Women Leaders, Interpreters, Companions: On Participatory Methodologies and Citizenship Building in Peru

The purpose of this reflection piece is twofold: first, we give an account of the participatory methodology applied in the project "Improving women's lives through the role of social translators in rural Peru". This project, developed between 2018 and 2019, sought to make visible and highlight the role played by community leaders in Puno and Ayacucho, in the Andean south of Peru, as ad hoc interpreters and translators, in benefit of members of their communities, many of them speakers of Quechua or Aymara and Spanish, with different levels of bilingualism. Secondly, based on this experience, we consider the scope of participatory methodologies as a resource for raising awareness of bottom-up citizenship-building processes in South America.