2011 Sydney Latin American Film Festival

2010 Wichi Community Centre: Argentina


The Wichi Community Centre (WCC) is a non-for-profit organisation run by volunteers which was created in 1980 to obtain land titles for the Wichi community and to safeguard their culture and language.
Members of the Wichi community live in Northern Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia. Many of them have been forced to move out of their villages over the last few decades as their land has gradually been taken away from them.
The Wichi Community Centre has set up a local public primary and secondary school with teachers from the local community. They are currently developing a community garden and offer traditional weaving and woodwork training for youth in partnership with the local high school. The Wichi have built a community health centre, water pumps and other necessary infrastructure to help support the Wichi families that are still living on the land.
The Wichi Community Centre seeks to improve educational conditions for students from the community. With the help of SLAFF, the Wichi community will create bilingual bibliographic material and didactic tools to safeguard their cultural identity and history.