The Daisy Wende Archive: A window into Bolivian history, now on Wikimedia Commons

In April 2024, while reviewing some articles about relevant Bolivian women, the team at Wikimedistas de Bolivia noticed an information gap on Wikipedia about one of the country’s most important fashion designers, Daisy Wende. Once the article was created by a volunteer, we reached the Wende family to ask them for a picture that could illustrate the recently created page. After we expressed our intention to the family, our joy was immense when we received an invitation to digitize not just a picture of this great designer, who celebrated her 95th birthday this year, but also a vast amount of pictures from her professional career and images that tell the political and cultural history of Bolivia during the second half of the 20th century.

That is how we created a first sample of about 80 pictures from Wende’s archive, which helped us illustrate the article about the designer, and improve many other articles about Bolivia with images of politicians, local celebrities from Bolivian cultural circles, and pictures relating to the camelid wool and textile industry in Bolivia, depicting its past and present impact on the country’s economy, as Daisy Wende is one of the pioneers who popularized alpaca fibers outside Bolivia. Thanks to this, an effort by the team at Wikimedistas de Bolivia, family archives that may desire to release relevant documents were contacted, and there’s currently a category on Wikimedia Commons listing all the pictures donated by Daisy Wende and her family, which we strongly recommend. 

Below, you’ll find some digitized images that were released into free knowledge domain. These are very important to illustrating the history of Bolivia on Wikimedia projects. We look forward to continuing the digitization of the Daisy Wende archive, as well as other private collections that could join the Wikimedia ecosystem sharing their archival treasures with the free knowledge realm in Bolivia.