Each year the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers highlights sixteen women, men and organizations that standout in the fight against gender violence. Representing December 7th, is:
Monica Carrillo
LUNDU (Centro de Estudios y Promoción Afroperuanos)
Peru
An Afro-Peruvian women’s rights educator
As an Afro-Peruvian woman, Monica (Carrillo) faces sexual and racial discrimination every day. Concerned about the effect of this discrimination on other young women like herself, Monica (Carrillo) founded and is now the Director of LUNDU (Centro de Estudios y Promoción Afroperuanos/Center for Afro-Peruvian Studies and empowerment), which is an anti-sexism, antiracism, anti-homophobia organization focused on empowering a new generation of Afro-Peruvian leaders.
It is currently the only group working on issues of gender, sexuality and human rights in Afro-descendent communities in Peru. In rural El Carmen, the site of a growing sex tourism industry with a high rate of HIV/AIDS, LUNDU is training peer educators to dispense vital information on sexual and reproductive health to Afro- Peruvian young people.
“We can empower more young women against violence, abuse, forced sex, unwanted pregnancies and AIDS”, Carrillo says. “Our girls believe their lives are worth something. When tourists ask them to dance, or have sex, our girls can say ‘no’. Our girls learn to live without wearing a mask.”
http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/16days/kit08/exhibit/carrillo.html
The CIA World Fact Book says that in Peru, close to 30% of the population is under 14. An estimated 93.5% of men can read and write, while around 82% of women can do so.
Of the various racial groups, the following is noted: Amerindian 45%, mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 37%, white 15%, black, Japanese, Chinese, and other 3%.
Then, there are the religious influences: Roman Catholic 81%, Seventh Day Adventist 1.4%, other Christian 0.7%, other 0.6%, unspecified or none 16.3% (2003 est.)
There are two main languages: Spanish (official), Quechua (official). Aymara, and a large number of minor Amazonian languages are also spoken.
An understanding some of the basic tensions of religion, patriarchal society, and Amerindian cultures of the country can be juxtaposed against the historic slave trade that occurred here as elsewhere in South America. (You thought it was just the USA?) The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has this to say:
[The African Slave Trade to the Western Hemisphere has been very conservatively estimated at 10 million. Of this number, the United States received 399,000 slaves, the Caribbean 3.7 million slaves, and Brazil another 3.6 million….
…The genocide practiced against the indigenous peoples and the growing demand for labor resulted in the expansion of the slave trade.
There are countries to which we do not attribute an African past but in which the presence of Africans predates any significant presence of Africans in North America by over 100 years. During the 17th century, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cartagena, Columbia; and Lima, Peru were major slave ports and points of distribution for Africans throughout South America.
By 1537, there were already 338 slaves in Peru. In 1590, there were at least 20,000 blacks in Lima and Callao, Peru. A 17th-century census shows that in 1614, 40% of the population of Lima was black. Until the early 19th century, there was not one region of Brazil with a population of less than 50 % blacks. In fact, the earliest and largest transport of slaves was to South America, which from 1451 to 1870 received in excess of 5 million slaves or 49% of the total African Slave Trade.
Yet today in Peru less than 3% of the population is black or some combination, thereof. As elsewhere, Africans were taken from many parts of the continent, and thus came with different languages. In Peru, the population was a first widely flung and thus it was very difficult to develop a cohesive community.
The town of El Carmen, where Monica Carrillo is active, has become a tourist destination. It is also the historic site of many slave homes, still recovering from a 2007 earthquake, and a large population of descendents of this human trade. It is partly this tension between these two groups of people that have spurred the activism and youth advocacy of 27-year-old Carrillo, who at only 21 founded LUNDU.
Minority rights meets Women’s rights and HIV/AIDS, in an environment where the culture pressure dictates you must have children by 16 or 17, and poor girls are unaware they have a choice and may say NO to sex or the other aspects of the tourist trade. Carrillo and LUNDU fight to change their future.
Wikipedia does not currently have a page for the Peruvian Monica Carrillo.
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