Carmen Perez, Founding Co-Chair of the Women's March
Author’s Note: I have been reading Latina feminist texts since high school, when a debate coach had gifted me with a Barnes & Noble gift card. In my 40s, following a divorce, I had the great privilege of re-reading those texts, and writing a book. While my book, ¡Presente! Latinx Power Remaking Democracy, is about U.S. Latinx organizing in general, I am running this excerpt on the birth of Latina feminism, and how it inspired the present-day Women’s March. — Elisa Batista
“A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.” — Gloria Anzaldúa, Queer Chicana Poet
In the evening of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, social activist Carmen Perez, then 39, was on a three-hour train ride from Washington, D.C. to her home in New York City. All around her, she listened to elections results being yelled with uncertainty by fellow passengers, “Hillary’s up!” and “No, Hillary’s down!”
“When the results were announced, I felt a sense of anger because Trump ran his campaign fueled by anti-Mexican sentiment,” Perez said. “He called us ‘rapists.’ He called us ‘murderers.’ No one came to our defense. There was no real cry or outrage for the protection of Mexican peoples. I say Mexican, in particular, because that’s who he targeted, and all of this felt too familiar. I had been told of the stories where my family and family friends — the older generations — were impacted by Operation Wetback in the 1950s.”
“Operation Wetback” was introduced in 1954 by the Eisenhower Administration in response to white hostility towards Mexicans, who, like Perez’s maternal grandfather, Guadalupe Ramirez, were brought in as temporary workers under the bracero program. The “braceros” were depicted as dirty and disease-ridden, and derogatorily called “wetbacks,” a crude depiction of desperate immigrants swimming the Rio Grande to reach safety on U.S. soil.
Eisenhower appeased his white base with an uptick in raids, and harsh, military-style tactics to cram anyone perceived to be Mexican like livestock into boats, buses and planes. Even U.S.-born Mexican-Americans were sent to parts of Mexico that they had never known.
For Mexican-American families like Perez’s the residues of racism, family separation, loss, and pain still live on. Those wounds were re-opened the night of Trump’s election.
“My anger eventually turned into grief after a while,” Perez said. “There were maybe two days after the election where I felt like I did when my sister first died in a car accident. My days and interactions with others felt dark and gloomy. I didn’t want to leave the house. I didn’t want to engage in conversations or hold space for white people and their tears. I remember my mom calling me and her saying, ‘You need to stop carrying the world on your shoulders.’”
After a few days of mourning, Perez called a meeting with her staff and volunteers at The Gathering for Justice and Justice League NYC for a candid conversation about the elections, white supremacy and white privilege. “Having white women on our team, we challenged each other to have difficult and authentic conversations,” Perez said. “We allowed ourselves to share how angry we — those of us who are people of color — were with white people. This was probably the first time we ever did that out loud and with one another. To be honest, it felt good to say we were mad at the 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump.”
Perez then jumped on another call with four other movement leaders, including gun violence reform activist Tamika Mallory and Gathering for Justice board member Michael Skolnik. Eventually, Perez, Mallory, Linda Sarsour — a Palestinian-American activist and Justice League NYC member — and a white fashion designer named Bob Bland, would become the four national co-chairs of the Women’s March.
The Women’s March exploded into what is likely the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. The Washington Post estimated that more than 4 million women, male allies, and children took to the streets all across the United States from major cities like Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles to the most remote areas of Wyoming and Alaska.
Not only did it dominate the political landscape with the media frequently referencing the fact that it had three times the attendance of Trump’s inauguration, but it was also a cultural phenomenon with babies in strollers donning pink “pussyhats,” and youth drawing up signs and sharing YouTube clips that mocked Trump. A record-breaking number of women — a diverse pool at that! — would later run for office as their surrounding culture and politics shifted in their favor.
Latinx women’s ascension to leadership can best be understood in terms of a theory that I will examine in greater detail: intersectionality. Leaders like Perez stand on the shoulders of their Latina and Black feminist foremothers, who in the 1960s and 1970s, created an intersectional social movement that honored the experiences and perspectives of all women, including non-college-educated, working-class women, women of color, caregivers, immigrants, and even more identities.
Organizing With An Intersectional Lens: ¡Qué dolor de cabeza!
Photo Credit: Axios
Perez and her three co-chairs joined forces with two immediate goals in mind. First, they wanted to leverage women’s fervor for long-term and productive conversation and action beyond Trump. Secondly, they wanted to make sure that their movement was “intersectional,” meaning, a space for every woman to bring her whole and authentic self to the movement whether she was white or a woman of color; queer; a mother or caregiver; and more. The coordinators’ reasoning was that everyone lives a multifaceted life and holds many identities at once.
“Intersectionality” emerged as a feminist theory formulated by African-American civil-rights advocate and leading scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. The theory is that multiple oppressions at once could compound “obstacles that often are not understood within conventional ways of thinking about anti-racism, or feminism,” Crenshaw told the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS).
VIDEO OF KIMBERLE CRENSHAW
“Intersectionality isn’t so much a grand theory as it is a prism for understanding certain kinds of problems,” Crenshaw told NAIS. “African-American girls are six times more likely to be suspended than white girls. That’s probably a race and a gender problem. It’s not just a race problem. It’s not just a gender problem. So I encourage people to think about how the convergence of race stereotypes or gender stereotypes might actually play out.
“You can’t change outcomes without understanding how they come about.”
Crenshaw’s approach has its roots in the Combahee River Collective Statement published by a trailblazing group of Black feminists in 1977. The Statement introduced the country to terminology such as “identity politics” and “interlocking” or “simultaneous oppressions.”
The Combahee River Collective Statement, or manifesto, helped launch a Black feminism based on the following premises: that the mere existence of a Black woman is an affront to white male rule, and that her existence is resistance on multiple fronts. She is both excluded by white feminists who refuse to check their privilege and racism, and is also excluded by Black men who refuse to address misogyny in Black liberation movements. To these exclusions, they responded by acknowledging that they would work with white women against gender-based oppression and with Black men against racism. They also saw themselves as class-based actors supportive of socialism.
Long before the #MeToo movement, the women at the Combahee River Collective challenged violence against women of color, and men’s indifference. They advocated for and organized the opening of refuges and rape crisis centers for battered women, joined labor strikes as well as picketed hospitals that curtailed health care access for the “Third World community.” They could also be considered the foremothers of the U.S. Women’s March.
The Women’s March was birthed by four women of distinct races, socioeconomic backgrounds, and interests, and covered multiple, often overlapping issues. Latinx women, Perez said, “are the living, breathing definition of what intersectionality is with the multiple worlds that we navigate.”
“Those are all things that I have now been able to own as a Latina who navigates in multiple worlds, understanding health disparities in our communities, and race disparities in the criminal justice system,” Perez said.
Creating an intersectional movement is not for the faint of heart. While the goal of the Women’s March was to be as inclusive as humanly possible, what the organizers also found was that no constituency was fully satisfied. In addition, the four women took on the challenge of gently working with people who were angry and grieving over Trump’s election to consider the bigger picture, one that requires the building of a long-term and wider-scale movement for justice beyond gender.
“A lot of people marching were like ‘F Trump! F Trump! F Trump!’ and wanted it to be a protest,” Perez said. “We were intentional about putting out ‘Unity Principles’ that provided entry points for people who had never marched to have something to march for. We tried to put a message out there of inclusion, meaning that if you were for immigrant rights or Indigenous rights or religious freedom — whatever it is — this is your march.”
UNITY PRINCIPLES CAN BE VIEWED HERE
Theirs was a movement based on solidarity across identities and causes, including issues not normally branded as “women’s rights” such as mass incarceration and climate change. Because so many different people with their own agendas sat under the same umbrella, many people recorded their complaints when they felt that their communities or issues were minimized or slighted. Even a seasoned organizer like Perez said that she had to conjure the strength of her ancestors to keep going.
“White men wanted us to change the name from Women’s March to the People’s March,” she recalled. “Hillary supporters were angry at us for not putting Hillary in our Unity Principles. Pro-life advocates were angry at us for being pro-choice. People were angry at the fact that we used the word ‘sex workers’ in the Unity Principles. A lot of people would come after us! Some Black women were critical of the Women’s March and called it a ‘White Women’s March.’”
Qué dolor de cabeza. How did Perez respond to haters?
“We stayed focused and kept our eyes on the prize all while working full-time or two other jobs,” she said. “That strength is really pulled from the people that came before you, and struggled even more than you did. How privileged am I to sit in an office that is (Jamaican-American entertainer and social activist) Harry Belafonte’s and mine, and organize one of the largest protests in the history of America, yet my family was dragged through fields or kicked out of their land? I would always think about my ancestors and the sacrifices that they made.”
Because of this grit and heritage of resistance, Latinx women like Perez are taking the reins of leadership in the United States. Their familist orientation help create family-like bonds in communities across the country for massive mobilization and transformation such as the Women’s March. Their intersectional lens — they see themselves as women of color, immigrants or the daughters of immigrants, working class, low-income, mothers or caregivers, women with disabilities, queer, and as bearers of still other identities — that makes them uniquely positioned to lead a populist movement.
The Birth of Latinx Feminism
One of my sheroes and inspirations, writer Gloria Anzaldúa.
The birth of the original comadres, or foremothers of U.S. Latina feminism, lies in the late 1960s, when women of Spanish-speaking descent launched an intersectional women’s rights movement based on the contemporary writings of Mexican-American women, or “Chicana” activists. Their consciousness-raising occurred simultaneously with a myriad of social movements in the 1960s, including the Chicano movement for Mexican-American empowerment, women’s liberation, the Black Power movement, and the farm workers movement led by Dolores Huerta and César Chávez.
“Many Chicana feminists simultaneously participated in more than one of these movements, challenging stigmatization on the basis of sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, and gender,” wrote University of California Professor Aída Hurtado in her book Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity.
That Hurtado was Perez’s professor and femtor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, is a poignant reminder of the Chicana movement’s continuing relevance. Perez, once Hurtado’s research assistant, said that her former teacher was visibly moved by her invitation to speak at a one-year anniversary event of the Women’s March.
“Aída was like, ‘I can’t believe you steeped this march in intersectionality,’” Perez said. “‘You sometimes think your students don’t listen.’ I said, ‘Ilistened every time.’ Then I go, ‘Every time you were so hard on me, and every time you had me transcribe’ — she wrote a book on Latinas and higher education — I’m like, ‘Your book on white privilege allowed me to really have those conversations here.’ Again, it just goes to show, when you have Latina role models in your life, then you’re able to emulate something bigger than yourself.”
The femtor of the Women’s March’s Carmen Perez: Professor Aída Hurtado of the University of California in Santa Barbara. Photo Credit: UC Santa Barbara’s Current.
Just as Black-American feminists were doing at the time, Chicana feminists pushed back against the patriarchy or machismo of the Chicano Rights Movement, and at the same time, called out white feminists for excluding their voices and experiences. The basis of Chicana feminism, or “Xicanisma” with the “X” paying homage to the Nahuatl language of indigenous Mexico, is an important one for all organizers to understand. It sheds light to the role of Latinx women in their families and communities, and explains the rationale behind their movement-building strategies and tactics.
Every day in her home and in larger American culture — the U.S. is every bit as patriarchal as Latin America! — the Latinx woman fights “good woman” and “bad woman” archetypes that have been carved out for her, largely due to religion and familism. (I previously discussed the downsides of familism for women — and the men who depend on them — in a previous chapter.) Due to strict gender roles prescribed by the Catholic Church and conservative Christian culture, and larger political culture of Latin America and the United States, the Latina’s mere existence is resistance to the following two archetypes:
The Virgin Mary or marianismo. This woman is placed on a pedestal like a goddess, but largely because she is chaste and completely selfless. Her greatest aspiration is to marry and bear children for which she does all related childcare and household chores. She is a virgin when she marries, and makes sure to meet all of her husband’s sexual desires. In the workplace — and she only works to provide for her family, not for self-fulfillment! — she dutifully listens to her boss, doesn’t dare speak up or ask for raises as her virtue will set her free. If not, her reward is after the death of her physical body, in heaven.
La malinche or the traitor. Malinalli Malintzin aka “La malinche” was a native Mexican slave who was handed over to the Spanish conquerors at the turn of the 16th century. She is best known as the interpreter and lover of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés. There are mixed feelings towards her among Latinx people.
Sometimes she is viewed sympathetically like a battered woman or rape victim of the Spanish. For others, she is considered the mother of the mestizo or mixed race people. However, for many, she is viewed as a traitor who sold out her people to the Spanish. Today, a “malinchista” in Spanish is derogatorily used to describe a woman who is a traitor.
In contested Latin American cultures, where patriarchy dominates, Latinas are expected to be virtuous, perfect and do everything in the home and in the workplace. If not, she is la malinchista, blamed for every ill of society — from the kids not behaving to social decay. As I will further discuss, Latinx women are changing the underlying culture for future political action by bringing their whole and authentic selves to the big screen and artistic spaces, in the home, and U.S. workplace. They are leveraging the power of their culture, including multilingualism, intersectionality, and grit, in the face of colonization by the dominant European culture, and patriarchy in the home and in larger society.
