Andrea Tock

Andrea describes herself as “a grassroots justice defender and an intersectional feminist activist working on the legal empowerment of Indigenous women and girls in Guatemala.” She is “building community power through participatory research and learning activities that center Indigenous women and girls while validating them as subjects of rights who freely exercise their agency.” As Director of Impact and Learning at the Women’s Justice Initiative (WJI), Andrea's work speaks to power and traditional patriarchal structures embedded in Guatemalan society. WJI addresses the challenges Indigenous women face by providing free, culturally-grounded, bilingual legal support, rights education, and leadership training in more than 75 rural communities in Guatemala. WJI operates four programs: Women’s Rights Education, Legal Services, Community Advocates, and Adolescent Girls. WJI also increases participants’ access to justice by providing mobile legal outreach in Kaqchikel, the native Mayan language, to rural communities, sometimes incorporating video-conferencing technology to improve accessibility for hard-to-reach communities and women with disabilities. WJI has found that its combined training and service delivery model is successful in empowering women to identify their legal needs and initiate legal processes both in cases of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and in securing economic rights through land titling, child support, alimony, and inheritance cases.

Andrea is active in several feminist initiatives in Guatemala including the Feminist Assembly, a space for reflection and political co-creation among different feminist activists around the country. She is part of the editorial board of La Cuerda, a feminist magazine. In the near future, she would like to create better ways to share the knowledge she has acquired through her work and life experience with other grassroots feminists and human rights defenders to build collective action that will allow everyone—especially women and girls—to live lives free from violence. She earned a BA in Political Science from Rafael Landivar University, an M.Sc in Social Studies of Gender from Lund University, and spent a semester at American University.