This issue of the NACLA Report is written, illustrated, and edited by a constellation of women from across the Americas. The essays and articles herein represent different facets of women’s organizing and movements from north to south: from daily resistance against anti-Black state violence in Brazil to the swells of women in green handkerchiefs taking and holding space in Argentina; from Ixil women’s central role in rebuilding communal structures in the wake of genocide to searches for the disappeared in Northern Mexico.
Sisterhood, friendship, and love motivate us to come together and to gather strength so that we can live and rebel against the rot of capital, patriarchy, and nationalism. Women, understood as those who self- identify as such, stand for life in the broadest sense, for human and more-than-human life, for rivers and forests, for clean water and air. We stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of our ability to make choices about our own lives: from our right to choose to become partners or mothers, to our right to exist-in-movement.
Women today are actively creating revolutions, according to veteran organizers Verónica Gago and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar. In their piece in the issue, they look at how women’s voices, bodies, and actions break and rupture the status quo in our daily lives and in public spaces in towns and cities throughout the hemisphere, framing the issue with an urgent call to the ongoing uprising of women in Latin America.
From there, our other contributors write about forms of resistance in different contexts: from the soccer field, as Brenda Elsey recounts in her discussion of women athletes from Jamaica to Argentina fighting for justice on and off the pitch; to the streets of Bogotá, where Julia Zulver reports on an Afro-Colombian women-led collective challenging white supremacy, police abuse, and sexism. Christen Smith reflects on how these kinds of abuses disproportionately affect Black women in Brazil, and how activists are reframing how we think about trauma. And an interview with musician and rapper Ana Tijoux, conducted by Hiba Bou Akar and Roosbelinda Cárdenas, traces how performance is a form of solidarity that creates South- South ties of resistance.
A c ent r a l t heme i n t h i s rep or t fo c u s e s on connections to the land as cr ucial to women’s organizing, as Hilda Lloréns and Ruth Santiago argue. They shed light on an eco-socialist collective in Puerto Rico that has helped rebuild after Hurricane Maria and promotes a community relationship to nature. Marxa Chávez and Claudia López write from Tariquía, Bolivia, where a women-led struggle against oil exploration is challenging state union structures and power-brokers. Amid ongoing repression against Maya Ixil communities, Gladys Tzul Tzul shares her insights from Guatemala into the power of collective work on the land—often led by women—in building strength and memory. And issue co-editor Dawn Paley examines how, in northern Mexico, family members of the disappeared, led by women, search desert plains for the thousands killed or disappeared over the course of Mexico’s decade-long war on drugs.
The Report also centers the voices of members of the LGBTI+ community who are standing up for immigrant justice and human rights in bitterly polarized contexts. María Inés Taracena reports from the first LGBTI+ migrant caravan, which traveled from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border last summer. The members of the caravan faced unimaginable challenges—as Suyapa Portillo and Jennicet Gutiérrez write, Roxsana Hernández, a transgender woman from Honduras, died while in ICE detention this year, an unspeakable horror for the trans community—but their solidarity and unity also give them great strength. Such strength is necessary in the face of new punitive laws that make sex work more dangerous for the trans Latinx people who rely on internet services to find clients, as Jamie Hagen describes in her piece.
Finally, we revisit the #NiUnaMenos movement. How do we analyze its novelty, shortcomings, and future? Scholar and socialist activist Luna Follegati reflects in an interview conducted by Verónica Schild on the movement led by women university students in Chile. Taken together, these pieces powerfully highlight how the destruction of patriarchy, from the highlands of Guatemala to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, depends on the destruction of capitalism.
Through these pages, we remember Marielle Franco, an Afro-Brazilian activist and politician gunned down on March 14, 2018 in Rio de Janeiro. We remember Luana Barbosa dos Reis, an Afro-Brazilian lesbian who was brutally beaten and killed by the police. We remember Mir iam Elizabeth Rodríguez Martínez, who led a search group in Tamaulipas, Mexico following the disappearance of her daughter, killed on Mother’s Day, 2017.” We remember Berta Cáceres, inter nationally-k now n Honduran environmental rights activist who was gunned down in her home in 2016. We remember Susana Chávez, the borderlands poet who coined the rallying cry “Ni una muerta más” (not another death), who was murdered and mutilated in Ciudad Juárez in 2011. We remember Guadalupe Campanur, a member of P urepecha communal organizations in Cherán, Michoacán, killed in January 2018. We remember Ixil midwife Juana Ramírez Santiago, killed in Guatemala in September. We remember Roxsana Hernández, the trans woman who died in ICE custody this year. As we speak their names, we remember these and so many other women who have given their lives to daily struggles for justice and a better world. In this NACLA Report, we give voice to women to talk about our resistance and our struggles.
The authors of our Around the Region section, though not explicitly centered on feminist struggles, likewise write from women’s perspectives. From Brazil, Daniela Mussi reports on the rise of a misogynistic, fascistic Right and its likely impact on women’s lives. Rebecca Hanson provides a crucial corrective from the ground in Venezuela on the country’s migration crisis, and Angélica Durán Martínez considers how Colombian president Iván Duque could set back progress in seeking alternatives to the drug war and unravel the country’s fragile peace.
Our reviews return to questions of trauma and resistance. Rosemary Joyce’s take on Dana Frank’s The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup revisits the 2009 Honduras coup that overthrew Manuel Zelaya, focusing on the activists who have resisted the onslaught of human rights abuses that followed. Marina Sitrin reflects on the suffering and survival strateg ies of women who were tor tured dur ing Argentina’s dictatorship as examined by Barbara Sutton in Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina. The book provides important lessons for women’s movements across the region and the world.
A demonstration against feminicide in Mexico in 2013 (LUCERO GONZÁLEZ/FLICKR)
Lastly, a note on our cover and some the images featured in the issue. These linocut images are by Mujeres Grabando Resistencia (Women Engrav ing Resistance), who form part of the international, Mexico City-based #VivasNosQueremos campaign. We hope our readers enjoy the graphic interventions by this collective of women and consider repurposing these pages for a wider audience.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dawn Paley
Dawn Paley is a journalist and author of Drug War Capitalism (AK Press 2014), which was recently published in México as Capitalismo antidrogas: Una guerra contra el pueblo (Libertad Bajo Palabra, 2018).
Laura Weiss
Laura Weiss is Managing Editor of NACLA. She holds a Masters’ degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University. She has published on immigration and human rights in Mexico in The Nation, World Politics Review, In These Times, Latino USA, Jacobin, and more.