Milagros PeÑa is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. She is the author of Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The Role of Ideas in Social Movements; a coauthor of Punk Rockers’ Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class and Gender; and a coeditor of Emerging Voices, Urgent Choices: Essays on Latino/a Religious Leadership.

Latina Activists across Borders

Women’s Grassroots Organizing in Mexico and TexasBy MILAGROS PEA

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3936-6

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiNongovernmental Organizations Studied……………………………………………………………………………………………………….xiiiInterviews with Leaders of Nongovernmental Organizations………………………………………………………………………………………1INTRODUCTION Mexican and Mexican American Women’s Activism in NGOS: Background on the Michoacn and El Paso/Ciudad Jurez Communities…………………31ONE Women’s Activism in Michoacn………………………………………………………………………………………………………….70TWO Women’s Activism in Greater El Paso/Ciudad Jurez………………………………………………………………………………………..108THREE The Religious Connection…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….134FOUR Are NGOS a Panacea? Some Observations on the Future of NGOS………………………………………………………………………………146FIVE Despite Limitations Women’s NGOS Push Forward…………………………………………………………………………………………..153Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………157Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..163

Chapter One

Women’s Activism in Michoacn

Understanding the emergence of an NGO in any part of the world requires looking at the economic, political, and historical forces that gave rise to it. In the next two chapters, I lay the foundation for understanding why and how women’s NGOs in Michoacn and El Paso/Ciudad Jurez became important to women’s mobilization in these two communities. The discussion shows that women’s mobilization is marked by responses to sociopolitical marginality rooted both in larger community struggles and in activists’ particular experiences as women in those struggles.

According to a 1990 study conducted by the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Poblacin (National Population Council, or CONAPO) cited and analyzed in a Team of Women in Solidary Action, or EMAS, report entitled Las mujeres en Michoacn, Junio 1994, Michoacn is among the states with the highest degree of marginalization (EMAS 1994). The report analyzed data such as the literacy rate for Michoacanos older than sixteen (17.32 percent), the percentage of the over-sixteen population that had not completed elementary school (48.56 percent), and the percentage of households without a drainage system, electricity, or potable water (58.46 percent). In comparing these data by sex, the study found women’s literacy rates to be even lower than men’s. Women’s dropout rates from elementary and high school were greater, which can be attributed to the expectation for women to fill domestic roles, particularly caring for children.

Of Michoacanos employed outside the home, women were 19.83 percent, while men were 80.17 percent. Significant in this last comparison is the fact that only 39 percent of Michoacanos over twelve are employed. Women working outside the home are concentrated in domestic or “pink” collar occupations, such as domestic work, office support, factory work, and teaching and other jobs related to education. In sum, their work outside the home is concentrated in occupations that are an extension of work women are expected to do in the home. The data published in Las mujeres en Michoacn, compiled by the economist and EMAS cofounder Maruja Gonzlez Butrn, show that when women work, they receive lower wages than men, face sexual harassment, and, because most are poor, work double and triple shifts, endangering their physical and mental health.

On the political front, while women have been very involved in organizing the fight for democracy and the right to vote in Mexico, few are elected or appointed to positions of power (EMAS 1994). The reason given is usually women’s low levels of education. Women’s NGOs like EMAS note that patriarchal structures impede women’s educational progress. The marginalization of Mexican women in the home is reproduced outside it, particularly in the workplace and political sphere. In Michoacn’s capital, Morelia, only one of the twenty state agencies is headed by a woman. In the state legislature, only one of the seventeen state deputies is a woman. Of the state’s judges, fifty-seven are men and fourteen are women. And of the five judicial positions considered to be the second and third most important, one is held by a woman.

The dismal picture painted in the CONAPO research analyzed by EMAS helps us understand the emergence and proliferation of women’s NGOs in Michoacn. But only partly, because, as I will argue throughout this book, and as other research on social movements has shown (McAdam and Snow 1997), marginalization, though an important ingredient in mobilization, does not explain mobilization by itself. Leadership, committed activists, resources (including other movement networks), and propitious historical moments are also critical. The experience of EMAS shows much of what is needed not only to mobilize potential supporters but also to awaken in them the consciousness necessary for a community of protest.

In Las mujeres en Michoacn, EMAS recommended that the first step to mobilizing women be strengthening their work in and with other women’s organizations that have overlapping interests. Networking could be done through gatherings or conferences, including cosponsored workshops, where all the organizations committed themselves to sharing ideas and exchanging resources in a women’s network. “The connections and complimentary potential [in networking] signify STRENGTH” (EMAS 1994). Building this network strength in Michoacn began with the efforts of EMAS. As we look at Michoacn’s women’s networks, we also find that networking plays an important role in forming leaders. It is no accident that one of EMAS’s cofounders, Gonzlez Butrn, was the author of the report and brought mobilizing savvy to the Michoacn women’s communities. Her background in EMAS and her connections to other women’s groups in Mexico prior to founding EMAS show that movement leadership is nurtured in many social movement locations. In other words, women with previous experience in other movement organizations, whether these groups are feminist or not, often emerge as leaders.

IN THE BEGINNING: MOBILIZING OUT OF CRISIS

The early history of EMAS, established in Mexico City in 1985 and now based in Morelia, is typical of women’s NGOs; it also shows how women like Gonzlez Butrn facilitated mobilizing across social movement networks in Mexico in the 1980s. That is, they were connected both to specific community service organizations serving women in the popular sector and to social movements. The contacts and community work strategies of movement participants help to mobilize resources for their communities because the activists can promote the projects of both larger marginalized communities and women in particular. In a 1995 interview, Gonzlez Butrn recalled:

Our group began working around March of 1985. We were women who had come from other experiences with other women’s groups who shared similar work objectives and perspectives. Most of us were working in colonias populares above all because important things had been accomplished there. We were very much interested in the problems of women from the colonias populares. There was at the time [early to mid-1980s] the Coordinadora Nacional del Movimiento Urbano Popular [National Coordinating Committee of the Urban Popular Movement, or CONAMUP]. This was a very important space because it grouped the principal independent organizations of the colonias populares at the national level. And women had, with a lot of effort and after much debate, created their own space there. This effort began in Mexico City and was called the Regional de Mujeres del Valle de Mexico [Women’s Regional Committee of the Valley of Mexico] of the CONAMUP…. We believed that united we could provide service.

In the year EMAS was founded, 1985, a powerful earthquake hit Mexico City, a crisis to which NGOs of all kinds were called to respond. This spurred women’s grassroots organizing in Mexico City and later throughout the country, causing women’s organizations to proliferate in the 1990s. Not only did NGOs discover the level of network activism at their disposal and its power, but all the mobilization around helping the victims of the earthquake solidified some organizations and gave birth to many others. The proliferation of women’s NGOs in Mexico can be traced to the 1985 earthquake crisis. Gonzlez Butrn recalled the disaster’s impact:

During that whole process of the urban popular movement a terrible event occurred in Mexico precisely the year that EMAS emerged, which was the earthquakes of September of that year. And really the situation in Mexico City was grave at the time and it was precisely in the center of the city where the worst damage hit. At the time, we were doing some work with the comunidades eclesiales de base [base Chrisitian communities-or CEBS] in the center of the city…. We had a group in the Guerrero colonia, a group of Christian women who were providing self-empowering training sessions at the time. And there was interest in starting a project together with them and with EMAS. The earthquake, really, accelerated that project and our proposal. Our having seen how grave the situation was and what these colonias were going through, that EMAS gave them support-more of a day-to-day support in areas declared in emergency.

What was important to EMAS was being able to count on other organizations, not all necessarily women’s organizations, but NGOs that pooled their resources to help the victims of the earthquake.

We had the opportunity and the luck of having crossed paths with other people who valued our work and our support very much. They supported us in establishing a house, a center. They helped us purchase a house, a center, so that there we could tend to people more efficiently. And in that physical space, really, we founded what came to be called the Centro del Desarrollo Integral de la Mujer (Center for the Complete Development of Women or CEDIM), which came to be the crystallization of that joint project that I mentioned earlier between EMAS and the collective of women with whom we worked in the Guerrero colonia…. The physical space provided for meetings, larger gatherings, and workshops…. We worked a lot with them, and obviously with other women in what came to be the women’s section of CUD, which was the Coordinadora Unica de Damnificados (the Unified Coordinating Group of [Earthquake] Trapped Victims)…. That group was broadly based because many groups thought that it was necessary for us to coordinate ourselves in order to achieve, for example, the rehabilitation or construction of housing in as little time possible. There, as women of CUD, we organized a very important conference. With that conference, other women’s organizations were formed representing the center of the city. There was, for example, the Unin Nueva de Tenochtitln [New Union of Tenochtitln], which was a mixed organization [consisting of both men and women].

Today the Unin Nueva de Tenochtitln represents people primarily from the center of the city. Its women’s section remains important for promoting political leadership. One of the founders of the Unin Nueva, Dolores Padilla Hernn, became a deputy in the Mexican Congress.

After 1985, the organizations that Gonzlez Butrn described as forming in response to the earthquake were ones that trained leaders “so that they could participate in union organizations or in those related to the popular movement, urban or ‘campesino’ communities.” Many “organized through workshops or meetings whether regional, national, or by sectors with objectives of consolidating leadership and promoting self-started organizations so that they could negotiate their demands with greater independence and within their groups” (Talamante Daz, Careaga Prez, and Parada Ampudia 1994: 8). The destruction of housing, the fear of another earthquake, and a preexisting ambivalence about the quality of life in Mexico City, with its growing crime and pollution, caused people like Gonzlez Butrn to look to live elsewhere in Mexico. Consequently, in 1985, EMAS expanded its work beyond Mexico City, opening a branch in Morelia when Gonzlez Butrn decided to move her family there.

RESHAPING THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN MICHOACN

Prior to the early 1990s, few women’s groups existed in Michoacn. Among the first to emerge was VenSeremos, a feminist collective that started with Fernanda Navarro, a philosophy professor at the Universidad Michoacana in 1982. Navarro began the feminist collective with students, four of whom were philosophy students from la Universidad Autnoma de Mexico (UNAM), and friends and called it VenSeremos, a name that can be read several different ways, including “We Will Win” (venceremos), “Come, We Will Be” (ven, seremos), and “We Will Win/Be.” In 1982, VenSeremos claimed thirty members and started a publication, La Boletina (The Bulletin), which gave birth to La Red Nacional de Mujeres (the National Women’s Network). The idea for the bulletin and network was to create a space for a network of women to share feminist ideas. Of the twenty-one groups that joined La Red in 1982, today VenSeremos counts on eight (Ludec 2006:92). Until EMAS was founded in 1985, VenSeremos was the only organized women’s group in Michoacn.

“My first organization in Morelia was VenSeremos in 1982,” Navarro recalled. “We worked by linking ourselves with other groups outside of here [Morelia], because as it was then we knew of no other group [locally]. Later, when Maruja arrived, we established contacts with other [local] groups; we learned of EMAS and the networks that evolved [from then on].” Today, VenSeremos can count on many women’s groups in addition to EMAS. In 1995, members of VenSeremos and philosophy faculty at the Universidad Michoacana established the university’s Center for Gender Studies and Research (Centro de Estudios e Investigacin de Gnero). And by 1995, when I started my research for this study, nineteen NGOs in Michoacn focused on women’s issues.

In 1991 leaders of VenSeremos and the Center for Gender Studies and Research formed the Taller Permanente de Estudios de la Mujer de la Escuela de Mujeres de la Universidad Michoacana, San Nicols de Hidalgo (Permanent Research Group for Women’s Studies at the Women’s College of Michoacn University, San Nicols de Hidalgo). Yadira Cira Gmez, one of the group’s leaders, provided insight into its work.

I believe the group began after we started a research project in the School of Economics. That research focused on rural women’s organizations, economic change, and women’s status [in the home and in society]. The project touched on a number of areas, the economic, industrial, informal, and rural sectors. I … dedicated myself to rural women’s situations. From this research we began to tease out theoretical questions concerning women, and we studied the question of gender a bit.

Since Cira Gmez already had worked with Gonzlez Butrn in the university’s School of Economics, the Taller brought issues raised by their research to EMAS. Thus, since the early 1980s, when VenSeremos held its first meetings, women had been organizing and using NGO spaces for mobilizing, consciousness-raising, and promoting research on women. In one decade, women’s and feminist networks in Michoacn grew from one reflection group to a network of women’s activist organizations with political influence in Michoacn and beyond.

Because of the link to EMAS, Cira Gmez and other students were able to learn about and join other women’s NGO networks. She noted, in particular, the Red de ONGs de Mujeres del Estado de Michoacn (Women’s NGO Network of the State of Michoacn), which advocated for democracy and political participation: “We analyze women’s status and we try to follow the women’s movement here in Michoacn and to participate actively in the movement, but in addition we seek to reach a level of understanding of the various perspectives of the larger feminist movement.” Early on, therefore, the university women’s group took on projects that members thought would help guide the feminist movement, but from the perspective of young women, a point of view that, Cira Gmez noted, was underrepresented in the feminist movement. The women who supported the Taller took up the challenge to add a feminist dimension to their work and contribute to larger feminist projects.

We decided that we had work to do in the School of Economics to bring out the point that there were other areas for research, particularly in areas affecting women, which often are not addressed in the traditional disciplines. Our approach is quite different than analyzing issues [and] making generalizations without looking specifically at how women suffer from their own particular situation as women, much of it stemming from economic problems…. So we took this line of [gender] inquiry and decided to work on that angle, by doing specific research projects to convince others that this was a wide-open area for research.

(Continues…)

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