Early activism and work arrangements of young feminists in Mexico City

ABSTRACT

The study investigates the relationship between the activism and later work life of young Mexican feminist activists in the context of social movements’ institutionalization and the precarious employment situation. Using the biographical narratives of fifteen feminists in Mexico City who were core activists during the period of high mobilization of the abortion rights movement from 2007 to 2009, this study aims to answer two questions: How does activism impact contemporary activists’ work life in an era of professionalized and institutionalized social movements? And how do their feminist identities and practices differ according to the workplace? The results reveal that (1) young feminists joined women's movement institutions through their activism, although those employment opportunities were unstable, and (2) they used reflexive strategies to manage their feminist identities amidst the uncertainty and to reconcile their work life conditions and their feminist activist identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Young adulthood
• work
• social movement
• feminism
• Mexico

Acknowledgements

The original paper was presented 2017 in the seminar of Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego. I thank all the fellows for their helpful suggestions and encouragement. The project was supported by the Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology. Agradezco especialmente a la generosidad de todas las feministas entrevistadas, protagonistas de este studio.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The statistics for this program show that 32 percent of students who receive Master's degrees go on to work in public institutions, including NGOs. Forty-eight percent of them are working in teaching and research, and 20 percent of them continued in a PhD program in Mexico or abroad (Jaiven and Perez 2005).

2 The name of groups and nongovernmental organizations will not be mentioned in this paper, and the name of interviewees will be changed.

3 Group ‘F’ was created after a feminist workshop sponsored by a feminist NGO. Group ‘D’ gathered the young activists working in reproductive rights programs from different family planning and human rights NGOs. The third group was a student group, ‘R,’ whose members declared themselves a socialist women's group.

4 They studied anthropology (4), social psychology (4), communication science (2), political science (2), Latin American studies (2) and history (1).

5 I met them in 2009 to collect data for another research project; from 2009 to 2016 I visited them once or twice annually, with interruption in 2012–2013. There were over 40 young activists that I interviewed during the whole period, but these 15 studied cases were willing to share with me their life and thoughts on every field trip I made and to keep contact with me in spite of the long distance between us.

6 Two of them were already working in a human rights NGO through relatives and friends and received gender training when they were students; afterwards, they joined the feminist movement and moved to women's NGOs.

7 ‘I know other activists who definitely do not want to be related to institutions who enter into an institutional job, such as in a civil organization or public sector … they have the idea that working in an formalized organization or an public institution is to be coopted … . Most of those friends were poor’ (Diana).

8 According to these criteria, the institutional working women are those interviewees who worked in public institutions or NGOs in their most recent job. The independent feminists are those who worked freelance or other non-institutional capacities (see Table 1).

9 Two were working independently, running their own business, one as a freelancer in all kinds of part-time work in administration. But three also belonged to other institutions, and did not have stable job positions, but their income came from the establishment: one from a political party (according to her it is not an institution but a revolutionary group), one with a scholarship to study for a PhD (which obligated her to have a regular teaching assistant position at the university), and one worked as a part-time and contractual researcher for a population policy organization. For them, it was clear that they did not work for feminist or gender-related institutions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology under Grant 104-2410-H-305-060.