My context for understanding the radical black female subject is a particular formulation of the black radical tradition that combines intellectual and activist work in the service of one's oppressed communities.
—Carole Boyce Davies, The Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008)

Nós, mulheres negras estamos nas ruas para denunciar e combater o racismo e o sexismo estamos reafirmando a trajetória de luta de nossas ancestrais, mulheres que foram arrancadas de suas famílias, sociedades, culturas, modos de viver na África, mulheres que criaram um modo de vida neste continente chamado América.
—CMA Hiphop, "25 de Julho Dia da Mulher Negra da América Latina e do Caribe" (2008)

Introduction

The extent to which July 25, the Day of the Black Woman in Latin America and the Caribbean, has been celebrated since its creation in 1992 is difficult to document. Rarely is the date or its significance mentioned. And I am doubtful that state recognition of black women's labor, politics, and cultures is possible, given that many Latin American expressions of public pride in black womanhood conjure up images of political subalterity, of feminist solidarity located on the fringes of black activism, and of desires of geographically boundless human dignities emerging from revolutionary ideals instead of the everyday realities of African descendant women. This essay is my attempt to reverse this tendency by restoring—rather than diminishing—the transnational black feminist possibilities in the Americas.

Black women have the poorest quality of life and the worst chances of survival, according to the human development indexes for Latin American nations, such as Brazil (Beato 2004; Lovell 1999; Lovell and Wood 1998). Yet this form of gendered racial class exclusion has inspired rather than hindered their ability to resist. Black women in Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere in the Americas share similar life experiences with racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia—all of which have led to shared political interests (Santos 2007; Safa 2006). For instance, when the marchers on July 25 shout, "Power to the black woman!" across Latin American cities, they mean to affirm a collective empowerment and to convey the urgency of political action both locally and globally. Political pessimism is not welcome.

This exploratory essay provides a brief reflection on the diasporic dimension of black women's politics, specifically how black women in Latin America understand their experiences, identities, and social activism in relationship to other black women throughout the Americas. What interests me, in addition to the knowledge production and political organizing among black feminists in Latin America, are the various attempts at forming a transnational community of African descendant peoples in the anti-sexism and anti-racism struggle. Focusing on the politics of geographic difference shapes the formation of a black diasporic feminist agenda, specifically the ethics and politics of crossing Latin American borders. I reaffirm the idea that transnational frameworks and actions are integral to the black women-led social justice project.

Groundings with my Sisters: Why Solidarity, and Why an Hemispheric Solidarity?

As the title of this essay and the introductory paragraph indicate, I implicate myself as a Jamaican-born U.S. feminist who has traveled throughout communities of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean for most of my life. My ongoing ethnographic work on black women's activism in Brazil is inextricably tied to my own yearning to unite scholarship and political action in ways that aim to improve the lives of all black women, "my sisters," as well as myself. The title also references the Guyanese activist scholar Walter Rodney's landmark text The Groundings with my Brothers (1969), in which he narrates the history of the Jamaican Black Power movement of the 1960s and describes how solidarity forms in the black world. Rodney uses the term "groundings" to define the process of building solidarity as black people:

I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of Black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because, that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting down together to reason, to 'ground,' as the Brothers [Sisters] say. We have to 'ground together' . . .. Now the new understanding is that Brothers [Sisters] must talk to each other (Rodney 1990: 78).

The term "grounding" is significant here for the purpose of understanding the roles women play in black liberation struggles. I consider myself one participant among many other black women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rodney's political passion for diasporic connections becomes salient when we, as "sisters," are considered, too.

In this re-inscribing of the term "sister" in black international "groundings" in Latin America, I also cannot ignore Manning Marable's pro-feminist essay, "Groundings with my Sisters: Patriarchy and the Exploitation of Black Women" (2001), which critiques the tendency of black liberation movements to erase women from political memory, particularly the importance of black female radical thought and action. This erasure represents one aspect of patriarchal exploitation and violence in knowledge production, where black women are rendered invisible, and black women's anti-sexist critiques are either ignored or viewed as racial betrayal. Furthermore, Marable's reference to "groundings with my sisters" reflects a need for "reasoning" between black radical men and women's scholarship in a way that pushes for greater ideological exchange, the building of cross-gender solidarity, and unity in the struggle to end patriarchal practice in black communities.

Carole Boyce Davies's most recent text, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008), addresses both this recognition of black women's radical thought and praxis, as well as the urgency for reasoning among black feminist thinkers and activists. For Davies (2008), Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian-born African-American intellectual and activist, represents the general silencing of black left radicalism in black feminist and black diaspora studies in the U.S. and the Caribbean. As Davies asks in her introductory chapter, "How could someone who had lived in the United States from the age of eight, who had been so central to black and communist political organizing throughout the 1930s and 1940s, up to the mid-1950s, simply disappear?" (1-2). In her reversal of this collective forgetting, Davies argues that, although Jones' state-sponsored deportation from the U.S. to Great Britain expands the definitions of diaspora, the Black Atlantic, and national belonging, her disappearance illustrates just how possible it is to displace both black radicalism and women's radicalism. In her text, Davies indicts not only the anti-left U.S. government that actively disappeared communists from within the geographic space of the nation but also the black liberation and feminist activists and intellectuals who nourished the omission of "radical black left female subjects" (18) from histories of anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and workers' rights struggles. Davies argues that the lacuna of black scholars' theoretical travel "outside the border of U.S. thought" toward radical black women like Claudia Jones ignores vast political views in black history, as well as the "global and local imbrications" of black resistance.

Black women's radicalism can be read, then, as attentive to discourses of geography, given that narratives of belonging within and across territories participate in the global positioning of black diaspora protests. As Davies writes, "Recovering Claudia Jones is a more developed understanding of the transnational/African diaspora subject, whose movement outside of circumscribing national space renders her nationless" (7). The concept of the African or black diaspora concerns a transnational historical and contemporary production of black individual and collective identities. I want to invoke here Avtar Brah's definition of diaspora as "an interpretive frame referencing the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of these contemporary forms of migrancy" (1996: 186). Brah's idea of diaspora "signals the processes of multi-locationality across geographical, cultural, and psychic boundaries" (194). For black women, the African diaspora suggests the articulations of their subject positions vis-à-vis fixed geographical spaces and migratory experiences (193). Blacks rooted culturally within the diaspora both "feel at home" and struggle for inclusion within their various transnational communities. The back-and-forth, up-and-down crossings of black diaspora communities sometimes imply returning to a "home" abroad, sometimes in Africa. But it also means claiming a permanent space within new geographic locations, such as the Americas.

It is in this vein that I enter the intellectual process of understanding black feminist thought and social activism in Latin America as part of the global black radical tradition. A certain militancy lies within Latin American feminist thinking—a militancy found in Claudia Jones' perspective on black women's social positioning, as described by Davies: "If all workers are exploited because of the usurping of the surplus value of their labor, then black women—bereft of any kind of institutional mechanism to conquer this exploitation, and often assumed to have to work unaccountable hours without recompense—live a life of superexploitation beyond what Marx had identified as a the workers' lot," (2). Thus, a crucial reason for sisterly "grounding" is "to talk about international solidarity in the black world" (81) and to develop strategies to address black women's specific needs as the most marginalized. At an ideological level, black women in Latin America are necessarily engaged in an international struggle because their histories, experiences, and cultures are international in form. For example, high rates of HIV/AIDS infection, maternal mortality, unemployment, and forced sterilization among black women provide evidence of a common struggle—and further convince us of the importance of feminist "groundings." As Eliza Noh writes, "Third world women and women of color have always been concerned with cross-national issues of labor exploitation, imperialism, migration, and racialized gender," (quoted in Davies 2008: 23).

From this perspective, I am very purposeful about giving little credence to the many critiques of identity politics that dismiss building political communities based on commonalities as racialized, gendered, and classed subjects. I am inspired not only by black women's action amidst the material reality of entrenched discrimination and exclusion, such as in the case of labor exploitation, but also of their firm defense of experience as a basis for forging group identity and organizing politics on all levels. Moreover, my preliminary thinking about these ideas have been heavily influenced by U.S. and Latin American black feminist thinkers, such as Patricia Hill Collins and Sueli Carneiro, who have asserted, like Claudia Jones, that black women who tend to occupy the margins do not question the validity of their experiences. For black women and the everyday working and non-working poor, experience is the lexicon of their lives, as well as the source of inventing new forms of solidarity. This leads me to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, the feminist academic and activist who argues that identity politics is neither an "unstable" nor a "merely strategic" approach to forging group solidarity. As the organization of black women in Latin America demonstrates, black identity or black womanhood is not always a "natural" basis for developing political alliances. Rather, class, gender, and other aspects of racial difference are always at play in group solidarity. Mohanty points to this in her writings about solidarity:

I define solidarity in terms of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities. Rather than assuming an enforced communality of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work together (2003: 7).

Worth noting is that Mohanty's definition of solidarity provides an adequate response to recent postmodern skepticism about politics and identity. She argues that these skeptics have ignored the importance of "experience" in identity construction, a dismissal that discounts the possibility of identity as a basis of progressive group solidarity and political mobilization (6). These critics not only deny race as a social category—and racism as a central aspect of social organization—but also provide "discourses of diversity and pluralism grounded in an apolitical, often individualized identity politics," (e.g., the multi/bi-racial movement). Similarly, as South African scholar and activist Steve Biko affirms, "The interrelationship between the consciousness of the self and the emancipatory programme is of paramount importance," (1986: 49); and as Begoña Arextaga states, "When the experiences of women from subordinate groups . . . is what is obscured, denied, excluded from public discourse, to foreground experience might be a necessary political act" (1997: 8). Hence the title "Groundings with my Sisters," which expresses both my recognition of the interrelated complex experiences of black women globally and how this political positioning informs feminist and diasporic solidarity. A focus on experience, called for by a number of scholars (myself included), emphasizes the centrality of a "global sisterhood" for the advancement of radical ideas and social actions (Mohanty 2003; Basu 1995; Souza 1983).

Black Diasporic Feminism in Latin America

Black women's subjectivities, whether in Latin America or the Caribbean, are products of simultaneous yet distinct processes of racial and gender inequality in the African diaspora (Safa 2006). There is a direct exchange between black diaspora feminist thought and the awareness of black women's political activism on a global scale. Black Brazilian feminist activist Sonia Beatriz dos Santos's (2007) essay "Feminismo Negro Diasporico [Black Diaspora Feminism]" provides an analysis of black feminist thought and diaspora as it relates to the formation of a cross-border political identity. Santos's essay is important because it emphasizes theoretical and political connections for black women located across different geographic regions:

Although separated by geographic, sociocultural, economic, and political borders, afrodescendant women have had the historic role as vanguards in the maintenance and reorganization of sociocultural, economic and political structures related to the afrodescendant population. It is in this sense that I consider fundamental that black women intellectuals appropriate the African Diaspora concept as a theoretical and political instrument that helps us in thinking about the presence of afrodescendants in the world, above all, black women (19, my translation).

One of the most significant examples of black women traversing Latin American borders to mobilize against racism and sexism can be observed in our collective memory of the preparatory conferences for the Third United Nations Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia that occurred in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The preparatory conferences in countries throughout the Americas were directed at developing an hemispheric, as well as a diasporic, agenda in combating global racism. More specifically, the participation of black women activists provided the opportunity in diverse geographic spaces in the region to forge alliances as black women in engendering the anti-racism movement and forming a transnational feminist movement (Bairros 2002). As Luiza Bairros emphasizes in an article that describes the political consequences of the Durban conference (as well as the previous Beijing conference on women), this kind of global understanding of the feminist anti-racism movement has impacted tremendously the organization of black Brazilian women. More importantly, the political agendas of black women's organizations in Brazil, such as Maria Mulher and Articulação de ONGs de Mulheres Negras Brasileiras, that emerged during the periods of the United Nations organizing, have played a key role in internationalizing national discussions of how to address the historical legacies of slavery and colonialism.

During recent years, these kinds of intraregional dialogues have increased, making more explicit connections between a diasporic connection as black women and the urgency for a transnational gendered anti-racism movement. As participants of the 2006 III Encuentro de Mujeres Afrodescendientes [Third Meeting of Afrodescendant Women] in Managua, Nicaragua wrote:

We affirm the historical validity, the political recognition of the Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American, and Diaspora Network, our commitment to continue pushing the construction of a collective leadership and the consolidation of the broader movement of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American and Diaspora women that incorporates perspectives of gender, ethnicity, and race (44, my translation).

Black women's organizations, such as the Ecuador-based La Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Negras (CONAMUNE), belong to this transnational network. These kinds of transnational organizations reaffirm the national struggle in Ecuador as part of a broader anti-racism and anti-sexism movement.

Theorizing the need for a black feminist agenda in the Americas encourages us to examine the lineage of a transnational approach to Latin American feminism. Black Brazilian feminist, anthropologist, and Black Movement activist Lélia González, in her 1988 essay "For an Afro-Latin American Feminism," calls for the transnational organization of African descendant women in Latin America. González was an activist in the Brazilian Black Movement who then helped organize a black women's movement in the 1980s. Her writings resemble the ideas of Claudia Jones, who understood black women as having a distinct subjectivity and militancy, and thus envisioned a diasporic response to their exploitation. González writes similarly:

When I speak of my own experience, I am talking about a long process of learning which occurred in my search for an identity as a black woman, within a society which oppresses me and discriminates against me because I am black. But a question of an ethical and political nature arises immediately. I cannot speak in the first person singular of something which is painfully common to millions of women who live in the region, those "Amerindians" and "Amerafricans" who are oppressed by a "latinness" which legitimizes their "inferiority" (96).

It is worthwhile noting that the twelve years difference between the Brazilian and Peruvian documents mean nothing in comparison to the almost five centuries of exploitation which both denounce. The situation of Amerafricans and their thinking is practically the same in the two countries. A popular Brazilian saying sums up the situation: 'A white woman to marry, a brown one to fornicate, and a black to work.' The roles permitted to Amerafricans (black and mulatto) were strictly defined; their humanity was denied; Amerafricans were seen as animalized bodies; they were the sexual 'beasts of burden' (for which Brazilian mulattas are a model). Thus, socioeconomic superexploitation of women has become allied with the sexual superexploitation of Amerafrican women (100).

González's account—and others like it—reveal the not surprising reality that black women throughout Latin America, in countries such as Peru, developed their militancy not within the women's movements but rather within the black movement. Black women in the region faced some of the same challenges as those in North America who felt that the race-based demands of black women were resented, considered anti-feminist, and subsequently ignored. Moreover, black women in Latin America now defend the need to develop their own political identities, and they claim the right to organize autonomously within anti-black racism movements.

Black Brazilian feminist activists, such as Sueli Carneiro (2000), have contributed significantly to the development of feminist organizing within national black liberation struggles. "Qualitative differences in oppression suffered by black women," Carneiro writes, "and the effects those multiple oppressions had and still have on black women's identity" . . . shapes "black women's double militancy," or their dual participation and leadership in anti-racist and anti-sexist movements for "a more feminist and more black society," (218 and 227). In sum, black women's double militancy is a product of both feminist theorizing and social activism throughout the African diaspora. Black diaspora feminists have aimed to further understand the complex experiences of black women—and have informed feminist and black social movements. These movements, in turn, have shaped the development of black diaspora feminism.

Diaspora identifications as black women, a large number living outside of Africa, illustrate parallel constructions across multiple racial and gender communities. The feminist politics of scholars and activists permit a broad analysis of black women's subjectivities in Brazil within the broader international structures of racial and gender subordination. Black diaspora feminist thought offers me a framework within which I examine the question of why and how black women organize social movements across communities of African descent. The cross-cultural articulation of feminist thought is concerned with issues of power and dominance, and more importantly, with anti-sexism and anti-racism action.

Conclusion: Resisting Erasure

After the publication of the first edition of his influential text Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1995), João José Reis received much criticism from scholars for his failure to mention the crucial role of African descendant women, such as Luisa Mahim, in the urban anti-slavery revolt. In his article, for instance, Ari Lima (2001) asks readers to name a black woman in Brazilian history who comes immediately to mind. As I read Lima's article, I remember the day in 2003, when I walked into a t-shirt shop in Salvador, a majority black city in northeastern Brazil, to purchase a gift. A t-shirt with the title "Panteras Negras (Black Panthers)" caught my eye, but the pictures printed on it included the portraits of Che Guevara, César Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Zumbí. The absence of black women illustrated the local and national collective amnesia of black women's history in Brazil—and black women's radicalism globally. I mentioned this to the saleswoman, and she told me, "You're right, but who would you include?" I quickly offered the names of Angela Davis, Nanny of the Maroons, Nzinga, and other women Black Panthers in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, but I was much slower to provide a similar list of black Brazilian and other Latin American women. As organizers of Day of the Black Woman in Bahia in 2008 emphasized, "Women such as Maria Filipa fought for in the war for independence in Bahia, but they are not remembered on July 2nd [Independence Day], Zeferina, Luisa Mahim." Who are the black women warriors of Brazil, specifically, and of Latin America, in general? Knowledge production on the lives of black women in Brazilian history continues to be rare, and black women have been erased from political memories of gendered anti-racism struggles, such as the abolition movement (Butler 1998) and the more recent struggles for policy reform in education and health care (Santos 2007). My commitment to unburying the political activism, writings, and legacies of black women feminists in Latin America intensified upon this realization.

In recent years, I have begun to collect black women's feminist writings from Latin America to organize an anthology that follows Beverly Guy-Sheftall's Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (1995). No such anthology of Latin American black feminist writings exists, and this essay begins to frame why such an intellectual and political project is necessary. These writings need to be written into the long history of the line of "sisters" throughout the African diaspora who have struggled against slavery, colonialism, and gendered racial and class oppression. As "academic others," their contributions to feminist thought, critical theories of race and diaspora, and black political radicalism continue to be minimized, marginalized, or erased, despite the fact that they have no doubt contributed to the black radical tradition and the black feminist agenda in the Americas (James 2002; Ransby 2003). Black feminists in Latin America are oftentimes left out of narrations of the black radical tradition in the Americas—thus they are the "sister outsiders" of the region. This leads me to two questions: Within black diaspora studies, how do we begin to understand the idea and practice of a black geographic context of feminist solidarity, and how significant are "nations" and "regions" in building radical black political communities?

This essay calls for an important need to document black women's radical tradition in Latin America, specifically the scholarship and activism grounded in feminist consciousness, diasporic identification, and grassroots politics. An anthology of black feminist writings in Latin America will provide a nuanced understanding of the diasporic relationship between black women, bringing awareness of their disparate experiences at the center of transnational solidarity. In essence, such an intellectual and activism project represents our efforts to further black women's politics against gendered and class-based racism in the Americas and elsewhere. However, the challenge for African diaspora studies remains the centrality (or the forging) of black women's histories, experiences, and knowledge in the formation of a global black diaspora community. This essay encourages us to rethink the relationship between black diaspora studies and black feminist studies, for, as Asale Angel-Ajani laments, "African diaspora studies fail women miserably," (2006). Moreover, it remains a challenge for black diaspora and black feminist scholars in the U.S. to increase their knowledge of black women's thought and praxis throughout the Americas. Engaging black feminists in Latin America and allowing a black diasporic vision to emerge deepens black feminism's radical possibility of global sisterhood and the convergence of common struggles.

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