Ana Lía Gonzáles Magueño didn’t intend to be a revolutionary, or a subversive. “I just wanted to climb with my mom and my dad, and I was happy. We have such beautiful mountains.”
The Indigenous Aymara woman comes from a family that guides, prepares meals, and ferries loads for climbing expeditions in the Bolivian Andes. In 2015, eleven Aymara women who worked as porters and cooks decided they too wanted to stand on summits, so they started climbing on their own, using borrowed or rented gear. Their first summit was 19,974-foot Huayna Potosí just outside La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. Next, they tackled three more high peaks as training for their ultimate goal, 22,831-foot Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside Asia. They called themselves “cholitas escaladoras”—the climbing cholitas.
New Zealand photographer Todd Antony, who is fascinated by colorful subcultures, traveled to Bolivia to photograph the women as a personal project. He wrote, “The word ‘cholita,’ as these Indigenous Aymara women of Bolivia
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