moving testimony from inside the Bolivian tin mines of the 1970s, by a woman whose life was defined by her defiant struggle against those at the very top of the power structure, the Bolivian elite. Blending firsthand accounts with astute political analysis, Domitila Barrios de Chungara describes the hardships endured by Bolivia’s colossal working class, and her own efforts at organizing women in her mining community. The result is a gripping narrative of class struggle and repression, an important social document that illuminates the reality of capitalist exploitation in the dark mines of 1970s Bolivia and beyond.

Twenty-five years after it was first published in English in 1978, the new edition of this classic book includes never-before-translated testimonies gathered in the years just before the book’s translation. Let Me Speak picks up Domitila’s life story from the 1977 hunger strike she organized-a rebellion that was instrumental in bringing down the Banzer dictatorship. It then turns to her subsequent exile in Sweden and work as an internationalist seeking solidarity with the Bolivian people in the early 1980s, during the period of the García Meza dictatorship. It concludes with the formation of the Domitila Mobile School in Cochabamba, where her family had been relocated after the mine closures. As we read, we learn from Domitila’s insights into a range of topics, from U.S. imperialism to the environmental crisis, from the challenges of popular resistance in Latin America, to the kind of political organizing we need-all steeped in a conviction that we can, and must, unite social movements with working-class revolt.

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 Educação) 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 Paraná, 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.