Camille and I taking a walk during a birthday party for a three year old host relative in Tejalpa, Jiutepec (Photo by Daniel Staples) At CIDHAL (Comunicación e Intercambio para el Desarrollo Humano en América Latina) we spoke with Flor Dessire, who shared with us about both the work of CIDHAL and various interpretations of feminism. CIDHAL has existed for over thirty years and was the first feminist organization in Mexico. Today, it provides a number of services including medical services that understand the specific needs of women, workshops within schools to open up dialogue around gender and sexuality, and a documentation center where information regarding the fight for women´s rights is available in Spanish and English.
One factor she mentioned that echoed the sentiments of other speakers and readings is that feminisms in Latin America are very different from the early feminism of the US. While feminism in the US has a history of being individualistic, representing for many only liberation for middle-class white women which often reinscribed patriarchal systems by relying on the domestic work of women of color and women from lower classes to allow time for jobs and feminist organizing[1], feminism in Mexico, although influenced by US and European feminisms, also stems from a class struggle and recognized the interplay of oppressions on women’s lives. Flor explained feminism as a theory and a social movement, as well as an instrument of analysis that allows us to explain the realities of women[2].
Flor also stressed the importance of recognizing diversity within the category of women, saying that women of different nationalities, social classes, races and ethnicities, ages, etc. will all have different experiences as women, but that all women are united by the common experience of the female body.
While we spoke mostly in broad terms of women’s experiences of oppression stemming from the devaluing of domestic labor, Nadia Alvarado, a woman of African and Indigenous descent working to reveal the presence of Afro-Mexicans, spoke extremely personally of her experiences of racism in Mexico. During her childhood through both her family and larger society, she witnessed and received overt racist messages where people with lighter skin were consistently favored and those with darker skin were devalued in assumptions of their intelligence and ability.[5] Meanwhile, while people in Mexico will admit that classism exists, many assert that there is no racism despite the fact that many of the poorest people are indigenous or of African descent[6]. Connected to the denial of racism is the denial of people of African descent in Mexico, for the history of the slave trade, the creation of communities of people of African descent who escaped slavery, and the historical contributions of Afro-Mexicans has been erased. Nadia outlined various parts of Mexican culture that have been influenced by different African cultures, and added that despite the denial of an African cultural presence in Mexico, the permeation of negative stereotypes about black men and women are pervasive.
Through her talk, Nadia also showed a side of Acapulco that tourists remain blind to, where people, economically strangled by the situation in Mexico created by neoliberal globalization spearheaded by the United States, are forced to work in the service industry for tourists, many of whom are American, who come to enjoy the beach and sample another culture. She shared with us about her struggle against internalized racism and her fight to raise children who take pride in and understood their background. Now, her thesis is about her father’s life as a man trying to reconcile his African and Indigenous heritage in the midst of a racist world. Although Nadia did not speak of feminism, she seemed to embody the feminist notion that the personal is political, and conversely, the idea that the political is personal, for in her life she both politicizes her personal experience of racism as evidence of the larger culture’s destructive biases, and realizes the personal affect of erasing from Mexican history the contributions of Afro-Mexicans as people of African descent.
[1] Flor Dessire, Talk at CIDHAL on Friday, October 19, 2007
[2] Flor Dessire, Talk at CIDHAL on Friday, October 19, 2007.
[3] Barker and Feiner, Liberating Economics, Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization (University of Michigan Press, 2004) p. 26.
[4] Flor Dessire, Talk at CIDHAL on Friday, October 19, 2007
[5] Nadia Alvarado, talk at CEMAL, Friday, October 19, 2007.
[6] Nadia Alvarado, talk at CEMAL, Friday, October 19, 2007.
A friend of the family, my host mom, Mariana, my host sister Abi, and me, walking in Puebla.
I was especially struck this week by our visit with Alicia “Licha” Arines, a feminist activist and leader of a Base Christian Community. She talked with us about feminist liberation theology and the participation of women in politics. This discussion pulled together a lot of issues that I have been struggling with lately, especially when Licha was asked why she continues to work within the church when there are so many challenges to her political and social involvement and to her identity. She shared that in the end, she believes that you have to struggle from within, as hard as that might be. As a priest once told her, “If our mother is sick, we aren’t going to abandon her, we are going to look for a way to cure her.” Alicia sees her participation in the church as giving her a right to follow and a right to question what she wants to, even though she struggles with being involved on a daily basis.
An article by Daphne Hampson, who discarded Christianity coming from a theological perspective, brought up a lot of the same struggles that Licha talked about. “The challenge of feminism,” she shares, “is not simply that women wish to gain an equal place with men in what is essentially a religion which is biased against them. The challenge of feminism is that women may want to express their understanding of God within a different thought structure…. While men (and some women) consider whether women can be full insiders within the church, women debate whether or not they want to be.”[1] There has been, for Licha, a reinterpretation of what being a religious person who loves God means.[2] She now sees God with a masculine and a feminine face, something for which she has been questioned about immensely, especially by priests and religious leaders.[3] It is not that she wants to be a man, she shared, but that she wants to be recognized as a strong and intelligent woman working for change. “I’m not a man,” she told us, “I focus on my family and their health and education [unlike most of the men that I know]. Don’t compare me to a man.”[4] Licha shared, however, that it has been hard for her to work within the church because while the communities talk about political and economic oppression and liberation, there are few spaces where she can discuss women’s issues from a theological, religious perspective. She no longer feels fulfilled by the retreats with the priests and the hierarchy with the “padrecito”.
For many of the authors that we have read this week, the fact that there has needed to be a re-interpretation, a re-reading, or a re-anything for that matter, brings up the question of the validity of Christianity in the lives of women, especially those with a feminist agenda, when there is such a struggle against the history of patriarchy and male-centeredness of Christianity.
These ideas really hit home for me this week. I have been struggling with patriarchy and inherent power that this brings to the people who benefit from it, whether in the church or in the larger society. And sometimes I get to the point where I think that you can no longer work within the system; that some things need to be radically changed. And I see so many people outside of the church, or the system in general, that accomplish so much for the world, a lot more than many people who call themselves “Christian” accomplish, that I start to wonder about the benefits of the church for women. As Licha shared with us, she has come, like I have, to the conclusion that “race and religion don’t matter if you are searching and struggling for justice. Your presence can say a lot, your presence of searching for justice. Solidarity doesn’t have a frontier or borders, a religion or a race.”[5]
And at the same time, I value so much the power of not just the institution of the church, but of the people of the church. I have been influenced greatly by strong Christian women in my life that have empowered me and shown me a place for intelligent and inspired women to have a voice within the Presbyterian church, of which I am a part. Like Licha shared, she stays a part of Catholicism because she feels that she has to fight to “create a space for women in the future so that they can discover their own liberation.”[6]
On a very personal level in dealing with identity and placing oneself within a system, I, along with everyone else in our program, have had big changes and experiences in the past week with our homestay families. It has been a great way to break down the stereotypes of the “typical Mexican family,” because there really isn’t one. Our families come from different economic, religious, ethnic, sexual, and social backgrounds, and have been giving us great insights into the sometimes unrecognized complex diversity of Mexican families and what that means. I have had the chance to attend a Quincineria and to visit Puebla with my family, which have been great bonding times. Laughter has been the sustaining piece in our time together, whether over a miscommunication or an inside joke.
I look forward to the upcoming challenges and laughter that we are all sure to experience, whether from speakers, classes, or our informal time together. Love and peace.
An example of Talavera pottery, native to Puebla. This is probably one of the most common phrases in Mexico!
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