Feminist history in Latin America

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Feminist movements in Latin America started at the grassroots level in each of the distinct nation-states. It is false to presume what the previous author of this page stated: "The Feminist movement in Latin American countries began only in the 1920s after inspirations from outside influences. Because of the necessity of outside influence, feminism took hold only in larger cities where those influences could be heard. Everywhere else in Latin America, the tradition of patriarchy stood strong."

Feminism in Latin America did not rise because patriarchy lost power, as was also mentioned in the article I'm reediting, but because women in many different parts of Latin America were forced to act. During the Sandinista Revolution from 1979-1990, there was significant involvement of Women and the Armed Struggle in Nicaragua. There are also many examples of feminist leaders in Latin America. The reason many of us don't know them is because it serves our system not to know them. Also there is a long standing history of undermining the words of women that can back this up.

Luisa Capetillo

Domitila Barrios de Chungara

Carolina De Jesus

Sandino's Daughters

Gabriela Mistral

Flora Tristan

Leonor Villegas de Magnon

Rachel Cuomo

Paulina Luisi was from Uruguay and represented the country in international women's conferences around the world. Berta Lutz, a Brazilian, organized the Brazilian Federation for Feminine Progress.

After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Latin America began to lose its sovereignty to a new era of colonialism. That is, the rise of free capitalism. During this time, Luisa Capetillo, a social anarchist woman coming to age in a time that increasingly assimilated more bodies into its campaign for democracy. In Mi Opinion, Capetillo argues for a complete reconstruction of social and economic values in order for women and workers to attain emancipation. Mi Opinion is a call to restructure hetero-normative relationships, religion, education, and labor laws and overthrow the power of the State.

There are so many more women who started at the grassroots level in Latin America. It was not something women looked elsewhere to for example, because in many circumstances in Latin America, "elsewhere" was part of the reason they found themselves in such desperate circumstances.

This Bridge we Call Home" Migdalia Reyes Routledge: New York

Latin American nations have historically held a political and economic Third World vulnerability, leading women to share a common legacy of oppression. The Latin American feminist movement has proposed that while economic dependency, poverty, and colonial relationships with western nations are key to understanding the conditions in which Latin American women live, patriarcha ideologies--such as traditional norms and values about women's social status and economic role, little access to formal political structures and educational resources, unequal division of labor and the exploitative nature of women's work, racism directed primarily at women of color (that is, of Native and African descent Mestizas), and the historical heritage of machismo and Marianismo characterize women's lives. Despite these conditions, women have always organized. For example, women organized in Nicaragua to assist with the revolutionary process during the 1979-1990 Sandinista rule through a very successful organization known as AMNLAE (Asociacion de Mujeres Nicaraguenses Luisa Amanda Espinosa). Later latin American women were organizing in the early 1980s biannual, regionwide Latin American and Caribbean feminist Encuentros offered women a vehicle for coming together and becoming politicized, and for developing strategies, to fight against prevailing sexism, racism, economic disparity, neo/colonialism, and political repression. While the organizing efforts focused on heterosexual women's issues, in 1987 lesbian feminist women sponsored the First Latin American and Caribbean Lesbian Feminist Encuentro with the goal of building a lesbian social movement." p. 464

[edit] Further reading

Books

• Castellanos, Rosario. Selections from Another Way to Be: Selected Works of Rosario Castellanos. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
• Jaquette, Jane. The Women's Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to Democracy, Routledge 1989
• Kampwirth, Karen. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Ohio UP 2004
• Lavrin, Asuncion. Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: 1890-1940, University of Nebraska Press 1995
• Miller, Francesca. Latin American Women and the search for social justice, Univ. Press of New England, 1991
• Shayne,Julie D., The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba, Rutgers University Press 2004

Articles

Alarcon, Norma. “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” Cultural Critique. No. 13, Autumn 1989, pp. 57-87.

Alvarez, Sonia E. “Translating the Global: Effects of Transnational Organizing on Local Feminist Discourses and Practices in Latin America.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Vol 1., no. 1, 2000, pp. 29-67.

Alvarez, Sonia E., Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Stoltz Chincilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro, and Marcelo Ríos Tobar. “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 537-579.

Azize-Vargas, Yamila. "The Emergence of Feminism in Puerto Rico, 1870-1930." in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History. 3rd edition. (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 268-275.

Acosta Belén, Edna and Christine E. Bose. “U.S. Latina and Latin American Feminisms: Hemispheric Encounters.” Sign: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 25, No. 4, Summer 2000, pp.1113-1119.

Curiel, Ochy. “At the 9th Feminist Encounter: Inertia in the Age of Globalization”. Unpublished manuscript translated by Ginetta E.B. Candelario.

Fregoso, Rosa Linda. “Toward a Planetary Civil Society.” meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 1-29.

García, Alma. “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse.” Gender and Society. Vol. 3, No. 2, June 1989, pp. 217-238.

Kaplan, Temma. “Reversing the Shame and Gendering the Memory.” Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society. Vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, pp. 179-199.

Asuncion Lavrin, International Feminisms: Latin American Alternatives in: Gender and History 10 (1998), 519–34.

Reyes, Migdalia. “The Latin American and Caribbean Feminist/Lesbian Encuentros: Crossing the Bridge of Our Diverse Identiteis.” Gloria Anzaldua and Ana Louise Keating, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 463-470.

Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. “Women Hollering Transfronteriza Feminisms.” Cultural Studies. Vol. 13, no. 2, 1999, pp. 251-262.

Sternbach, Nancy , Feminism in Latin America : from Bogota to San Bernardo in: SIGNS, Winter 1992, pp.393-434.