Elvira Espejo Ayca | |
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| Born | 1981 (age 42–43) Oruro Department, Bolivia |
| Occupation(s) | Museum director, poet, textile artist [1] |
| Known for | Poet, essayist and musician |
Elvira Espejo Ayca (born 1981) is an Indigenous Bolivian artist, poet, and the director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz until 2020. In 2020 she was a joint winner of the Goethe Medal for improving cultural exchange. She is Aymara and Quechua and speaks both of the Aymara and Quechua languages. [1]
Ayca was born in the Bolivian Oruro Department in 1981. She was brought up in an Indigenous community in the province of Avaroa. She was not only encouraged to have ambition and to leave her Ayllu (village community to learn more) named Qaqachaka, but she always remembered her own culture. [2] She went to high school in Challapata where she was attracted to painting. [3] She went on to higher education in La Paz where she studied at Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes Hernando Siles . [2]
She went on to study languages which are not written down. [2] She speaks the Aymara and the Quechua language. [1] Her first ambition had been to paint but after she heard a Japanese Haiku she started to write poetry. [3]
In 2006 she published awutuq parla and Phaqar kirki-t ́ikha takiy takiy – Canto a las Flores. The latter is a book of poems which won her "best international poet" at the World Festival of Venezuelan Poetry in the following year. [1]
She became the director of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore in La Paz. She was sacked in June 2020 by the Brazilian provisional government despite international protest. [4]
In 2020 she was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside pro-European English writer Ian McEwan and Zukiswa Wanner. Wanner was the first African woman to win the award. [5] Ayca was chosen because of the cross cultural exchange she encourages between Europe and South America. The German commission who awarded the medal called her a "true bridge builder". [6]
Quechua, also called Runasimi in Southern Quechua, is an indigenous language family that originated in central Peru and thereafter spread to other countries of the Andes. Derived from a common ancestral "Proto-Quechua" language, it is today the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family of the Americas, with the number of speakers estimated at 8–10 million speakers in 2004, and just under 7 million from the most recent census data available up to 2011. Approximately 13.9% of Peruvians speak a Quechua language.
The demographic characteristics of the population of Bolivia are known from censuses, with the first census undertaken in 1826 and the most recent in 2012. The National Institute of Statistics of Bolivia (INE) has performed this task since 1950. The population of Bolivia in 2012 reached 10 million for the first time in history. The population density is 9.13 inhabitants per square kilometer, and the overall life expectancy in Bolivia at birth is 68.2 years. The population has steadily risen from the late 1800s to the present time. The natural growth rate of the population is positive, which has been a continuing trend since the 1950s; in 2012, Bolivia's birth rate continued to be higher than the death rate. Bolivia is in the third stage of demographic transition. In terms of age structure, the population is dominated by the 15–64 segment. The median age of the population is 23.1, and the gender ratio of the total population is 0.99 males per female.
The Aymara or Aimara, people are an indigenous people in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America. About 2.3 million live in northwest Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Their ancestors lived in the region for many centuries before becoming a subject people of the Inca Empire in the late 15th or early 16th century, and later during the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th century. With the Spanish American wars of independence (1810–1825), the Aymaras became subjects of the new nations of Bolivia and Peru. After the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), Chile annexed territory with the Aymara population.
Andean music is a group of styles of music from the Andes region in South America.
Aymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over one million speakers. Aymara, along with Spanish and Quechua, is an official language in Bolivia and Peru. It is also spoken, to a much lesser extent, by some communities in northern Chile, where it is a recognized minority language.
Luzmila Carpio is a Bolivian singer and songwriter who has performed in Spanish and Quechua. She also has served as the Bolivian ambassador to France from 2006 to 2010.
Quechua people or Quichua people may refer to any of the indigenous peoples of South America who speak the Quechua languages, which originated among the Indigenous people of Peru. Although most Quechua speakers are native to Peru, there are some significant populations in Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina.
South Bolivian Quechua, also known as Central Bolivian Quechua, is a dialect of Southern Quechua spoken in Bolivia and adjacent areas of Argentina, where it is also known as Colla. It is not to be confused with North Bolivian Quechua, which is spoken on the northern Andean slopes of Bolivia and is phonologically distinct from the South Bolivian variety. Estimates of the number of speakers of South Bolivian Quechua range from 2.3 to 2.8 million, making it the most spoken indigenous language in Bolivia, just slightly greater than Aymara, with roughly 2 million speakers in Bolivia. In comparison, the North Bolivian dialect has roughly 116,000 speakers.
The Goethe Medal, also known as the Goethe-Medaille, is a yearly prize given by the Goethe-Institut honoring non-Germans "who have performed outstanding service for the German language and for international cultural relations". It is an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany. The prize used to be given on 22 March, the anniversary of Goethe's death. Since 2009, it has been given on 28 August, the anniversary of Goethe's birth. The first awards were made in 1955. In the intervening years, through 2018, a total of 348 women and men from 65 countries have been so honored. It is not to be confused with Goethe-Medaille für Kunst und Wissenschaft (1932–1944) and Goetheplakette der Stadt Frankfurt am Main.
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Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian feminist, sociologist, historian, and subaltern theorist. She is Emeritus Professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia, where she taught Sociology for over thirty years. She draws upon anarchist theory as well as Quechua and Aymara cosmologies. She is a former director and longtime member of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina. The Taller de Historia Oral Andina has conducted an ongoing critique of Western epistemologies through writings and activism for nearly two decades. She is also an activist who works directly with indigenous movements in Bolivia, such as the Katarista movement and the coca growers movement.
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Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2014, Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature.
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Irina Lazarevna Scherbakowa (Scherbakova) (in Russian : Ирина Лазаревна Щербакова) (born 1949) is a Russian historian of the modern age, an author and a founding member of Memorial. She was awarded the Carl von Ossietsky Prize for Contemporary History and Politics in 2014, and the Goethe Medal in 2017. She has been studying Russia's modern history since the 1970s. Memorial was identified as one of Russia's "foreign agents" in 2016. In 2022, Memorial has been co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dora Justiniano de la Rocha (1925-2016), full name Dora Justiniano Callau de la Rocha, was a linguist, educator, and poet from the Beni department of Bolivia.
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