Ángela Camacho, activist and artist: ‘There is no perfect way of being Indigenous’

Ángela Camacho, 45, has lived a thousand lives in the two decades since she emigrated to London, or as she calls the city, “the belly of the beast.” But she’s always kept one goal in mind: becoming a “good ancestor”. Activist and artist, she consults and lectures at some of Britain’s most influential cultural institutions such as the South Bank Centre, Barbican and Tate Modern. She defines herself as a witch, an Indigenous descendant, a creative, an “ancestor in the making” and community organizer. She is also a domestic worker and caregiver of two children, Monday to Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., an activity that she does not want to give up despite her increasingly frequent cultural projects because, she says, it gives her economic freedom. But nowhere does she accept losing her identity or millenniums-old knowledge: that of her Indigenous grandmothers, two Bolivian women from La Paz who, after migrating to Buenos Aires, continued to speak Quechua and Aymara, followed the agricultural calendar, and wore their traditional chola garments.

“Maintaining legacy is a life’s work,” she explains in an interview with EL PAÍS. “There is no perfect way of being Indigenous, which is something that has taken me years to learn,” she reflects. “We are displaced, but we follow the practices of our ancestors… I am an extension of my territory, and I will not allow them to fragment me.” With these assertions, this warm-spirited woman is becoming a reference point for London’s Indigenous and Latin American migrant communities. “I was told that I was the face of ecofeminism, and I had to Google it,” she laughs.

Part of her most recent artistic work was recently exhibited in the show Against Apartheid in the southern English town of Plymouth, an exhibition on how climate change is making life impossible for part of the world’s population. Camacho’s work is an archive made up of collages of Indigenous American women that she created with her mobile phone to raise awareness of their lives, and which has been published in the form of an online encyclopedia on her Instagram account, @thebonitachola, which has more than 30,000 followers. Her goal is to give visibility to the Indigenous population to “break down the information barriers” that surround them. “We are less than 5% of the global population and we defend 80% of the world’s diversity,” she says.

She stakes her claim to belonging to this Indigenous population, albeit from the diaspora’s gray asphalt, where she has not always had it easy. She arrived as a student in the United Kingdom at the age of 23, and spent 10 years undocumented, largely because she could not afford the cost of a temporary visa, which must be renewed every two years, and in her case, amounted to the sum of $3,260. This is not uncommon. A single mother, she recalls selling cakes from a cart in the Elephant and Castle shopping center, painting faces, working as a cleaner, and, she says without shame, as a sex worker. It was precisely during this era when she constructed a network, got her visa, and came out ahead. “The community saved me. Whores saved me, and I say that proudly. My work is born from the roots of the community, it grows in and is nurtured by that space. I always go back to that point,” she says.

“Historically, we had five or six genders”

Now she seeks to leave no one behind. She does that via intergenerational embroidery workshops, designed so that the youngest members of the community — many of them orphans without knowledge of their roots — get to know their heritage. Also, with neighborhood networks in community centers, like the one in multicultural Brixton, where issues affecting the Latin American community are discussed, from labor exploitation to how to get funds for organizing cultural events.

At the museums and cultural institutions with which she also collaborates, her audience is different. “For a long time, I refused to participate in these spaces, which are not made for — but are rather, about — bodies like mine,” she says. But now, she believes such sites are essential in the quest to break away from Eurocentrism and start uncomfortable conversations. For example, about feminism, a movement that she argues was not created for Black bodies, either. Or about the colonial heritage inherent in homophobia. “Historically, we had five or six genders, two-spirits… gender was conceived in a more spiritual way. When the colonists arrived, they brought homophobia with them,” Camacho explains, alluding to research that found that some Indigenous peoples recognized more than two genders.

For Camacho, the key to curing colonialism’s harms lies in practicing “long memory.” On social media, she posts a reminder every October 31: “My culture is not your costume.” “For those who are thinking about dressing up like Pocahontas, a Hawaiian person, a chief … I will ask you to light a candle and reflect on those who have gone before, on those who are no longer here and on everything that they had to pass through before us.” She ends with an invitation: “Practice being a better ancestor in progress.”

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