Betty Pérez

Betty Perez is working to secure recognition for Afro-Bolivians as a distinct ethnic group to reduce discrimination against them and provide new avenues to express their citizenship.

Many Afro-Bolivians are the descendants of slaves who were brought by the Spaniards to work in the mint near the silver mines of Potosí. The number of present-day Bolivian blacks is not known, though estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000: they were included in the “Spanish speaking” category in the last census. Among the indigenous and ethnic peoples who comprise 70 percent of Bolivia’s population, they have been nearly invisible, assimilated under the bowler hats of the Aymara Indians, which most of them wear.

Betty Perez is documenting the existence of a distinct Afro-Bolivian cultural identity. Through contact with community organizations in the areas where blacks have historically lived, she is reclaiming oral tradition, customs, music, dance and ritual. As people rediscover their black culture, its value and richness becomes more evident and available to combat the severe racial discrimination they face. Betty is taking the further step of creating a process whereby they can secure recognition by their government as an ethnic group.

During the 1990s Bolivia passed a series of laws that are among the most progressive and clear in Latin America to allow members of designated ethnic groups to secure title to collective land and develop their own governance. Betty’s work will enable Afro-Bolivians to participate more vigorously in their country’s collective life on the basis of a legally recognized ethnic identity.

In spite of the great pride many Bolivians take in being a multiethnic and pluri-cultural country, many of its members suffer racial discrimination. The Afro-Bolivians are the poorest people in the country; few ever attain a high school education. They endure the most racism and discrimination of all the ethnic groups in the entire Andes region. Many people did not even know they existed until they marched into La Paz in 1990 and were received by the President of Bolivia for the first time in history.


In 1990, indigenous and ethnic people were discouraged about the progress toward implementation of the government’s stated policy to bestow land titles to qualified groups who had occupied land collectively. Over time, it became evident that the strongest and best known indigenous groups—such as the Aymara and Quechua Indians—were the ones who would be able to use the new provisions and secure ownership of their land. Other areas would be taken by eminent domain and sold. When people discovered that the government had set aside a new park and sold an oil concession in large tracts of land where indigenous and ethnic peoples lived, they arose from all over the country to join in a protest march that lasted 28 days. More than 30,000 people marched, including members of ethnic groups that were thought to be extinct and their cultures dead. In traditional garb, some with bows and arrows, they marched to La Paz, stood before the Presidential Palace and demanded to be recognized. The government responded with mechanisms to put the new land-title law into motion, but the President refused to negotiate with the blacks, saying that they had not been recognized as an ethnic group. The proof was that they were not in the census.

Many Bolivian blacks live in lowland valleys in an area in northern Bolivia called the Yungas, where their slave ancestors were sent by the Spaniards in the 16th century. Unable to tolerate the high altitude of Potosí, where the men wrecked their lungs turning the presses in the Casa de la Moneda (House of the Coin), they were put to work growing the coca that was routinely supplied to the miners. They have remained in the Yungas, and their history of growing coca fits the government’s standard for traditional collective land use. However, unless they are recognized as a group, they cannot apply for ownership and therefore risk the loss of their land.

Further, without status as a group Afro-Bolivians have no basis for utilizing new provisions for local governance with government funds that have been put into place through Bolivia’s Popular Participation Act of 1995. The Act grows out of the government’s commitment to a process of decentralization, placing more resources and autonomy at the disposal of municipalities. Ashoka Fellows Carlos Mamani and Cristina Bubba have assisted Aymara groups to gain a place in this process on the basis of their indigenous identity. Cultural identity is strong among the Aymara, who have defended it staunchly during 500 years of colonization. They commonly disparage efforts by the blacks to establish their own ethnic status and urge instead that the Afro-Bolivians consider themselves part of the Aymara and be “the new children of Pachamama,” the earth-mother center of spirituality of the Aymara.

At its core, Betty’s strategy is to clarify the definition of an ethnic group in Bolivia—to show how Afro-Bolivians qualify for it and to elevate cultural regard for them. She is collecting what black Bolivians remember of their history and what is unique about their cultural practices. She began with a pilot program in three communities in the Yungas, where the most Blacks live. She contacts local groups to find out the names of older people and their relatives who might have information about cultural contributions from the past. She has walked all over the Yungas, documenting such discoveries as herbal healing and uniquely black religious practices and celebrations of the Day of the Dead. Once the investigation and recovery has taken place, Betty organizes workshops and events where she presents the recovered information, and people decide how they want to incorporate into family and community life the sewing of traditional clothes, the dance, music, oral history, rituals and traditional medicine. The people put into practice what they have learned and form their own local groups who dance and sing in community events.

A network of Afro-Bolivian groups was thus formed. Betty has organized exchanges between blacks in rural areas and in cities, to find solutions to the common problems they all face. She has also established an international presence. The second meeting of the Network of Black Organizations of the Andean Region, including participants from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil, took place in La Paz in 1996.

Using the information that has been collected together with the support of the community groups, Betty and others from the black movement have secured an agreement from Bolivia’s Secretary of Education to introduce the culture and historical contributions of blacks into the textbooks supplied to the country’s schools. Ashoka Fellows Cristina Bubba and Juan Carlos Antezana have also contributed to cross-cultural understanding by inviting Betty to talk with the people they work among.

Betty’s program of rediscovery, practical application, community organizing and networking is essential to the Afro-Bolivian movement in the Andean Region and their efforts to be recognized as an ethnic group and have their historical contributions recorded by the State. She expects to secure official recognition by the government in time for Afro-Bolivians to be in their own category in the next census. In the long term, she expects that other unacknowledged ethnic and indigenous groups will be able to adopt the model she is establishing for Bolivia’s blacks to achieve official recognition.

Betty began her social activism while still in middle school. In the neighborhoods surrounding her, poverty was highly visible and the people needed help in organizing community groups and gaining access to food and used clothing. She helped to organize a community kitchen and secured help from the Minister of Health. She worked as an assistant to the local teacher who taught five grades at the same time. She was elected a delegate for a political party in her neighborhood and continued her work organizing community groups to improve living conditions.

Betty came to La Paz where she worked during the day and went to school at night in order to get her high school diploma. She is married to an Aymara man and has three children. She has been a member of the Afro-Bolivian group, Saya Afro-Boliviano, for two and a half years. Saya is a dance group that was started by high school students in the Yungas area in 1982 to perform their traditional “Saya” dances. Their performances were the first public demonstrations of Afro-Andean ethnic culture in Bolivia. Betty and her family have been instrumental in reintroducing the black songs and dances in public events throughout Bolivia, looking forward to a day when black Bolivians would take part as a group in the Gran Poder, the biggest Bolivian festival of the year in La Paz, which they did in 1996.

Betty has been dedicated to improving the conditions of blacks in Bolivia all of her life. She says that someone must bring the information about the black culture out of the people and put it into practice and she is the one to do it. The people in the communities have been waiting for someone like her. This is her life’s mission.