Category Archives: Latin America

Mujeres bici-bles

Andrea María Navarrete is the founder of Mujeres Bici-bles, a bike women group with the aim to empower themselves. Mujeres Bici-bles is a Latin American social movement with headquarters in Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. Their main target is to help women to ride bikes in urban scenarios. Urban biking can be difficult for men, but it is more problematic for women specially in the patriarchal societies. Thanks to the mind of its founder, who is also a university teacher, urban cyclist and touring cyclist, this movement has quickly spread. They support other women who want to start riding a bike. For instance, in the Colombian cities of Bucaramanga and Salta, they have informal schools to teach more women pedaling.

OK, but what if I want to create a Mujeres Bici-bles group in my city? Well you can contact to Andrea María through [email protected] or Twitter (@MujeresBicicles).

She offers a talk, the group creation and, if future bikers want, interesting teachings about how to create the bike school for women in every city she travels. In return, Andrea María asks for help to move to another city and a place to spend a few days. Once the group is created, she proposes talks regarding genre perspective, and pedaling and mechanics workshops.

Titiribici

Titiribici is the artistic name of Pablo Olias, a Sevillian adventurer who rode 22,000 km in South America. He enjoyed marvelous landscapes and possibly suffered from extreme climate conditions from warm areas to snow, from mountains to salt lakes. Take into account the countries he visited: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chili, Argentina and Uruguay. Up until now, this amazing travel constitutes a great achievement, but in reality it is even greater. Not only did he rode his bike in those countries, he also did it by stretching a trailer inside which he kept his puppets. He represented a show in every village he arrived. This fact made him popular among the people and above all the children. Thousands had fun with the stories and also organized a workshop so that children could manufacture puppets, sets, scripts and developed several ideas to create stories, to set free the imagination.

He started playing with puppets 25 years ago and still preserves the pixide of this period. He has a webpage (http://www.titiribici.com) on which you can have an idea of this magic travel on a bike. Do not miss his impressive video (https://youtu.be/R0IxSo1oZXM). From this experience, he always brings his puppets with him as they can be called his close friends.