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.
