Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives

By Melanie A. Medeiros, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Christen A. Smith and 10 more

Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives employs an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to examine Black cisgender women’s social, cultural, economic, and political experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. It presents critical empirical research emphasizing Black women’s innovative, theoretical, and methodological approaches to activism and class-based gendered racism and Black politics. While there are a few single-authored books focused on Black women in Latin American and Caribbean, the vast majority of the scholarship on Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been published as theses, dissertations, articles, and book chapters. This volume situates these social and political analyses as interrelated and dialogic and contributes a transnational perspective to contemporary conversations surrounding the continued relevance of Black women as a category of social science inquiry. Many of the contributing authors are from Latin American and Caribbean countries, reflecting a commitment to representing the valuable observations and lived experiences of scholars from this region. When read together, the chapters offer a hemispheric framework for understanding the lasting legacies of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, plantation life, and persistent socio-economic and cultural violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978836327

Book preview

Introduction

KEISHA-KHAN Y. PERRY AND MELANIE A. MEDEIROS

On June 19, 2022, Francia Márquez, an environmental activist and the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, became the first Black woman elected to Colombia’s executive branch as vice president. Despite her landmark win, critiques of Márquez’s candidacy and appointment as well as violent verbal attacks and persistent death threats against her reflect a broader ideological problem with the devaluation of Black women’s intellectual and political contributions across the Americas. We see this volume, Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives, as playing a key discursive role in challenging damaging misconceptions of Black womanhood. This volume engages intellectual work by and about Black women while shedding light on the sociopolitical conditions that shape their participation and leadership in political struggles for citizenship rights and resources. A singular goal of this book is highlighting their contributions at this critical juncture in history, in which social movements such as Vidas Negras Importam (Black Lives Matter) and #NiUnaMenos (Not One Less) are increasing global awareness of the physical and structural violence that threatens Black women in the Americas, at the same time that the rise of authoritarianism threatens to dismantle their hard-won recognition and rights. Additionally, this volume explores the role of the social sciences in documenting anti-Black violence and forging hemispheric struggles against that violence.

A Transnational Black Feminist Legacy

Márquez represents a generation of activist-intellectuals in Latin America and the Caribbean who are leading the way for revolutionary change in political representation and whose influence extends beyond nation-state and even regional borders. Contributors to this volume, such as Colombian anthropologist Castriela Hernández Reyes, have benefited from Márquez’s scholarship and activism. They have marched alongside her or have sat in audiences in which she spoke. Márquez has presented her work at North American universities (Brown, University of Texas at Austin, University of Massachusetts-Amherst [UMass-Amherst], etc.), at conferences, and in our classrooms. Christen Smith, author of this book’s foreword and founder of the Cite Black Women campaign who encouraged people to engage in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production (CBW 2022; Smith et al. 2021), invited Márquez to speak at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. Smith was also part of an African diasporic delegation that traveled to Colombia to witness the presidential electoral process. Reyes was part of a delegation of graduate students at UMass-Amherst that coordinated Márquez’s visits to the Five Colleges on several occasions. In March 2010 and 2014, Angela Davis met with Márquez, and in September 2021, they participated in a conversation hosted by the University of California, Irvine and the International Coordinator of the Community Movement Builders’ Pan African Solidarity Network. In a 2018 interview with Democracy Now, recorded in New York City, Márquez stated, Afro-descendant communities have the lowest levels of basic rights and services. We don’t have access to water, to health[care]. Essentially, Márquez has long been circulating in Latin American and Black studies spaces in the United States and has been key to building a vast Black diaspora solidarity network in support of radical Black politics in Latin America. We believe she has reshaped how U.S. academe understands gendered racial violence and social movements in Colombia and the broader region and that her exchanges with U.S. scholars and students have had a profound impact on her intellectual and political formation.

Another prominent contemporary example of a Black woman activist-intellectual with transnational significance is Brazilian sociologist-turned-councilwoman Marielle Franco (1979–2018). Franco was brutally assassinated because of her radical ideas and political praxis. Her master’s thesis, the result of rigorous academic training at one of the nation’s most renowned universities (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, PUC-Rio), documents the human rights violations enacted by the Pacifying Police Units in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest communities. It is a landmark account of systemic state violence and its genocidal impact on Black people in Brazilian cities. Franco is celebrated on a global scale. Solidarity groups continue to demand justice for her assassination (see Caldwell et al. 2018). In a recent interview for NACLA: Report on the Americas, Anielle Franco, who is now Minister of Racial Equality of Brazil, emphasized that her sister’s murder is a reflection of the institutional conditions of racial, gender, and homophobic violence that take the lives of many Black people, women, transgender people, and activists in Brazil, a racist, misogynist society, a society that understands that our Black bodies are disposable (2022). She highlights the role of education in her political formation, including her transformative studies at a historically Black college in the United States that prepared her for this political moment. One of Marielle Franco’s most important legacies, as lived through her sister and other Black women, is the integration of intellectual work, global solidarity, and