Chrysalises: Feminist Memories from Latin America and the Caribbean

Introduction

In this publication, we are setting out to recover histories, struggles, and resistance in Latin America and place ourselves in moments of the history of Nuestra América ¹– ‘Our America’ – when women have been on the front lines of the battle to build a more just world. This history encompasses an enormous diversity of sectors, geographies, climates, flavours, and sounds, an entire universe of people, of dissidents, who, step by step, have walked the path of history. We are setting out on a path to recover the history of struggles, resistance, insurrections, and revolutionary dreams that have been led by women and LGBTQ+ people throughout the region at different times in order to find the seeds of the popular Latin American feminisms that exist today.

These feminisms emerge from popular, collective struggles that are born as vital means of self-defence on the fringes of the peripheries. To speak of popular feminisms in Latin America and the Caribbean means thinking about all that women and LGBTQ+ people do every day as they fight for the common good in places where precariousness prevails. It is to speak of that intersection where the communal becomes a fundamental space to guarantee life, always in tension with the pedagogy of cruelty that governs our societies. Popular feminism raises the banner of the collective over the individual; it transforms everything that must be transformed for the decent life that the ‘nobodies’ deserve.

In addition to being organisers and leaders of national processes in various social sectors, popular feminists have set to work vigorously alongside hundreds of comrades to create and sustain a continental platform of social movements as part of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA (which translates as ‘dawn’). Founded one dawn on Venezuela’s Margarita Island by Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, ALBA is a polysemic concept that is dear to our region.

The continent’s platform of popular organisations, known as ALBA Movimientos, seeks to understand the continent’s current context through the eyes of struggle and mobilisation. Of course, in order to do this, it is essential to have material that reclaims the history of the struggles of the women and dissidents of Nuestra América who preceded what today is a struggle for the transformative power of history in every corner of our region.

Arlen Siu

The Mockingbird Tells of Arlen ²

Those who knew her say that, despite the times in which she lived, Arlen was a woman of revolutionary and advanced ideas whose intelligence was complemented by her musical talents playing the guitar, accordion, and piano as well as the gifts of writing, drawing, and painting. She was a poet, artist, intellectual, and revolutionary.

Arlen Siu was born in Jinotepe, in the department of Carazo in Nicaragua on 15 July 1955. She grew up in an intercultural family, her father a migrant of Chinese origin and her mother Nicaraguan. Considering the financial means of Arlen’s family and her intelligence, she could have achieved any of the goals that young women of her time and economic status set for themselves. However, she chose to be a guerrilla fighter, and, with that commitment, she decided to take to the mountains, where the cruelty of the Somoza dictatorship was most relentless. ³

Arlen was a gifted writer, and she used her words to express her indignation in the face of injustice. Among her most revealing pieces was the final letter she sent to her parents:

Mankind’s ⁴ determined struggle to achieve perfection is true love. We are more authentic insofar as we break down barriers and limitations, bravely and optimistically confronting the vicissitudes that appear along the way. One day, you come to discover that we are capable of more than what is asked of us, and that we can achieve what for some is forbidden or impossible.

With each of her revolutionary acts, Arlen became more authentic. Such was the case in December 1974, when after having accompanied over five hundred workers rebelling against the abuses committed by the textile company Sacos Centroamericanos, S.A. (SACSA) in Diriamba, Carazo, she organised study circles with worker leaders. In these circles, she made use of two communiqués issued by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) during their raid on Minister Chema Castillo’s house and during the release of Somoza’s captured henchmen in exchange for FSLN political prisoners.⁵ On 1 August 1975, Arlen was killed in action in El Sauce, León (in the west of Nicaragua) while covering for her comrades as they retreated during an unequal battle against three hundred armed national guards. Mario Estrada, Gilberto Rostrán, Julia Herrera de Pomares, Mercedes Reyes, Hugo Arévalo, and Juan and Leónidas Espinoza were also killed.

Arlen Siu did not live to see the triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution in 1979, but she nonetheless played a key role in the struggle and in organising workers and the population. Even after her death, she inspired the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (Rural Workers’ Association) in their work building a rural workers’ social movement through her poem María Rural (‘Rural María’).

Rural María

Dona Nina

‘I began my activism very early, without realising I was an activist, you know? As a feminist, from home, in the struggle for independence’. ⁶

-Dona Nina

Maria Madalena dos Santos, better known as Dona Nina, is seventy-three years old and has two daughters, three sons, three granddaughters, and two grandsons. She was born in the quilombola⁷community of Cafundó dos Crioulos in the city of Santa Maria da Vitória, Bahía State, where she began and continues her activism. Dona Nina is a rural quilombola woman, a popular educator, trade unionist, and the president of her community association.

Dona Nina became involved in organising around the struggle of rural women in the early 1980s following the attacks on peasants in her home region, including through land evictions, displacement caused by the construction of dams, and the extreme exploitation of their labour, which mostly fell on peasant women who, at the time, received a quarter of what men received for a day’s work. She later learned that the same phenomenon was taking place in several regions across the country, and that rural women were also organising there.

In the 1980s, there was a resurgence of popular organisations in Brazil. In Bahía, Dona Nina, together with other rural women, realised that they needed autonomous and self-organised processes; without this, their demands would not be included as part of broader struggles. So, she became one of the coordinators of the National Platform of Rural Women Workers (ANMTR) and actively participated in the struggles to ensure that social security programmes and protections would be included in the 1988 Constitution. She was also the coordinator of the national campaign ‘No undocumented rural workers’.

The fight for a better world led Dona Nina to travel all over Brazil and the world, where she participated in debates on the need for a global peasant organisation and in the first congresses of CLOC/La Vía Campesina.⁸Dona Nina was instrumental in the process to create the national Peasant Women’s Movement (MMC) in 2004, which emerged together with the international peasants’ movement. As the coordinator of peasant women in the northeast, she travelled to several states to discuss the importance of a national movement so that the feminist and peasant struggle would become a reality. Dona Nina recalls: ‘It was not easy; some people didn’t want it [to happen], and they got in the way, but we knew it was important that women be fully included in the term “peasant”. Today, we have achieved that’.

At the age of 73, Dona Nina continues to contribute to the political coordination of the MMC in Bahía. She is a guardian of indigenous seeds and of the Cerrado savanna, serving as inspiration for resistance and commitment to women’s struggles in the fields, forests, and wetlands. She is part of the living history of popular peasant feminism.

Las Bartolinas

‘The double discrimination we suffer as women and as Indigenous peasants in our families, communities, organisations, and society as a whole has led us to fight against the violation of our fundamental rights and to defend our full and equal participation in decision-making’.

–Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Peasant Women of Bolivia

The Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Peasant Women of Bolivia (whose members are known as ‘Las Bartolinas’) is the most influential women’s movement in Bolivia and is well-known far beyond the country’s borders.

The confederation, named in homage to the Aymara hero Bartolina Sisa (one of the most emblematic women of Latin America’s eighteenth century anti-colonial struggles), was founded on 10 January 1980 in a national congress, continuing the legacy of the decisive role that many women played through the peasant women’s unions during the period of military dictatorships. This movement emerged and developed as Bolivia rebuilt its democracy and as popular organisations began to regroup. It was created with the vision that rural women would fully participate in this process through their own organisation and would be able to fully participate in roadblocks, hunger strikes, marches, and other forms of collective action by peasants.

Through their actions, Las Bartolinas seek to reclaim land and food sovereignty as well as dignity among Bolivia’s peasant and Indigenous women. The confederation seeks the equal participation of women in political, social, and economic spaces through the Aymara framework of chacha warmi ⁹as a concept of gender equality. They also promote the ongoing education and training of women as the only way to free their minds from oppression and ignorance and achieve true freedom.

Las Bartolinas fight for the social, economic, political, and cultural advancement of peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Bolivian women. They also strive to build a political platform for peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Bolivian women based on their nationality, political programme, unity, reciprocity, and solidarity with the country’s labour and popular organisations.

Furthermore, they are part of the fight against illiteracy in the countryside, demanding public and free education for children in coordination with parents, teachers, and education authorities and promoting bonds of fraternity, solidarity, and reciprocity among the peasant and indigenous women and girls of Bolivia. This process must also defend fundamental rights, including women’s rights to education and food sovereignty, and guarantee gender equality and the full participation of all women.

Las Bartolinas also fight for land and territorial rights and ownership, which are key to the sovereignty of indigenous and rural peoples. In doing so, they seek to disseminate and reaffirm the cultural and historical identity of the indigenous peoples and nationalities of Bolivia in order to build a unified, plurinational state.

Three Periods in the History of ‘Bartolina’ Women

The Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Peasant Women of Bolivia was shaped by a progression of events, beginning with its incipient debate on its role within the peasant movement. This included the need to build an autonomous organisation rather than join the existing organisation formed by men, the Unified Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (CSUTB). So, Las Bartolinas built their own identity as an autonomous movement of peasant women, forming their own confederation with the same influence and importance in the Bolivian sociopolitical scene.

The Bartolina Sisa Confederation soon took on a leading role in the country. In 1994, the confederation was among the organisations that founded the Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (IPSP), later to be known as the MAS-IPSP, with the aim of securing a leading role and direct participation in the country’s parliamentary politics. MAS-IPSP would later become the party through which the working, indigenous, and peasant classes came to power for over a decade beginning with the presidency of Evo Morales.

During this period, the organisation directly participated in the state and in forming public policy, such as seeking to guarantee the political participation of Bolivian women through a policy of gender parity. It has since become impossible to speak of Bolivian politics without recognising the pioneering role of Las Bartolinas. Today, women who are part of the organisation hold senior positions in the state and are leaders of regional politics.

Las Bartolinas’ leading role among Bolivian social movements and their influence on Bolivian public policy represent a huge step forward in terms of women’s political participation in the country. It is important for this successful example of women’s advancement in such key spaces to spread, but it is also the duty of all organisations to guarantee women the full exercise of their political rights not only in Bolivia, but across the Global South.

Back cover

Notes