NAMELESS-STORIES · The Invisible Women: Nameless and Forgotten Stories of the Rubber Boom (Bolivian Amazonia, 19-20th centuries)

The Invisible Women: Nameless and Forgotten Stories of the Rubber Boom (Bolivian Amazonia, 19-20th centuries)

‘Nameless-Stories’ aims to reconstruct and revalue female agency during the ‘Rubber Boom’ in Bolivian Amazonia (1880-1920). The goal is to rescue the participation of women neglected by the historical sources (immigrant settlers), rendered invisible on the account of their ethnic condition (Indigenous workers), or even ‘silenced’ by the sexist bias of regional historiography (Creole or European workers). The project proposes an alternative reading that sheds light on female agencies that not only played a decisive role during the period but were rather heterogeneous and diverse: the overall goal is to reconstruct female agency by repositioning ‘rubber women’ in a more visible place within the local archives and regional history, and rescuing from oblivion the voices, experiences, and perspectives of and about indigenous women (rubber-tappers, cooks, maids, seamstresses, washers, ‘bush wives’) and the Creole or European women who also worked in the industry or simply joined their parents or husbands in the great rubber adventure. The multidisciplinary approach aimed at two specific objectives: 1) The creation of an open access web archive that rendered information accessible to the general public: historical archives, documentary sources, ethnographic data, unpublished texts, and little-known pictures of ‘rubber women’. 2) A critical re-reading of the historical, journalistic and literary sources that revalued the multiple modalities of female involvement in the extractive endeavour. The aim was to articulate archive data with an updated ethnographic perspective that reconstructed the oral memories and life-stories of ‘rubber women’ through a varied continuum of relations that ranged from barter to wage labour, from marriage alliance to ‘compadrazgo’ (fictive kinship), and from commerce to sexual violence, kidnapping and even enslavement. Reconstructing, contextualising and disseminating the histories of these ‘rubber women’ not only is crucial to render their testimony visible in the historical archive, but also to empower their descendants. In this way, the reconstruction of female agency allows to contribute updated elements of reflection to gender studies and, at the same, time to open the way towards a fairer, more inclusive and comprehensive view of a crucial period in Amazonian, Bolivian and South American history.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз