Today, Worldview presents part of Jean Friedman-Rudovsky’s series on women and girls in Bolivia and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico called Ground Shifters: Stories of Women Changing Unseen Worlds. It was part of an ongoing collaboration between WBEZ and the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in the Arts & Media as part of the project “Gender, Human Rights, Leadership, and Media”.

First, in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, close to 1,500 women were disappeared over a decade. We’ll hear a profile of Marisela Ortiz, an activist who’s spent years fighting for justice for families of what’s known as “femicide”. Then, we travel to a women’s prison in La Paz, Bolivia. This prison is a miniature city—with shops, businesses, a school and even a union. We find out how its inmates exercise their rights to improve their communal home. Finally, we meet Ana, Brigida and Noemí, young girls in La Paz, Bolivia who are proud to work. In fact, they’ve unionized, along with more than one hundred thousand child workers across Latin America.